Hari's Corner

I've not exactly been blogging actively, but I've been writing a few community articles on TheAdminZone forums. Mostly they're about community building and forum posting. Here they are:

How to leave a community or stop posting at a forum
Small community admin tips, tricks and solutions
Framing community rules - a guide

Update (more articles):

Influencing community behaviour by your leadership
Effective use of emoticons to handle online communication
The case against SEO - why social marketing is better for small communities

Feel free to leave your thoughts and comments.

Almost a month has gone by and there has been no new post here. That's because I have been busy with my forum LiteraryForums.org. After converting to vBulletin (which is a great forum software, by the way) I have had a lot of other work to do.

I've now gone into a kind of non-technical phase. I'm still using Linux, but I am at a point where I'm more worried about what I do with the OS rather than be worried about the OS itself. Which means no more Debian or Slackware rants from me for a while. A few people here might have also noticed that I no longer post on many forums like I used to in the past in line with my new policy online. In particular the biggest forum I used to visit regularly, LinuxQuestions.org, is no longer in my daily radar.

I had also written a couple of articles but I was not satisfied with the results and they remain as drafts. It seems that writing comes in patches and when you're with the flow of blogging, you tend to blog more freely. A month after a break from blogging, it's hard to get the engines moving again. There seems so little to blog about whereas when you're in the stream you write on almost anything under the sun effortlessly.

I should come back with the next category in the Top 50 Linux apps list soon. Otherwise the list might well remain unfinished.

Ok. A special cartoon corner. I was recently talking about my cartoon corner with my friends and one of them asked me if I could render Velu Naicker. This is the main character from the famous Tamil movie, Nayagan (1987) played by the renowned actor Kamal Haasan. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here's the Wikipedia page for Nayagan.

So, here's my rendering of Velu Naicker in cartoon form! Enjoy...

After a while, I have returned to my top 50 Linux apps list. Here I'll try and cover a few internet clients for the Linux desktop.

Since there are a huge list of apps in this category, I'll skip some of the more famous ones like Mozilla and Firefox and concentrate on clients other than web browsers.

Gaim I'm not into online chatting, but Gaim seems to be one of the most popular instant messenger for Linux since it supports a variety of protocols including AIM, Yahoo!, Jabber and ICQ as well. The other IM client I would like to mention here is kopete, but since I don't want to flood this category with Instant Messengers, I'll let you choose between the two!

Konqueror Konqueror is a desktop file manager, a fairly feature-rich web browser, an intuitive FTP client and a universal viewer for KDE capable of embedding almost any file type. It's one of my favourite apps on the KDE desktop. Konqueror also provides some of the core functionality in the KDE API and so it's really an app that no KDE user can ignore.

XChat XChat is a popular, multiplatform IRC client. I'm not really into IRC myself, but this looks to be a fairly common client and being multiplatform also makes it suitable for a variety of IRC users.

akregator akregator is my desktop RSS/Atom feed reader of choice. Integrates nicely with KDE and can be iconized in the KDE system tray. It also provides notification by displaying the number of new articles in blue. Fairly feature rich and has a built-in KHTML view which allows you to view the original articles without opening a browser window. Highly recommended.

Thunderbird I wanted to include both a mail client and a newsgroup reader in this category. Thunderbird servers both purposes. Part of the Mozilla Family of products, I would recommend this to anybody who needs a Linux mail client and newsgroup reader rolled into one. There are plenty of choices in this particular category, so take your pick.

Note that I've tried my best to cover as many areas as possible. That's why I had to miss out some very good apps under this category. Internet clients is a very broad category and it was a challenge to compile such a small list. Feel free to add your own recommendations. In particular, I've left out P2P and Bittorent from this list. Any apps under those categories are also welcome.

I'm going to document this little shift in my policy towards my online activity so that I can read it to remind myself every now and then . I am no longer going to be actively involved with large and busy forums and communities with lots of members and posts. Instead I'll be looking to catch up on smaller boards with a friendlier ambience and also go back to promoting my own forum Literaryforums.org, which I feel that I've long neglected and my brother's forum ToonsAndComics.com. I will be consciously focussing my free time (which might become scarce as I'm now getting busier with my career drive) on my blog, my forum and then the rest. I want to establish a clear set of priorities for my time spent online and contributing in my modest way towards small boards which need active members and not continue to be a drop in the ocean of larger communities.

Hopefully this new focus will help me streamline my online activities, make me more productive in my areas of strength and allow me to concentrate on my career through this summer.

I have always been amused when, in online discussions, people tend to equate piracy with plain theft. I have been equally amused when companies like Sony and Microsoft try to jump on the high moral platform in this issue and purely focus on piracy as a criminal/ethical issue rather than an economic issue, which it truly is.

I for one, do not condone piracy. On the other hand, I don't think that people who take the moral high ground on the piracy issue are doing justice to the issue at hand. It's not as simple as saying that piracy is theft and therefore an immoral thing. Let's also forget the fact that the theft=piracy analogy doesn't make sense in any case. I'll grant you that piracy, in fact, is a crime. Although it is technically a crime, I think that there are enough grey areas in piracy and that not all piracy can be treated as equal. For instance, if a friend of mine copied a music CD from me or ripped my CD as Mp3 files and copied them on to his computer, he and I would be technically liable for piracy. However, a professional piracy racket involving dedicated individuals who spend their life in actively promoting piracy for their own profit is a totally different kind of piracy. And this piracy industry thrives purely because piracy is profitable and it makes good business sense for those who aren't too particular about ethics or morals in the pursuit of making money.

And yet, the music and movie industry is either unwilling or unable to realize the primary factor behind piracy which is the economics of the issue. Let me give you an example. Original Harry Potter movie DVDs are on sale at many reputable supermarkets. Do you know the price of a single DVD? It is in the range of about Rs. 799 to Rs. 999. Sometimes, new releases are priced at more than Rs. 1000 per piece. These glittering shops always sell at the MRP rates and offer no discounts. If you came back three or four weeks later, you find the exact same DVD lying there gathering dust with the same price marked on it. To me, this kind of pricing policy seems unjustifiable, considering that I might not see the movie more than once. Who would want to pay that amount for watching a two or three hour movie maybe twice or thrice? It's ridiculous to say that since I own the DVD, I can watch it as many times as I want. In practice, I doubt whether many people watch the same movies over and over again. Most movie CDs/DVDs go into the dusty cupboard and hibernate there after a couple of viewings at most. Music CDs/DVDs probably have a slightly longer life. On the other hand, I can easily get a pirated Harry Potter movie DVD priced at Rs. 50 to Rs. 100 at any of the less reputable shopping districts. While I personally don't care much for HP, wouldn't there be so many people out there who love Harry Potter and would want to watch the movie even if they couldn't afford such a price? If the original DVD was priced at Rs. 299, wouldn't that help in cutting down some of the piracy? Is it really necessary for music and movie companies to make 1000 percent profits on sales of CDs and DVDs? I certainly think it would cut down piracy considerably if they took stock of the economics involved. Most reasonable people prefer to avoid piracy when they can. Only when the originals are priced at ridiculous prices are they forced to seek alternatives.

There is another argument that the "moral high ground" squad will take at this point: "If you cannot afford something you shouldn't buy it. You have no business pirating it and enjoying it."

To say that those who cannot afford to buy shouldn't want to enjoy it is stupidity confounded by a naive idealistic view of human behaviour and psychology. Marketing strategies ensure that desire for material products and comforts are embedded firmly in the minds of people, giving them a perpetual sense of inadequacy and a constant need for "more". To me, that manipulation of the human psyche to create artificial wants and desires is as morally repugnant as piracy if not worse. It is a product of unbridled free market capitalism which is a totally different topic altogether. Nobody of course, has to listen to the latest music albums, watch the latest Hollywood movies or use the latest software packages. Entertainment is not an essential of life. But in reality, isn't the industry itself creating that very human desire in the first place? Aren't they, in a sense, manipulating our emotions and feelings and creating that want inside us which drives us into purchasing products which can be termed as "unnecessary" to our lives? Doesn't the whole entertainment industry thrive on this rather questionable manipulation of our individual tastes and desires? From that angle, wouldn't it be fair to say that piracy might be an offshoot of the problem rather than a problem by itself?

The biggest issue is, of course, that companies not only want to continue making hefty profits but also manipulate the public into thinking that piracy is a crime that is to be equated with burglary or kidnapping. The preachy nonsense of anti-piracy drives in fact alienates even the most reasonable, paying customer apart from having zero effect on those who have no moral objections to piracy anyway. To me such arguments are as morally questionable as piracy itself - some might say it is used as a form of emotional blackmail. To the ordinary customer, such a stance also reeks of hypocrisy considering the profit motive and the questionable business practices of these companies who tend to take the moral high ground on issues that suit them. To assume that every customer is a potential thief drives more and more people away from buying their products. DRM is a prime example of such a measure which not only alienates the paying customer, but actually drives him into piracy actively. The professional pirates, of course, will continue to thrive in any situation.

The best solution and the only solution to piracy, then, is to address the economics of the issue and make piracy unprofitable. How do companies do it? By selling their products at reasonable prices in the market. Price does matter to the end customer. No amount of emotional or moral-ethical posturing can get around this simple fact. Given a choice, most customers would prefer to be honest. No reasonable man would want to take the risk of criminal or civil liability however small if he can avoid it. Sadly, the blind profit motive continues to dominate and companies who can still make good profits by following ethical business practices prefer to sow artificial desires and wants in the minds of people by manipulative marketing practices and then grossly overprice their products merely to exploit the situation. There can only be one word for that: Unadulterated greed. Which is more morally questionable I leave it to you to decide. If the music or movie industry loses millions of dollars to piracy in such a situation and still make profits, it tells me a kind of story...