eer-to-peer (P2P) and the World Wide Web (which we most commonly perceive as hypertext — HTTP) are separate. When one uses an Internet connection to directly communicate with a remote machine, then traffic is uncensored, often not monitored, and there are no restrictions imposed on the exchanged material. This justifies the potential illegality of P2P networking.

There are less controversial ways of obtaining media. When it resides on the World Wide Web and hosted by a trusted source, it is then subjected to copyright laws. For this particular reason, it is safer to download MP3 files from trusted Web sites, many of which distribute music for free in interests of self-promotion. Downloads are also far faster because data is delivered by a Web server. An older item explains how to automatically (READ: recursively) download music from the Web.

I have just discovered an inexhaustible source of music, which is also delivered as an RSS feed. That source is the MP3Blogs Aggregator. You must read this entry on the subject in order for everything to make sense. The gist: infinite amount of freely-distributed music reaching your hard-drive on a daily basis.

Open Source software might slowly conquer the market according to this item from IT Manager’s Journal:

Is the enterprise software business dying? Is anybody out there buying new licenses? Based on news from the past few weeks, it seems that there are very few buyers. The collapse of new licensing revenue isn’t news — it started five years ago — but the latest news makes it look like a permanent and accelerating fact of life for software vendors.

Regarding operating systems and the take on computers in general, Clayton Hallmark from Argentina predicts that low cost computers from Asia will bring Microsoft to its end.

MOBILIS apparently goes for only $220 in India

A bunch of hilarious amateur posters making fun of major Linux distributions. UNIX fanatics will find it amusing.

recent market survey reveals which Linux distributions are most popular, which windows managers are on the rise and likewise with applications. A must to any Linux enthusiast (via Slashdot).

…Mandrake and SuSE are now essentially tied for first place — at 17.6 and 17.5 percent respectively. Red Hat comes next, at sightly over 15 percent, and last year’s winner, Debian, has slipped into fourth place, garnering half a percent fewer votes than Red Hat…

On the left: Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM

The following screenshot gallery demonstrates the features of one future desktop environment (X11). Windows exploit OpenGL for window ‘swinging’ (see the previous entry on luminocity or even bogus transparency). The effects are quite distracting, but provide that ‘wow factor’. Another long-anticipated eye candy is the spherical desktop.

indows and Mac users face long procedures of installing and recovering software whenever a computer is bought. This time-consuming process shows the strengths of comprehensive Linux distributions such as SuSE or Fedora.

PC users sometimes assemble a list of programs, each of which needs to be installed in turn. Why not use an image with all the software pre-loaded? Since hard-drive capacity is enormous, redundant bits cannot harm (with the exception of the Windows Registry). Also, one can distribute everything on several machines, without any repeated effort. If this does not illustrate the power of free Open-Source software, what does?

here came a time when I stopped shutting down machines, let alone restarting them. The waiting is unnecessary and re-opening of programs is avoidable. Today’s computer architecture is sophisticated enough to deprive monitors from power and stop the rotation of hard-drives after a specified time-out. What’s more, modern programming languages, standards and fast-growing operating systems make memory leaks rare, while in fact, perhaps needless to mention, memory becomes cheaper.

My personal experience has shown that Windows XP is stable, but it slows down considerably after hours of work. Similarly, the Registry gets bloated after months of regular use. Linux (and branches like Mac OS X) suffers from none of these issues. I typically reboot after 50-100 hours of persistent work. Windows CE suffers from similar problems and needs to be reset quite often (provided it has not already crashed). My Palm gets reboot every 3 weeks or so.

The bottom line: if you tolerate system crashes or reboot too often, consider alternative platforms.