Isolationism

Bram Cohen, creator of the BitTorrent protocol and owner of BitTorrent, Inc., has purchased what is almost unarguably the best Windows-based torrent client, μTorrent.

The move was almost certainly in support of Hollywood’s attempt to stem movie piracy and encourage legitimate uses of the protocol (no doubt through the use of heavy-handed tactics like DRM etc.).

I’m fine with encouraging fair use, but the MPAA and I disagree on what that means (on just about every point on the subject). It probably goes without saying that just about all of μTorrent’s users are understandably more than a little pissed off.

The clowns in Hollywood won this round; they’ve discovered that like themselves, some people out there will do anything if you throw some money their way.

I’ve been searching around today (in vain so far) for an open-source, command-line tool that allows for the conversion of an SVG-formatted file to PDF—I know of ImageMagick which would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that it rasterises the damn SVG before converting to a PDF (which defeats the purpose of creating a PDF at all in my opinion).

In my travels, however, I stumbled across Xara Corporation’s press release page (looking at something to do with Über-Converter, which would probably do the trick if I were willing to spend 12 hours getting all the Perl dependencies installed required to get the damn thing running), when I stumbled across the latest entry which was amazingly dated today (how lucky is that?):

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A recent blog entry by Mark Shuttleworth (owner of Canonical, creators of Ubuntu Linux) describes a gripe about audience response to his presentations about Linux: “pervasive support.” I think Mark and I agree that this level of product support is required, but our opinions perhaps differ a bit on perceived vs. actual levels of “support” in/for Linux, or even the multiple meanings of the word.

He first points out that commercial distribution vendors are willing to offer end-user support for their products—for a fee of course. He however neglects to point out there are multiple levels of end-user support, including the “non-critical” variety that is acceptable—even preferable, in some cases—to home users and DIY types (who prefer to learn to fish rather than be handed one when they get hungry)—as well as those working on a budget who don’t have the extra cash to shell out for support (or the operating system itself).

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Anyone watching the news has no doubt long-since encountered the news of Novell entering a “protective covenant” with Microsoft to essentially line Novell’s pockets in exchange for “protection” against patent infringement suits from Microsoft, because according to them, Linux infringes on many of their patents, and Ballmer has made a lot of noise (read: FUD) about how Microsoft is going to start to pursue legal action to protect them. It smacks more of posturing tactics to me; kind of like how they got caught red-handed lining SCO’s pockets through investment intermediary BayStar Capital, except this time they’re operating overtly instead of covertly.

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Every once in a while you run into a piece of really nice software that you have to sing form the hilltops about. Everyone who’s even casually glanced at my blog knows by now that I feel that way about Boodler, although I know my audience’s interest in the same is considerably less than my own.

I’m writing today to talk to about another piece of software that is right up my alley that you probably don’t care about: It’s called ArtRage and is made by the folks at Ambient Design who appear to write software geared toward designers and artists.

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