What do you think is the best way to defeat terrorism?

Educate people and tackle poverty. Sadly there are no short term solutions.

Ask me anything

If you could wake up as anyone tomorrow, who would it be?

A much cleverer version of myself

Ask me anything

formspring.me

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/silner «» This is quite good fun actually

Why Apple may never reach the mass market and why it's so obvious

OK in every new market (such as tablets right now) Apple surges to a massive market share. Why is this? Well here's the deal. The people who buy Apple products are rich, so as soon as a new product comes along they can just take those hundreds of pounds out of their petty cash and buy it.

The rest of us meanwhile, the ones who covet an Android phone for example, have to budget for items like that. Once we have the reserves, we'll get out and buy what we want. We make take longer, because we're not as impetuous as these Apple Junkies, but what we are, is a lot greater in numbers, so eventually we'll swamp the market and Apple's share will dwindle, because Apple only has early adopters.

There is no mass market for Apple goods and there never will be. There's no magic about this. It's so obvious and yet no one in the Apple press gang ever gets it. They really are wearing roses.

So there are programs that rip Blu-Ray after all

I was discussing this topic on IRC recently. At the time I wasn't aware of any applications that performed this task. So I was of no help to my fellow chatter. Since then I've asked more widely and come up with the following list.

AnyDVD HD

MakeMKV

DVDFab

HD Decrypter

As I understand it, these programs would be illegal to use in the USA, because of the DMCA, as well as being illegal in many parts of the EU, depending how member states interpret the EU copyright Directive, but by the same token, I assume they're perfectly legal to use in countries like India and New Zealand. I'd be interested if anyone can correct me on these assumptions.

Personally, I won't buy Blu-Ray films, precisely because I can't copy them. If I can't make back ups, then I don't really own them and I've never believed in renting. It's dead money, as they say.

Why I had to download most of KDE, yet again

It all comes down to Blogging software. I read the reviews and tried them all. I tried Drivel. I tried Gnome Blogger. I tried Blog GTK and I tried several others I've forgotten the name of. Not one of them was anywhere near as good as Blogilo. Oddly enough, Blogilo wasn't mentioned in any of the reviews I read. In fact, thinking back, I seem to remember it took me ages to find it the first time. I put this down to having such a weird name. Anyway, there's one big drawback with Blogilo, for the Gnome user. It seems to need almost every major set of KDE libraries. It's a real kitchen sink job. 72 separate files I didn't need when I was using Gnome. Come on Gnomes. Make some decent Blogging software for crying out loud.

My growing problem with Apple

I never really paid Apple much attention before this year. Historically, I was a Windows user, but over the last few years I've gradually used Linux more and Windows less. I had a brief period using Mac OSX 10.39 (Panther?) For me, it didn't match up to Mac loving colleagues descriptions. It was a perfectly serviceable system, but nowhere near worth the asking price, so I stopped using it and forgot about it.

Then it turned 2010 and all of a sudden Steve Jobs was suddenly and then constantly in my face. Every week brought me a new story where he was either threatening to sue all and sundry over some ridiculously broad software patent, or else playing Rumpelstiltskin about some minor infraction of his ever changing iPhone developer contract. So it seemed no one could actually rely on any third application staying around, beyond Jobs' whim.

To ensure developers wouldn't get fed up and leave, Jobs had to make sure they couldn't possibly develop cross platform applications. So now these developers work within this tiny walled garden and hope Jobs doesn't get out of bed the wrong side one morning and move the wall.

This is not a computer platform. This is deja vu and it's the nineties all over again. This time around, Microsoft is IBM. Google is Microsoft and Android is Windows, but Apple is still Apple and they're headed back to elitist obscurity, where they belong.

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Powered by Blogilo

This is why Software patents are stupid.

"HTC has already decided to shorten its list of troubles by ponying up for a license from Microsoft for "running the Android mobile platform. Yes, that does sound ludicrous, but it's now an unfortunate fact that a major Android phone manufacturer is having to pay Microsoft royalties to use Google's operating system"

See what's really happening here is this: they're playing the same hand as the Church of Scientology plays. They know they would lose in the end, at least in most countries, but they also know very few companies can afford to fight them in court. They're playing poker with the law. This is why Google OS will blow this whole thing out of the water, not because anything have changed, but because, despite all their privacy crimes, Google have one redeeming feature. They don't back down against the Behemoth. They didn't back down against China and they won't back down against Microsoft.

So what will happen. Well I have no idea how this will play out in the USA, but I'm confident certain Key South American Governments are never going to accept the idea of Software patents and, as for India: well there the ground has already been set against Microsoft with the recent copyright bill there. My inexpert opinion is this: for the first time Microsoft will actually have to fight and they will have to lose somewhere. The interesting thing is, wherever they lose in court, that country will become a magnet for Free Software and Free Culture. Let's just hope, for all our sakes that country's no China?

Second (and probably last) update on Blogilo issue in Ubuntu Lucid..

Many thanks to @mtux on Identica for all the help he gave me » http://identi.ca/conversation/29947005#notice-30036378

It turns out to be a dependency issue. For some reason the install fails to grab all the files it needs. All I needed to do to solve it was grab libsqlite3-0 from the main software repository and it all worked fine.

The real problem the content industries have right now

What's really happened over the last few years is the creative industry's rebel façade has be pulled away. It doesn't matter any more whether they stop file sharing. The damage has already been done. Never again will we believe, "it was never about the money," because they've made it patently obvious. It always was about the money.

Now they're just like plumbers and if we don't like their charges, we'll do it ourself. We'll make our own music and we'll share it for free. Of course it won't get the mass market Big Content companies want, but no none ever explained to me why that's a problem. If 1000 musicians have 1000 fans each, that's at least as good as one band having a million fans. In fact, it's probably a whole lot better.

The mass market is on its way out. Deal with it.

Update on Blogilo issue in Ubuntu Lucid.

I just noticed this has been reported here: http://is.gd/bIeSX & here http://is.gd/bIeTI so no further action is needed by me.

Blogilo on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx

This KDE Blogging application seems to be broken in RC1. I installed it from the repos and it seemed to go fine.

It starts OK and goes to set up Kwallet as usual, but when you get the next screen, to open the wallet and access the newly saved credentials, it fails to access the database and repeatedly does so on further attempts.

I tried removing all the related home directories for Kwallet and Blogilo and repeating the process, but the same error occurs. I'll report this on Launchpad tomorrow. I used to like Blogilo.