And they call this an information society..
The new copyright law that is being pushed by music industry representatives in Finland has created quite a bit of controversy. One of the gems on the discussion is contributed by Tommi Kyyrä, of IFPI Finland:
Kysymykseen siitä, toimivatko nämä rajatun kopioinnin tekniikat muissa käyttöjärjestelmissä kuin Windowsisa, Kyyrä ei halua vastata suoraan. "Nyt pitää ymmärtää, että tietokoneella musiikin kuuntelu on extraa. Normaalisti musiikkia kuunnellaan autossa tai stereoiden kautta", Kyyrä sanoo ja jatkaa: "Jos nyt käytät jotain Linuxia tai Macia, kannattaa harkita ihan tavallisen cd-soittimen hankkimista". (tietokone.fi)
The question was whether the copyright protection schemes would work on other operating systems as windows, his reply translated is roughly something like this (I am not an interpreter really, so bear with me 
) :
"Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra priviledge. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos", says Kyyrä and continues; "If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player."
Finland, the model of the Information Society, my ass. Are the music producers stupid, blind or living on their own parallel universe? Or maybe trying to appear so, to avoid the real questions?
Sorry, I am ashamed of the level of discussion on the subject in my country. For finns, EFFI website has more information.
Update: Apparently the magazine quote was pulled from the website quickly. You can see the difference here. Thanks to Ilmari for a quick screenshot action. If you wonder why people lose interest in politics, a good look in the mirror might reveal you a good hint of the cause..
I’ve created a monster!
It all started with a true and innocent need for pixels. Gnome project was in the very beginning years ago. And it needed icons for the user interface.
Half a decade later, we have icons. Lots of icons. Looking at our software today, it is more or less the de-facto standard that a button or menu item should have an icon. Our original goal was fulfilled with a great success!
But what is the purpose of the icons? Now that we are trying to be more usability-conscious, we try hard to make easier user interfaces, our bold goal is to create software that just works right without tweaking and is pleasant to look at and easy to use. We should look at how we use icons on the user interface.
In my opinion the purpose of the icon is to hilight the important, often needed functionality. Just like you dont put a toolbar button for every menu item (you wouldnt need the menus then) - maybe we should not have icons for all the menu items and buttons either? Mac OS X has no icons at all on menus. Neither OS X nor Windows have icons on dialog buttons. It results in a cleaner user interface.
The original idea of hilighting important items in the interface is not working anymore, because everything is marked as important. We who designed the icons loved the fact that our work was on thousands and thousands of desktops worldwide. The developers loved the extensive icon libraries on their reach. Its everybody's fault, and it is very understandable that this has happened.
But perhaps now it is a time to get this thing in order too? If you want to have a good example, compare the Firefox default theme (the one with a yellow roof on the home icon) to the nice "Industrial" theme created by Garrett. Garrett's theme is great, makes Firefox look really nice with Gnome, but you see the point with icons being visual clutter. It's not Garrett's fault at all, the theme just matches with Gnome. Another great example of over-using icons is Openoffice.
See my point? What do you think?
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