5 posts tagged “computers”

Well, once again, DRM proved to stop digital technology....

For a US History project, I needed to do a Power Point, and set some music to it that was representive of the idea of "Fearlessness". I picked out "Duel of the Fates" by John Williams (bit of Star Wars). I had recently gotten the song legally off of iTunes, and tried to pop it into Power Point, but guess what, Power Point wouldn't recongize the protected Mp4 format.

Well, now, I don't know what I'll do. I tried burning the song to CD, and then copy it back to iTunes, so it would come in Mp3, but iTunes 7 was janked, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I like to fancy myself a technical-adept person (since I've used a computer since I was 3 year old, you know, but maybe I'm kidding myself).

I wanted to use a purchased song in a simple, legal, Fair Use way. I wasn't going to give a copy to every one of my friends, or put it on the internet, I just simply wanted to use it for my power point, and I couldn't because of the stupid lawyers and their DRM.

On the Zune, I believe that technically, its better that the iPod. Bigger screen, better UI, awesome Wi-Fi sharing feature, but its crippled by DRM features. I've seen a Zune at school, and its a very impressive device, but, the lawyers got their hands on it and ruined it. Microsoft's engineers shouldn't be blamed for the Zune, Microsoft's legal team should. Remember, DRM (or Digital Rights Management) isn't protecting our rights, its protecting the rights of the RIAA. What do you have when you have a RIAA lawyer burried up to his neck in sand?

Not enough sand.

I've got this fear, some would say, naive fear, that if I change the title of my blog, people will be confused about what it is, so since I've been signed up on Vox, its been, thekevin's blog, with the tagline, "The Midautumn Tech Blog Classic", a pun on Baseball's All-Star game, called often the Midsummer Baseball Classic.

Well, after looking around at some of my favorite blogs here on Vox, I've decided to change it to the The Midautumn Tech Blog Classic, and change the tagline to thekevin's thoughts on today's tech industry.

Therefore, I get to use my baseball-esque name, and people know what it is. Good enough.

The "power user" community has been set on fire the past week by the official release of Firefox 2. Personally, I don't see the big deal.

I used IE until 2003, when on a bet I tried Firefox and feel in love with it. Now, I'm not an open-source guy. I DISLIKE most open-source products for various reasons, but Firefox and Thunderbird are ones that really just click with me.

Now, I think most Firefox users are smarter than the rest, if only by a small bit, but, honestly, they are overreacting. I tried the IE7 beta just a few weeks before I tried Firefox 2 RC1, and honestly, it seems like they copied each other.

The Twitosphere said that Firefox 2 seems "Vista-like" and not having tried Vista, and only checked a few screenshots, I can't say, but I've got this hunching suspicious that Firefox 2 is very IE7-like. No idea why I think IE7 was first, maybe because I tried it first, but they are VERY similar, except for the IE7 rendering engine.

That rendering engine is the reason that I'll be sticking with Firefox 2. The new engine is BEAUTIFUL. Web pages look great. I don't know what it is, but the font just looks brillant. The IE7 internet looks better than the Firefox 2 internet. That being said, it still renders slower. A LOT slower to this broadband Firefox user. The reason I use Firefox is not because its customizable, it does a billion things, or because its powered by the "infinite power of community." Its simply because my favorite web pages load faster.

I run no plugins on Firefox 2 (now, Thunderbird I do, but I digress). and I just surf. Even Opera seems a bit slow for my tastes. We all are a little ADD, and me, if it takes 10 seconds or 3 seconds to load Wookiepedia matters to me.

So, until the IE team overhauls their rendering engine and makes it faster, I'm riding the Firefox bandwagon.

TheKevin's Note: This blog entry was orginally written for my Blogger blog on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006. Enjoy.

How true. Those words, spoken by Cory Doctorow, ring very true for me. Doctorow is a science-fiction writer and tech world journalist (and a socialist.... *gag*), and he was a guest on this week's edition of "This Week in Tech".

There has been a computer in my house since I was five years old (since I was born if you count my dad's Commodore 64 in the basement). I've always feel completely comfortable with a computer, and like Doctorow, I could type on a QWERTY keyboard before I could write curvisve.

Doctorow went on to say that he finds writing with pen and paper "painful". Well, I wouldn't say that writting with a pen (or more often, pencil) "painful" I do find it... unconfortable, maybe even difficult, but not painful, not yet anyway. I do find writting a list or something on paper unconvenent ("What do you mean I can't copy and paste?")

This makes me ponder... in the far, far future, will standard writing be replaced by everybody typing? Computers and becoming more and more common in schools, will writing be replaced forever? Just some things to ponder.

Until next time, I'm out.

Post-script: and the funny thing is, you can tell I dependent on word processors. Look at all thoes spelling mistakes. ;) Until next time...