It appears that a certain Mr Stephen Fry, a delightful chap you may have seen in ‘old media’, has decided that Linux is the way forward.

On closer examination of his personal blog post, it appears Mr Fry has obtained an EEEPC, the dinky little device from Asus. Unlike other palmtop-ish sized devices, the EEEPC is essentially a fully featured laptop complete with a 900Mhz Intel Celeron M and 512MB of ram viewed through a 800×480 resolution 7 inch screen. The storage is solid-state (flash based) and both RAM and storage are upgradeable.

Now, the reason Mr Fry is so het up about Linux is that the EEEPC runs a Xandros based software distrubtion and provides an easy-peasy apt or synaptic repository based software installation system. As I found out today when I made an ‘urgent’ reinstall of my Ubuntu desktop (hardware failure), synaptic can shave hours off a system build. My fully featured install consisting of Ubuntu and a huge set of office and design applications took just over an hour to install.

Mr Fry is so taken with the idea that he states:

I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.

…and somehow I’m a bit inclined to believe him. Of course, I know that every year since 1997 has been hailed as the ‘year of linux on the desktop’ but I starting to think that everything is coming into place for that really to be the case. From Dell offering Ubuntu on their mainstream desktops and laptops through the EEEEEEEPC to low-power embedded devices offering a Linux based platform. Then there’s Microsoft who for reasons only known to themselves spent years developing a product, now known as Vista, which upon release was found to be one of the most pitiful operating systems ever seen.

I don’t think that Linux is going to just drop in your lap but I do think it might sneak up on you from behind

Photo Credit: Red cc-by-3.0

The UK government has announced plans to terminate the internet access of UK citizens who use peer-to-peer networks to share files over the web in breach of copyright.

This would mean that ISPs would be required to become an element of the policestate, examining all data sent across their networks. The system is proposed to be a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ operation, the first strike being an emailed warning, the second account suspension and the third, account termination. Quite how the ISPs are expected to filter and examine every packet sent is anybody’s guess and we all know the kind of false-positives that are generated when people or systems start guessing. Of course, this all seems rather ridiculous coming at a time when the recording industry is seeing record sales due to the success of online music retailing.

The ‘content’ industry has been vociferous as usual, wheeling out the usual falsehood that every illegal download = a lost sale.

I was also horrified to see a comment from a BBC Have Your Say user who said “…while I understand that copyright infringement is basically theft…” No! No! No! dammit. Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. If it’s done by the person it’s a civil matter which you can be sued by the copyright holder over. If you infringe copyright commercially (copy then sell) it becomes a criminal matter akin to fraud, not theft.

Just because the ‘content’ industry repeatedly bleats on about piracy and theft, does not mean that UK file sharers are forcing people to walk the plank or breaking into movie studios!

The Internet Service Provider Association points out that UK data protection laws make deep packet inspection illegal and even if it wasn’t, complete monitoring would be economically impossible without driving costs up for UK consumers who already pay over the odds for a sub-par service when compared to much of Europe.

If enacted, this would make the UK one of the most draconian corporate police-states in the world.

The French train manufacturer Alstom has today unveiled it’s latest electric train. The 224mph AGV (Automotrice à grande vitesse) is to replace the 200mph TGV (train à grande vitesse).

Instead of using separate power cars, each set of wheels on the AGV will be powered and will allow it to transport 460 passengers with 15% greater efficiency than the earlier TGV.

High speed electric trains are the obvious choice for France, a country which derives 79% of it’s power from nuclear generators. This means that these high-speed transport systems are in fact ‘low-carbon’ in operation.

I just picked up this story over at Arstechnica.

Apparently, web metrics firm Xiti has found that 28% of the web browser market in Europe is now running Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is an alternative to Microsoft’s operating system tied Internet Explorer product. Firefox offers improved security, performance and extendability over IE and the fact that it is free, open-source software has undoubtedly helped in it’s adoption. IE, fairly or not, has gained a bit of a reputation for having vulnerabilities and exploits. Firefox also has these but enthusiastic developers tend to produce patches with all haste.

It probably also helps Firefox’s position that, unlike IE which is only available for Windows (it is discontinued for Mac), Firefox will run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and soon a range of handhelds.

It will be interesting to see if the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.0 increases the Mozilla market share still further.

For the record, I believe delusionofgrandeur.co.uk looks considerably smarter in Gecko (Firefox’s render engine) than in IE. You can download Firefox for free HERE.

The BBC reported earlier that an RAF Eurofighter Typhoon, presumably of 17 Squadron RAF Coningsby, went supersonic over Shropshire at about 4pm today.

The Typhoon with two crew reportedy made an emergency descent from 30,000 feet down to 10,000 feet and inadvertently exceeded the speed of sound causing a sonic boom. The reason for the emergency descent was given as a ’systems failure’.

I would speculate that the most likely ’systems failure’ to necessitate a rapid descent to 10,000 feet would be a failure of a crew ‘breathing vest’ or loss of breathing oxygen (perhaps even a wardrobe-malfunction with a mask). The crew would probably use oxygen at any altitude above 10,000 feet. Loss of oxygen would lead quickly to hypoxia and unconsciousness.

Pushing the nose down at high subsonic speeds in the Typhoon would probably take you supersonic in short order and to be frank; if I was at the controls and thought I could be risking unconsciousness, I’d get get down below 10,000ft as soon as possible, supersonic or not.

Unfortunately for some Shropshire residents, they were treated to what would probably have been a loud ‘double-boom’ (one from the nose, one from the tail) with no obvious source. Of course, like all good citizens, they have been trained to be scared of their own shadow and the BBC carries quotes from suitably ‘anxious’ and ‘frightened’ people.

I had a brief go at explaining the issues surrounding the UK government’s ten-year-late decision to build new nuclear power stations yesterday.

Bascially, the UK government have procrastinated for ten years and now we’re staring at an energy gap that we can’t fill.

Burning Our Money blog has made a rather better job of the discussion including comparing the cost of renewables with the cost of nuclear energy. Burning Our Money even include a reasonably witty Pen & Teller clip for your enjoyment.