<rant>I just read this article iPhone Coders Miffed Muzzled By Apple s NDA - Webmonkey. Steve Jobs. You can kiss my ass. There is nothing insanely great about Apple, who uses BSD under the hood of their OS for God's sake, and then has draconian and stupid NDA's like the iPhone app developer one. I hope Linux phones bury your iPhone. You can believe me when I say that will never ever use an iPhone. In fact... I'm thinking of selling my iPod classic (not that it has ever been sullied by any DRM iTunes) now too.

What an assualt on our freedoms to have something so potentially cool also be so horribly corrupted by control and fear. If you think your product is best then put your access to it where your mouth is. Open everything up so that it can be freely enjoyed.  Apple frustrates me so much, because the potential is so great. But the constant over-control and fear that is clearly there behind almost every product is just maddening to me. 

As I was doing some research on some Dungeons and Dragons 4th Ed licensing, I happenned upon this Wired article about some whack job that spent $250,000 on an Elizabethen MMOG. If I wasn't so damn tired right now I think I might have fallen out of my easy chair.

But wait. It gets better. The creator of the game says this about it.

It's no fun," Castronova says ruefully. "We failed to design a gripping
experience." The scholar says he has, however, gained a deeper
appreciation for the challenges of game design: "I always had respect
for the people who made World of Warcraft," he says. "But now it borders on worship."

It turns out that its not really even an MMOG. Its built on the Neverwinter Nights engine. It can handle about 16 people at a time maybe? I kept on thinking that it must have been an April Fool's joke, but it was published in March. 

How about we all just go see a great performance of Shakespeare instead? The bard's word was meant to be performed after all! My wife and I saw an awesome performace of Romeo and Juliet that my friend Gregg was in last year. We had a wonderful time with it. 

As for MMOG's based on a writer's work? Well they couldn't even get Lord of the Rings Online to be as well liked as World of Warcraft, and Age of Conan wasn't all it was cracked up to be for me either. Maybe books should just stay books. 

We all know that Linux can read NTFS partitions. Right? Well maybe. Maybe not. But you can. NTFS-3G works great and it comes installed with Ubuntu. I hate to say it, but I still have to dual boot sometimes. So while I spend 95% of my time in Linux, I still game everyonce in a while with Windows. Its nice to be able to grab files from Windows while I'm in Ubuntu.

Its especially handy when I find out that I can run yet another game in Wine or Cedega. I can often just go and grab save files or configurations from the Windows partition when I set it up in Linux. I did this with both City of Heroes and with Wow. Both of which run faster in WINE under Linux than they did in Windows.

So what happens when I need to read a Linux EXT3 partition from Windows? Well its easier than you think! Firstly we can thank the EXT3 design for being backwards compatible with EXT2. Because there is a great EXT2 driver for windows called fs-driver (Often called IFS). There is no journaling support because it is using the partition in EXT2 mode. In fact, if for some reason you try to use an EXT3 partition that still has data in its journal, IFS won't mount it at all.

As the article "Should We Fear the (Microsoft) Geeks, Bearing Gifts?" states, we should be wary of Microsoft's intentions here. Microsoft's worst market and the one that has the most growth is in the web server space. But should we really be all that worried?

There is no end to the stupidity of decision making in IT, but when it comes to dollars and cents, especially these days, it is hard to justify an expensive Microsoft Windows operating system. On top of the Microsoft cost, it will also require lots of other expensive security programs and management tools just to keep it running and secure. Thousands of dollars worth of software just to run the worlds best free web server, Apache? 

That sounds monumentally stupid and costly. Perhaps we shouldn't be worried until Microsoft starts giving away their operating system to everyone and just charges for support.  Free as in beer will only get you so far, but I think that is the only way that Microsoft will ever be able come close to competing. Open Source will swallow them whole in few more years. They already know it.

It will be even worse for them with the economy in the state it is in. Everyone is looking to save a buck. I think it will cause a lot of true blue Microsofties to rethink their purchases like I finally did over 10 years ago. There is no room for loyalty when the company you are being loyal to is pretty much ripping you off. 

Microsoft director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow is quite frankly a jerk. He thinks that a person, organization, city, state, nation, or continent, can't take advantage of open source unless they can code it. I've added a few extra items in the list, but I'm just extrapolating his idea, which is ridiculous. The reason is simple. Microsoft doesn't allow you to code their operating system or applications, yet he is asking you to use them. How silly is that? One system allows you do jump in and code away, if you have the skills to do it, while the other system keeps their crap bloated code to themselves whether you have the ability or not. I can't help but find it funny that Matusow can't see the irony in his complaint.

I think that they should put their code with their mouth is and open everything up to South Africa. Make all of their software truly free and open source just to apologize for Matusow's ignorance. I know that won't happen. But hey, it would be a fun experiment. Oh but that won't work because no one in Africa can code right? 

Someone better tell that to South African Mark Shuttleworth who started Thawte and then created the Ubuntu Linux Distro. I wonder where he learned to do all that?

Microsoft Supporting ODF? -- Close, But No Cigar - I wish I could wholeheartedly applaud the Microsoft announcement about native support for ODF, but I can't. Of course, it's better to have native support for ODF, no matter what motives may have influenced Microsoft's announcement, and I'm glad about that for the sake of end users. But it hasn't happened yet. Was the word 'vaporware' not coined for Microsoft? In any case, I'm in the "I will believe it when I see it" category when it comes to Microsoft. They've earned my caution.

And I see danger signs for FOSS I'd like to share with you, so you can consider them. Once again, the problem is software patents. Internet News indicates that commercial Linux/FOSS vendors, and the GPL license that Linux comes with, will be excluded:

Microsoft, however, frames its latest moves as part of fulfilling a company-wide interoperability initiative that it announced in February.

Uh oh. Remember this from February, when Microsoft announced the availability of APIs?

Microsoft has officially pulled is Yahoo offer. In my mind furthering their already huge plunge into the dark waters of irrelevancy. No large company in their right mind would want to merge with Microsoft at this point. Firstly, Balmer is no Gates. Balmer reminds me of an angry junior high school teacher who is trying to make himself feel important by bulling the kids. Well this time the kids stood up for themselves.

I don't even understand why Yahoo was attractive to Microsoft in the first place. Anything useful from Yahoo would be killed by the Microsoft's culture. You can't "borg" Yahoo. It just wouldn't make any sense for a "Windows Only" company to take over a company like Yahoo that has used so much open source to fuel its features. While I'm not exactly a Yahoo fan either, I think their open source usage and support is to be commended.

I don't think Microsoft's leadership is capable of understanding Yahoo's technology choices or supporting them after a merger. If they aren't buying them for their technology, what else would they buy them for? If its for their users, then they would be in for a horrid shock. After killing their services with "Microsoft" technology and idiotic marketing shams, how many users would be left? I guess the scariest thing is that Microsoft's leadership actually thought this was a remotely good idea. It just shows the complete level of delusion of its leadership.

Finally! At long last I will be able to ditch horrible Windows for broadcasting on uStream! I am a member of the Lords of Tyr gaming group. I broadcast our games live over the internet using uStream on the Lords of Tyr Channel. Its not really for others to watch, although they are certainly welcome to. Really uStream is used as a remote gaming tool for members can cannot join us in person, and as a way to record sessions online in case we ever need to review something that happened in an earlier session.

uStream is awesome, but I was forced to use Windows, because it uses Flash. Flash for Linux does not support Video for Linux 2 (V4L2). Instead it uses the completely dead V4L standard. Yuck! So guess what? I couldn't use my USB camera or my Sony Digital firewire camera in Linux for uStream. But now all that is going to change! I haven't try it yet, but I just found this new project call The Flashcam Project.

It creates a loopback and forwards frames from V4L2 to V4L devices. Something I thought would be possible, but haven't the time to figure out for myself. Thank you for making this awesome little app Oliver! I'm going to give it a try tonight to make sure it works before our game tomorrow afternoon.

Summary

Tools used: 2 Kubuntu 7.10 PC's, Gizmo VOIP client, Gizmo VOIP conference feature, Icemat Audio headset and usb card, Audacity audio editor, Podsafe Music from http://music.podshow.com,

Process:

1. Use only SIP compliant VOIP clients (iChat, Gizmo, Ekiga) so that everyone can use the Gizmo VOIP conference call number.

2. Use two Gizmo clients on your end. One to participate in the call and one just for recording. The PC that is recording with Gizmo should have its speakers and mic turned off. Otherwise strange echoing or feedback will occur.

3. Everyone call in using the full phone number that you get from Gizmo (It should look like 1-222-xxx-xxxx). Using other methods doesn't seem as reliable.

4. Record the call. Everyone will hear a message that says that the call is being recorded. Make sure that at the end of the call everyone is off mute and you record about 10 seconds of “silence”. This is for later on when you use the noise filter feature in Audacity.

5. Hold your podcast session

Even Gartner, who I have always thought as company that has over-hyped Microsoft, has come to realize that Vista was a horrible horrible mistake.

The entire Windows eco-system is collapsing because it is too big and not secure enough. So much of the corporate expense of Windows is not just the Microsoft licenses, but the huge cost of management and security software. This cost also includes massive hardware costs that are incured by every system that needs to run that software.

I think the tipping point is here. Look at the success of hardware like the Asus Eee laptop. Apple! Are you listening? Blot is out and you are next on the chopping block if you aren't careful! 

I was just messing around with my Zaurus PDA this week. I've been installing Android, the gPhone software. I also installed a full debian distro on it called Titchy Linux. Then I installed Angstrom, which is also a Linux distro based on the former OpenZaurus project.