All copyright proponents start with “We all agree, that we need to protect intelectual property” and then proceed to explain how they need to create draconian laws and draconian protection technology. It goes without saying that they both suck.

But at that place, they already lost me. I don’t really believe in a thing called intellectual property. For me this is about as useless as the notion of owning land was to the native americans. But really, think about it. It basically says that your thoughts are some kind of sellable product. That’s absurd. Lawyers have came up with a term “immaterial goods” which is an contradiction in itself.

We need to stop trying to fit our physical terms in a world where they don’t belong. And we really should consider the damage copyright has done. In fact, it is crazy to complain about the split between the rich and the poor and then create stricter copyright laws, that protect the mainly the rich copyright managers.

Recently, I read a pro-copyright pamphlet signed by some german book authors, complaining about piracy, no actually about stealing, which would be funny if it wasn’t so sad how misguided it is. Piracy is not theft and with that article they made sure that I won’t ever buy anything which bears their name. I don’t want to support people who view things differently but also lie to the public and try to influence public opinion, maybe by malice but most likely by ignorance. Not to mention that book piracy is not nearly as common as for example music, because the most popular e-Book platform is the kindle and Amazon makes it much easier to buy books than to pirate them.

This is interesting, because I also create copyrightable works, I write software. You can find most of it on my GitHub account. And if I had a couple of wishes, I as a programmer would wish for less copyright, not more. Also, getting rid of patents, but that’s stuff for another post. The last thing that I would want is for my copyright protection to be stronger. Currently, my copyrights expire some 70 years after my death, and given an estimate that I will evade being flattened by a bus for the next 30 years, you can freely incorporate my previously AGPLv3+ licensed code in your proprietary applications in 2112. See, this is ridiculus.

The aforementioned book authors were fearing for their jobs and proclaiming that we can’t keep up our culture level without professional culture creators. That’s maybe the most ridiculous claim. They ask to help them survive. I don’t see a reason for this, it is like supporting a ice-transport industry because it might get replaced by refrigerators so people don’t need ice. And like ice transports we don’t need copyright. Sorry, that’s life. If you can’t survive as author, don’t become author than. I like cycling, but I can’t get people to pay me doing this. I don’t write newspaper articles how unfair this is, it is market at work.

Besides this, the notion of paid professionals necessary for creating culture goods is totally wrong. The most prominent example is the Free/Open Source Comunity. While there are many people paid for developing on the Linux kernel, on the other projects there’s many people working on lots and lots of smaller low-profile things in their free time. You might say, ok, but that’s software, it does not apply to other things. I beg to differ. See the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV which was released under a liberal license. Actually, from the statistics I saw, most musicians earn their money from their concerts and not from the actual sold “product”. Also see the works of paniq which are at least as good as many mass-media commercial releases. If you look at DeviantArt you can find lots of beautiful art from hobby artists. And crowd-founding sites like Kickstarter show new ways on how to create great things and still get paid.

But let’s look at it from the other side, let’s see what copyright destroys. Take a look how many videos are blocked on YouTube because they use some copyrighted music (it get’s even funnier, I saw talks that were blocked because the presenter used copyrighted music), take a look at all that crappy DVD encryption bullshit, take a look how much effort DRM is. It is basically impossible to buy legitimate media on Linux because of all that software that is needed for the DRM is not ported to Linux and because it is DRM, it cannot really be implemented freely. Se how the copyrigh spawned an entire industry of lawyers to sue people and other companies.

What if there was a world where copyright didn’t exist… oh wait, there is. See how the industrial Japan came to existance. That’s old history, so take a better example of China. Guess which country’s industry is growing like crazy. Have you seen the chinese copies of Twitter? Nobody gives a damn about what copyrights Twitter might have of that. Is there something wrong with that? I my opinion, not at all, they are free to do that and the world is none the worse because of that. Actually, on the contrary, the copied Twitter style is nice enough and it saved the chinese internet users from having to deal with an ugly, blinky 90ies style site. I can see chinese companies suing western companies for copyright infringement in some years.

We need to stop this madness. We need to get rid of copyright. Chances of that actually happening: 0.

Everytime I read about systemd in the news, I facepalm in advance. Not because I don’t like systemd, mind you. But because I already expect to see the uninformed or idiotic stuff written in the comments. It divides into complaining that systemd makes things differently (well, duh!), personal attacks against Lennart Poettering and complaints about PulseAudio, one of the previous projects of Lennart.

I for one, welcome our unified boot system overlords. Let me start by listing a number of boot systems that current Linux distributions use:

• System V init, used by many systems because “that’s how it’s always been done”
• initng, used by Pingwinek, Enlisy, Berry Linux, Bee. Honestly, I never heard about any single of these
• OpenRC, used by Gentoo. Together with their older Gentoo init scripts. What the heck is “friendly upstream” in the linked Wikipedia article even supposed to mean?!
• eINIT
• Upstart, written and used by Ubuntu and sometimes used by other systems
• The “BSD” boot scripts in Arch Linux
• At this point I stopped caring about more

They all are basically “init”+asynchroneous process starting. It baffles my mind why everybody has to reinvent the wheel badly, but whatever. The intersting thing is, that they rarely look at the booting problem from a broader perspective. Not only make the computer do things in parallel but also, lo and behold, start only stuff that is necessary.

Now this is a point that many users in Linux cannot accept. Novel approaches are discouraged, whereas reinventing the same thing is great. Please tell me the actual differences between GNOME2 (MATE), XFCE and LXDE. Why do we need so many identical desktops?

I also used to be conservative, afraid that the new “Firefox” will be terrible compared to my beloved Mozilla Suite, nowadays called SeaMonkey. Fast forward couple years, I would be insane to consider SeaMonkey an alternative to Firefox. Also, I tried liking Unity or GNOME3, unlike many others, who looked at screenshots and dismissed it right away. Also, I wanted my smartphone to have a hardware keyboard, but having tried touchscreen keyboards, I realized that the smaller size of the device is much more important.

This is where systemd comes in. systemd takes a broader approach and finally utilizes the Linux kernel with all the extra functionality that it provides to create a solution that is not just a rip off from some old eighties Unix but actually looks how computers are used nowadays. As such it has some intersting ideas. You can read about it in Lennart’s blog. To me, they all sound really reasonable, like the guy behind it knows what he’s talking about. Therefore I don’t understand why people protest because of protests sake. This is all to obvious in this video where the main point was “OMG THE SYSTEM WORKS DIFFERENTLY THAN IT USED TO!!!11!”.

Now, one point is that systemd is bad because it is authored by Lennart Poettering, the guy who wrote PulseAudio, which famously didn’t work in Ubuntu. Now, fast forward to 2012 and PulseAudio is the only audio system on Linux that matters. Who misses the mess with applications written for OSS that blocked other applications from playing? Or the sound-server wars with EsounD, aRts where you had to tell applications which one to use and hope they even supported it. Thanks, my SoundBlaster is IO 220 and IRQ 7. Now, I can plug in additional sound cards via USB at will, control each application volume separately and best of it, it just works. When GNOME 3 on my Arch Linux pulled in PulseAudio, it just worked, no tweaks needed at all.

And I am by far not a systemd fanboy. I am using systemd in Arch which is nonstandard and I had my fair share of problems, when systemd wouldn’t start NetworkManager (by the way, also an evil technology, because it is not distribution-specific config files, you know). But generally it’s been running quite well. In Fedora 16, where it is used by default, it works beautifully. Boots fast and supports the one-to-rule-them-all bootsplash solution, Plymouth. Bootsplash is another topic, some people really need to see the console output of the Linux kernel, because it is always been like this. Yeah, right.

And the next shock will be Wayland, which updates graphic interfaces in Linux to the 21st century. X11 has served us well, especially since Xorg took over from XFree86, but the point is that they are patching around an ancient protocol that was invented 30 years ago. As such it certainly stood the test of time better than FTP for example, but that doesn’t mean it needs to stay around forever.

Ok, so as a final point to you, the reader: please try to be open about things. Don’t dismiss them because they are different. Consider that things like mouses, windows and laptops used to be different but now most people consider these to be great.

There’s a lot of posts, predicting the future of computing and you might wonder why the heck I need to write about it. Well, maybe I can chip in the opinion of an desillusioned ultra-nerd instead of the consumer view. Just so you know my context: using PCs since 16 years, GNU/Linux since 2001 and online since 28.8 to 56k dial-up age. I believe I have seen a number of fads and trends.

1. Desktop computers will not completely disappear

I haven’t owned a desktop computer since my last one broke down, somewhere in 2007. Because there’s no “mainstream” use for these. Laptops have eaten all the share. You can use your USB input devices with the laptop, your external screen. Storage on Laptops is plenty and even if you need more, there’s a multitude of NAS devices and external discs. Upgradability stopped being an issue – I dumped my last Core2 Duo laptop because I was bored, not because it was too slow. A nerd friend of mine argued, he needs an desktop PC, but all points he brought up could be satisfied with a laptop. It is just unflexible thinking.

From my non-nerd friends, hardly anyone has a desktop computer now. What for? I shudder when I think that I could be using a huge, noisy box that is not portable. So while I don’t think desktops will completely disappear, they are becoming as common as mainframes.

2. A tablet is more than most customers will ever need

If you have older parents, you sometimes think which computer to give them, so they can stay connected to the rest of the world. If you have given them a Windows PC or they got it for themselves you’re probably familiar with the regular visits, to fix up and desinfect their installation. If you went with GNU/Linux, you probably had to debug their problems with the operating system. They updated Ubuntu, it doesn’t even boot up anymore. If you got them a Mac, you just spent a lot of money on a machine where they won’t ever use anything more than the browser.

Looking at how “normal” people use their computers, they have exactly two priorities:

1. Let me use my browser to surf the net
2. Don’t bother me with anything else

Lately, a special type of device popped up, that does exactly that: the tablet. While I was critical of netbooks (ugly, small screen, same sucky software) tablets seem to be actually an interesting type of device. To be honest, first time I saw the iPad, I was sceptical, until I realized that this type of device is not meant for me but people like my parents. And my non-nerd friends. And ultimately, I’ll argue in a moment, for me.

Oh, Chromebooks tried to settle for the same niche, as a simplified netbook design that had potential, but as they weren’t pushed aggressively and were too expensive they are just a historical sidenote. Dear manufacturers: noone will buy a device that is basically unknown and more expensive than a full-size laptop. If you really thought this would work out, you’re sillier than expected.

Heck, since I got my smartphone, I stopped carrying my huge 15 inch laptop to university. I don’t ever use this phone for calls, not even fro mobile internet. It is great as an always-with-me-device that is tiny enough that I always have it with me, it rarely breaks down and has enough battery life that I never need to turn it off. I realized that except for programming, that device is plenty enough for mobile use.

3. The move away from individual devices

While the cloud is a grotesquely overused term, it does serve as a great place for storage. I was, like many people hesistant to use it, but after you get over to hand your data to someone else to handle, the upsides are quite an easy sell. I have my contacs “in the cloud”, that is, in my Android address book, that is synchronized with my desktop mail program that is automatically backed up by highly-paid Google guys and not by me who has some other job. Amount I pay for this: 0. I started to synchronize important data between my devices with Dropbox. Also completely for free. The comfort of getting rid of byte-shuffling on USB sticks or E-Mail between my devices is about as big as the switch from the super-small capacity floppies to the huge CD-Rs and then from the read-only CD-Rs to random-access USB sticks.

To quote Sun’s slogan “the network is the computer”, but in a totally different way than Sun expected it to be. This vision was finally realized by Google. See GMail, see Maps, see Android. There’s hardly anything that I cannot do with a browser on any device. GDrive which was announced today continues this trend.

An important point in de-emphasizing the individual device is, that the irreplacable user-data is not bound to the specific device. If I break my phone, that’s sad, but the amount of data-loss is not a problem, since there’s hardly any data unique to the device. There’s a couple of apps and settings that I loose and that is about it. Actually this doesn’t only apply to phones. A friend of mine uses a Macbook Air in the same way, personal data is backed up in the internet, if the device breaks down he could just get a new one and continue where he left of.

4. What about programmers?

Now, many people might argue, ok, that’s for consumers who don’t create content. What about content producers? I suppose for those the desktop, but mainly laptop will stay. Though for programmers, the situation is different now. They can do their work quite fine on tablets. First, there are the browser IDEs. These are ok if you are programming in the language-du-jour and constantly improving. But if you need more flexibility?

Well, I’ve been developing on a virtual server via screen/tmux and a text editor since about 2007 as I realized that I am too lazy to set up my development environment on every new machine, which usually starts with installing my favorite operating system. Having all that in my own personal cloud makes development possible with basically only an SSH client which are available on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X as well as iOS and Android which cover more platforms that I am even likely to use. Incidentally, this blog post is written in exactly this way.

So, what about typing? Many people complain that typing on touchscreens suck. Well, on my phone it certainly is difficult, because it has a crappy digitizer and a small screen. But I still write long E-Mails with it sometimes, and surf with it, even while I use a laptop. And you know what? Bluetooth keyboards exist. While they might not be as good as IBM Model M style clicky keyboards it is still a very much viewable solution and some are actually better than the cheapo wired keyboards that some of my aquaintances use.

If you really need a dedicated system with a “traditional” OS, there is now another possibility: the Rasberry Pi. Thinking of it, this might be one of the most interesting devices for developers ever made. It is true, just 700 MHz but for many things this is already enough. Unless you are compiling huge codebases, the RPi could be a game changer. Thnk of programming books that don’t ship a CD but a full RPi with pre-made environment on SD card. Plus, it runs a full Linux, so you can do multitasking and splitscreen, a field where current tablets lag behind.

After trying to implement this nifty script in Python 3.2, which is by the way impossible because the Python 3.x ports both PIL and PythonMagick refuse to work, I said dammit, I can also write the blog post I was planning to write anyway.

Ok, so I read The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. You might remember, the guy who wrote an innocent book about the church and got lots and lots of publicity. I read all his books years ago and for the most part, enjoyed them. So I picked The Lost Symbol and was quite disappointed, up to the point of rethinking my previous judgements.

Here’s why: it is stereotypic and repetitive. I read the book in, maybe a week, because the style is admittedly flowing quite well and hooked up the reader. But it has lots of chapters and many of these chapters recapitulate in the first paragraphs what happened in the previous chapter. Some readers may remember that the Harry Potter books do the same at the beginning of each book, but there it serves a purpose, because they were released years in between. The chapters in The Lost Symbol are meant to be read more or less in one go.

So, why stereotypic? Well, because the “hackers” are portrayed in the stereotypical way how any cheap movie would show them. I think we moved past that. Also, Langdon has no development and apart from knowing his symbolism and being every woman’s darling, no personality. While I do not expect him to be a super-sophisticated character, halfway though the book I just stopped caring about him, whether he is caught or anything.

And then there is the missed chances. There could’ve been some interesting plot turns especially about the origin of the antargonist or well, by simply getting rid of Langdon in an interesting way. But Dan Brown chose not to do it, because, maybe it would make it harder to write a next book where Langdon goes to yet another city and solves other ancient mysteries with the help of another beautiful woman.

Oh and don’t get me started on the “science” part. That was just so much bullshitting and not explained in any credible way that it was just silly. Also, the mysteries in this book seemed to me to simple. I am by far no person with any sort of special knowledge in ancient stuff, but many of the riddles, especially at the beginning were obvious even to me.

After all, not a bad book as I read the 600-odd pages in a week, but I felt some kind of guilt to be absorbed in such a cheesy story.

I used to have an Ikiwiki installation at this place. I liked it, because of the Git integration, but honestly it looked kinda ugly and stale. I never posted to it. But now that Marc has created a blog using Tinkerer, I was encouraged to re-evaluate.

In the end, I chose against Tinkerer, because I prefer writing prose in Markdown. So, I decided to give Octopress a try. After all, we’re the same league, right, Ruby-guys?

Let me start with what I like, before I commence rambling how terrible everything is:

• Statically generating blog posts is completely fine with me, after all, my very first blog, some aeons ago was statically generated using Firedrop2. Considering the number of security issues in WordPress and my general dislike for anything PHP that sounds like a sweet deal.
• I can write the posts in my favorite editor on the server, from anywhere. Yeah, the cloud! Cloud! Whee!
• I can use version control on my blog posts, shiny.
• It looks nice out of the box. Also kind of generic, but I take this over the even-more-generic Blogger look.
• It is more popular than Tinkerer and has more plugins. Well, Tinkerer is quite young, we’ll see.

Ok, now the sucky part is, as far as I see the set-up

• What I did was to compile Ruby 1.9.3-p125 and use rbenv hoping that it will be something like virtualenv in Python. Turns out it is. Kinda.
• Octopress forces the local version to 1.9.2-psomething, so I needed to delete the file. Why is it even checked in?
• Everytime I run rake, it complains that my rake is too new, 0.9.2.2 instead of 0.9.2. Seriously? So I run bundle exec rake generate and everything is fine. Why oh why?
• No pip, no PyPI equivalent? I am disappoint, Ruby.
• Need to figure out how to version my posts properly.

Oh, did I mention that I love the solarized colorscheme?

1

print("Hello World")

So that’s that.