Nothing endures but change.
-Heraclitus

I find myself in my final year of College, at last. This marks yet another year of changing faces, places, and alike. The common thread among all my education has been change. College is about adapting, learning, and changing.

I begun my college career in 2001. Yes I have been in school for going on 7 years now. I guess I am not a traditional student per say. I am thankful for my experience and I think I have an interesting perspective on college life. The landscape of colleges is totally different now as compared to 2001. I think this is true in about any area of life. Things change, times change, change occurs.

There has been such a bigger emphasis on “group work” in the past few years as opposed to earlier years in my college career. I think this is valuable experience for the work field. Working with people is vital in any area of the “real world”. The way we interact with people is crucial for success. I think I am an easy fellow to get along with and that goes a long way.

I hope this year, as opposed to years passed, I am going to integrate things from my classes into my blog postings. I think this will be interesting and fun to see what people think of the things I learn in school. This semester I have some fun classes like UI Design and Implementation, JAVA II, Network Security, and Astronomy. Hopefully this will keep me fairly excited about the subjects that I am learning.

I am ready for change, and we must remember that change is not bad. Change is the essence of life.

Convicted Linux user, sk0t, is forced to use Windows because the government cannot support Linux to monitor his Internet activities. Do they even need to install software to monitor his traffic? I don’t think so.

I guess they just want to monitor what he is doing on his computer. Still I think there is probably a hardware/software neutral device that could work here. How can the government force something to use a certain software product? It makes no sense.

This is the guy who is responsible for leaking Star Wars III onto the net before it opened. Yes all by himself, he was responsible. Again, I don’t think so. But he faced charges and is paying his dues. Torrentfreak has a great article on the entire ordeal.

I really feel this is a case of our government just not getting it. To punish a person, IMO cruelly, for doing something that the movie industry refuses to do. If you don’t adjust your business model to changing technology you will be left behind. The technology is there, people want to use it, they are using it, but the movie/music industry refuses to change.

Rant done.

There’s a shift occurring in the Computing Industry. A recent report out of mac.co.uk states that Apple is driving a “transformational” shift in PC sales. Somewhere up to 30% of people that are going to purchase a laptop in the next 90 days want to buy a MacBook. I think we shouldn’t get caught up in predictions, but it is an interesting statistic.

If I were going to buy a laptop in the next 90 days I would want to purchase a MacBook. I’m not looking to buy a laptop though, I’m sticking with my thinkpad that continues to chug along.

The reason I feel people are being drawn to Apple products is because the platform is independent. Just about everything I do now is via the Web.

• Gmail
• Google Docs
• Google Reader
• Myspace/Facebook/Twitter etc

I’m not stuck to Windows to do any of my daily tasks. Sure there are going to be products that I could not use on a Mac and vice versa there are products I could not use on Windows. I think this is where Apple is making up the most ground.

• Parallels – Virtualization to run Windows or Linux
• Boot Camp – Run Windows on a MAC, no virtualization
• VMware/VirtualBox – These work on all platforms and do the virtualization thing

They are focused on their customers’ needs and wants. You are going to pay a hefty price, but you will be satisfied. Apple gets it, maybe just Steve Jobs.

The other part of Apple’s success lies in the fact that their products are hot right now. I’ll be honest, I think the MacBooks look really nice in white and black. They are simplistic and are easy on the eye. I think Dell is trying to come out with different colored laptops, which looks nice, but it might be a little late in the game.

The “operating system scene” has really turned into a three horse race: Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It is a race that doesn’t really matter, because we are finding out that locking into one OS is bad for business. I love Ubuntu and I’m apart of the doubling of the Linux desktop in the past year. It doesn’t matter, the platform is moot when everything is on the Web.

This is what is driving Web 2.0.

Out of Arstechnica today. It appears that Windows’ patch tuesday on August 14th brought Skype to a grinding halt. I don’t use the automatic updates at work, well things like this can happen, plus you always want control over what is updating on your computer(s).

“With so many machines restarting, Skype says the network was sunk into a vicious cycle of deprivation, wherein rebooting machines would attempt to log on to the Skype network, but so many machines were rebooting that the network was unable to meet demand. “

I’m glad they found the bug and hopefully came up with a solution for this in the future.

This comes down to an issue of trust. Do you trust Microsoft? No, I don’t. I’ve had updates break drivers before, FUBAR things, and so forth. In a perfect world you would want to install updates in a lab environment. Then you could have a little reassurance that it would run in the work environment.

We don’t live in a perfect world and things can be rolled back. I guess it all depends on the scale of your company. I couldn’t imagine rolling back everyone of our computers at work. That would be an entire day or more of work.

So I think Automatic Updates is good in theory, but in practice I think it is a very bad idea. IT is about control and you have to control your technology.

I remember when Service Pack 2 dropped for XP. Not a fun experience in the IT world. We now have planned days for the updates and to allow them to “ripen” for a bit.

Adblock Plus is a great extension for the wonderful and growingly popular browser Firefox. If you don’t have Firefox plus get it and use it! If you don’t like ADs on the pages you view, you have a choice, you can control how you want to experience the Internet. This is much like watching TV, if you don’t like the commercials you can either change the channel or flip to another channel.

Well this post is all about http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/ because the author of this site is claiming Firefox’s Adblock is stripping him of income! You don’t need to visit, here is the general idea.

“The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing.”

That’s right it’s no less than stealing! stealing, humbug, etc etc, those whipper snappers. Oh no, should the owner of a site have to actually change to adapt to his/her readers! That is non-sense! This reminds me of my previous post, The DRM Dream is Over, because it is similar to the views of the Music Industry/Movie Industry/etc. It’s really like any business, you have to adapt to your customers or your customers will go somewhere else.

The first reason why I started to use Adblock Plus was those stupid ads with the smiley faces that yelled at you! I can block ads in my own mind thank you, just like I can when I am watching TV. When there is a commercial I space out till the commercial is over. I have no idea what the commercial was about and ADs are much like that.

So Adblock Plus saves my mind much processing power, so I can do more critical functions. Like blogging.
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