Rubenerd

Interesting article on the sorry state of the music industry today and how all an artist has to do is say hoe or slut to sell a song. Where'd all the Jazz go?

http://www.fradical.com/Theworseit_gets.htm

Thanks to the wild success of artists like Ludacris, Nelly, Chingy and Beyoncé, for the first time in the 50-year history of the Billboard charts, black artists dominated the top 10 earlier this month, signalling hip-hop’s ascent as the driving force in pop music and culture.

The multi-billion dollar hip-hop industry, whose effects are felt across the board from fashion to advertising to slang, is under a lot more scrutiny lately because of its monstrous commercial appeal. It’s everywhere. Ludacris, Eminem, Jay-Z and Beyoncé are in movies and plug their own clothing lines while Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera have revamped their pop profiles with the help of hip-hop staples the Neptunes and Redman, and get downright “Dirrty” in videos.

So it’s not what’s on Billboard’s top 10 charts that’s amazing these days, but what’s actually still in it.

The only problem with this article: it makes the assumption that Hip Hop and Rap are actually music!

Where's Michael Franks when you need him?

Okay, it's time one and for all to silence all those people who claim Windows XP is a great OS and that the only reason it's targeted is because most people use it!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/security/securityreportwindowsvslinux/

These are my favourite bits:

Perhaps the most oft-repeated myth regarding Windows vs. Linux security is the claim that Windows has more incidents of viruses, worms, Trojans and other problems because malicious hackers tend to confine their activities to breaking into the software with the largest installed base. This reasoning is applied to defend Windows and Windows applications.

This reasoning backfires when one considers that Apache is by far the most popular web server software on the Internet. Only 21% run Microsoft’s Windows-based IIS. IIS has long been the primary target for worms and other attacks, and these attacks have been largely successful. Yes, worms for Apache have been known to exist, such as the Slapper worm, but Apache worms rarely make headlines because they have such a limited range of effect, and are easily eradicated.

And something regarding the kernel itself and why Windows will inveitably collapse upon itself:

Viruses, Trojans and other malware make it onto Windows desktops for a number of reasons familiar to Windows and foreign to Linux:

• Windows has only recently evolved from a single-user design to a multi-user model
• Windows is monolithic, not modular, by design
• Windows depends too heavily on an RPC model
• Windows focuses on its familiar graphical desktop interface

On 17 April 2005, nine young Australians were arrested in Bali on charges of trafficking heroin, and were soon dubbed "The Bali 9" by the Australian media. They have all recently been sentenced and some have received the death penalty.

And now two people have come together and co-written a book together about it. This is the blurb from the book according to HarperCollins:

On 17 April 2005, nine young Australians were arrested in Bali on charges of trafficking heroin. Four of the group – Renae Lawrence, Martin Stephens, Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj – were caught with the drugs taped to their bodies. Two others, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, were alleged to be the ringleaders of the operation. And a final three – Si Yi Chen, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen and Matthew Norman – were also scooped up as the final element in the Bali 9, as the group came to be known.

Their arrests, so closely following that of Schapelle Corby, shocked Australians; even more shocking was the revelation that all nine could face the death penalty in Indonesia. Public opinion has been loud and divided on their individual levels of guilt, and on the appropriate punishment.

Journalists Cindy Wockner and Madonna King have investigated the extraordinary untold story of the Bali 9. With the cooperation of several family members of the Bali 9, they explore the histories of these eight men and one woman who have so unwittingly come into the public eye, to try to discover why these young people would take such a perilous risk. They also look at the controversial role of the Australian Federal Police in the fate of the Bali 9, and they are present at the trials and sentencing.

One-way Ticket: The Untold Story of the Bali 9 is a compelling, clear-eyed portrait of an unforgettable chapter in Australia’s history. It also serves as a chilling warning to all parents: this could be your child, too.

So let me get this straight: two reporters got together, gathered all the information they could, and published a book to take advantage of and exploit the current mood of Australians and make money out of it.

Disgusting. I sure won't be funding this blatent money making scheme.

Just found myself at About.com through a Google search and was presented by this dialog box:

They say I need to update to the latest version of Safari. I'm running the latest version of Safari, on the latest version of Mac OS X (10.4.5), on the latest version on Ruben's Brain.

Who coded this? :D

I've been looking around for a small, lightweight Bittorrent client for Mac OS X. So far I used the vanilla Bittorrent client and Azureus on the Mac and was fairly impressed, but the vanilla client was pretty… vanilla, and Azureus uses so many system resources! I guess because it's Java and not a true Cocoa program.

I tried Transmission (http://transmission.m0k.org/) and was really impressed. It's only 300 kilobytes in size (VERY refreshing after downloading Azureus!) and because it's a native Cocoa.app it works brilliantly, even on my ageing iBook G3 machine.

Plus I can also use it on my XFce DragonFlyBSD machine with the Linux version too, both are VERY polished programs!

And if you're a Windows user and want to give it a go… GET A REAL OPERATING SYSTEM! :D.

Below are some screenshots; I've uploaded them onto my server so I'm not leeching their bandwidth, so check out http://transmission.m0k.org/screenshots.php for updates. I don't think I need to tell you which one is running on Mac and which is on Linux ;)

Have been having an interesting discussion on the ONS forums about Mac versus Linux vs Windows… this is what a bloke called PaulV had to say:

While the PC has its advantages including but not limited to marketshare and the sheer quantity of software and the Mac has the user-friendly and admitedly better GUI, my friends, fancy polished software and beautiful interfaces can not match the raw computing power of a linux box.

I have used Macs for video and audio work, I use a PC for Pro/E and my Finite Element Analysis, but in all seriousness, when I want to compute the big numbers of Computational Fluid Dynamics the only economic viable solution is Linux.

The thing that I do not like about Macs is the nature of the closed architecture. I can’t go in and play around with hardware easily.

The thing I don’t like about Microsoft: Microsoft. And while XP and 2000 give hope that Vista, I pray will be a decently stable and useful OS, it’s expensive and patched together.

I’m not a real fan of either becuase their source codes are such closely gaurded secrets. You can’t really customize the inner workings of them.

Linux is open source which rocks. You can get the source code, make changes and create an entirely customized version of your OS to fit your needs.

And my reply to his post:

While I agree with some of what you said PaulV, the power of Linux part I have a differing opinion. Darwin is based on Mach and FreeBSD, which both I have found to be FAR more stable and powerful than any Linux distro. FreeBSD actually has roots in UNIX, Linux was written to behave like UNIX… *BSD rocks

Though I wholeheartedly agree with what you say about customisation, I love being able to whack together a Linux box with XFce, KOffice and Flock, it’s fast, reliable… though lately I’ve ditched Linux altogether and use DragonFlyBSD with XFce.

I gave OpenSolaris a go too recently, aside from the irritating hoops you have to go through to boot it with the original Solaris disc, it’s actually quite a compelling product: the basic command line utilities such as ls and mv seem to be much zippier, and apparently the whole TCP/IP stack was completely rewritten and is the most memory efficient of any *NIX, apparently to reduce the latency in data centres.

At the end of the day though, if I write a #/usr/bin/perl program, I can pretty much run it unmodified on Linux, Solaris, *BSD, Mac OS X/Darwin, MINIX, HP/UX (had a small amount of experience with) etc… but when I come to Windows… you get the point

And that’s what that’s all about :)

I’d also point out that Macs being a “closed architecture” is such a tired old cliche. Just open a Terminal.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

30:20 – Ruben's Monologue (38 degrees in Adelaide, 4WDs, the environment, petrol guzzling monsters), mah naa naa, The New Website (Georgia font, Flash audio player), listening to Techy2, The Top 5 (excuses people give for why Windows "isn't so bad"), going to Mount Lofty in the Adelaide Hills, why Adelaide is a nice place, iced coffee, The Overnightscape Totem, and why Centrelink needs to know.

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Ruben picks apart the useless spam he receives from the spamming spammers who spam him with their spammingly spammish spam.

Finally the real thing – no more tip-offs! Enhancment Patches are hot right now, VERY hot! Unfortunately, most are cheap imitiations and do very little to increase your size and stamina. Well this is the real thing, not an imitation! One of the very originals, the absolutely strongest Patch available, anywhere!

The patches are the easiest and most effective way to increase your size. You won’t have to take pills, get under the knife to perform expensive and very painful surgery, use any pumps or other devices. No one will ever find out that you are using our product. Just apply one patch on your body and wear it for 3 days and you will start noticing dramatic results.

Millions of men are taking advantage of this revolutionary new product – Don’t be left behind!

As an added incentive, they are offering huge discount specials right now, check out the site to see for yourself!

Yeah, patches. And anti-ageing cremes remove wrinkles. And smashing a mirror gives you seven years of bad luck.

Another update from the infamous Israel Brown who's in Japan:

I’ve been to Tokyo again and am going a third time tomorrow. On this next trip, however, I will mostly be using the station as a way to get to Ueno and then I’ll be taking the train to Yokohama where I will spend the rest of my day.

As for Karaoke, I won’t be doing that. My first reason is that it is too expensive! The second reason is the fact that I’m completely alone and would have only myself to listen to. Finn is working every day until I go home, and I can’t speak Japanese at all, so I haven’t made any friends. In fact, I’ve been feeling rather hated lately with all the weird looks I’ve been getting.

The Internet connection here has been spotty and I’ve been busy, so I have a bunch of pictures that I never got around to posting:

He's really outdone himself with all his photos, but as usual I don't want to rip him off, so you can visit the Overnightscape forum post here.

© Israel Brown

If you've been hanging out for Rubenerd Show #69, it is coming, don't worry! I'm not sure whether it's the Servage FTP timing out or whether it's our [hopefully temporarily] unreliable ADSL connection, but I get within 88% of uploading the latest show and it times out.

Here's an offer to the Liberal Party, Labor Party, The Greens, The Democrats, Family First, Nick Xenophon, if you can promise me reliable internet in the South Australian elections next month, I'll vote for you.

Okay, maybe not the Liberals because they're right wing bastards. And scrap Family First too, the name is designed to hide their dangerous conservative agenda.