Julianna Yau’s blog

Although no one else can see it because comments are moderated on this blog, there has been a spike in comment spam in the past few days. If I were less cynical, I would be happy for the indication that my blog is slowly gaining visibility. But because that’s not the case, and because I’m tired of deleting Brenda’s “comments” linking to that website selling something or other, I have added a CAPTCHA module for the comments and activated Akismet.

To date, the only comments which have been deleted are those which are obviously spam. Thanks to everyone for maintaining their civility in this crazy, internet world of ours.

I’m finally catching up on [some of] my blog reading, and got to the copyright year in review post on Northworthy. It’s a thorough and broad summary, although I had to laugh to myself when I read “it was a relatively quiet year for copyright law”. I could barely keep up with everything that was happening in December!

I finally finished my copyright inquiry letter The Honourable Andrew Telegdi, P.C., M.P. for Kitchener-Waterloo, The Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry and The Honourable Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage. It took a surprising amount of time to make it a concise, one-page letter. Here’s the bulk of it:

When I initially started this letter, it was to urge the government to take care with the upcoming copyright legislation, with synopses on items which need careful attention. With everything which has happened to the copyright issue since early December, I am now writing instead to urge the government to launch a public inquiry into copyright.

Never before have so many Canadians been individually impacted by copyright, nor has the legitimacy of copyright been so fervently challenged by creators and non-creators alike. The issue of copyright is no longer one which impacts only the creative community. Ever since the introduction of personal recording devices into the consumer market, users have been challenging the limits of their rights¹ and creators have been fighting to maintain theirs, while producers and other supporting entities of creators scramble to keep things status quo.

In the past two months, I have taken a step back from all of the politics of copyright with the intent of finding some root causes². Through this exercise, I have found that many of the roadblocks preventing the creative, legal, consumer and political communities from reaching any internal or collective agreement stem from the inability to keep the various issues separate.

One of the few points upon which people have been able to agree is the need for a public inquiry into copyright³. The UK has been pro-active and launched a public consultation of their own on January 8, 2008⁴. Canada needs to follow the example set by the UK and take a leadership role in shaping copyright reform to the needs of all citizens, rather than following the US model by including the interests of only those who can afford the most time and money to invest in lobbying.

Footnotes:
1. See, for example, the case of Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) or any one of the recent cases involving peer-to-peer sharing.
2. http://blog.juliannayau.com/category/deconstructing-copyright/
3. Printed copies of the various blog postings have been included for your convenience as samples of the consensus across persons who represent different perspectives on copyright.
4. http://www.ipo.gov.uk/about/about-consult/about-formal/about-formal-current/consult-copyrightexceptions.htm
A copy of the press release has been included for your convenience.

The postings printed for footnote 3:
http://www.creatorscopyright.ca/op-ed/2007-12-10/modest-proposal-copyright-inquiry
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2007/12/royal-commission-on-copyright.html
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2006/11/parliamentary-committees-and-copyright.html
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2007/10/craig-parks-on-canadas-copious.html
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1536&Itemid=125
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2502/125/
http://johndegen.blogspot.com/2007/12/royal-commission-on-why-were-all.html
http://www.jeremydebeer.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=195
http://samtrosow.ca/content/view/23/1/

The Asus Eee runs on Xandros, which is a Linux-based operating system which branched off from Debian.

“Huh?”, you say?

In layman’s terms, the Asus runs on something that isn’t Windows or a Mac interface.

The factory default settings use what they call “Easy Mode”, which is a tabbed view of the desktop space with easy access to common applications:

I actually quite liked the Easy Mode because it did everything I needed it to do… which was basically launch Firefox and OpenOffice. But I was curious about what this “Advanced Mode” was all about, so I followed some instructions on enabling Advanced Mode on the Eee. The result? I unlocked the KDE interface, which is what I’m using for openSUSE in my full-sized laptop:

For someone who is used to the KDE or Windows desktop, this is much less frustrating. I was able to get rid of some of the stuff I never intend to use, like the games and the somewhat puzzling CD and DVD writing programs (the Eee does not come with an optical drive, but I suppose it can accept external ones).

With the full KDE desktop, the startup and shutdown times are a bit slower, but still much better than a traditional laptop:

The time comparisons are actually quite surprising because I didn’t expect Windows to be faster than openSUSE (the first time for Windows and openSUSE mark when the start menus became accessible).