Does Trent Reznor get it? Or how to piss off the RIAA.

Well it’s been all over the place today the new Nine Inch Nails record the slip was made available by Trent Reznor, the creative force behind NIN made the post on dig himself after all. This is just the latest in high profile artiest (like radiohead) that have started to experiment in new forms of distribution for their works. Don’t forget you can still pick up free tracks from Trent’s work ghost as well. So is this guy out to change music distribution single handed, or has he just made all the money he needs and feels like thumbing his nose at the establishment. I mean come on this is NIN we’re talking about.

I’m not really sure where all this is going, I do know however that times are a changing and I’m sure not the first person to say this, but licensing like creative commons covers everything from books to movies and even graphic art. People still need to make money but they are doing it in new and creative ways. How we get paid for the products we produce will change. Will everything we own be covered in ads, will you get services along with your product, free music with that concert ticket that happens to be encoded holographic memory. Who knows. I’d say 90% of the software I use is open source, I pay for my use of open source software by promoting it with the zeal of an evangelist on the pulpit (and when I can a donation or two). I can see fans of NIN having more money to spend on tickets for that concert tour that was announced just a day before the release of the free record today, what can I say Trent sure knows how to market and piss off the RIAA.

Trent just encase you ever read this I like 1,000,000 and Discipline… Oh and thanks for the free music you rock.

Microsoft creates a device that bypasses windows security.

I just love when companies do this kind of thing under the umbrella  of  public safety or the law. I wonder how many computers have had this device used on them with out proper warrants (cause that never happens). So tell me again why people use Windows or trust Microsoft?

PDAmill is giving away all of its PalmOS games for free.

Ok not open source and not Linux but free is free, PDAmill is giving away all of it’s Palm games for free. The bad news is that will not be developing for the palm and that’s too bad cause they make some nice games. So go get your palm and start the download fest.

The Rocketers find Open Source Rocket Software

Behold the proud rocketers of New Mexico.

Here we prepare the launchpad, please note tangled wires.

No skimping on safety as Senior launch coordinator is as far as he can get from launchpad.

A perfect launch if you squint you can see the second stage separate

Top of the line 10 year old recovery vehicle

Had a great time spending the afternoon launching rockets, so we decided if we could find some open source software to help us reach for the stars, and we did.

Lawndart is an open source model rocket simulator for Linux.

Go get a rocket and go have some fun.

Ubuntu 8.04 the party continues.

As promised I’ve posted more pictures of the New Mexico Hardy Heron release party.

It’s really been a great year, we started with just two of us and now we have over 30 active members, official status, and even have 2 Ubuntu official members with more on the waiting list. I’m real proud of what we have accomplished with the LoCo and can’t wait to see what we do next year. If Friday nights party was any indication it’s going to be a good year.

Click here to see what we did at our party…..

New Mexico Hardy Party Huge success

Hardy Release Party was a huge success we had over 25 people show up from all walks of life to celebrate the release of our favorite Linux distribution here is just a few pictures of the event.

Good food, lots of talks, lots of installs. I made 35 disk and they were all gone. W00T!

Great info on Hardy

lifehacker

If you’ve flirted with the idea of switching your desktop operating system to Linux but never took the leap, the time is now.

It’s a Hardy Party in New Mexico! So you green or Red

We have two kinds of chili (peppers)  in New Mexico and you can tell allot about a person on if they like green or red chili. If you hear someone say Christmas they like both.

All the details

April 25th,2008 Ubuntu 8.4 Release Party
Ubuntu 8.04 Release Party That’s right, our second release party, and our first as an official Ubuntu LoCo!
Where: Flying Star — Acequia De Corrales, at 10700 Corrales Road
When: Friday 4/25/08 at 6:30pm until 9:00pm click here for directions.
Check out the location here
This year we are doing it in style and have a room reserved.

Linux on the desktop, your time has come.

Yesterday, as if you didn’t know was the release date of Hardy Heron Ubuntu 8.04, and once the servers cooled down and the torrents where seeded it was pretty easy to get a copy. My son who is 10 was chomping at the bit to upgrade his computer, a trusty old Inspiron 5100. So I decided to let him install without any help from good ol’ dad. Not only did he install it no problems at all, the one glitch he did have was handle with out a hitch as well. To use our wireless network he has an old linksys usb wireless adapter which had never been supported by Ubuntu and to the displeasure of by son 8.04 is no exception. In a move that made this dad as proud as if he ran in the winning touchdown in the championship game, he pulled out the windows driver disk and installed Ndiswrapper and got his beloved computer on the network.

Next my son installed wine, just because he loves scratch it’s a great little programing language but no Linux version (come on MIT you know better than that). It took him all of 25 minutes to go from nothing to programing, all of this without asking me one question.

It sure looks like Linux is ready for the masses, none of this talk about a learning curve, none of this talk about not being able to run applications. It’s ready and it really is up to us to make it happen.

OOXML I told ya so!

Wow, read this and you will start to see why the ISO is meaningless.