I made a productive use of my time today…
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Apple Pumpkin
My MacBook Pro
About a fortnight ago, I ordered a MacBook Pro and an up-to-date version of Leopard. I had one custom modification - a glossy screen as opposed to a matte one - and it angered me how it took a week or so just to get into the UK. However, it was well worth the wait and I have quickly taken to my new Macintosh.
Moving to OS X, in my opinion, is easier than making the Windows-Linux jump; my only frustration is with iTunes, the fact it likes to bring disorder to your music collection (or its own sense of order¿) and the fact it refuses to accept .avis (I mean seriously! And you thought Microsoft were stubborn!). It’s also slightly irritating that Alt+F4 doesn’t close a window but rather ⌘+w does, and when you close a window the fact the process isn’t killed will also take some getting used to!
I’ve decided to go with NeoOffice for my Office suite, with MS Office installed on XP via. Parallels Desktop, Firefox as my web browser, Mail as my mail client (all I need now is Google to give me IMAP support) and Adium for IM (iChat doesn’t support MSN). I’m not certain about image editing but I’m inclined towards Seashore due to its pricetag (libre and gratis).
I’ve set up Time Machine on a 50GB partition on my 250GB external HD (time will tell if this will suffice!), excluding music and videos.
Enjoy some pictures of my MacBook Pro and iPod Nano fresh from iPhoto!
Tags: apple, macintosh, os x, macbook pro, os x leopard
Web 3.0 and why we don’t need it
We don’t know what Web 2.0 is yet people are already touting things as Web 3.0. The beauty of Web 3.0 is that PR people will be able to use the buzzword however long Web 2.0 lasts but not a day afterwards; Web 3.0 is something new start-ups claim they are working towards yet no one is sure what that something is.
Whilst the definition of Web 2.0 is fluid, the definition of Web 3.0 is even more so! For a service to call themselves Web 2.0, they generally need to follow that movement of design or require user-generated content. What Web 3.0 is remains much more mysterious and elusive permanently remaining that way.
The term Web 2.0 is misleading to the general public: when they hear it, they think a new Web is out… not a new dot-com boom!
Lets not talk about Web 3.0 until we iron the bugs out of Web 2.0 and perfect it. Maybe one day, the Internet and desktops will be perfectly integrated and there’ll be no difference between the online and the offline… but that day remains decades away.
Who’s THE personality of Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 has its fair share of personalities ranging from RWW’s Richard McManus to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to Orkut Büyükkökten from well umm Orkut.
But who’s the biggest personality? If someone wanted to choose one person to summarise Web 2.0 best, who would it be? Would it be a blogger, like Arrington, an entrepreneur, like Steve Chen, or a charity, like the Wikimedia Foundation. Or perhaps the best personality is the average Joe?
Blogging and Web 2.0 are undeniably linked: both started allowing anyone to contribute to the Internet and both happened at roughly the same time. A blogger and a Web 2.0 personality are, in my eyes, very different as whilst they are linked they are different. However, some of the most successful blogs are about Web 2.0 (eg TechCrunch and Read/Write Web). Perhaps it’d be fitting to say such a blogger who knows lots of what’s going on in the Web 2.0 world would be the best personality? However, these people (and indeed I :P) lack innovation for merely documenting ideas and not writing our/their own.
The people who invented start-ups like Facebook, YouTube or Flickr became rich. Web 2.0 saw these people start off with fairly little but end up making millions and millions of pounds. Perhaps the success of Web 2.0 is best shown in these entrepreneurs as financially Web 2.0 has been very successful for them!
The other category for personality could be us and the projects we contribute to. Time made us the person of the year and look at what we’ve built… a multi-lingual encyclopaedia with 2,000,000 articles in English alone amongst other things!
I bet the news people pirate
Yesterday, it was fairly big news that file-sharing site OiNK (currently hijacked courtesy of the BPI) had been shut down through an operating involving Cleveland Police, the Dutch Police and Interpol… the site’s administrator had been arrested (and now released without charge, according the Guardian).
It’s interesting how nearly all of the newspapers covering this event are very much against (illegal) file-sharing because I suspect that the journalists, like lots of the population, file share. I also find it curious how our government are so much in objection to file-sharing suggesting when most of their voters are in favour of it. They also suggest more laws should be introduced to protest intellectual property and that they would encourage ISPs to censor/filter preventing file-sharing (this would damage Linux too as many distros are downloaded through P2P, legally!). It is worth noting that our government “hounding 14-year-olds who shared music”. Still, I don’t like the idea of my ISP actively filtering my Internet… this isn’t China!
OiNK seems to have been portrayed unfairly in the media. Lots of people suggested they were a subscription service: we now know this is untrue… it was merely an invitation-only site/tracker which accepted donations and required a certain share ratio (much like Demonoid).
Everyone downloads music… I bet even the constables arresting OiNK’s administrator do! The record industry can’t just keep shutting down sites and sueing users as no matter what people will think of a way around it (any OiNK member will be tech-literate enough to shift to another tracker easily enough!) and suggestions of filtering our internet - at least for file-sharing - is a risk to our freedom of speech and to open-source.
I also question the illegality of OiNK… is linking to a file which is pirated against law? They aren’t hosting the file… merely a list of places where the file can be found.
