The reason why I say much Western medicine is because on rare occasions (mostly those involving people who are NOT American), he will allow his people the help and treatment they need.  I can not think of a human being I would deny medical treatment to… besides Hitler, Hussein, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Kim Il Sung, and a few other wicked souls who have led/do lead their people in an evil fashion.

I hold that Kim Jong Il was one of the most evil dictators there have ever been.  Even though his father started the idea, with the help of North Korean media, that Kim Il Sung was an all powerful leader and a god amongst men, it was Kim Jong Il who really took it a couple flights of stairs further.

When Kim Il Sung seized power in 1945, after North and South Korea split, the economy was very shaky.  It took a great deal of time and effort from his people’s toiling to, at least, steady the economy enough for Kim Il Sung’s benefit. However, by the time Kim Il Sung could reap the rewards of being a dictator, he had died which left Kim Jong Il to benefit from his people’s blood, sweat, and tears.  Notice I said for Kim Jong Il’s benefit because while his people slave away either of their own accord or at one of his various, luxurious prison work camps, he boats around on yachts and drives around in sports cars. His people toil in the earth, starving for food, and certainly, it is not for their benefit; it is only for his and his few favorites.

The “Great Leader” and his few favorites are allowed to freely use technology while his people are far removed from it.  What other world leader in this day and age would deny his people rights to technology?  The “Great Leader” is allowed to watch whatever movie tickles his fancy, while his people are only allowed to watch Korean based films and media with the exception of one very highly edited Western culture movie called “Bend It Like Beckham”.

Even though I could put all the blame on Kim Jong Il, his father, and the North Korean media, in all honesty, it really comes down to the people.  Do they really think that a god would let them all suffer from starvation and medical ailments and toil in the hard earth while their god roams around like a fat cow in a golden field? Surely, they mustn’t.  I believe it is a combination of great, terrible fear of their leader’s mystical power alongside with fear of his fiercely loyal and gargantuan military force and the ever so horrible prison work camps that people tend to disappear to.

I realize that no one from North Korea will ever know this article I’m writing ever existed because of their “Great Fat Leader” ehem I mean “Great Leader”, but in all types of dictatorships before, there have been rebels who will rise up. Perhaps someone will be able to open up the door to other types of mediums such as computers and internet and someone may read this. It may spark an idea and a revolution.

That’s why I pose the question: REALLY, NORTH KOREA? REALLY? When will you all learn that a revolution is necessary to change your lives for the better? Except how can one know what a better life is like if you are never allowed to see one? I guess that will have to remain a mystery.

Months after making the full switch to Linux and getting my handle on the more complicated side of things, I finally figured out how to work Compiz Fusion. It was surprisingly simple, really. I just never took the time to mess around with it until recently when I got so bored that I was considering actually going outside for once! Oh noes!! Haha Anyways, I made a vidja about Compiz Fusion. This is like the 15th stab to get gtk-recordMyDesktop right, and I still am failing somewhere, but this video does get the job done. By the way, it’s a little faster than it should have been, and the choppiness is not from my screen but from gtk-rMD. I guess I need more processor power before I can really take full advantage of recording 3d graphics. Here it is, though, enjoy!

ay, i

Anyways, let’s see what comes with it!

What Comes With It?

The picture below shows what I got when I purchased my Clip. It came with a USB 2.0 mini cable, a Rhapsody install mini cd, instruction manual, a set of pretty rad earbuds, and of course the Clip itself with its clip on the back. Who would have thunk it?

Clip and it's accessories...sorry for crappy quality

Tech Specs

First of all, let’s start off with the Technical Specifications of the Sandisk Sansa Clip. This whopper of an mp3 player weighs in at just 0.92 oz and measures at 2.17″ height x 1.35″ width x .65″ thickness. This little bugger will fit right in your hand, like shown below.

Sandisk Sansa 8gb Clip in the palm of my hand

Using the Clip to Transfer Music

This mp3 player is much like a vast many others when it comes to transferring music to and from your system (completely disregarding the iPod, mind you). The default mode for the way it deals with your system is Autodetect which basically means if you’re running Windows, it will use the MTP (Microsoft Transfer Protocol), if you are using GNU/Linux, Mac, Unix, etc., it will go into MSC mode (Mass Storage Class). However, in the Settings of the Clip, you can set this to: Autodetect, MTP, or MSC by default when connecting via USB. In the first protocol, Windows can sync music files to it through your favorite application. The second protocol makes the device act like a mass storage device or just like a thumb drive or external drive. It is just as easy to transfer music to your Clip, because all you need to do is open it up in your window explorer and drag your music files into the folder that says “MUSIC”. That also means that you can copy the music off of there too!

I really like the feature of being able to copy music to AND from my mp3 player. If I lose the songs I have on my computer, I know I can easily and readily access them from the Clip on any computer regardless of what system it is using. I had that happen when I had my iPod nano, and it is so very stressful to try to get the songs OFF the iPod >:| But I feel at ease with my Clip now

Battery Life

The battery life is given to be at about 15 hours of playback time. This is one of the key features that really got me excited about grabbing one of these bad boys up. My iPod couldn’t do that even with the “power save” settings I had set for it. I have been using the Clip for about two weeks now, and I have been very impressed with Sandisk’s claim for its battery life. I have went about 3 days right now without charging it (roughly 8-9 hours of playtime in actuality), and it looks like it still has about 1/2 bar of juice left in it. So hells to the yeah!

Music: File Support and Quality

The Sansa Clip supports MP3, OGG, FLAC, secure WMA and Audible files (for audio books). This means you can stay around 2,000 songs into your little hand-held mp3 player. More and more mp3 players are supporting the OGG format for songs which is remarkably fantastic! The OGG format is a format that can multiplex separate and independent codecs for free, open source format for audio, video, text, and metadata. It does not provide support for m4a/aac files because of patents and the like.

The quality of sound that is produced in my headphones is phenomenal. It’s hard to believe that such a tiny player can deliver such momentous sound! Quality wise it gets an A+!

Other Features

Another very neat feature that is not common place in most mp3 players is an FM tuner with the ability to record audio from your favorite channel and set up to 20 presets! I guess most manufacturers just believe this to be extraneous and unnecessary. I love that Sandisk has included this, though, because at my local gym, they play the t.v. audio through an 88.something radio station which I can now pick up on my mp3 player.

Not only can you record audio from your favorite radio station, but you can record your own voice if you just like to it or others if you so wish. The mic on the Clip is pretty impressive as well. I didn’t have to yell for my voice to come in clearly and distinctly which is another positive.

Another nifty feature is the Custom Equalizer where you can control exactly how the audio comes out of your speakers or headset. Another cool feature is the ability to create playlists in MSC mode which rocks! And if I forgot to mention it, the whole reason it is called a Clip is because of the clip on the backside of the player that you can clip to your shorts, pants, whatever to keep on rolling!

Conclusion

The Sansa 8gb Clip has my vote for one of the best mp3 players I have ever owned, and I have been through some dandy and not-so-dandy ones. If you want the best bang for your buck (just to remind you, I paid $49 for this at Wal-Mart if you can still find it there, if not go online to eBay or another retailer), then this is definitely the mp3 player for you!

Just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past 15-20 years or in a giant shoe tending to your 12 children (however that fairy tale goes), I’m sure you’ve heard of the software giant Microsoft and its [in]famous Windows operating systems. Microsoft is one of the leading software distributors in not only the United States but the entire world. Microsoft dominates the operating system market with an approximate total of 88.8% of users of the popular w3schools.com website (stats taken from W3Schools – OS Statistics 2009). These statistics do not fluctuate very far at all from including every single computer user. What you may not have heard of, however, is another type of operating system which, unlike Windows and Mac systems, are free (as in freedom not necessarily cost, I’ll get to that later) known as Linux.

What is Linux?

The original Linux kernel (what all Linux distributions are based on and what provides support for hardware) was created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The rest of the system, including the utilities and libraries generally comes from the GNU operating system created by Richard Stallman¹(see footnote 1). Until several years ago, Linux distributions were generally text based with shoddy, buggy support for hardware and a very limited amount of software to run on these systems. Plus, they were still mainly a server technology and hadn’t really spread to the desktop scene, yet. This was due mainly to the fact that there weren’t a lot of developers for the Linux kernel and Linux distributions.

My Ubuntu Desktop with GNOME interface

Today, with the help of some of the top Linux distributions such as Canonical’s Ubuntu (screenshot of my desktop with GNOME above), Fedora, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, and others, Linux is becoming more and more popular and getting better and better support. Why? Because the larger a user base becomes for any Linux distribution (or even the kernel itself alone), the more developers can hop on board and contribute. It is simply proportionality: the more popular Linux becomes, the better it gets. Linux is certainly not perfect, though. It has some bugs here and there and may require some tweaking at the beginning install to make it more user-friendly. And it can be very confusing at first to learn how to install software without the aid of Add/Remove Programs, but then again, most, if not all, the software you could possibly need are in the Linux repositories which you can access from Add/Remove Programs or Synaptic Package manager.

What is Windows?

Just in case you actually have done either of the first two things mentioned in the first paragraph, here is a breakdown of Windows operating systems. Microsoft’s first Windows operating system was in 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS²(see footnote 2). Since the rise of the GUI (Graphical User Interface, which is what 99.9999% of people use today), Microsoft has released several versions of Windows including 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP (Home or Pro), Vista (not even sure how many versions there are), and the not-yet-released 7. I’m still not sure why it’s called Windows 7 when it’s technically Windows 10, but I guess they are pulling a Rocky move and going back to when people actually thought Windows was awesome. Sorry about that Windows is based upon closed source, proprietary software. Any software Microsoft releases has been exclusive to the Windows operating system only (with the exclusion of Office for Mac). Also, Microsoft refuses to recognize any other type of operating system beyond it’s own. If you don’t believe me, try to install Linux then install Windows on to your machine. Windows will not recognize the OS and simply try to overwrite its existence. It is a very difficult task to install them in that order for an average user.

Business Models and Free as in Freedom

Now let’s talk about the business model that Linux and Microsoft run on and what I mentioned about free as in free speech and not necessarily cost. A vast majority of Linux distributions run on the business model that their software should be free and open source, but since they have built the software and know it like the back of both their hands and feet, they are able to provide you with support for a small donation. Don’t automatically assume this is a “catch”. Generally, the community can provide you with enough support to get around any technical difficulties an average or even an intermediate user might face for free. Many of these people are the same people who have built the system, and some are just extremely experienced users who have used the particular system for a while much like anyone who has worked on a boat for a number of years would know their ship. Also, licenses for this software are typically free of charge for lifetime (see Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE) and most of them come with (and all have access to) open source, free of charge software that can replace your existing costly software and perhaps even do better. Oh, and did I mention upgrades were free of charge too? In fact, the whole system out of the box is free of charge and there only a very FEW software packages that may require a nominal fee. And did I also mention that downloading these free programs won’t give you a virus on your computer? I know it’s very hard to believe that there are no viruses for Linux (well there was that 1 but it never made it far at all and couldn’t do hardly any damage); this is because of the way Linux treats files and directories. For more information about this, visit http://www.linux.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux.

The Windows business model is to charge from $200-$700 per license for a regular user to use their operating system which has a general life expectancy of about 5-7 years (see Windows XP). Any of their retail software for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. will cost around you the bottom of that price range to a couple hundred more per license, I’d like to remind you. Sure, schools and governments will receive a discount from the software giant only because they know they are buying in bulk (see Sam’s Club/Walmart). Microsoft’s support is very shoddy, and it’s hard to find an English speaking person with a dialect you can understand (see Cheap A** companies). With all the money (billions of dollars) they extort, I mean make, from their customers, you would think they might hire some Americans for minimum wage and not some foreign outsourcing for $2.00 or whatever they pay on the hour. But I digress, basically the business model is really to sell their software to you without you knowing what it actually does, you are just supposed to believe that it works on Microsoft’s Magic Voodoo . It’s very funny to say you are just supposed to believe it works, but the sad part is: it’s true. Microsoft has never released any of its source code for any operating system.

Free as In Freedom

The principal of free as in freedom is that operating systems should be freely open to anyone to see what they actually do! This is a common sense principal. It is the same as when you get a car (except if you got if you got this car for free haha). When you get a car, it is yours to do what you wish with. You can look under the hood and examine the parts of the engine and see how they work together. You can get underneath the car and understand how the exhaust and carburetor work. You can check out any part of the car you wish because it is yours. This is the way that Linux works. It is designed so that everyone can see what their operating system does for them. That is what it means to have an operating system that works with free as in freedom.

Final Point and Conclusion

When it comes right down to it, in my very biased opinion, Linux is the victor period. The Linux community has some of the best support you can possibly get from any industry, especially when compared to Microsoft’s barely-speak-english outsourced version of support. No viruses, spyware, or malware on Linux versus thousands of sites and programs who will freely give you any of those bastardly things. And last but certainly not least, free software for Linux that will cost you hundreds, may cost you thousands on Windows.

Linux isn’t perfect, though, and may not be for everyone. But if you asked me for a winner, even in a no-rules, street brawl, I would say it’s Linux all the way baby!

Linux vs. Windows Suck it!

1: Stallman’s GNU operating system is comprised of completely free software and is Unix-like (meaning similar to Unix but not Unix, of course).

2: MS-DOS stands for Microsoft Disk Operating System which was a text based, non-graphical operating system until the add-on for Windows came along.