Whenever I hear of an artist, “Fighting the good fight” as I like to call it, I always feel compelled to spread the word.

From the article: “They are quite rare events but on occasion, artists actually encourage fans to share their music online. Singer Joss Stone has no problem doing so at all. In fact, after a recent concert in Argentina she said that piracy is “brilliant”.”

You can read the full article here: http://torrentfreak.com/joss-stone-piracy-is-brilliant-080625/

I always think it’s refeshing to hear these kinds of views. Allthough I can’t say I’m familiar with her music, I do know that I will be looking for it when I get home this evening. Miss Stone, you’ve found a new fan, and I haven’t even heard your music yet. I did find a few samples online at her official website, http://www.jossstone.com and I have to say I like what I’ve seen and heard so far.

Just some food for thought…

unwise (Score:1, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16, @01:36PM (#23093170)
Eliminating all human labor is unwise and ultimately self-destructive. Delegating “black arts” to highly reproducible mechanical processes goes against esthetics and homogenizes into blandness the infinitely variable human process it replaces.
This is all just shallow thinking to maximize short-term profits. In that sense, it is just plain dumb, albeit in a spectacular bling-blingy sort of way.

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Ah, a luddite. How cute (Score:4, Insightful)
by Moraelin (679338)  on Wednesday April 16, @02:05PM (#23093552) Journal

Ah, a luddite. How cute.

I’ve got news for you. Your standard of living, or that you can afford to spew pretentious words on Slashdot instead of being out in the fields with an ox-drawn plough, is because things like that already happened.

E.g., look at the clothes you wear. There’s been quite the movement against mechanical looms in the 19′th century. In fact, that was _the_ original luddite movement. Turns out that it wasn’t self-destructive or short-term after all. Previously you’d have maybe one set of clothes, total, for a decade. And you’d stitch and patch them when they broke, because it would be too expensive to buy a new set.

E.g., the fact that they’re clean. Previously washing the clothes was a very time-consuming manual process, and it wouldn’t be done anywhere near daily. If you enjoy pulling a clean new t-shirt out of the drawer daily, or a pair of socks, or underwear, or whatever, then roll it around in your head that people used to just wear the same clothes through mud and dirt and whatnot for quite a while.

E.g., if you enjoy a nice office job with a computer, it’s only because agriculture got heavily mechanized and a small number of farmers can feed the rest of society to do better stuff. We used to need 5 peasant families to support a knight. Maybe also add a burgher family, although those were a lot fewer than that actually. Almost three quarters of the population used to be out there ploughing dawn to dusk, just for subsistence, in the good old days of non-mechanized manual labour. By sheer probabilities, chances are that would be your lot in life, if we still were at that point.

E.g., for that matter, read that again: dawn to dusk. Literally, that was how the acre was defined: the surface that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dusk to dawn. That would be your daily schedule, for 6 days a week. Not to keep some cushy office job by putting up with a PHB’s demands for overtime. That would be the _normal_ schedule, and just for subsistence.

E.g., enjoy all that free TV and free content on the internet and whatnot? Well, that too is because society now makes enough of a surplus, that marketing can blow on subsidizing those in exchange for ads. Previously your only entertainment would be the pub, sitting and listening to the same stories around the fire, and maybe a village dance on sundays. Don’t think even books, because those were quite the uber-expensive things before Gutenberg went and made it a “highly reproducible mechanical process”.

Etc, etc, etc.

Turns out that none of that actually made us any poorer. We just end up producing more, and affording to divert more work into entertainment and services.

Microsoft isn’t killing XP entirely. They are just stopping the sale of new copies. If you don’t already have it, you’re not going to be able to buy it. If you already have a copy, it’s not a big deal just yet, as far as I can tell. The best thing to do is just follow a few basic rules of computing to keep your PC secure. A secure PC is a happy PC, and will keep you up and running for as long as you are willing to keep it that way.

First things first, everything I’m about to spew out is from my personal and professional experience. These tips aren’t meant for the corporate or enterprise network. This is for those of us at home with one or two PC’s around the house. Please don’t think this is going to work in any situation where you have more users or computers than you do fingers.

1- Don’t trust anything.

Don’t know what it is? Not sure where it came from? Is that big name brand spelled wrong? Don’t install it, click on it, open it or read it. Unless you are 100% sure that it is legit, don’t use it.

2- Stay up to date.

I know they aren’t perfect, but stay on top of those Windows updates. It’s safe to be leary of major updates like service packs, sometimes it’s better to wait a day or two for the major bugs to be worked out. A couple Google searches for your model PC or laptop and the name of the update will usually turn up major bugs. Same goes for printers, network and video cards or even CPU brands or models.

3- Get a good anti-virus program.

Avoid the “all in one” type programs. It’s been my experience that the more tasks a piece of software tries to take on, the worse it gets. (Norton Internet Security Suite, anyone?) Stick with a good old fashioned anti-virus program. I’ve used AVG for many years with great success. (http://www.grisoft.com) The free version should be more than enough for most home users, but the Pro version really stands out if you like to tweak, or have a more advanced setup.

If you need something to keep the malware away, Spybot Search & Destroy (http://www.spybot.info) and AdAware (http://www.lavasoft.com) are both tried and true. I think Spybot alone is usually sufficient, but you can’t beat the one, two punch combo.

4- Don’t set a password on your user account.

“Holy crap, are you kidding me? What are you, nuts?” Before you think I’m crazy, just understand this. When you don’t set a password on a user account, remote access is disabled for that user in XP Pro. Unless someone is physically sitting at your computer, they aren’t going to log in. And if someone you don’t want using your computer is sitting at it, you’ve got more problems than I can address here.

If you absolutely have to have a password on your computer to get the “Warm fuzzy feeling,” set a BIOS password, and leave your computer off when not in use. When you turn on the computer, you get prompted for a password. If you don’t have the password, the computer won’t even boot up. You shouldn’t be wasting electricty by having it run 24/7 anyway.

5- Don’t use IE.

Sure, Internet Explorer has gotten better with IE7, but FireFox is really a better solution. Just don’t go bogging it down with all those add on extensions. Do you really need to have the weather report constantly updating on your screen? They just end up sucking up memory and bandwidth. Opera is also another choice, if FireFox just doesn’t do it for you.

Sure, there are some sites that are designed for IE, and some will even force you to use it. Not a big deal, just don’t use it for your everyday, all the time browsing.

6- It’s not a matter of if something fails, it’s a matter of when.

I’m sorry to say it, but computers aren’t perfect, and something is going to go wrong somewhere. Whether a piece of hardware fails, you accidentally delete something, a windows update breaks something, a program you install crashes your computer, lightning strikes, you get a virus, or the kids decide that the computer is hungry and feed it a ham sandwich and glass of milk. The possibilities are endless.

How can I make sure I don’t loose my data? Backups. I recommend that everyone has an external hard drive of some sort.

I just bought a Western Digital eBook, which is a USB hard drive that you can hook up to any computer. Mine is 500 gigs, and it makes a great place to save pictures, documents, music or anything else you don’t want to loose, and isn’t likely to fill up any time soon. (My laptop currently only has a 40 gig hard drive in it.) I keep it hooked up to my laptop, and I make it a point to copy what important data to it regularly. That way, I have two copies of everything. One on my hard drive, and one on the eBook. If you want to be double safe, you can copy the data from the eBook and burn it to a CD or DVD on a regular basis, and have yet another backup, in case something happens to the eBook.

I was reading a nice article the other day, written by Michael Janke, at “Last in – First out http://lastinfirstout.blogspot.com” and it inspired me. He talks about how he surfs the internet with both java and flash, and basically everything he can, disabled. The only problem is, you’re hard pressed to find a useable “big name” website that can function like that. A great example, was his fight with trying to get information from the Acura website. You can read about that battle here: http://lastinfirstout.blogspot.com/2008/05/flash-javascript-and-clowns-that-design.html

At the end of the article, he makes a statement that ring very near and dear to my heart.

“I’ve got a solution though – Make all web site designers & testers use a 1Ghz Pentium with 256MB of RAM for their workstation. I’ll bet that they’ll design fast, lightweight web sites.

They’ll have to.”

I agree. Many people come to me with problems, and when I can’t duplicate them, they are quick to say, “Oh you work in IT. You’ve got the latest and greatest equipment.”

False. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I take pride in being at the END of the product replacement cycle. I want the oldest, slowest, dumbest stuff possible. I like to keep my users way ahead of myself, at least in hardware terms. In fact, I have NEVER owned a personal computer with more than 512 megs of ram, but that’s another story for another day.

My theory is, “If I can make due with the worst equipment, and make it work, then I know my users shouldn’t have any problems.” Am I the only one that takes a “Less is more” approach?

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One of my favorite bands, Nine Inch Nails has joined what I call, “The Good Fight.” Real original, I know, but the name works for me. Recently, Trent Reznor release a new album, “Ghosts” entirely online, without a label. Here’s an excerpt from their website:

“Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.

We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc. It’s licensed for all non-commercial use under Creative Commons.”

If that’s not awesome, I don’t know what is. I highly suggest you grab a copy of the torrent, and help spread it around. There’s already quite a bit of buzz going around about it, and I’m seeing some amazing speeds from the torrent. I plan on helping support the cause, and buying the entire package online.

You can get more info at the official website, at http://ghosts.nin.com

I’ve also uploaded the torrent to my website, which you can download at http://ryannedeff.com