The deal was far too tempting and actually not as expensive as I once thought.


For just over £700 I’m getting:

• A White MacBook 2.2Gz Intel Core 2 Duo, 120Gb, 1GB etc..
• A 8Gb powder blue iPod Nano

The only reason why I got another iPod was because Apple have a special offer for University students — a £79 mail-in /online rebate when you buy a Nano. Then I got a further student discount to the Mac latop – just over £50.

Although, even after all these discounts and rebates I just about blew my entire term student loan forking out for the laptop. No food for me for a little while then.

Buying my MacBook got me thinking about Apple’s future as the main competitor to Microsoft (well, 7% market share is still competing… right…). News came yesterday of Apple’s impressive forth-quarter fiscal profits; Up nearly 100% from the same quarter last year. With increasing choice, more-than-tempting student offers, complete interoperability with Windows and Linux with BootCamp and sheer the style and sophistication that Apple’s products carry, it’s no wonder why they’ve had such a good year.

In contrast, Microsoft however have had a mixed year. They have just agreed to comply with the EU ruling with regards to monopolistic methods (after about 4 years and countless appeals later). Their new Vista OS has not made a dent in the percentage of use world-wide as server administrators refuse to deploy it over worries over security. The new version of the Zune media player (that noone actually owns) has failed to impress.

Are the tides starting to turn perhaps?

To add insult to injury, we found after a good hour with Linux console and ndiswrapper that my newly bought off-the-shelf Wifi dongle, doesn’t easily work in Linux. Grrr! Windows, for now, it is!

As you could imagine, all of the above do not lead to a reliable internet connection as the following picture demonstrates:

I’ll hopefully soon get this sorted!

I
have been developing a major project for my sister, involving
e-commerce, secure multimedia downloading and streaming, RSS jiggery
pokery – all under a new CMS called MODx (which is fantastic0.

I have also upgraded my host to a grid based server from Media Temple, as my shared server was starting to feel the load.

I
have been working with the Google Maps API, php and the Sugar CMS to
produce an app involving geo-coding UK postcodes… more later.

…and I’m about to embark on my second year of University after passing with just over 66%! WOOT!

Google announced the set of open source tools at Google's global developer day, seeing over 5,000 programmers attend meetings and seminars worldwide. Google hope that the invention of these tools 

Initially, the tools will enable Google Reader to work offline, but the more obvious candidates for offline execution are the documents and spreadsheeting applications – expect this in the not too distant future.

For a demo, install google gears, then go to one or all of these:

Simple Database Demo – Store and retrieve values in the database
Simple ResourceStore Demo – Capture a URL and display it while offline
Simple ManagedResourceStore Demo – Capture a versioned set of URLs atomically and update them together
Simple WorkerPool Demo – Perform a long-running computation without blocking the browser UI

Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional.

We provide a suite of the best open-source applications available for multimedia creation. Completely free to use, modify and redistribute. Your only limitation is your imagination.

Only time will see how successful it is against the multimedia market leader Mac. 

1. 'Lose' the key
2. Throw key in big river
3. Force Paris to 'ingest' key
4. Make her go into a X-men/Magneto style prison – no chance of escape.

Any of the above is acceptable.

Sign the petetion to keep her in jail:

JAIL PARIS HILTON!
(currently 20,802 signatures)

DONT PARIS HILTON!
(currently 14,096 signatures) 

All values correct at 18.08 BST, 9 May 2007 

It has allowed me to double my legal music catalogue, buying albums from artists that I would never have even considered.

So it greatly annoys me when Pandora announced this week that they are stopping they’re service of streaming music to users outside of the USA. They said in a statement,

    “Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the content rights holders – we have always believed strongly in honoring the guidelines as determined by the artists, labels and publishers. In the U.S. there is a federal statute called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that provides this license for all the music you hear on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S.”

So from that statement we can clearly see that the only reason why Pandora can’t broadcast to outside of the USA is because of the DMCA. The DMCA is a US law signed by President Clinton in 2000, and it will be the cause of Digg probably being taken off-line soon. 

It is all supposed to protect the good of the country (the World according to the USA that is).

Restrictions to import and export of games, videos and digital content has long been controlled and has long been circumvented by techies. Region codes on DVDs and DRM infections in all downloadable media content simply have no place in the modern global economy.

America, it’s laws and it’s ’special interest committees’ such as the RIAA are beginning to police the World, and dictate what we in other countries are allowed to watch or listen to. 

How can we stop them?

The AACS have been recently quashing bloggers, directories and search engines over the discovered keys, giving cease and desist letter to those who infringe upon the copyright.

However, a rebellion is starting on the world famous Digg website. Initially, Digg's stance was to remove any stories linking the keys. As more users became aware of Digg censoring the story, the owner and founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, decided to come outright with it. In a bold move he titled a new blog entry with the key it self in.

www.playble.com

Instead of users of the service subscribing to the website by explicitly paying for it, PirateBay give a cut of the advertising profits which appear on band pages to the band themselves, thereby making money for the band and PirateBay.

This comes as a welcome change to the previous stance of the PirateBay on piracy. The ’screw you!’ element of authority may be starting to dissolve in place of a more legitimate approach to torrenting in a few years maybe?

For me, it comes as a great improvement to Google services to me, and an marvelous time for Google to start trumpeting about all the goodness of social networking, in opposition to the fat $1bn lawsuit that Viacom has slapped it with a few months back over copyright infringement.

In a statement to BBC news, Google representative said:

By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for internet communications, Viacom's complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression,