I am Moving!

I have moved my blog to a new domain – www.molom.org

And I have also moved my tumblelog – tumblelog.molom.org

Here is my announcement:

I have finished developing my new blog and its up and running! I didn’t like having my old blog being so limited, so the solution was to create my own. BUT, there will be a few changes around here. I have made this blog a lot more explicit and I am going to put forward my opinion a lot more than the old molom.wordpress.com blog. Don’t worry, I am developing another project ATM that will provide the things you have missed in my old blog and will be up and running soon and will provide many professional blog posts. I will announce it here and many other place I visit like forums and such.

What else is new?
I didn’t like tumblr so much (Pretty much because it was a complete different domain to where my blog was located). So I came up with a solution, my new tumblelog is in the Links footer or the top right header links, which takes you to tumblelog.molom.org.

What the hell is wrong with your theme?!!

Well, since it’s a personal blog, I wanted it to be plain. My project, which I will be released soon will be a lot more creative. So stay tuned!

Thanks for stopping by and let the source be with you

Learn your consumer rights!

I have 2 years of Commerce and 2 years of Business Studies under my belt from secondary school and out of all my subjects they were the most useful. Business Studies in Australia teaches you how businesses work and regards much to the law which the businesses have to take into account. With Commerce you learn how you should live as an individual in society, in other words you learn the techniques that will help you in the modern world unlike the usefulness of solving the integration of ‘y = x⁴ – x² + 3′ in maths. In Australia most popular subjects won’t ever be used again when stepping out of secondary school and university unless relating to your career.

So at school during Commerce, I’ve learned about my consumer rights in Australia (Not sure if there are many differences in the American amendments, acts, laws etc.) and the main one I have learned and found useful are the laws that are found in the Trade Practices Act 1974, which is still under the statutory law of New South Wales at. It states, that it doesn’t matter what the warranty of a product is, the warranty doesn’t override statutory law and it doesn’t remove my consumer rights. The only thing that matters is if the product or service isn’t of merchantable quality, which practically means if you paid a reasonable price for a product and it breaks for example 13 months after you bought it (And it only has 1 year of warranty), you still are entitled to a refund. It really depends on the product, if you paid 1000 AUD for a PC and it breaks after warranty you normally won’t be entitled because PC’s normally break, which makes it really unpredictable, but if the computer was 4000 AUD, you might have a shot to getting it fixed for free regardless of warranty.

If you ever have a problem related to warranties (IN AUSTRALIA) related to this situation, you should follow these steps to be able to get a free replacement/fix/refund:

My Linux Distro Review List

I’ll be planning to make a huge amount of Linux distros reviews, I’ve compiled a list on what distros I have planned to review in the near future.

• Arch
• Pardus
• Knoppix
• OpenSUSE
• Sabayon
• Gentoo
• Ubuntu
• Linux Mint
• Parsix
• Mepis
• Maryan Linux
• OZOS
• OpenGEU
• Fedora
• Debian
• PCBSD
• Desktop BSD
• Zenwalk
• Vector Linux
• Foresight
• Wolvix
• Mandriva

Big list huh?

Global Menu Bar & Dock (Make Linux like a mac)

I find there to be advantages and disadvantages in the Mac GUI, some features make the GUI look nicer, but not function well, but some do both. I’ll state the two main features that people notice when changing to or looking at a Mac, when they are accustomed to the Windows GUI.

Global Menu Bar

The global menu bar is the panel which you see at the top on Mac OS X, where the menu bar is located. The global menu bar is a very old concept, its been in the Macs since the black and white versions.

The original Mac OS 1 (1984!)

Mac OS X still uses the concept of this bar and I find it amazingly useful when I had my Mac and am happy Apple have stuck with their old concept. These are the advantages:

• The bar is always in the same place, your response will always be faster when looking for it.
• You waste less screen space because you have the system tray, clock etc on the same bar. You can hide the dock without hiding the clock and system tray because of this bar, while on Windows you have to hide all of that. For example if I don’t want a taskbar and want to remove it, but have the system tray visible, I simply can’t do that. If I had the global menu bar, I could just remove the taskbar and not even waste space with the external system tray.
• It makes theming far more attractive because less sections are found on the windows

A lot of controversy

My previous post, seems to have made quite a ruckus. I have got a very large number of referrals from the tuxmachines website (And I’m very grateful and thanks to whoever posted my post on that website) because my post was put on the front page for some few days, I was overly excited. Some diggs came out and so on. I had positive and negative comments, but the negative comments due to that, which were and are still false, which included/related to:

• I hate Ubuntu and Canonical
• I think Debian is better than Ubuntu [PERIOD]
• I think Ubuntu is a poor distro because it’s far more recognised

I’m going to get some points out before anything else, which are:

• I don’t hate Ubuntu, I prefer Debian over it and that’s it
• I don’t prefer Debian over Ubuntu because Ubuntu is far more recognised
• I love my Diet Coke and it doesn’t make me anymore feminine

I believe that Canonical isn’t here for ‘Free Software’, it’s my opinion and don’t go against me for it, of course I respect everyone’s opinion though. Mark Shuttleworth is an entrepreneur who has sold a security company for a very very large amount of money, and I don’t think it will be the last. I have spoken to other knowledgeable Linux users about Shuttleworth and what they say makes a lot of sense. Let me just share a quote, so you get the idea and so I don’t spell it out for you:

‘Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995, which specialised in digital certificates and Internet security and then sold it to VeriSign in December 1999, earning R 3.5 billion (about US$ 575 million at the time).’

I think Canonical was made for the same reason. Why? Because I think there are more important things that Free Software (World Poverty, World Hunger, Global Warming, The Homeless and so on), and I’m sure Shuttleworth knows the same. Canonical are probably not getting filthy rich at the moment, but if the idea works, I think it will turn out like a Micrsoft-like project (Not the same, but similar).

I’m now Twittering!

If anyone wants to follow me using Twitter, you can now!

http://twitter.com/molom

If you don’t know what Twitter is, click here

Apple’s new iPods & my opinion

Apple has released a range of new iPods, and overall I have found some features useful, some completely useless and some just a complete gimmick.

Let me just categorize these things and mention one after another.

iPod Classic

Upgrades: 120gb instead of 160gb and as thin as the old 80gb classic. Firmware upgrade that has the marketing gimmick called ‘genius’.

This is really not an innovation, but I find it kind of nice they have downgraded the 160gb to 120gb and made it thinner, in my opinion I prefer physical size than capacity, but proportionally. So no arguments about this, the price has gone down and I couldn’t ask for more. And the old 160gb? I don’t think anyone needs such a big HDD unless they haven’t compressed their movies to MP4.

iPod Nano

Upgrades: New size and design, increase in capacity (Up to 16gb now), accelerometer, firmware upgrade including genius and some more useless features.

3 days ago a guy told me 'everyone has to get the new nano'. I asked 'Why?', he told me 'It's so cool! It comes in so many different colours!'. Some people buy anything for the worst reasons... Cough... Impulse Buying...

Ok! A new design… It looks nice, but I can’t stand how the screen is curved, I can see a lot of glare complaints soon. Personally I prefer the last iPod nano which is short, wide, but very thin.

For movies? Can you imagine how you would have to hold a thing that small to watch movies in landscape? It would be like holding a bicycle handle. And I can see another ‘originality’ idea by Apple.

(K)(X)Ubuntu Alternatives

Read this post after reading this post and/or before commenting on this post.

I’ll admit it, I really dislike Ubuntu and its official variants (Kubuntu & Xubuntu). The reason why is because I find it bloated, slow and unstable compared to other distros. Many believe that its the only proper user-friendly distribution available. Well… There are more and better alternatives to Ubuntu in some aspects, and these of course are proper/pure Debian-based distributions. I have tried some and they are as easy to use as Ubuntu. Advantages of proper/pure Debian-based distros?

• Faster… A LOT FASTER
• Stabler… A LOT STABLER
• More Packages… A LOT MORE PACKAGES (Currently ~18 000)
• Easy Upgrades to New Bases… A LOT EASIER UPGRADES

I will highly recommend these distributions if you want Gnome, KDE or XFCE. These are:

• Mepis

Have I tried it? No

Mepis has a long history compared to new distributions. This is a distribution that is based on Debian, supplying the KDE Desktop Environment. This distribution is friendly and easy to use. Mepis supplies all the positives of Debian providing a friendly and elegant system.

• Parsix

Apple’s originality, Steve’s arrogance and Apple’s smart and powerful Marketing Strategies

Whenever I see this video, I feel like hitting Steve with a raccoon tied to a stick. Lets first give my opinions of Steve Jobs and some general knowledge. (You’ll see the video later)

Steve Jobs is the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple and has stood at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and introduced the new products, which were then after placed on the Apple website. He has introduced products like the Macbook Air, iPhone, iPod and other Apple’s so called ‘innovative’ products.

Now lets get to my opinion about Apple and Steve. I’m very much surprised Apple has survived under the so called ‘monopoly’ of Microsoft. Apple was about to drop out, but the iPod saved them, it lifted their market share and gave them enough revenue to continue their other Apple products such as the iMac, Powermac, Powerbook and iBook.

Their unpopularity has saved them in a way in terms of Mac OS X. Mac OS X had a compatibility environment that would be able to make Mac OS 9 software work under the new architecture of OS X. Microsoft can do the same, but will have the big risk of loosing market share, its the software availability that makes Microsoft the top of the rank, so if Apple were in the same situation, they wouldn’t be able to.

Ballmer moments…

I have compiled a list of videos of Ballmer. I just want to prove to you how much of a risk it is to have him as CEO of Microsoft

Steve Ballmer on coffee (Assumed)

Steve Ballmer trying to make a Top 10 song