I've just about decided which laptop to get next. But then there's the question of operating system.

I refuse to get drawn into the Apple straitjacket. For all sorts of reasons.

There's really no software on Ubuntu that isn't also on Windows that I really, really want. Well maybe Amarok.

I'm sick of Windows XP degrading over time. Both long term with bloat in the registry and startup programs and short term in that eventually you just have to reboot to get the thing to work again. And I'm sick of the monthly forced boot when MS issue yet another set of security fixes. But XP only has 4 months to run before it starts getting difficult to obtain. Meanwhile there's a constant stream of windows only software I want to play with. Or where the Windows version is leading edge and the Mac-Linux versions appear later, not at all, or there crippled in some way.

Vista continues to look like a really bad idea. I really don't want to have anything to do with it.

So then we get into hybrids. XP+andLinux would let me run Ubuntu programs but like I said, there's nothing I really really want. Ubuntu + VirtualBox + XP makes a lot of sense, but there's continuing horror stories about USB support. All the things like Apache, PHP and MySQL that I run locally could all run in Ubuntu. Leaving Windows really just for website checking with IE6 and 7, Skype, Winamp and that stream of windows only bits.

And just to make matter worse, a bleeding edge laptop is likely to have hardware in it that may or may not have drivers for XP and Ubuntu.

I'm almost persuaded that the solution is to get a proper desktop with an eeePC and to shift as much work as possible to web based systems. And to leave the desktop on all the time with an SSH tunnel so I can get at the disk from anywhere. But I don't like the idea of leaving a desktop running 24/7 because of the electricity/power draw.

Choices, choices. And no good solutions.

And the laptop choice? The top of the range Dell 1525. 2.0Ghz T7590, 4Gb ram, 250Gb hard disk, Intel Graphics hardware, 15" widescreen. It seems to be the cheapest with that class of hardware. Sony's are more expensive and have too much range engineering. The other manufacturers don't seem to have quite caught up with that processor. And it's less than half the price of the equivalent MacBook.

Somebody said to: On a side topic, anybody ever heard of landmark education???

Julian Bond says: avoid like the plague. It's a cult.

They said: my g/f just got out of it... she said it was torture

I said: It's the bastard son of Erhard Seminar Training or EST. It uses a basic mindwashing technique. Spend 2 days grinding people into nothing, then 2 hours building them back up again.

It turns people into apparently happy smiley people who look at your left ear while talking to you and trying to persuade you to join because it changed their life.

2 days convincing you how bad your life is and how good it can be by fulfilling these landmark education classes at some dollar figure

I think of all these cults as being the second oldest profession in the book. That of Shaman or Witchdoctor. Arguably it's the first because the first example was the snake. (In the old testament tradition). Convince gullible people they are worthless and the only person who can give them worth is you, and you'll only do it for food, lodging, sex and coloured beads. And there's a plentiful supply of suckers who'll fall for it. Because at 4am everybody feels worthless. Sorry to sound so cynical but I really think these things are evil.

Quick thought. What the hell happened last summer? Did somebody feed the monkeys? Because it feels like the web is exploding again. Huge numbers of web2/UGC sites, Facebook gadgets, OpenSocial, socialgraph, dataportability, FOAF, XFN, Microformats, OpenID, Wow, just Wow!

There's *so* much happening right now.

A comment on Linux Journal | The Original Magazine of the Linux Community

As well as VRM, here's another TLA to conjure with. CDA or Customer Driven Advertising. This takes Publisher Driven Advertising one stage further.

I would love to have an RSS/Atom feed of adverts specifically targeted at me. I leave enough traces round the web at places like Amazon, eBay, Last.FM, the gadget sites, doubleclick and so on that an advertising agency should be able to come up with a very tightly targeted feed. And I want to help refine it with Love,Skip,Ban buttons on every ad.

Doc Searls Weblog · On the continuing end of broadcasting as usual :

My wife is addicted to BBC Radio 4. Every couple of years, the portable radio gets dropped one too many times and has to be replaced. Each time the radio gets more features and works less well. The latest upgrade was to a portable Sony DAB that has less battery life, takes more batteries and requires a good signal with the antenna extended to work at all. If you change from mains power to batteries, it doesn't just switch power and stay on, it turns itself off. And all this for only a small improvement in audio over FM?

This household at least could do with an ultra low power radio that picks up Radio 4 and nothing else and has a sleep function.

The other half (ie me) is addicted to last.FM tag radio ('Chillosophy' tag). That's fine in the house, but there's no solution (yet) for listening in the car. And even in the house, I could do with some portable solution to this. A Chumby perhaps?

Totally awesome!

Marc's Voice - Dataportability.org video

But I was disappointed there was no Opera Singing. ;)

OpenSocial API Blog: Orkut is looking for a few good apps... : The directory will go live for Orkut's user-facing launch, coming up at the end of February.

So will we see an iteration of the data API at the end of Feb? And I guess this means there'll be another rash of PR from people like Plaxo, Hi5 and Ning that all those ClosedGadgets run on their platform as well.

I don't know what all the fuss is about Waterboarding. It doesn't seem nearly as bad as some of the things the Inquisition did, like Strappado or perhaps the Iron Maiden. Or that were common punishments for treason in the 17th century such as half-hanging, drawing and quartering.

If we're going to use torture, surely we should do it properly without any half measures?

Kevin Kelly says: Cool Tool: Roku SoundBridge : Following months of ripping the thousands of CDs in my collection, I now have more gigabytes of music on my laptop than even the largest iPod can hold, so plugging an mp3 player into my stereo wasn't an option.

Oh, yes. When you get over 70Gb of MP3s you're options narrow sharply. If you get over 140Gb, you're completely stuffed. It's no longer possible to carry your entire music collection with you even if you want to.

But there's another problem too. You really need a fairly large screen and a good UI to navigate it all. Which means a PC. Have we just found another use for an eeePC? As a front end to your home NAS where all the files are actually held?

I refuse to use iTunes because it is a system hog on my Windows machine. I rely on WinAmp instead

A man after my own heart.

What no comments on his blog? I shouldn't complain really. There's no comments on this blog either. And probably for the same reason.

If Iran Were America (And We Were Iran): A Timeline by J. L. Bryan

Brutal. I weep for the world.

Christmas came and went and all gadget freaks are no doubt thinking about what to give themselves seeing as they didn't get the gadget they wanted.

So I'm in the market for a new PMP. I was seriously thinking about a shiny new 160Gb Classic iPod. But news that Rockbox doesn't work, Sync utilities have been borked by Apple and the fairly high price is putting me off.

So how about "Not an iPod" as an alternative?

- Must be >100Gb, preferably 160.
- Plain old USB mass storage, drag and drop Sync.
- Zero interest in DRM music so all I want is the ability to play MP3.

Or do I just slap another bigger disk in my ageing Zen Xtra for peanuts? So that's what I did. I got a 160Gb disk for my Zen Xtra and tried installing it.

- I had to uninstall WMP11 to reload the firmware
- Formatting the disk, it only recognised 128Gb
- Transferring tracks worked for a bit but it started throwing errors
- Stupidly persistent I re-formatted, re-initialised, re-booted several times.
- I eventually got 65Gb of music loaded before it refused to accept any more. This is less than than the 70Gb the old 80Gb disk held.
- I gave up

What's wrong here
- Creative got screwed over by Microsoft when they bet on MS PFS-MTP
- Creative got screwed by their firmware supplier (presumably outsourced) when they built in hard and soft limits on capacity
- Customers got screwed by Creative because these problems are well known but they still haven't bothered to update the firmware on old hardware
- Creative and Customers got screwed over again when MS gave up on PFS and went into competition with them with Zune
- It's time for disk drive manufacturers to stop lying. 1GB does not equal 1,000,000,000 bytes.

So 2-3 years after first hitting the requirement there still isn't anyone who makes a personal music player that I want to buy. I'm almost at the point of just going "Screw you guys, I'm going home" and buying an iPod Classic 160Gb knowing that it's only a temporary fix and it will just annoy me.

How did we get to the point where it's acceptable that a product costing £200 upwards is a disposable item? To which I'd add, "If you can't open it, break it and fix it again, you don't own it".

Andrew Orlowski intervw: IPFI chief says it's time to hose down the networks | The Register Some thoughts:

It's abundance not scarcity. There's never been so much music being created and listened to. What has happened though is the decline of the star system and the Short Head. All the interesting new music is buried down in the Fat Middle and Long Tail. This changes the game for the big music publishers. They're now in a volume of sources, algorithmic business not in a monopoly volume of product business. And their competition is also coming from artists doing all the production and distribution themselves. That puts the record companies into a very different role of being VC and Marketing consultants for artists and not owning them.

The value of music has dropped drastically. And it's not just P2P that has done this by undermining the price but also the supermarkets and online CD retailers. Music is just not worth $0.99 per track any more. (or £.0.79). However there's been no official test of how much price elasticity there is in online sales. There's really only 3 data points. Free P2P, AllOfMp3 and iTMS.

Free P2P is a misunderstanding. It's only free because you don't charge yourself for time and materials. There's significant pain in finding, downloading, tidying, renaming, re-tagging P2P music. Relief from that pain can be charged for.

So there may be a way out of this and that's for a retailer to build a site to copy the AllOfMp3 interface and pricing and then stuff it with every bit of audio that's ever been recorded. It's at least possible that selling 192Kb VBR MP3s with no DRM at $0.25 (£0.10) per track and $0.50 per track for lossless would make more money in total than the record companies currently make out of iTMS and Amazon.

OpenSocial REST API - OpenSocial API Definition | Google Groups : I am not a google employee, but I have pestered them all about this
issue.

Let me summarize the bad news:

The data api is not on the slate any time soon.

All platforms will launch with version 0.7 at least, which will not have data api.

Sigh. So I guess they won't be part of the DataPortability specs any time soon either.

What a great rant.

Marc%u2019s Voice » Blog Archive » Open Letter to Dave McClure: "Where are the open social networking panels at Web 2.0 & Social Graphing?" :

I particularly like this about OpenSocial

Why don't they just call it OpenGadget - or even better 'ClosedGadget' - cause where's the open?

I'm withholding further judgment on OpenSocial until the Data APIs get firmed up and they get implemented on a Google property and at least one other 3rd party site. I've actually already implemented my interpretation of the People Data API on Ecademy but took it down again when it became clear that the Data Apis are works in progress likely to change radically soon.

I do hope DataPortability comes to something and doesn't turn out to be another nude but sunburnt emperor.

A placeholder link to the DataPortability.Public documentation pages.

Sony BMG Exec Talks Nonsense At MidemNet :

"As we all know, the technical price given to individual music tracks and/or albums transferred over the Internet is for all practical purposes, nil."

I take issue with this. The price for free music off the net is your time. Time spent finding, downloading, renaming filenames, fixing tags, organising your library, syncing your iPod. As I think Steve J said, it's only free because you pay yourself minimum wage.

Which means there is actually a market for processes that take the pain out of this. I think this is the real message from iTMS and iTunes (much as I hate them) that the people who purchase from that route are actually buying convenience not music. That $0.99 is not a reflection of the value of the music, but of the value of our time.

This makes me think that there is a sustainable market for downloaded music with a real price and value but that the price per track is more like $0.10 than $0.99 for 128Kbps and perhaps a bit more for 192 and upwards to lossless compression. In other words the old AllOfMp3.com model. Which in turn means that a music retailer should appear that exactly copies the AllOfMp3 website and pricing, is supported by the labels and is packed with every piece of audio ever recorded.

I know, I know, its not going to happen. Unless. Unless a full on features and price war breaks out between iTMS, Amazon and anyone else that sells non-DRM music online.

Oh, Yeah. "Just Say No To DRM" m'kay?

My honourable friend Dave Winer says A decentralized Twitter? (Scripting News) : We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages.

To which I say "Nice", what an interesting thought experiment.

So here goes.

The core of Twitter is micro-blogging. This is well handled already by a subset of RSS. Or rather RSS with an etiquette imposed. Let's call it TSS.
- No Titles
- Limited length description. I find 160chars, not quite enough so let's say 255.
- A Channel name and thumbnail image.

The next bit is the Following, Followed by social graph. We can do following with OPML because it's basically a set of TSS feeds.

Followed by is harder though. This is where one or more aggregators needs to step in and collect all the OPML files so that you can answer the question "Who follows this person". This is the same problem as aggregating FOAF to answer "Who says they know this person".

Now we need a simple micro-blogging engine some thing like a cut down wordpress that understands all this. Enterprising people could provide this as a hosted solution. It needs to both display the incoming feeds and make it really easy to post. And it could copy the Twitter API so that you could use developments of your favourite Twitter helper program

So far so good. Now since Twitter already has RSS feeds this same system could pull in your Twitter like feeds not just from Twitter, but also from all the other Twitter like status systems. Facebook, MySpace, Pownce, Jaiku et al. At which point it becomes obvious that we've already got a decentralised system. It's just that we're not very good yet about grouping them all together.

The bit missing in here is SMS. So there's another opportunity for someone to provide service to the cloud.

What's interesting here is that I'm already doing this by using Twitterfeed and Twitter to gather feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku and Ecademy Status updates. There's quite a few other similar systems. But that's all too geeky for most people. There's already a need for a simpler system to do that.

I used to get my Facebook's Status updates fed into a dummy Twitter account using Twitterfeed which I then follow from my main account. It seemed to stop working some time in December. When I went to check the Twitterfeed setup, the authentication for the dummy account was failing. And it had been dropped from the accounts I was following. Even stranger was that the account was read only, although there's no indication of that on the screen. You can still type in your tweet and hit submit but it's not saved.

So here's what happened. Somebody complained to Twitterfeed and then to Twitter that their Facebook Status updates were escaping out into the web. Twitter then made my dummy account read only. So I've dumped that account, created a new one, made that protected updates, followed it from my main account and started again. Twitterfeed now works again and I'm getting a flow of FB status updates again. As the dummy account is Protected and so not visible, hopefully whoever it was won't notice.

This is the problem with web based systems, especially when they have RSS feeds but even with scraping. Once it gets posted to a public website, it doesn't stay private for long or at least it's hard to keep it private.

And it's made worse because Facebook likes to present this facade that only your friends can see what's happening. If it was all open, people would be a bit more guarded about what they posted.

Speed reading my RSS, I come across a story titled "Vast Cloud of Antimatter Traced to Binary Stars", my mind actually sees "Vast Cloud of Antimatter Traced to Britney Spears". Scary that the society of the spectacle has so pervaded my mind.

At last So here's some predictions for 2008

- Apple announce that iTMS is 100% DRM free.
- Amazon drop prices, iTMS drops prices, Amazon drops prices.
- 192Kb VBR reaches $0.25 per track by year end. Lossless drops to $0.50 by year end.
- Amazon announces "One World Price" Opens store to global customers.
- MP3Sparks finds a way for customers to give them money. Does deal with Paypal.
- Despite all this, overall track sales and CD Sales continue to fall. P2P sharing in all it's forms continues to rise.
- Record Biz survives another year. (Except for EMI which goes specactularly bust)