Why People Hate Windows

Yep!
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Why People Hate Windows � GraphJam: Music and Pop Culture in Charts and Graphs. Let us explain them.: "

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Facebook needs a fade-friend application

Now this article makes an extremely good point: (Scott Brown on Facebook Friendonomics) and to cut to the chase it's this: "we've lost our right to lose touch. 'A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature,' Emerson wrote, not bothering to add, 'and like most things natural, friendship is biodegradable.' We scrawl 'Friends Forever' in yearbooks, but we quietly realize, with relief, that some bonds are meant to be shed, like snakeskin or a Showtime subscription. It's nature's way of allowing you to change, adapt, evolve, or devolve as you wish—and freeing you from the exhaustion of multifront friend maintenance. Fine, you can 'Remove Friend,' but what kind of asshole actually does that?"
This is sooooo true. In fact the use of the term friend in facebook has meant a devaluing of the term to cover what really ought be be 'acquaintances'. I've got to the point of distinguishing between 'friends' and 'facebook-friends'. So the solution offered here is very attractive. "A Facebook app we'll call the Fade Utility. Untended Friends would gradually display a sepia cast on the picture, a blurring of the neglected profile—perhaps a coffee stain might appear on it or an unrelated phone number or grocery list. The individual's status updates might fade and get smaller. The user may then choose to notice and reach out to the person in some meaningful way—no pokes! Or they might pretend not to notice. Without making a choice, they could simply let that person go. Would that really be so awful?"
No; it would allow to happen on Facebook what seems to happen in real life; we just lose touch and that's sometimes alright. I'm as interested as the next person in sometimes finding out what happened to old friends and acquaintances, I like Friends Reunited for that. I like being able to renew old acquaintance; but I have noticed in reunions and even facebook, that just a catch-up every so often is sufficient. We aren't 'wired' for indefinite extension of 'meaningful' relationships. It's no coincidence that we tend to work with networks consisting of between 30 and 200 people in total.

The real meaning of free software

Here's the oigin of the activist version of free software; once you hear the story, the importance of the movement becomes very clear. In my view this story should be told more.

the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT had received an elegant new printer from Xerox. The printer, however, had an unfortunate tendency to jam, causing print jobs to pile up and nothing to get printed until someone happened to notice and fix the jam.

For Richard Stallman, one of the programmers at the AI Lab, this wasn’t such a big deal. With their previous printer, Stallman had simply changed the printer driver to detect whether the printer was jammed and, if it was, to notify anyone who had sent it a print job.

“If you got that message, you couldn’t assume somebody else would fix it,” Stallman later recalled. “You had to go to the printer. A minute or two after the printer got in trouble, the two or three people who got messages arrive to fix the machine. Of those two or three people, one of them, at least, would usually know how to fix the problem.” (Free as in Freedom, ch. 1)

But the Xerox printer was different: Xerox hadn’t provided the lab with the source code to their printer drivers. There was no way for Stallman to add this new functionality to the driver. When Stallman asked Xerox for the code, they refused to provide it, insisting that it was an important trade secret for their business. And when Stallman found a student at Carnegie Mellon who had been given access to the software, that student also refused to provide a copy, saying he’d signed a contract with Xerox not to share it.

Stallman was outraged. Computer software was supposed to be a tool to serve people; that’s why he and his labmates spent their time writing software. And yet, through a combination of greed and legal restrictions, people were forced to suffer because they were prevented from improving these tools.

The site this links back to is worth checking out as it seems to be some opening discussions about the way that our data can be kept relatively secure and personal in an age of web2.0 apps.

Sophie 1.0

I haven't tested this myself, but the tutorials look encouraging and I'm downloading it with a view to installing and using it to produce some multimedia online learning materials. It's free and seems targetting at academic usage, so it's the business from that point of view. Sophie 1.0 Available Now | Sophie: "Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins." There are a bunch of tutorials here.

Microsoft Office Drops Support For Older File Formats

Well, that's the point of proprietary formats isn't it? It's about leverage towards built-in obsolescence. It's the economics of drug addiction: hook 'em then screw 'em. Open standards is the way to go. So I'd echo this plea. "... there’s an alternative which is somewhat easier (and free): just grab a copy of OpenOffice which can handle the older file formats. Once you’ve got them open, now might be a good time to convert them to ODF documents lest Office 2017 decide to again disable support for older file formats."
Microsoft Office Drops Support For Older File Formats | Compiler from Wired.com:

Superworm ready to strike Windoze

This is disturbing particularly for you Windows users, though I'm also concerned about our college network. It's a very cunningly designed, sophisticated piece of malware, and it hasn't even done anything yet ... "Oddly enough, Storm isn't doing much, so far, except gathering strength. Aside from continuing to infect other Windows machines and attacking particular sites that are attacking it, Storm has only been implicated in some pump-and-dump stock scams. There are rumors that Storm is leased out to other criminal groups. Other than that, nothing. Personally, I'm worried about what Storm's creators are planning for Phase II."
Gathering 'Storm' Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets:

Moral panic over tech and sociability

It really is starting to seem to me that all that handwringing about how social software is causing a breakdown in society is actually a moral panic. The following quote shows why there is a lot of nonsense being written and said about it:
"It might look like I'm ignoring a passing acquaintance in order to 'use my phone.' But actually I'm checking in with a new mom who is running home, baby and business on her own while her partner's job has him commuting to Canada temporarily. "
We need to remember the McLuhan doctrine that technology extends existing human capabilities. This means that it may distort some existing cultural thingies, but it will open up others. It will redistribute the balance of goods and ills but rarely, if ever, will it be entirely one or the other.
Rude People, Not Tech, Cause Bad Manners:

Support ogg not MP3

"The use of MP3 is restricted by patents, while Ogg Vorbis is not. Unlike MP3, there are never any licensing costs for using Ogg Vorbis, and you do not have to worry about anyone suing you for using it without a license. You might have heard about Microsoft's recent loss in a $1.5 billion suit over their use of MP3. These patent lawsuits might never affect you directly, but they create a culture where creative and skilled individuals cannot develop multimedia software without fear of being legally attacked. Using Ogg is one way to support them in their efforts and to encourage a better culture."
FSF - Getting started with Ogg and installing Ogg plugins: