Once again I tried to come up with a good flash playback option for my desktop which is running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) amd64. And once again I’ve failed to find an option that I can call good. The only benefits I can see about Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is that there will be newer versions of swfdec (0.5.4 up from 0.5.1) and gnash (0.8.2 up from 0.8.1) and that users will be able to use the update-alternatives command to switch between them. However I’m not convinced that either version will be usable though I’m really ready to be done with having a ton of extra packages installed to use nspluginwrapper.

I'm just finished downloading Ghosts I from The Pirate Bay and I'm giving it a listen. Already the release is significant as a rejection of the old, increasingly obsolete music industry business model. The entire release is Ghosts I-IV with Ghosts I being released for free under a Creative Commons non-commercial license and uploaded by the musicians to various bittorrent sites. The rest of the release is divided into tiers. For $5 one can purchase all the music (36 tracks) in lossy and lossless digital formats. For $10 one can buy all the digital music as well as receive a 2-CD set of the music. The $75 package includes a data DVD with the actual tracks which can be used for remixing. And there was a limited edition $300 option which has already sold all 2500 copies which alone earned $75,000. Not bad for a band forsaking the major record labels. For more details: http://ghosts.nin.com/