I’ll let Mark speak for himself…

Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Note to content owners: DRM doesn’t work

And in the continuing saga of the ‘Me too Zune’ player from Microsoft they have ‘announced plans’ to offer DRM free tracks on the Zune Marketplace and some undisclosed future date.

Yawn.

Don’t waste my time telling me that you plan to do something, shut the frack up and do it already!  Sheesh…

Microsoft sees DRM-free music in Zune’s future | CNET News.com

The first crack in the DRM’ed content wall!

EMI, the smallest of the ‘big four’ labels, have inked a deal with Apple to offer tracks via the iTunes music store without copy protection.

This is H U G E!

Assuming they don’t pull some other shinagins this means that you’ll be able to download tracks into iTunes and then move them between computers, iPods, burn to CD, etc. without limitation.  You’ll still likely have to convert the tracks to MP3 if you want to play it on some portable device other than an iPod but that’s a small inconvenience.

Hurray to EMI!

EMI-Apple pen deal to sell songs – CNN.com

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors have approved a city-wide ban on plastic bags from supermarkets.

I am constantly surprised at the reaction I receive when I ask for paper bags rather at the grocery store.  I often get the ‘why would you want to do that?’ look from the high-school aged droid working the register.  I sometimes get the deep ‘oh-no-he-didn’t, this old fart is going to make me reach down below the counter and drag out those dingy paper bag things that give me paper cuts’ look.

To which I return my ‘I’m doing this to save the World for insipid, ungrateful little wretches like you so just drop the ‘tude and do what I say’ look.

Our little household of two adults generates one small bag of ‘trash’ weekly.  Yes, the bag is plastic but in this case it is justified.  We’re not always real good at eating all the leafy veggies we buy and what remains after they have been in the ‘frigde for awhile is a fifth state of matter; not exactly liquid, not quite solid, but with a significant gaseous component.  Anyway, to dispose of that in a paper bag would be… umm…  impossible.

However, when recycle day comes along bi-weekly we put out two heaping bins of ‘stuff’.  Our recyclables outweigh our trash by a factor of 15.  Our town is also in the enviable position of getting paid for each pound of recyclable material that is picked up.   So not only are we saving the World for insipid, ungrateful little wretches we’re also lowing our tax bill.

San Francisco to ban plastic grocery bags – CNN.com

I visited Australia 12+  years ago and found it to be a beautiful place with welcoming people.  However, I  discovered a mindset that I likened to the Wild West days of the US; a deep seated biggotry against the native peoples and a belief that all natural resources were infinate.  It seems they have gotten over at least the second bit.

Too bad the bulbs over the heads of our ‘government’ have already burnt out and are therefore incapable of new ideas.

Australia to ban old-style light bulbs

This piece covers a finding by Google engineers that in some ways contradicts commonly heald beliefs that high temperatures and/or high utilization will cause a hard disk to fail sooner.

Basically, they found that there is a weak coorelation between temp and failure rates. It also found that drives up to 3 years old that are used infrequently are more likely to fail than those that have a high utilization.

They also found that a drive with any scan errors (surface errors) is 39 times more likely to fail than a drive with none.

What I took away was this:
– Expect to replace drives after 3 years
– If a drive is showing scan errors, replace it.
– Don’t worry so much about temp & ‘thrashing’.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Hard disk test ‘surprises’ Google

Here is a direct link to the paper itself:  http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf