I think you're talking about Android again... Media transcoding software wouldn't be allowed through the Apple app store, surely?

Join, and vote for, the Australian Pirate Party. It's just starting, it needs your support, and we Aussies sure as shit need it. http://www.pirateparty.org.au/

Twitter in the third world:

What are you doing?

Starving to death

What are you doing?

Still starving to death

What are you doing?

...

Hotspot shield is oversubscribed, especially for streaming anything. If you are willing to shell out on the order of US$40/year, get a pptp account from http://witopia.net/. That works for hulu, last.fm, and probably pandora (although I haven't personally tried that one).

Have a look at http://witopia.net/. Works excellently, about US$40/year.

I play it on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and it works a treat. It hangs when I try to exit, but I can live with that.

Perhaps you could get to work on curing scarcity?

Also IINet customers may get sued for infringment re:, you know, that movie...

There is practically no learning curve, even for a Vista user. For a linux user, should be child's play.

The rest of this post is speaking more to Windows users.

I've wanted to move my main machine onto Linux for some time (years?), but I'm a windows developer and a semi-avid gamer (WoW), and didn't think it'd do the job. Recently though, I found out I could run WoW on Linux via Wine, and as most of my development is in VMWare machines anyway, I thought I'd give it a go.

Ubuntu installed on my Dell Inspiron 9400 basically without any intervention on my part (well I did have to put the CD in, and choose to reformat my drive to ext3). It even found me a proprietary driver for my graphics card, and handled setting it up. There were no hardware issues.

The gnome desktop feels like you are using windows (especially many of the shortcut keys are the same, eg: CTRL-V, CTRL-C, CTRL-X). There just really wasn't any learning curve at all.

Now getting WoW running acceptably under Wine (it now works well, although I wouldn't recommend it for serious end game folks), and getting VMWare (Server) running (VMWare doesn't really go the extra mile to support debian based distros afaik), that took some work. But the amount of info online to help you is staggering; much better quality of information than for Windows. Even though the gui is very polished and you can live solely in it, instructions tend to be cmdline based, because of UNIX's command line orientation, which is off-putting for a windows person at first. Stick with it though, it turns out to be excellent, because instructions in terms of command lines and scripts are very precise. That means more advice and more depth of advice online because you can explain a complex solution in a compact way, meaning it's quicker to write up a solution, meaning more people bother to do it.

I've been a professional developer, using windows solely, for 15 years, and it's with great surprise that I found Ubuntu is a superior user experience. There are rough edges, for sure (eg: why is Pulse Audio not set up by default you crazy people), but just the app respository alone, with its unbelievably deep well of valuable free gui based software, puts it beyond the shareware/crapware shuffle of windows.

I came to Ubuntu expecting a serious uphill battle, and found an easy cornucopia.

It's amazing that it took them this long, but I've been waiting for it to happen, the time is right.

Microsoft's usual pattern is this:

• ignore a hard technical issue.
• third parties pop up to solve it
• if the problem is real (ie: everyone has to have a third party's software) they notice
• vendors become microsoft partners
• microsoft creates nice APIs for the vendors products to implement, along with serious framework. The vendors love it
• microsoft implements the API itself and includes the API in Windows for free
• niche dies

If you once wrote proprietary faxing software, or CD burning software, or even IDEs (with .Net they created the API+framework and implemented it at the same time, slightly different but still devastating), or, well, cruise through Control Panel or Accessories or Administrative Tools for more examples, anyway you can see what I mean.

And in the end, it's good. Once stuff subsumes into the "OS", it just becomes easy.

Anti-virus got to the API+Framework stage a couple of years back. Microsoft released Windows Defender for Spyware/Adware and not Viruses, why? Probably just to be nice to their "partners" for a bit; how hard would that final step have been? But it had to come eventually.

I have no sympathy for Symantec/McAffee/et al. Their products suck (Symantec I'm talking to you here!). One day no one will remember their names, and it will be wonderous.

Meanwhile, I'm writing this on an OS with no need of anti-virus. Thankyou free software people!

Yes, I think you might be right. I've noticed that even the boomers are beginning to get that you don't need to write a word document and email that as an attachment, just send an email (or update the wiki or whatever). OTOH, there are still people using these things as much as ever. If you think the office apps are declining in importance, it might be a sign that your career is going well (fully technical) rather than heading for the skids (management).