Mininova Alternatives

Mininova has deleted all 'copyrighted' torrents from their site. They decided to do this after a failed attempt at filtering out certain torrents. Unfortunately, they had no choice but to carry out this drastic action as they had lost a court case and were ordered to remove all offending materials or face a massive fine of up to 5 million euros. It's not quite all over for Mininova, they are possibly going to make an appeal but I wouldn't get your hopes up if I were you.

Obama Advocates Indefinite Detention Without Trial

I knew it was too good to be true, it looks like Obama will turn something immoral into something that is legal. He plans to detain people, possibly for an indefinite amount of time and without trial, for crimes they might commit in the future.

Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

While I was browsing around the net looking for something to take my mind off revision I came across a site called fundies say the darndest things. It's a site with collections of quotes from all over the internet from people trying to argue against science. And by 'people' I mean mainly religious people. Although, non-religious people do say stupid things they don't have a collective agenda against science and reason. Some of these comments are funny but a lot are just plain disturbing, the stupidity of some people out there never ceases to amaze me. Below are some of my favourite comments.

Windows 7 vs Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04: Boot Time

When I heard Microsoft were giving away Windows 7 free for a year I decided to put it on my EEE PC 1000H and see what it was like. There has been a lot of buzz surrounding it, people were claiming it was much better than Vista. I was very surprised at how fast it run on my netbook, I had tried Vista previously and can remember how slow that was. I also had Ubuntu Jaunty already installed on the system so I decided to time both OS's boot time and see how they fared.

I expected Jaunty to be faster since Ubuntu put in a lot of effort to make things speedier but it turns out so did Microsoft. Both system booted in almost exactly 25 seconds, see for yourself in the videos below.

Windows 7 booting:



Ubuntu Jaunty booting:



I have to give Microsoft credit for Windows 7, it felt faster overall and it looks great too but after using Ubuntu for so long it felt a little awkward using Windows again. While the 25 second boot may seem impressive now, just wait until October when the next version of Ubuntu, which promises to be even faster, will come out. Sorry about the video quality I used my Sony Ericsson P1i to record it.

Pop Idol Kenya

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We are Linux

The Linux foundation has just announced the winner of the "We're Linux" video contest. The video created by Amitay Tweeto, called "What does it mean to be free", was chosen by a panel of judges as the winner.

The contest was set up by the Linux foundation to get people to create a one minute video showcasing what Linux meant to them, essentially an "I'm a Pc, I'm a Mac" type thing. Linux doesn't get a lot of advertising or promotion in the public sphere, it's usually through word of mouth that people find out about and try Linux. The aim of this contest was to make people aware of Linux and to encourage them to try it.

I really liked the winner because it not only told people that Linux was out there and they had a choice but it also portrayed the core ideas and ethos of Linux. Linux is not just software but also a community of people who believe in sharing, the ability to use your OS as you want and making it better together for everyone. Here is the winning video:



The runners up:

Intel Promises 2 Second Boot with Moblin

Moblin is Intel's Fedora based distro specifically engineered for netbooks such as the eeepc range.

Currently at the early alpha stage, Moblin is already able to boot within 20 seconds but a 2 second boot seems a bit unrealistic. Intel engineers have managed to do some remarkable things so far, let's just hope they can achieve this.



Check out Phoronix.com's test of Moblin against Ubuntu Jaunty.


I had a little play around with Moblin on my eeepc 1000h last week and unfortunately I didn't experience any lightning fast boot times. In fact it was slower than Ubuntu Intrepid which boots in about 30s. It was obvious that it was alpha stage software from the look of the UI but I didn't experience any crashes, although it did fail to boot once. Wifi worked out of the box. I found the fonts to be hard on the eyes and I also couldn't get update to work at all.

Moblin uses XFCE desktop environment which fooled me into thinking it was GNOME for the first few seconds but the differences become visible quickly. Being used to GNOME and Ubuntu I found the UI a little strange. However, it is alpha and Intel plans to completely re-design the look and feel of the interface to something more modern. The video below shows some of the ideas they are playing around with.



I only had Moblin on my netbook for a day, I replaced it with the beta version of Jaunty which is working perfectly. Currently I can't see myself using XFCE but with a 2 seconds boot I think I can live with it.

Update: Just found this video of Moblin booting in an incredible 5 seconds! See for yourself.

The Megapixel Myth

Ars Technica has an interesting article on why bumping up the megapixels on a mobile phones camera is not making any substantial improvements to image quality.

"Megapixels are the digital camera market's equivalent of horsepower and megahertz—a single metric that consumers and marketers latch on to tenaciously, despite the fact that it hardly describes overall performance. Over the last several years, camera manufacturers have been pumping up the megapixels on each successive camera model, regardless of whether such increases offered any real benefit (hint: it usually doesn't)."

Although you will notice a big difference between a 3 megapixel camera phone and a 8 megapixel one, it is claimed that 12 megapixels is the most we will need.

There are several factors which combine to make a good camera; the quality of the lens is crucial along with things like having a decent flash and also sophisticated post image processing.

Although the article quotes a guy from Olympus Imaging's SLR planning department who may feel threatened by the rapid rise in camera phones, I do feel he has a point. We may soon see phone manufactureres putting less emphasis on megapixels but more on other aspects which will continue the improvements in image quality.

Read the full article at Ars Technica.