A new fad for advertisement seems to be the claim that your product is “green”. Whatever that means - less CO2 emissions or whatever. Carbon neutral? Green?

I recently noticed this fad by browsing for some web hosting for a “future project”. Obviously the first hosts I stumbled upon were the usual oversellers: “Lunarpages”, “Bluehost”… “Dreamhost“. Dreamhost especially seems to be high on the “green train”: a while back, their landing page, from what I can recall, was basically full of the sentence “we’re green” twisted into every form possible.

Who honestly cares? I don’t. Dreamhost might as well force all their employees to walk to their jobs and make them supply all power to their servers with exercise bicycles. Now that’d be really “green”, wouldn’t it?

I mean, seriously. I know global warming is a serious issue, but “being green” is just cashing off a serious topic. Dreamhost should really consider making the background of their website black, and forcing all customers to have black background-only websites too. It saves power, and thus it makes the world a “greener” place.

Then again, there’s probably a million of blog posts bloggeries already ranting on “being green”. Oh well. Now there’s a million plus one.

Dreamhost even gives you icons with texts like “My site is green” on them. But wait - let’s assume that your site is running WordPress - the #1 blogging platform on the planet. What if Matt Mullenweg’s car releases too much green house gases? Congrats, you’re running on “ungreen” software, removing your website’s “green” status. ▪

Apparently you’re going to let XP live longer and longer. Vista hasn’t been as successful as you have wanted it to be. People still want XP - for many reasons: older hardware, software incompatibilities, or just because they don’t want Vista.

I’m using Vista: I’ve used it for about 9 months now, since buying a new computer. I don’t really have any problem with it - but if I could, I’d still be running on Windows XP: after all, it _is_ a lighter OS. Not that it really matters to me, because I’m running on a quadcore rig with 4 gigabytes of DDR2 memory.

So what stops me? I’m an avid video gamer. With Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced DirectX 10, and games that are Vista-only. I want the full graphical experience (although most “DX10 features” of Crysis could be enabled with a tweaked configuration file). And how am I going to play games that are restricted to Vista only in XP?

Vista isn’t a bad OS. But there’s honestly nothing “new” in it that I want. I could as well use XP - whichever is OK for me.

But guess what would be a great idea? Drop the price of XP to something like 20-50 dollars. I’m pretty sure that a lot of P2P users would even be willing to pay that sum for a good desktop OS, to save them the trouble of removing “Windows Genuine Advantage” nags and the activation system.

But then again, this’ll never happen. But it’d be really awesome. ▪

I recently wanted to hear a few songs of the Finnish band The Rasmus. So what did I do? I went to YouTube, which is full of songs, mostly illegally uploaded by other people, but seems like record companies are getting on the train, too. I mean, who honestly fires up iTunes to listen to a 30 second sample of the song, instead of listening to the whole thing in YouTube and then deciding if to “purchase” the song?

So, record labels are getting into this whole “YouTube” thing. That’s great - maybe I can watch higher quality music videos while enjoying the music. But wait… this sounds too good to be true.

And it is. Pretty much any modern artist that gets their stuff uploaded to YouTube by their record label is restricted to certain countries. “This video is not available in your country.” is a familiar error message to me. Ok, I understand, there’s probably some slight legal complications, et cetera, et cetera…

But then… Back to The Rasmus. I believe that the video in question is this one. At the moment of writing (4 October, 2008), it still gives me the following error message:

Now, keep in mind, I’m Finnish. Rasmus is a Finnish band. Of course it makes sense that I can’t even see videos that should exactly be targeted at my goddamn country. This is starting to get a bit too ridiculous. Or perhaps they’re so out of hope they need to force Finns to buy the album to even hear the song for the first time in their life? ▪