I just left this on my friend Richard's blog when he discussed the "copying CDs is stealing" issue. I've been struggling with this for many years (one reason why I haven't made a CD in a while, I'm morally unsure of what it means anymore), but I'm slowly getting to a place where I think I am starting to understand this fully...

"Illegal downloading ( Read more... )

Frankfurt Musikmesse is the biggest music instrument trade show in the world, by a very long way. Twelve halls of everything from tablas to grand pianos. I've been coming here nearly every year for about twenty years, first as a customer, and then as an exhibitor. This year I could definitely feel the economic woes hit - it used to take me about ( Read more... )

At last my thoughts on the digital copying issue have finally been crystallised in this statement from Cory Doctorow, in the foreword to Little Brother:
...here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:
Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that ( Read more... )

Since The Pirate Bay trial is currently running in Sweden, I have been amusing myself this morning by reading some of the legal threats they have posted on their site. Funny reading, especially if you have a layman's interest in the law, as I have. My favourites have to be the emails that end with things like:

> This message and any attached ( Read more... )

You know how you've been hearing how much better Windows 7 will be over Windows Vista? Two Australian gentlemen decided to find out... by showing people KDE/Linux and telling them it was actually Windows 7. And the response was...?

Quick catchup on the last couple of weeks...

The trip to Anaheim was great. Worked my ass off, we showed some awesome new software, and pretty much stole the show by all accounts. Was nice to back up on stage for the old firm, as it always is. And very nice of the new employers to give me the time off to go, which was much appreciated. The ( Read more... )

Am at CXHQ for the second weekend in a row, getting ready for the festival we are playing in Belgium next week. It's going well, though most of today was spent installing software on our new computers, which is always a horribly tedious task. We also added a rather wonderful 600W B&W subwoofer to the studio's main monitor system (an old but lovely ( Read more... )

Now this is truly science-fiction crime: imagine if you could intercept the manufacture of credit card readers destined for major retailers and insert an extra chip that would read out all the card info and send it back to you automatically. No need to hack computer systems or anything like that, just get the data right from the checkout counters ( Read more... )

A remarkable article that I know will be of interest to several people reading this:

But I Did Everything Right!

DNA discoveries are revealing why even the best parenting doesn't have the effects experts promise, from breast-feeding to letting kids learn from mistakes.

News just in is that Nokia have bought up Symbian, and intend to release it as Free Software (under the Eclipse Public License) as of today. As far as I'm aware Symbian is currently the most widely used Operating System in the world - there were 100 million phones running Symbian in 2006 - so this means that as of this moment Free Software is now ( Read more... )