Things I am interested in…

These are my links for May 18th:

• Khet – strategy at the speed of light
• The Dice Tower – Home
• Purple Pawn 
• Google Operating System (Unofficial Google Blog)
• Home – Home Server Land
• Greenbuild | Building materials | Building products | Building construction
• The Yes Vote – NZ Referendum on Child Discipline 2009
• Computerworld – News, Education & Headlines – Security, Storage & Networking – Information on Hardware, Software for Laptops & Desktops
• Insecure.Org – Nmap Free Security Scanner, Tools & Hacking resources
• Baby & toddler sleep – swaddling wraps, Go Go Bag & grobag baby sleeping bags, sleep sacks, Mokopuna, SwaddleMe, Miracle Blanket, new baby gifts, gifts for babies, baby shower gifts & Safe T Sleep – The Sleep Store, New Zealand

Just the other day a friend of mine made a comment in an email about how his computer was not running all that well under Windows Vista, to which I replied:

“Windows Vista is the spawn of the devil!”

He responded by asking me what I had “against” Vista.  He had only had a few minor problems with it (italics mine), such as several items of software not working, including video drivers I would imagine.  He is a keen audiophile, and mentioned that for him the most annoying thing was the time when iTunes would not function.

Here is my reply to his question (which I believe he had already answered in part):

I don’t like Vista because it is built on the premise that everyone who uses it is a potential thief (whether they are or not). There are parts of Vista that the person who has bought the computer hardware, and has also bought the computer software (including Vista), has no control over – Microsoft does.

In the future you, and everyone else using Vista, may find yourself locked out of your own computer because Microsoft find something you are doing objectionable (most likely because you haven’t paid them enough to do it, on a repeating basis).  Or another scenario is that the overzealous and oversensitive “protection” system ( e.g., “tilt bits”) produces a false positive and shuts you down even though you are doing something totally legitimate.

For an interesting (and controversial) analysis of this see the article referred to in my April blog post – http://turbott.net/blog/2007/04/22/the-longest-corporate-suicide-note-in-history/ .

Copy protection doesn’t work – it merely makes things harder and more cumbersome for the average honest user.  Pirates have been able to hack past every single copy protection system yet devised, including that for BluRay, HDDVD, and the protection on the iPhone.  The average time that passes between a piece of (DRM protected) music appearing on iTunes, and the same piece of music appearing stripped of copy protection on some peer to peer site is around five minutes.  Once an item has been hacked, anyone with access to the internet and a search engine is able to find a copy (hassle free, that will run on any computer system with ease – except Vista) by entering “{item x} torrent” into the search engine…

I will never deliberately purchase Windows Vista until such time as I have no choice.  This will only be when the majority of games I am interested in playing will not run on anything else.  Even then, I will probably keep a seperate games’ machine, tainted with Vista.  The rest of my network will continue using operating systems that I have legitimately purchased, and therefore can expect to retain control over, instead of Microsoft or any other third party…

Here endeth the rant!

Peter F. Hamilton‘s homepage.

Where Lois McMaster Bujold fans hang out.

Cory Doctorow‘s homepage. Most of his stuff can be downloaded in a variety of formats from here.

A perennial favourite – John Varley.

A webpage where Accelerando by Charles Stross is available for download.

Terry Pratchett‘s home site (not strictly SF, but still very good).

Three Brits, two Yanks, and a Canadian. Guess who is who…

P.S. Favourite children’s fantasy author – Diana Wynne Jones.