So here I am again, bashing Apple. In the last few days everybody and his brother was talking about how cool the iPhone is and how they can’t wait to buy one because it’s sooo hi-tech and yadda yadda yadda. Actually, you just have to look at the specs to be deluded:
- Cingular only
- no UMTS
- battery life just 5 hours talk
- 135 grams
- no camera zoom
Ok, there are nice sensors, a multi-touch screen and a neat user interface, but at the end of the day who cares? Since I have a phone in my pocket 16hours a day the most important features are small size, light weight, battery life, audio quality. I’m sorry I can’t trade my own comfort for any UI, however cool it is.
This device is going to be sub-optimal both as a phone and as a computer (no QWERTY, 3.5″ screen). It’s like a tablet: that useless mid-size that makes everybody unhappy.
I don’t usually waste my time on java, but today I was in the right mood and tried to write a very simple network daemon, just to learn how hard it was. After some quick google I found that java can’t daemonize itself (it has no access to relevant native system calls) and therefore the Apache guys developed a nice component called org.apache.commons.daemon. I though Apache guys are smart, after all they developed the Apache web server, Subversion and more interesting stuff, so they have to know very well how a network daemon works. So I happily started with the test app, SimpleDaemon, bundled in the commons tar file, just to prove it works.
Unfortunately at the 1st attempt I got:
pioppo@roentgen ~/sandbox/daemon $ jsvc -verbose SimpleDaemon.class SimpleDaemon
24/12/2006 00:32:53 32525 jsvc error: Cannot execute JSVC executor process
Gosh, what is this? Read the rest of this entry »
From the BBC website:
“What we are in the process of discovering is disturbing, and that is that Telecom Italia sheltered one of the biggest private spying organizations this country has ever known,” said Pino Sgobio, parliamentary whip of the Communist Party, part of Romano Prodi’s ruling coalition.
Well, compared to what Telecom Italia does, I think this blog is the least of the problems for my own privacy….
My mother is a self-employed artisan 56 years old and happy Linux user. She pays taxes in multiple tranches every year and so far never had problems, but this year is different.
Italian Minister Bersani recently issued a decree mandating use of on line tools to pay social security taxes (F24 form). This means, starting from Oct 1st you either go to very expensive authorized 3rd party tax professional accountants, or you buy a very expensive on line bank account from one a few authorized banks, or you go to the ministry web site and download an application they provide for free.
She asked to her bank, but they said they’re not authorized. Of course nobody wants to waste lots of money in accountants (their services cost typically around €1000/yr) or in additional bank accounts (€200/yr), therefore she tried to download the on-line software. Problem is, the ministry web site says this application is only available for Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac. What if you run Linux or any other operating system of your choice? Well, you are on your own, you moron, just waste your money buying a copy of Windows and shut up. At this point, my mother was desperate and asked for my help.
Federico Aldrovandi was an 18 years old guy from the same town where I was born. One year ago, the early morning of Sep 24th, Federico died in the hands of the police. They initially tried to hide what happened and the body was left alone 5 hours dead on the ground while his mother was looking for him. Then, their version has been that he collapsed by drug overdose when they tried to arrest him.
Pictures and independent analysis show that he he was beaten hard with a wound ruptured on his head, violet colored stripes on his pulses of the handcuffs, his scrotum smashed, lots of blood under his body. This story was almost unknown outside of the town, until Federico’s mother opened a blog. That eventually brought the case to national attention.
After one year, the truth still struggles to emerge as no trial in court took place yet but, no matter what really happened, we must make sure people won’t forget Federico’s story. I know, this post is mostly useless and won’t change anything, but then again…
Former Italian Welfare Minister Roberto Maroni joyfully declared he illegally downloads copyrighted music from the Internet. Of course this shaked the parliament and the music industry. Several Members of Parliament declared music should be sold at lower prices and taxation. A few of them even admitted they download illegally as well. It’s ironic our severe legislation against p2p has been approved by the former government, the same where Maroni was Minister, but then again…
I think it was quite some time this topic needed a serious discussion. There are sovereign states where privately exchanging copyrighted material without profit is considered legal (fair use) and legislations (e.g. in US) where copyright is just an temporary monopoly granted by the State for the sake of the public good, not a human right. I agree we need to remunerate artists to guarantee healthy culture production environment, but in the Internet era do we still need the music industry? For the sake of our society, don’t we have any better way of producing culture and entertainment?
Recently I’ve had the possibility to buy music directly from the artist (Mayday) and paid just €5 for a good quality CD (btw: thanks guys, your music is great!). How come an independent artist can produce a few hundreds CDs and sell them at €5 while record labels produce same quality in zillion of pieces (at much lower costs) and sell it at €20? Do they waste most of that money in advertising? Or do they make unreasonable margins?
Anyway the most interesting comment came from Bobo Craxy, son of former prime minister Bettino. He said downloading music from the Internet is stealing. Well, his family certainly knows what qualifies as stealing and what not.
A quick stat among guys that were in my classroom before university shows 2 married (one with kids), 3 living with their partner (one with kids), 2 with a stable relationship, 2 singles. Maybe it looks not so bad, but actually it is very very different than what you could see for same age and social level among people that were born ten years earlier. The same statistic among people working in my staff shows 2 married (one with kids), one living with his partner, one with a stable relationship and 8 singles. Oh my…
Today Steve Jobs announced the new amazing features of OSX 10.5 aka Leopard.
- they can run natively on Intel hardware (wow, I stopped using Intel in favor of AMD at least 5 years ago)
- they have the Time Machine, or they can apply versioning to files and directories (wow, I’ve been using Subversion for so long…)
- they have multiple virtual desktops (wow, we have had this feature since KDE 1.0)
- they can index files according to metadata
OK, maybe Spotlight is cool, but why so much fuss for such a simple new feature? When you talk with Mac enthusiasts they seem to imply 10.5 is a revolution and nothing will be ever the same under the sun. I don’t think so.
After a good kickstart, lately our government has been busy at creating laws that make me uneasy. First they cut three years jailtime to almost everybody who committed crime before May 6th, including killers. They made instantly free about 13k people, one third of the jailed population. This is supposed to make us save a lot of money (they say billions, but there’s no account for the added expenses on social security) but frankly speaking I saw no urgency for this act, I felt like we’re already tolerant enough, expecially after the last government ruled by Berlusconi almost legalized financial crimes.
Now, they want legal immigrants to be allowed to bring their relatives in Italy and to apply for citizenship after just five years they lived here. Apparently this is strongly pushed by the catholic movement. Now I’m OK with this, I love melting pots, I think italian culture is more in danger because of mcdonalds and american movies than because of immigration, but I don’t see what the hell they’re trying to achive. Don’t they have anything more urgent and useful to work on? Can they please explain what’s the deal? And what impresses me the most is that people most upset by immigration are also the most integralist catholics. Totally schizophrenic.
