OSNews Staff

RIAA against CD ripping

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 18:03:33 GMT

“In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer. The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings,” writes WashingtonPost.

I hope RIAA goes to hell. It’s as simple as that. As someone put it well:

“Making a copy on your computer is part of the normal process of playing a CD on an MP3 player - not fundamentally different from making a copy of the music in the RAM of an anti-skip CD player as part of the normal process of playing the music. I’m willing to defend the notion of copyright and the reasonable rights of copyright owners, but this is going too far in my opinion (and it’s stupid - by the time they argue that buying a CD and ripping it for your iPod is as illiegal as pirating the album, people might as well save the money and pirate stuff).”

Maybe the cause of this stupidity is indeed what this Stanford uni professor (and board member of Creative Commons) said: that both sides of the fence are going into extremes to piss each other off now, without any logic behind their decisions.

Powerbook

donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 14:03:32 GMT

Last Thursday, I finally bought a new Mac, after months and months of pondering what to buy. I decided to buy a 2nd hand PowerBook G4 from an Apple retailer (so I get support and guarantee). It’s a 15″ PowerBook G4 1.25Ghz, 768Mb of RAM, Radeon 9600 with 64Mb of RAM, 60GB hard disk, and a combodrive. It runs Tiger, and I’m really, really happy with it - it’s in mint condition. I’ll up the RAM to 1.5GB next month.
I’m launching a web comic on and about OSNews. It’s a definite gamble, but I like doing it, and the first responses were very positive. We have settled on a name, which will be revealed as soon as we get the website in order to publish comics.
I’ll spend my New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam.

Tigers and Ethics

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:03:40 GMT

I have enough archived HD footage of the San Francisco zoo tiger that this past week got out of its cage, killed a teenager and hurt two more people. Some of you might have seen parts of that footage on my zoo video.

Tonight I got a message by a fellow videographer telling me that I should try and sell my footage to the news TV channels. I replied that this would be a bad idea, and he replied “why? why is this bad?”. And this is what I replied back to him:

“It is inappropriate because it’s an exploitation of the current unfortunate situation. IF I had been selling that footage for months before the accident happened, that would have been ok. But selling it now, after and because of the accident, that’s greedy and it shows a low quality person.”

I hope more people think about their personal ethics before they do the things they do. In the specific situation everyone lost: the tiger got shot, the kid died, two more visitors got hurt, the zoo was closed for days. Everyone lost. And then, here I would be, the smart-ass prick, selling footage and be the only one who gains something from it. Sorry, but no sir. I like my conscience to be clear as day. If shooting and selling footage was my job, I would have pursued a sale, but not under the current conditions.

Update: It’s amazing that there are such low IQ people in the world. Now the guy calls me a hypocrite, because my Vimeo Zoo video uses footage from that tiger. No matter that this video was put together MONTHS before the incident and so it has nothing to do with the ethical dilemma I posed… That guy is so unbelievable! He is either 10 years old, or someone with an IQ below 80. “He will pray for me”, he said… What a fucking joke.

Cellphone usability

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:03:33 GMT

Occasionally I’ve been asked which phones I believe they have the best usability. I’ve tried over 30 phones in my time as a reviewer in the past 3 years, so here’s my opinion on what’s intuitive:

Sony Ericsson’s non-smartphone OS tops the list, with Series60 from Nokia being close. Everything else in that market is mediocre IMO. In the touchscreen market, iPhone kicks everyone’s ass. PalmOS and Windows Mobile can kinda compete because they have been in the market longer than anyone else so they have fixed some mistakes over the years, but overall, Apple got it right, right off the bat. The funny thing is, that I consider UIQ having the worst usability of all touchscreen systems I ever tried (even worse than some half-baked Linux systems I’ve seen out there). Sony Ericsson bought UIQ this past year. And they went from having the best smartkey OS, to the worst touchscreen OS. Nice going SE.

LG KU990 Vewty

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 05:04:12 GMT

UPDATE: A video grabbed by the Vewty, downloadable higher quality VGA version here.

I will be reviewing the Vewty on OSNews in a few days, it’s an interesting competitor to the iPhone. Is it as good though? Here’s a screenshot from the touchscreen system, rendering OSNews in windowed and fullscreen modes. The browser used is a 2005 version of Obigo (the company behind Obigo is out of the browser business for a year now btw).

More RED footage

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 11:03:53 GMT

Some amazingly-looking footage from the RED camera can be seen on this site. I especially like the “Engagement Clips” here. Looks great on an HDTV.

Samples by the New Wave of Videographers

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 07:03:30 GMT

I published an article on OSNews with some of my favorite video clips out there, created by video enthusiasts. Solomon Chase’s “Rainy Day” remains my favorite such clip ever. Canon should send the guy a check, a lot of people bought the HV20 because of this clip alone.

Regarding brain doping

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:03:33 GMT

You might have heard that the latest fashion is brain doping. In a world where the most intelligent or best performing employees get the most benefits, it appears to be “wise” for some people to dope themselves to equally compete in the workplace. The reason this is not illegal (yet), it’s because these pills are prescription medication and there are no conclusive studies (yet) if they are truly harmful or not.

I am personally a purist when it comes to medicating oneself, so I dislike drugs in general. However, I can understand people wanting to perform better. That’s how our competitive society is built. So I can’t hold this against them, although I am concerned that doping the brain is the same as over-clocking your CPU. Eventually, it will crash, except if your brain is actually built by mother nature in a way that can handle this pressure.

However, I gotta say that it doesn’t make sense to dope humans forever. Instead, allow some gene manipulation so the next generations are by default more intelligent than us. When we have the technology for something like this, of course.

They are just like people

donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 12:03:36 GMT

I went to a 6 story apartment building in Gaza which just got bombed by Israel. I spoke with local people, survivors, and was looking for emotional illustrations of cliches such as “despair” and “flabbergastedness”. A woman told me she kept on thinking she had to get her washing machine fixed. “But then I realise, it’s underneath the rubble. Just like my husband.” Bingo, brilliant quote, and while I went away, I saw how someone slid brand new baby clothes underneath the rubble, for the approaching camera crews.

Similarly:

After a particularly large Palestinian terrorist attack, the bodies were kept on site just a little longer, because the prime minister wanted to hold his speech against the backdrop of 18 body bags and a burnt out bus. An Israeli secretary made several compliments to the camera crews who filmed a few cheering Palestinians right after the September 11th attacks. In close-up, it seemed like a lot of Palestinians, and the imagery was repeated on US television numerous times. The Israeli Government Press Office proudly reported it had forced CNN to do a story on terror victims - to repay a debt because CNN had interviewed the friends and family of a suicide bomber after an attack. A jewish-American businessman boasted against Israeli media how he had gotten rid of a critical reporter at the Miami Herald by threatening to cut funding to the newspaper.

Joris Luyendijk, one of The Netherlands’ most well-respected journalists and reporters, on the Media War between Israel and Palestine. He has worked for the NOS, and two of our largest and most well-respected newspapers, De Volkskrant and the NRC. He has studied politics, history, and Arabic and religious anthropology in Amsterdam, Kansas, and Cairo. He was stationed in the middle east for 5 years - in other words, he knows his shit.

Last year, he published a book that more or less put a bomb under the journalistic world. In this book, he explained how everything you see on the news, what you read in the papers, about the Arabic world is manipulated and artificial. In fact, the concept of an “Arabic world” in itself is laughable, as no such thing exists - at all. It is like saying that there is a “European world”, and that all of us Europeans think the same, speak the same language, agree with each other on everything. Nonsense of course, and the same goes for the Arabic world.

In the Holy Land newspaper articles and television screens were not just windows on the conflict. They were also the stages on which the conflict itself was being fought. Like an Israeli director of Information said: “It does not matter what happens, it matters how CNN reports it.”

Luyendijk explains that it is impossible to do Western-style reporting in Arabic countries, because of the relatively simple fact that all of those countries are countries without democracy, without freedom of speech, but with vicious dictators and the like. There are no polls, no statistics, no honest opinions, no nothing. In other words, you cannot ever trust whatever’s being thrown your way as a journalist, because there is no way to do any fact checking or any of the other journalistic values. Sure, someone might tell you something, but how do you know he’s not a member of the secret police, or that he is being pushed by the government to make everything look much worse (or better!) than it actually is? You cannot fact-check anything your source tells you, meaning the stories you get told are, according to western journalistic values, more or less worthless. Many of the stories you see, are all written by journalists who were taken by the hand by corrupt and manipulative governments (and that includes Israel!), and shown only those things that they want you to actually see. The journalists writing these articles live separated and secluded lives, live in 5 star hotels, do not speak the local language, and are not in contact with the local people in any way.

But still, they make headline news, and it are those articles and journalists on which we all base our opinions of whatever happens over there.

The book, called “Het Zijn Net Mensen” (”They Are Just Like People”, English review) is a definite must for everyone. It is very well written, filled with sarcasm and self-mockery (he lambasts himself for taking part in the media circus), and it has won several awards this year.

Eye-opening material.

Casinos of Reno

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 09:03:38 GMT

Happy holidays everyone!

We just came back from vacations in Reno, NV. I shot 25 minutes of video there, that translated to 2 minutes of a presentable video clip. I hate casinos btw, but hey, they make nice flashy videos. HD version here.

What Christmas is all about

donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:03:59 GMT

You can even listen [.mp3] to this entry. Notice the professional mouseclicks.

When one of my colleagues arrived at work today, at 11 (she starts a few hours after the rest on Mondays) she told me about how she just went by the supermarket. She was flabbergasted by the insane amounts of stuff people had stacked into their trollies, especially when she realised there were couples with not one, but two trollies completely filled with food and other stuff.

I shrugged.

It’s exactly what is wrong with our Western world today. The two stuffed trollies of food symbolise our greed, our gluttony; for most people these days, Christmas is about stuff, about food, about things, about soulless materialistic objects. They stuff their faces with food, food, more food, drinks, drinks, more drinks. Every year on Christmas’ Eve, the 18:00 news tells us how much money we spent this Christmas on food and stuff, and every time, it’s more than last year.

To me, Christmas isn’t about food. It’s not about drinks, it’s not about buy buy buy buy and things things things things. To me, Christmas is not a materialistic thing, but an emotional thing. It’s about feelings, belongingness, warmth, family, friendship - and a word only seen in Dutch: gezelligheid. In other words, the things that matter. The things that will outlast money, food, and materialistic stuff.

I’m quite a materialistic guy all year long. I like spending money, I like buying things, I like things that are shiny and emit light, and I like the rush of buying something expensive. I’m honest in that; I’m a perfect little western capitalist. But when it’s Christmas, I’ve been taught to put all that aside. To stop and think for a minute, to take a breather, to… To not consume.

Take a breather, people. You don’t have to be religious to realise what you have. And that’s what Christmas is all about.

General computer stupidity

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 07:03:40 GMT

We are currently in Reno,NV and i only got with me the nokia n800 to use with the hotel’s wifi service. This blog post message is written with the n800 too, painfully slowly. So, while using the file manager, it automatically picked up smb connections from other users in the hotel. It didn’t ask me if i wanted to search for computers in the network, it just did it. There are a bunch of people with sharing on! I did not open their files but there were a lot of documents there that *obviously* belonged to the company that employs them (filenames). Such is the ignorance of some computer users. And this ignorance can put honest users into legal trouble, just because their device automatically connects to network shares. I hope nokia is listening and adds a checkbox preference for that feature or only search if someone hits the ’shared’ virtual folder - the same way mac and win do it.

And yes, even if these folders are shared, connecting to them it’s still considered ‘computer intrusion’ according to the law, because obviously this was not intended by these clueless users.

I am an aunt

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 19:03:34 GMT

Cogratulations to my little brother and his wife in Greece for becoming parents of their first child, a 3.3kg daughter. My parents are grandparents for the first time, and very happy too. This was the first time i wish the iphone had mms support so my brother could send me a pic of the baby right away.

Turkey

donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 10:03:35 GMT

Like, 2 months ago I stopped drinking coffee, cold turkey. Early this year I stopped drinking alcohol, also cold turkey (not that I was a regular drinker, but hey). Had a great time yesterday with my friends, a nice restaurant, and staying the night at my place.

I drank an espresso, and about an entire bottle of Martini Bianco.

I’m back, baby.

Quickies, Part II

donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:03:33 GMT

* I put together a Christmas tree last night (not my style to do that stuff you see). It went all well, except that at the end I found out that half of the lights were burned off and wouldn’t light up. Bummer.

* I dreamt of Tiger Woods and his wife last night. I was trying to convnice him to let go of his career, “go chill man, you got enough money now…”.

* We will be going to Reno, NV for the holidays. I hope to shoot some video of snow and skiers.

* I am watching the “Lost” season 3 on Blu-Ray. Looks really good. In one of the documentaries on the discs we see a typical day for the writers. They go to work at 9:30 AM, but they also leave at 9:30 PM… Hard work.

* Speaking of Blu-Rays, it seems to have won the war. Not clearly yet, but it currently sells 2:1.

* JBQ seems to be happy at Google. He’s becoming fat.