Girl’s Got Rhythm

First she quotes IDC…

Linux server revenue exceeded $1.4 billion in quarterly factory revenue in 2Q05 as Linux server revenues showed 45.1% growth, the fastest rate of growth since 2Q04. Linux servers represented 11.5% of overall quarterly server revenue – reaching an all-time high.

Then she opines…

I tip my hat to any hardware vendor who can kiss off $1.4 billion of quarterly revenues as too trivial to bother with.

But, you say, those are servers. Everyone knows that Windows servers are teh suck, and Real Admins run Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Unix, or Solaris. Real Admins don’t need sissy stuff like fancy video or multimedia. That’s for dumb ole end lusers.

That’s Carla Schroder for us folks. I chance upon her stuff every now and then and I like her every time cuz she gives us a break from the bland stuff that tech writeups are otherwise. You can also read her recent Fedora 6 reviews: Part 1 & Part 2. Here’s quoting her again…

So I says to myself, I says <censored>. Ah well, that’s life on the bleeding edge.

So, that basically sums up a FC6 really. OK no, she has some nice things to say as well. Now shooh! Adios!!

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We’re Gonna Groove?

If you’ve ever heard Bonzo’s Montreux… well, then you should know I wrote that. It’s a completely different matter that Bonzo stole my notes, banged on his drums, recorded a song and became famous. But you know how that lord guy above never misses a thing? As a result, soon Bonzo got like too drunk to ride a motorcycle sanely enough and died in an accident or somethin. Bet that taught him a lesson or two about respecting other people’s intellectual property rights.

Anyway, we’re not gonna groove, so go take a hike. Adios!!

Nowhere To Go!

A few days ago Amarok 1.4.4 was released. With the Last.fm radio integrated a while back what more could we’ve asked for? Ummm… how about an integrated music store? Hey yuh! Magnatune’s been integrated in this release.

In case you don’t know what Magnatune is, well, their tag line says “We Are Not Evil“. And they certainly aren’t and I’ll tell you why. Firstly, no other music store gives you so many choices once you buy an album — from letting you decide in what format you want the song to what price you wanna pay for the stuff (anything between USD 5 and 18). Secondly, they don’t put DRM and support the indie artists. Hey even Brad Sucks is in there. Please visit Magnatune.com for more info on their vision and mission.

Anway, here’s how Magnatune streams work from inside Amarok….

Click for full image!

The first time you run it, you need to click that update button on the bottom left-side pane and watch it download the Magnatune collection database. Afterwards, just like your local Amarok collection, it’ll also be arranged alphabetically. Of course to make your life easier, there’s a genre drop-down menu on top of the collection browser, so you can browse bands/artists by their genres. You’ll notice I’ve Punk Rock selected.

Anyway, so that’s how you can keep trying out new bands and stuff. And yes they stream the full songs and each and every song from an album. So, what if you stumble upon this one band you just can’t get enough of and wanna buy the music?

Click for full image!

As you can see you can simply click on that Purchase Album button on the left-side pane! You enter the basic CC details and choose the amount you wanna pay and that’s it. Oh and another cool thing is, once you buy the album they let you give away three copies to your friends (or enemies if u prefer). Check out the store shitheads! Adios!!

P.S. –> Oh and don’t forget to check out Sonny by The Napoleon Blown Aparts  from their album Thrill Hype. Great song!!

P.P.S. –> Following’s my mail to Magnatune.com sometime back requesting logos and Amarok integration and their prompt response. I posted it from somewhere within the Web site and xxx@gmail.com is of couse me.

From: Teresa Malango    
To: “xxx@gmail.com”
Date: 08-Jun-2006 00:36
Subject: Re: more logos

Hello-
Thank you for your message and support of Magnatune!  Your suggestion about the logos is a good one and I’ll see what we can do. You can link directly to Magnatune shoutcast radio streams off our website at www.magnatune.com/info/shoutcast  but the idea about including this info with the amaroK integration is a good one- I’ll forward it along too!
Best regards,
Teresa Malango
Magnatune
yyy@magnatune.com

On 6/6/06, xxx@gmail.com wrote:

    Hi! I came to know about this company from the amarokLive project. kudos to what all you guys are up to! I was wondering if you guys can make more logos available for us to put on blogs to refer to you guys… the logo has to contain your tag line “We are not evil” or maybe “They are not evil” cuz a thrid party is referring to this. Just an idea…

    All the best for your awesome venture. And thanks a ton for not being evil, also for embracing Free and Open-Source Software.

    just another fan

    P.S. –> Also, is there a streaming radio available? Then that’d be awesome way to tell people more about Magnatune. Maybe it can be based on genres… Genres-based radio is important cuz people should not be distracted by the type of music they aren’t fond of. And it’s gonna be a great way for us to know what kinda music is available in stores. Oh and if the radio is availble please bug the amaroK devs to integrate it in, cuz I dont see it there. Thanks again!

So, as you can see, both sides eventually came up with something a helluva lot better than what I’d initially requested for (and I’m sure a lot of others did too!).

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So it was real…

GrokLaw editor Pamela Jones headlined the deal as Novell Sells Out, and here are some more updates from her regarding legal issues concerning the deal. While Bruce Perens also has an interesting piece here. However, since a lot of people are showing their disgust with Novell currently, I’d space u with that and quote somthing quite interesting from Perens’ article’s comments section…

jwwjr: I wonder how Linus Torvalds feels right now. His arrogance toward Richard Stallman regarding GPLv3 has been sickening. Richard enabled Linus, Linus did not enable Richard.
Is Linus ready to be Bill and Steve’s bitch now? Does he care?
Linus is a great programmer and project manager, but in terms of vision and setting strategy for free software (disregarding Mr. Stallman’s philosophical zeal, looking at this on the merits only), Linus is not fit to carry Richard Stallman’s water, and is in fact, dangerous. He doesn’t know the edge of his competencies.

Bruce Perens: Linus is playing Alfred E. Newman, the character from Mad magazine whose motto was “What, Me Worry?”
His response was “Why assume that everyone has to be enemies? Let’s see how this plays out”.
I agree with you, Linus botches strategy outside of software and it would be best if he’d shut up about it.

I’ve even said it before that you can call me a fundamentalist prick but I only care for stuff coved by GPL. I understand there are other “Free” licenses, like the BSD one, that give you many of the freedom w/o putting any restrictions but they do more harm than any good — need I ask you to say hello to the MacOSX kernel? We do need some restriction to protect our freedom. Thanks to upcoming GPL v3, we’ll have some new statements covering patents and DRM issues that were not previously covered. Although, the Linux devs can choose not to accept it and go down the drain for all I care. Adios!!

Resolution?

The XFCE 4.4RC desktop environment on Fedora Core 6, with the Listen 0.5beta media manager in the background. Looks pretty neat, eh? Guess am gonna be on it for a while now. I especially like the floating panel (with my main menu, shortcut icons, system tray, et all) on top, so I can have more free space for my stuff. By default XFCE comes with that panel at the bottom center fixed, and the task bar on top. I was thinking of switching it around the GNOME way. However, while doin so I discovered the floating (non-static) panel feature under properties and think it’s way better and handy this way.

On not so related news: Am I the only one who thinks the headline “Microsoft & Novell Enter Linux Partnership?” reads real funny? What the fuck’s up with Novell there? The CNet blog is based on WSJ reports, so I bet they are not even trying to humor us this time around.

Oh well, play time’s over and goin back to figuring out why the ’send host-name’ thingy of the dhcp shit not working in my client. Think the client puter would rather be known as a localhost.localdomain? There you have the dhcp.conf file just in case anyone has a clue on what the fuck’s the matter with it. Adios!!