[tags]Ummah Films, Ramadan Reruns [/tags]

Let’s see what’s the awesome FLOSS world is introducing to us, lets see Firefox Ubiquity.

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them. Read more

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

[tags] web mail service,message composition,ubiquity,floss,email,san francisco restaurant,search engine,map[/tags]

$427 million. That’s what the oil and coal industries spent during the first half of 2008 on lobbying and advertising. They’re protecting their interests – and hurting ours.

This ad is running on TV right now, but we need millions more to see it. The special interests will outspend us, but we can compete head-to-head with them when we find ways to share these messages for free.

We want 50,000 people to watch this ad in the next 72 hours. Will you help?

[tags]coal industries,special interests, tv ad[/tags]

My niece approached me asking me to help her reinstalling Windows XP, Autocad, 3D max, Photoshop & Microsoft Office, for her I work in computers and I should be able to help her but in fact I can’t.

I cannot install illegal software so I asked her if she has the original CDs she said no but I can buy them if they are better, yet she didn’t understand my point and she do not know how much would it cost to buy those apps; she’s just a junior engineer student.

so I decided to help her finding a place to buy them (Yet she have no idea how much that would cost her) and we started with Norton Anti Virus and the price was $99 why we started with Antivirus ? because Microsoft Windows doesn’t last long without it.

Then we googled for autocad online shopping option and it was there for $1200 and 3D max for $3,495, Adobe C3 was for $649, Microsoft Office 2007 student license was for $149.95 and we kept searching for Microsoft Windows XP License but we couldn’t find anything on Microsoft.com… website and the only solution was to buy Microsoft Windows Vista and use the downgrade rights later and first thing is first we had to check if her laptop is ready to run Vista, long story short her 500 JOD laptop cannot run Vista by any chance so now we have to add a new laptop to the cart and lets assume it’s just 1000 JOD, now after comparing Windows Vista editions we thought that Home Premium is good and it’s usage license cost $259.95

Now we have the following in our cart, I will convert mentioned JODs into USD to make it easier.

New laptop that can run Vista - 1200
Norton Antivirus - 99
Autocad - 1200
3D Max - 3495
Adobe CS3 - 649
Microsoft Office 2007 student license - 149.95
Windows Vista Home Premium - 259.95
Total is 7,052.9 USD which is 5000 JOD.

Now I can tell you that she’s in shock that she have to pay that loads of money for software without receiving any on site support and most likely a new version will be released soon and she have to upgrade.

Now she have two options, Going legal or Going illegal.
If she decided to go legal I will charge her $1000 because she have money to buy that load of apps and my time isn’t for free with people who have such money.
Going illegal means she have to go to some computer service around the university and install that load of apps and even more for around $15.

The other side of this story that the Kingdom would lose lots of money if they decided to be strict about it, we have at least 50,000 university student and lets assume that their average spending on software licensing would be only $1000 a year, that would mean $50,000,000, let me spell it Fifty Million US Dollar a year and our assumption was the minimum to get your computer legalized.

The other option would be making the use and the utilization of Free software a national strategy. which should be a win win situation, people will be using free software with very minimal cost (and they own things at the end of the day) and money will be recycled locally.

[tags]autocad 3d,reinstalling windows,3d max,niece,windows xp, photoshop, license, software, money, antivirus, norton[/tags]

[tags]تفاهات, العالم, العربي[/tags]

You got to read her post about driving in Jordan and if you had a similar experience you will feel excusing SELECT * FROM THE_PAST WHERE BEING_STONED=TRUE

Now you can track the news that Obama and McCain are reading and sharing with you, both McCain and Obama presidential campaigns and leading political journalists are using Google Reader to keep up with their favorite new sites and blogs as well as share articles that interest them.

All of that is publicly available now at Power Readers in Politics

[tags] political journalists,presidential campaigns,share articles,google,obama,mccain,blogs[/tags]