Dreamer ant

As some of you may know, a new law (”Hadopi”) has been voted in France that allows private companies to monitor illegal downloads of their copyrighted content, log the IP addresses, ask the Internet access providers for actual names, and then start doing stuff like sending email and disabling your Internet connection for up to a year (while you still continue to pay for it).

As an effort to try and show how absurd this law is in today’s world I put up a fake page (in French) selling the “Hadopi router” that automatically cracks passwords of the nearby Wifi networks and connects to them to download torrents.

It’s a dumb joke, but I think it does point out a little bit of the absurdity of the law Comments and suggestions welcome!

Programming tools like Eclipse assist your geeky typing by automatically adding closing brackets and ending quotes for you when you type the opening ones. This gives you extremely bad habits and you end up leaving all kinds of doors open.

Now I am not saying it is always that bad, but frankly, I could have taken this photo in many (if not most) car interiors in any Chinese large city:

Note the lucky charm (top right), but no belt (also note that this is a fancy car that belongs to a very wealthy family).

Whoa, look at that, there is a Linux hater’s blog, and whoa, it has a new post about my whylinuxisbetter.net website. From the post: “[...] it reads like a talking point manual for your local neighborhood Linux zealot. I thought we might have a bit of fun with this one.” Hmm, let’s see… Yay, let’s fight

• Is your system unstable? “Who knew. When a system doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t crash.” All of Google runs Linux. So Google doesn’t do anything? Well that’s news. Nasa probably doesn’t do anything either? The French administration doesn’t do anything? Oh wait, that was a bad example.
• Choose what your desktop looks like… “To make yourself feel better about it not being to do anything. At least it is pretty.” Huh, were you just talking about Windows Vista?
• Too many windows? Use workspaces. “Yes. Spaces.” Oh, you mean that Mac OS X thing? So if I got two windows A and B on space 1, I put window B in front/focus, then I go to space 2, then back to 1, woops, now A is in front of B. And this is the newest version of the OS, released this year. Linux got this right 10 years ago.
• Why does your Windows get slower day after day? “Because you install a shit-ton of crap on it? If the same large selection of software could run on Linux, users would be having all the same problems“. Would they now? Fortunately for Linux, uninstalling software is done in a clean way and doesn’t leave a shit-ton of crap in your registry.
• Forget about viruses. “I think we went over that already” (with a link to another post). Oh, so the problem of viruses in Windows is completely fixed, solve, basta, finito? That’s news as well.
• Linux protects your computer. “What does that even mean? It sounds like the same as [the previous one]“. Does that mean the problems with spyware, adware, etc. is fixed as well? Well, great. Oh, but maybe you don’t know about them because you’re protected, right? How much did you pay for this protection? Are all users well protected? Is the average user well protected? I guess not because otherwise, all these crapware problems would have gone away by now, right?
• Don’t pay $300 for your operating system. “But spend 10 weekends setting it up“. Well, now I understand why you don’t like Linux that much, that’s because last time you tried to install it was 10 years ago! Got it. By the way, last time I installed Windows, it took me a whole day to go, fetch, and install all the device drivers for my hardware. And reboot after installing each one of them. Last time I installed Ubuntu, I spent 10mn in front of the screen, went away for 20mn, and everything was working and ready to be used when I came back.
• Does your digital life seem fragmented? “No? Does anyone care? Is it so hard to click three buttons to defragment?“. Well if it takes 5 hours and I can’t use my computer during that time, yes. Oh but didn’t you just wonder whether anyone cared? So why are you still doing it?

To be fair, let me say that whylinuxisbetter.net mentions several situations where you’re better off keeping Windows, including (among others) if you work for the book/printing industry or are a hardcore gamer. Linux isn’t perfect, but what this website says is that it’s better than Windows for most users.

Like many people, I now rely on web-based solutions for email (namely GMail) and I love it like this. However, I do want to be able to archive my email from time to time. So, lately, I just downloaded all my email from a veeery long time ago until now, got a huuuge mbox file, and converted it into multiple .eml files because I believe it’s a bit more easy to use/search/archive (but maybe that’s a mistake).

The main problem is attachments: I do want to keep the text of all these messages, but have usually no interest in keeping the attachments in most cases, and I’m trying to make this as small as possible if want to keep it around for a long time. I searched for easy solutions to “trim” attachments out of .eml messages, but didn’t find a nice way to do it automatically so I just ended up opening the biggest ones with a text editor and removing the encoded attachment by hand…

So I was just wondering how you guys handled email archiving. Do you archive email at all? Do you have simple ways of removing attachments? Or do you just dump the whole thing onto a blank CD or DVD every once in a while and don’t care about size?