Soft District

As time passes bay, more and more commercial products move on and become open source. In the end, it seems everyone starts to recognize the advantages that an open development model can bring. Obviously, there are also exceptions, but we're not going to talk about them now. The best part is that, even when certain software producers choose to keep their products as closed source, a move towards opening up is still being made, and the last example is Adobe and their Flash Player...


Until now, to look at the SWF specification, you had to sign a licensing agreement with Adobe. That agreement required you not to create competing players, but now Adobe is trying to expand the reach of the Flash Player, so starting today, all restrictions on the use of the SWF specification are going to disappear!

All the above is a part of a bigger picture, called Open Screen Project. The Open Screen Project has a very nice goal, to enable a consisten runtime environment across a wide range of devices and desktops, improving Internet experiences on every device you can think of, from computers to digital video recorders.

So far, so good, but let's hope the Flash Player for the iPhone will also be ready in time for the 3G iPhone...what do you think? Am I aiming too high, or I'm not the only dreamer?

If it weren't those P2P music downloads lawsuits, probably most of us wouldn't have any idea about what is RIAA and what it does. In fact, RIAA is widely known for watching your downloads, rather than trying to take care of the artists' rights. Even when I look at the snipped shown in Google for their page, I see "Trade group that claims to represent the US recording industry." So not even them can't be sure about what they DO? Great! Well, today, it may be the beginning of their end...


...because a federal court rejected one of RIAA's basic theories, passing a decision that could lead to the end of its litigation strategy, according to a copyright lawyer. Here's what the judge wrote:"Merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution."

This is it. The beginning of the end, as I said. I won't add anything else, because I am sure there's nothing more to say, at least now. I'll get back to the subject as soon as the effects of this decision will start appearing...

If you look around on Google, or ask your friend, you will surely get a lot of answers regarding how to find out what's your computer's IP. Well, instead of opening a certain site just to get your IP adress displayed, there's something much easier to do, and this action can also provide you much more information...


As you can see above, it's all about typing a command in the Windows command prompt, but let's take this step by step, shall we?

1. Press the Windows key+R, or open the Start menu and choose Run

2. Type in "command" to bring forward the command prompt

3. Now, type "ipconfig /all" and press Enter to get the info you need (and some extras)

4. Notice your IP adress, Subnet Mask, Default Gateway, and the rest of the information provided by this command

Note: if you need to know your network card's MAC, then you should know this is also displayed by the command mentioned here, as "Physical Address."

Oh, just one more thing - I know I displayed my IP address in the screenshot, but don't waste your time to play funny tricks on me, because I don't have a fixed IP...