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Shallow and Pedantic

Why Vista worries me

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.

On Vista

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.

Pmount-hal + cd

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`" }