My brother upgraded and now his MICROSOFT brand mouse does not work. Specifically, the extra buttons no longer work. Way to not support your own stuff Microsoft!

And not just the side of the street on which they drive!

The Brits Have it Backwards on Vimeo

Here are two short videos. The first one is extremely short. The second one is my favorite, and the action matches the beat of the music. Enjoy!

Tian Tian Or An Extremely Short Stop-Motion Featuring a Giant Panda Father on Vimeo
Tai Shan’s Jazz Time Or A Visual Stop-Motion Interpretation of Kevin McLeod’s No Good Layabout on Vimeo

An introduction to Libre Software and why you should consider using it.

Libre Software Part 1 (An Introduction) on Vimeo

I read a blog post a few days ago where someone who purported to be a Linux user (so as to not be accussed of trolling) claimed that although Linux and its freedoms were great and all - at the end of the day - the user had to return to Windows to get any serious stuff done. Well, I’m here to say, that I think that’s completely bogus. I haven’t had my Windows computer on since last Monday and I’m only turning it on today to work on my photography. All week long I’ve used Linux for everything, even helping to correct my younger brother’s paper by using Open Office.org Writer.

The Inquirer.net reports a boy who is counter-suing the RIAA! Why?

for defamation, violating anti-trust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

Awesome! It’s about time someone fought back!

They have demanded a jury trial and filing a counterclaim against the companies for allegedly damaging the boy’s reputation, distracting him from school and costing him legal fees. The record companies have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States, the court documents say. Competitors in the recording industry are a cartel acting together in violation of the antitrust laws by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay”, our precocious teen wrote.

Well, I’m not sure if Timbaland did it purposely or if he was under the impression that he had permission, but he took music for Nelly Furtado’s song “Do It”. The sampled song is in the MOD format, popular in the early 1990s electronic BBS music scene. Currently it has a pretty decent underground following, as you can see at modarchive.org. You can see the MOD artist’s information here. And you can see some more detailed information at this forum. If you listen to the original file and then the background at the beginning of the Nelly song it is extremely obvious that they are the same song. I hope that Tempest (Janne Suni) gets the compensation he deserves. Tempest did not license his music under a permissive license so if the song makes money, he deserves it. After all, it was his creative genius that came up with the song. Obviously, it was good enough if Timbaland wanted to use it.

Tristan Rhodes has come up with a great analysis of Open Source vs Proprietary software by using fruit. It’s on the same par as Neal Stephenson using the car metaphor to describe Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Here are some of the key arguments that I loved.

Mabolosoft is a company that sells seedless fruit. They have orchards full of fruit trees that they have genetically-altered to be sterile, so that no seeds will be included with the fruit. Consumers want fruit, so they buy it from Mabolosoft. This fruit is seedless, so when people need more fruit they must go back to Mabolosoft.

View it here!

Dell has introduced (or, if it’s been around for a while, it was just recently brought to public attention) the nSeries Desktops. These are computers that have no installed operating system - so you don’t have to pay for windows. It comes with a Freedos disk. So you can install Linux, *BSD, or whatever you want onto that clean machine - without having to first get rid of windows!