We had a hardware problem early this morning and again this afternoon around 4 to 5pm that meant that the Ecademy site was running very slowly. We're temporarily sorted this out and are currently investigating the cause to prevent it happening again.

Although this coincided with the new functions and changes going live, it was not actually related.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Why do we find it so hard to build an insanely great Few To Few communication system? Conversations within a group of like minded people is fundamental to what it means to be human. From the 3-25 people eating together to the couple of hundred people worldwide that share an interest in some obscure form of motorcycle to the local golf club, small groups of people getting together to socialize is very very common.

The geek world has tried all these:-
- Mailing lists
- IRC
- Usenet
- Skype Public chats
- Web Forums (phpBB etc)
- Tribes, Orkut Groups, Ecademy Clubs

And for various reasons, they've all failed, been discarded or at least haven't reached their potential. Often this is due to poisonous people (The Fuckwad problem) or it's because the technology is too hard (IRC) or too unstandardised (email client threading).

But then we get a whole series of technologies that are supposed to be better and are promoted as if they provide a real alternative. So we have:-
- Blogging - Actually a monologue, One to Few.
- Blog Comments - One to Few and impossible to track across the blogosphere.
- Twitter - Another monologue, One To Many. With almost no feedback and response.

So here's Danah Boyd talking about Twitter. I'm reading between the lines but Danah seems to be complaining that there's no back channel and Twitter is broadcast only. "The techno-geek users keep telling me that it’s a conversation. ... But i don’t think that either are typically conversations. More often, they are individuals standing on their soap boxes who enjoy people responding to them and may wander around to others soap boxes looking for interesting bits of data."

I've thought about and actually written the code to Tweet, whenever I get a new entry in the RSS feeds from last.fm (what am I listening to), my blog (what have I just said), Librarything (what have I started reading), Amazon Wishlist (What do I want), Flickr (What have I just posted). But I've decided not to enable it. Not because I want to be secret, but because I don't want to pollute the Twitter stream with hundreds of posts per day.

Meanwhile, we still need a better Few-To-Few conversation medium.

P2P File-Sharing Ruins Physical Piracy Business | TorrentFreak : If the likes of the MPAA, RIAA and IFPI are to be believed, file-sharing is causing worldwide havok, costing billions of dollars and creating unemployment. It's true that some people are feeling the P2P effect; they're called "physical pirates" and one of them says that file-sharing has ruined his business.

The story is about a Brit who made CDs and DVDs of music, games, movies and software and sold them for up to 10 quid at car boot sales. His (illegal) business has collapsed as he can't even give them away now. The combination of P2P file sharing and cheap DVD burners mean that there's no market for cheap ripoffs any more.

So let's get this straight. If you can't even sell cheap pirated copies what hope is there for selling the real thing?

I do have to take the story with a pinch of salt. I understand there is still a big market dominated by the Chinese in London for pirated disks. And I seem to remember seeing people selling bootleg tapes and CDs last time I was in Camden Market. Perhaps this is just a case of the future not being evenly distributed. Or maybe it's that you have to offer something unavailable elsewhere such as bootleg concert/mix performances.

A comment I posted a few days ago.

p2pnet.net - the original daily p2p and digital media news site : "They're just hoping somebody is going to figure all this out for them."

Something to understand here. The big labels are not involved in direct retail sales. In fact they have a huge channel conflict problem which prevents them from doing due to the risk of upsetting their existing customers which are the big retail outlets.

So the only way for anything to change is for somebody (like Apple, say) to come to them with a new business model. But when that happens, the lawyers, middle managers, and all sorts of other interests tie the negotiations up in endless powerpoint and chocolate biscuit meetings while they debate how the business model can't possibly work for them without this that and the other restriction, the most obvious of which is DRM.

So it's not really that the big labels aren't doing anything. It's because they can't do anything due to their history.

Which is what makes the death of AllOfMp3 all the more galling. Here was a positive new approach to selling music that is being killed by short sightedness as they've successfully cut off it's income. What the labels ought to do is to buy (or encourage someone to buy) the assets of AllOfMp3 and transplant it into the west.

The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » links for 2007-02-13 : DRM systems are broken so quickly because they are grounded on some thing that is scientifically bankrupt, the idea that you can keep a secret from some one from whom you have told the secret.

I'm not sure I should suggest this to anyone but I can't be the first to see this. There is a way for DRM to work and to be effectively unbreakable. Use PKI. But it relies on the customer having a unique key pair. The provider encrypts the content using the customer's unique public key. The content is then decrypted with the customer's secret key. This could be encapsulated in the player software (iTunes say) and made pretty much transparent. On installation the player software would report it's newly generated public key back to the provider who would then use it when the provider created the file for download. In addition the encoded file could be signed by the provider and the signature checked against the Provider's public key.

This could all be open sourced and the algorithms published. Just as with SSL, the same scheme could be used by multiple providers and with player software from multiple sources.

The downside of course is that the provider has to uniquely encrypt each file for a specific customer.

There's a catch though. There's always a catch. Once the software has done it's job, and created the plain text version, this now sits on the customer's PC waiting to be captured and turned into a DRM-free version.

So what we've done is to prevent the customer from stealing a file meant for somebody else. Or distributing the encrypted file because it won't work for anyone else. But we've failed to stop the plain text version from being captured and distributed. And there lies the rub. it's not so much that you can't keep a secret from someone who you've told the secret as that you can't dictate what a customer does with the decrypted file once it's decrypted.

Slashdot | No Passport For Britons Refusing Mass Surveillance :

This sceptred isle
I used to be very proud of being English. I believed Britain to be a light in the darkness and a bastion of freedom. I believed that the U.K., along with the U.S., stood as examples to the rest of the world as to what was possible when freedom won out over fear. But today, I no longer feel that way. I see freedoms being given up for illusory safety, and an unprecedented level of control being given to a government that has never proven itself even remotely worthy or capable of such a responsibility. Mostly, I feel anger and sadness, and a sense of frustration that the proverbial shining city on the hill has become so horribly tarnished with the shit of misinformation, misdirection, fear-mongering, and mediocre talking-heads proclaiming that just a few more liberties need to go to make us all safe.

Me too. We were never as good as we thought we were, but we were never as pathetic as we are now.

Gizmodo's Anti-RIAA Manifesto - Gizmodo

Digital Rights^H^H^H^H Restrictions Management, or DRM, is the software that makes it so music you buy from the iTunes Music Store can't play on any other player other than the iPod, such as a Zune or Sansa. Right. DRM is not about paying the struggling artist. It's about filling the coffers of Apple and Microsoft (and Macrovision and the other DRM vendors)

Apple - QuickTime - Download - Standalone QuickTime Player
It's been really annoying me that you couldn't install or upgrade Quicktime without also installing iTunes. So it was good to finally discover the page for the standalone player. [from: del.icio.us]

Properly Chilled - Downtempo Music & Culture
What it says! So chilled, it's positively Arctic. [from: del.icio.us]

SKMap(ww)-Global Map
Puts your Skype presence on a Google Map [from: del.icio.us]

Thank you. I'm glad somebody can point out the holes in the email I received from my good friend, Tony the Blair.

NO2ID:Press Release Blair ID claims 'fact-free' : "The PM's claims on this subject are not exactly lies, so much as fact-free. Endlessly repeating a fabrication doesn't make it real, Mr Blair."

The Register adds: Collar the lot of us! Blair adds whole UK to police suspect list

I also look forward to taking part in the government's plan to make people travel to interview centres to provide a biometric for the national identity card.

Is the right time for a Godwin moment? Or should I invoke the ghosts of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Robert Anton Wilson? (fnord)

Gosh. No. 10 is replying to petitions. Are they actually listening?

bandrm - epetition response :

We received a petition asking:
"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Ban the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies for digital content."
...
However, DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.

Bwaahahaha! So who exactly wrote that last bit? "DRM enables unprecedented consumer choice". Now where have I heard that before?

I've signed maybe 30 petitions now. Can I expect a personal email for every one?

This turned up today. It's exactly what I expected. And I hope others will rip into it unmercifully. Because it reads to me as "I'm right. You're wrong. And the critics are all lying".

---

E-petition: Response from the Prime Minister

The e-petition to "scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards" has now closed.
The petition stated that "The introduction of ID cards will not prevent terrorism
or crime, as is claimed. It will be yet another indirect tax on all law-abiding
citizens of the UK". This is a response from the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme
attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-
petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who
signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the
National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a
safer place.

The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism.
While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or
crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders
more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism.
More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of
protecting this country - believe.

So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the
opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I
would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way
the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a
biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad
will soon need.

In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and
its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain
less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card,
should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.

But first, it's important to set out why we need to do more to secure our
identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which
people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and
international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across
borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple
identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they
operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four
criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition
details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much
more difficult.

Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity
fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building
yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID
card and matching biometric record will be much harder.

I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those
guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare
the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the
information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will
be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of
offenders.

The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the
vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work,
for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened
tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.

Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in
preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new
biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this
technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have
already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into the UK.

Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to
secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or
iris recognition for their staff. France, Italy and Spain are among other European
countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards. Over 50 countries
across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are
proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. The introduction
in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant
that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a
visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure
we maximise the benefits to the UK.

These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I
recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National
Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds. They will, I hope, be reassured by the
strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register and the right for
each individual to check it. But I hope it might make those who believe ID cards
will be ineffective reconsider their opposition.

If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the
law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected.
This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes
survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.

I am also convinced that there will also be other positive benefits. A national ID
card system, for example, will prevent the need, as now, to take a whole range of
documents to establish our identity. Over time, they will also help improve access
to services.

The petition also talks about cost. It is true that individuals will have to pay a
fee to meet the cost of their ID card in the same way, for example, as they now do
for their passports. But I simply don't recognise most claims of the cost of ID
cards. In many cases, these estimates deliberately exaggerate the cost of ID cards
by adding in the cost of biometric passports. This is both unfair and inaccurate.

As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no
choice but to have a biometric passport. We estimate that the cost of biometric
passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The
additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for
their 10-year lifespan. Our aim is to ensure we also make the most of the benefits
these biometric advances bring within our borders and in our everyday lives.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Blair


Useful Links

10 Downing Street home page
http://www.pm.gov.uk/

James Hall, the official in charge of delivering the ID card scheme, will be
answering questions on line on 5th March. You can put your question to him here
http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page10969.asp

To see his last web chat in November 2006, see:
http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page10364.asp

Identity and Passport Service
http://www.ips.gov.uk/

Home Office Identity Fraud Steering Committee
http://www.identity-theft.org.uk/

There's a certain irony in "Google Loses Cache-Copyright Lawsuit in Belgium" They thought it was ok to grab text out of news articles and display them on their news site. But if somebody takes their News RSS feed and then republishes it on another site they get upset.

This one caught my eye in Bruce Sterling's State of the World discussion.

"The Globalisation of Balkanisation"

We're all in the Balkans now.

It seems like AllOfMp3 is having it's life blood cut off. The only ways to pay now are JB and Diners card with Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Xrost all gone. There have been sites that let you buy AllOfMp3 gift cards but I can't find any real ones any more.

So I guess that's it. With no way of taking money, they'll disappear. Unless of course they can sell the whole operation to Amazon.

I still think the AllOfMp3 model is the future of music distribution. They needed to find a real way of passing money back to the artists but the basic site, approach and price worked well.

So what now? Investigate their competitors or just switch back to the P2P networks?

Here's a brief summary after 10 days of playing. I'll add specific links later (maybe) but this will help for searching.

- The number one problem is fonts. I'll say that again, FONTS. Install the MS core fonts. Find a copy of Tahoma and install it. Add a ~/.fonts.conf file to turn off anti-aliasing for < 10 pt and enable antialiasing for bold. Go to the gnome font setup in Admin, preferences and set maximum hinting, sub-pixel anti-alias. set all fonts to tahoma 8 or 9. Install kcontrol. install GTK libraries, run kcontrol as user not root. Ignore the startup error messages. Set as for gnome.

- Firefox in Ubuntu edgy needs two tweaks. Set the keyboard handler to re-enable backspace=go back one page. Turn off the internal font engine by adding a ~/etc/mozilla/rc file that disables pango (sp?)

- The number one problem is fonts! It's irritating that Gnome and KDE have different font settings when they're both driven by X. You can run KDE apps under Gnome and vice versa but they don't pick up the font information and overrides from the same place.

- Open Office in Ubuntu Edgy is terminally borked. The fonts and font rendering generally are so bad as to make it unusable. This is an absolute show stopper if you're trying to impress people into making the switch and is unforgiveable. It was ok once but appears to have been broken for 6-9 months now. Did I say that the number one problem is fonts?

- There's some conflicting information about using Windows Shares. it's not clear if you should use smbfs or cifs and what code page to use so filenames look right. This is a key area to improve as so many Linux machines will be used in a windows environment with other windows machines surrounding it. smbfs really ought to be installed by the distro to start with.

- You absolutely will need all the proprietary codecs. In particular MP3 is the single most common format for almost anything. It's understandable but sad that it can't be installed by default. Look at EasyUbuntu and Automatix if you don't want to do this by hand.

- Amarok is an amazing app. But it has a serious problem importing large quantities of music into the collection. It has a tendency to be unable to cope with tags in certain files for no obvious reason. Get too many errors like this and it just gives up forgetting all the work it had done so far. This makes you realise just how good Winamp V5 is and its a real shame that there's no port of winamp to linux. Functionally Amarok is just about at the same level as winamp but it's not as polished. See fonts (again) you can change half the fonts in amarok's config but the other half come from KDE.

- Ubuntu does a pretty good job of finding and configuring all your hardware but it might not be perfect on old hardware. In my case the powernowd daemon needed turning off as it didn't work and was hurting performance and introducing mouse/keyboard glitches. After fonts this is the major area of tweaking with lots of fun to be had juggling ati/nvidia drivers, wifi drivers and so on. Ultimately it's up to the manufacturers to provide better linux drivers or to provide apis and specs that the community can work with but don't hold your breath.

- The number one problem is fonts. Or did I say that already? ;) You can have all the eye candy you want but if the text is unreadable you won't impress people. It's a damn shame MS don't include tahoma in their distributable pack but there's an awful lot of copies out there.

- Skype just plain didn't work. And the Skype-Linux release is now a long way behind XP/Mac. I don't have time to get to the bottom of this.

- And finally. Package, app and upgrade management is great. But it's surprisingly hard to uninstall major apps and install a later release than the one included. Upgrading OpenOffice to the latest release was a mission. As it turned out it didn't solve the OO font problem. Linux needs the functional equivalent of Installshield or Nullsoft installer so any old developer can package a new app with an install wizard.

So I think I can stop playing now. Ubuntu is not yet good enough for my needs. If and when I switch, I think I will have to have XP running in parallel either with vmware or parallels. And that probably means the next laptop replacement. So I'll come back to this in 6 months. But there is light on the horizon and the state of the art means that Ubuntu+XP+VM is very close to being an alternative to Vista or OSX for a computing professional. Ubuntu on it's own is generally slick enough, once tweaked, for most average users.

But guys, come one. An unusable Office package is just not acceptable.

As George Bush heads into the last 2 years of his presidency, I have a modest proposal to help him make up for the mess of the last 6 years. He's finally got on the Global Warming bandwagon. He's talked about reducing the USA's dependence on terrorist oil. And he ought to know that US health care is a mess. So here's the proposal.

Increase petrol/oil tax to European levels. Plough the vast additional income into funding a European/Canadian state health system.

Now this is something that the Democrats cannot fight because it simultaneously targets their major issues. Tripling petrol prices will drive the market towards smaller more efficient cars. This will enable the USA to meet the Kyoto accord without having to actually enforce any reductions. And it will undermine the absurd health insurance crisis while improving the lot of the bottom 3rd of the society by enabling them to get real health care.

The one downside is of course that it will drive the economy into recession and high inflation. Oh well.

I know the Inspiron 4000 is old but it was lying around!

I've since discovered:-
- that the lost mouse movement is a known FAQ. A couple of other Inspiron 4000 users have the same problem.

- I've finally worked out the font issues. In XP I have cleartype turned off and font smoothing set to standard. On Arial it doesn't anti-alias below about 10pt normal. In Ubuntu I now have sub-pixel smoothing with max hinting. It's very close to being the same but is trying to anti-alias small fonts like 9pt when perhaps it shouldn't. It's a subtle difference but just enough to be distracting.

- For some reason, screen refresh such as scrolling in Firefox has improved. No idea why but I have been doing a lot of fiddling.

- Radio buttons in firefox are truly horrible. No sure if this is firefox, gnome or X

- Stuff keeps coming and going and I've no real idea why! For instance Restart and shutdown has just disappeared from the quit menu. hey ho.

Latest game was trying to persuade it to auto-mount a volume on a Linksys NSLU-2 that is shared over Samba. I can see it in the file manager but can't persuade it to mount. Perhaps I'm putting the wrong commands into fstab or it's permissions on the mount point or something. dmesg is not very helpful.

A lot of this stuff still feels surprisingly hard compared with XP.

Have you noticed how when you do a search for solutions you often pick up on fixes that were out of date 3 years ago? ;)

Later

As usual with the linux you can do anything with some command line work. I discovered that fonts.conf can be configured to disable anti-aliasing for small fonts. I set it to 10pt (is it pt or px?) so 9pt is displayed clean and it's worked a treat. Bizarrely Firefox has it's own anti-alias settings and doesn't take all of them from X. Still digging on that one.

The Samba problem was that the smbfs package wasn't loaded but smbclient was by default. So I could see the share, use "connect to server" to mount it but a mount in fstab didn't work. Now it's all peachy.

So now I have my 90Gb of music mounted. I pointed Amarok at it but it complained of too many tag errors. This is good because it will prompt me to fix the few remaining MP3 tag errors in the collection. but bad because Amarok should have completed it's scan regardless.

Hibernate stopped working. It will hibernate, it just won't restart.

Later still

Somewhere in trying the ATI screen drivers and installing XFC to try the Xubuntu variant, the login sessions and Quit dialog got badly screwed. There was no obvious way to turn the machine off as restart and Shutdown had disappeared! trying to resurrect it looked like too much work, so I gave up and re-installed. At which point I discovered the logic of having a /home partition.

Firefox anti-aliasing is curious. It takes some of it's setup from X but does some of it itself. There is a font.antialias.minimum setting in about:config but it doesn't appear to do anything in the Ubuntu build. This could be a distro bug rather than a firefox bug.

For some unknown reason backspace in Firefox doesn't do what you'd expect. But that's also fixable in about:config.

I tend to use mouse wheel click for doubleclick. I think there's a way of making this work involving the usual hacking of .conf files but I haven't attempted it yet.

There's something weird about Amarok. I think it's a KDE App running under Gnome and so it's using it's own font definitions for the gui. The font in the data content areas can be changed in Amarok configuration, but the dialog fonts can't and they look awful.

This is all a geek's experiments. I want to see what the current state of desktop Linux is like. I'm quite happy to dig down in the process just as I did 4 years ago with XP. The only performance issue I have is hiccups in mouse, keyboard, scrolling and MP3 playing. And I'm mostly prepared to accept that I wouldn't see it with faster hardware even if I think it's still a bug.

And even later

The glitches in mouse movement were coming from powernowd which is supposed to handle CPU speed for power management. Turn it off in services and it's all smooth. The whole system is now the same or slightly faster than XP on the same machine as I expected.

I can't manage to get all the fonts to work right in all the Apps. The problem is Amarok and Firefox. which use KDE and GTK respectively. I've tried installing kcontrol and fonts with that are now the same as in Gnome but it's having no effect on Amarok. You can change the fonts in some of the windows from within Amarok configuration but the dialog and collection text come from KDE. I'm beginning to get pretty tired of this. This really needs sorting by the OSS community. Fonts are the one thing that you immediately see and compare and it ought to be possible to (perhaps with one click) set up a new Ubuntu install to look exactly like Windows. Why? Because it's one of the few things that MS is very very good at.

Amarok is repeatedly failing to collect tag info from my entire music collection. It fails with a bizarre error message after 30 minutes saying "too many errors. Maybe you've got an old taglib." Right. It really should just ignore errors and carry on.

The "ugly" proprietary drivers for MP3 et al installed ok. but until I rebooted, Rhythmbox played MP3s at double speed!

Even though mount on the SMB share works (see above) fstab won't mount it during startup. My guess is that it's timing out. Curiously browsing the share in nautilus also times out. The first time you try to open a folder or file it almost always fails. Try again and it just works. Maybe there's a samba config setting somewhere to tell it to just wait a little longer.

I tried loading Skype. It loads, starts logs in, gets most of the contact info and then fails spectacularly. The display is all over the place with text being shown on the screen well outside the window. resize the main window and it never manages to redraw it.

O I think I'm going to stop there and leave it all for a few months. My over all impression is that you can change everything which is good. but you have to change everything which is bad. It's made me rethink what I use every day and what I need to make it work. Key windows only programs are:-
- Winamp
- Skype
- Turnpike (really!)
- IE6/7 purely for checking web development, not to actually use.
Given enough time tweaking, everything else either has a direct port in Linux or a direct equivalent.

I think we stand at a crossroads. XP is good enough but it's not going to be around forever. Vista is expensive and scarily DRM riddled. MacOSX is neat but your exchanging an MS straitjacket for an Apple straitjacket. You gain some of that OSS goodness but also get more Apple lock-in and lose some programs that never get ported from windows. Go to Linux and you're into the OSS anarchy where nothing is clear and everything almost works.

In theory, given enough memory it's now possible to run VMware or Parallels to run two or more of these at the same time. I've been trying to find somebody who's actually run Skype under XP+OSX/Linux+Parallels/vmware but without success. Maybe it's possible. Not sure I want to try. And certainly not on this hardware.

One other thing thats a larf

I put up my original post on my own blog as well as here. Today I tried again to search google for things like "KDE font ubuntu gnome amarok". A large number of the front page results are either pointers to here and my own blog or to Linux community sites that have picked it up and commented on it. It's the downside of having lots of Google Fu. You frequently end up being the definitive statement of the problem. Which is a pain in the neck when you didn't find the answer and still haven't a month later when you go back and try again!

Centralize, De-Centralize, Centralize, De-Centralize. The pendulum swings. Back and forth, back and forth.

Well after Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Google, Amazon, eBay, it's time to swing back. Don't forget it's a World of Ends. Nobody owns it. Everyone can use it. And crucially; Anyone can improve it. And they can do that from any end (edge). It doesn't have to be improved from the center outwards.