This man has some beautiful design ideas for the Linux desktop.

I’ve heard the latest Security Now, regarding the debate between Dave Marsh and Peter Guttman on DRM in Windows Vista. While a few good points were made, the major one - in my opinion - was not. DRM, in a practical sense, is deeply flawed: The idea is to give you your media - say, a WMA piece of music - and a program to play it with - say, Windows Media Player - but encrypt the media.

Well, penny knows. But I have proof she knows… http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PUZZLES/waldo.html

Everyone knew this was going to be an interesting one to watch. Die-hard Microsoft fans were sure Vista would be the final nail in the Open Source coffin, die-hard Linux fans were sure that the release would be Microsoft’s demise. Myself - I’m sitting and enjoying the show. It’s always very interesting to show Beryl to non-Linux users. They are almost always highly impressed, and are often completely in shock that Linux is a graphical system - many people still believe Linux is command-line only.

This is absolutely antique (2000), but it’s good to hear an artist with a clue. http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html

If you’re like me, and don’t use Gnome or KDE, then you probably use the pmount or pmount-hal applications to mount removable media. Here’s a neat thing to add to your .bash_aliases: 1 2 3 4 5 function pmh { pmount-hal $1 UDI=`hal-find-by-property --key block.device --string $1` cd "`hal-get-property --udi $UDI --key volume.mount_point`" }