This weekend it was LiveEarth, a global music concert promoting Global Warming led by the man who used to be “the next president of the United States”, Mr. Al Gore.

Sorry, but these type of concerts don’t work anymore.  Live Aid was amazing, back in the day.  And that’s because it overcome huge technical challenges to do a multi-venue event across continents.

And then there was Live 8, that was also sweet, but only because it was a follow up to Live Aid.  So until such times as the put a band on the moon and play from there, these worldwide events are not gonna get me to switch off lights and put the computer off more often.  Sorry Al Gore.

Another point of these concerts is to grab the attention of governments.  Unfortunately, the UK does not have a wannabe rockers prime minister any more.

I note that the BBC also appeared to lose their objectivity with there coverage.  It was very clear that the BBC was supporting the ‘call’ by broadcasting all the short films and commenter about the issues.  That’s fine; something does need to be done about Global Warming but the coverage reeks of BBC bias.

Also, does any one get the impression that MSN is only in this so flog Zunes and show off their new video streaming platform?  Shame on you Microsoft, get behind the issues here and ‘answer the call’.

Oh this just gets better and better, I’, watching the MSN on demand stream, not only are Microsoft fogging Zunes but oil companies are reminding us how nice they are, bit bloody late if you ask me.

And just who likes Madonna, if I was standing in the golden circle (where those foolish enough to pay £750+ for corporate hospitality get to stand) and Madonna just called me a mother fucker I’d be up on that stage kicking her ass.

I think I better stop watching, it’s just annoying me and I think I’ve vented enough here already.  Check out this post on Fred Wilson’s blog for some better analysis.

©2008 The Blog of Ross C Brown. All Rights Reserved.

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For a long-time now, Mac OS has been the favourite operating system for most creative professionals with most of the creative software they rely on optimized or built exclusively for Mac OS.

But over the last year or so, I have noticed Adobe becoming more and more Windows focused. Sure, their applications are Mac compatible but in short they like Windows way too much!

I grabbed the above screenshot from an Adobe Promotional video showing the features of Adobes answer to Final-Cut Pro, Adobe Premier CS3. The still from the video clearly shows Windows XP running on the Mac Book computer. Adobe, what’s going on?

Further to my argument, not so long ago (possibly an Adobe Live 2007) two Adobe presenters asked “Why don’t we have Macs” when they experienced difficulties connecting a Windows notebook computer.

And finally, let’s look at what applications are included in “Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection”, notice that the last two applications are exclusively for the Windows platform.

• Adobe InDesign® CS3
• Photoshop® CS3 Extended
• Illustrator® CS3
• Acrobat® 8 Professional
• Flash® CS3 Professional
• Dreamweaver® CS3
• Fireworks® CS3
• Contribute® CS3
• After Effects® CS3 Processional
• Adobe Premiere® Pro CS3
• Soundbooth™ CS3
• Encore® CS3
• Adobe Bridge CS3
• Version Cue® CS3
• Device Central CS3
• Dynamic Link
• Adobe OnLocation™ CS3 (Windows® only)
• Ultra® CS3 (Windows® only).

But don’t worry Mac users, Adobe have a solution for the short comings heir £1200 software suite, “Adobe OnLocation requires Boot Camp and Windows (purchased separately) or a separate Windows based computer”.

Still, those MacBook computers look mighty fine…

©2008 The Blog of Ross C Brown. All Rights Reserved.

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Akismet - the amazing spam prevention plug-in for WordPress seems to failing quite regularly with me having to remove between ten and twenty spam comments a day. Its madness. And I’m not the only one experiencing this, Veronica Belmont of VeronicaBelmont.com is reporting the same.

What is more concerning is the number of false positives that Akismet is flagging. When user comments get hidden hundreds of entries deep in the Akismet folder users get slightly annoyed.

It could be an issue at Akismet, after-all they did have some downtime in February but the Akismet blog has not been updates for over a month…

©2008 The Blog of Ross C Brown. All Rights Reserved.

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It’s almost 18 years to the day since the infamous student protests in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. To most in the west, the mere mention of the Tiananmen Square protests will bring up memories of the ‘Unknown Rebel’ who was photographed in a photo of the same name by Jeff Widener standing before a line of advancing tanks in protest.

Outside of China we may discuss this freely but behind the ‘Great Firewall of China’ mention of the protests remain a taboo.  So much so, that there is a generation of Chinese citizens who are not even familiar of the events in the spring on 1989.

Editors of the ‘Chengdu Evening News’ have been sacked as their newspaper carried an ad ’saluting mothers of protesters killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown’. Hong Kong’s ‘South China Morning Post’ reported on Wednesday that a young clerk approved the advertisement for publication. The report goes on to mention that she had never heard of the military crackdown.

It is truly sad that many of China’s youth are ignorant to the events on 1989 as the result of a cover-up at state level. References to the Tiananmen Square protects are prohibited in the media aw well as online and in other printed material.

However this highlights an interesting point for the Chinese communist party - with so few people knowing about it how do they prevent the few that do know from taking advantage of the fact and raising awareness?

I’m very interested to look are the political development over then next few years in China. If they want to come to the international table and do business, their culture of secrecy must end.

Of course, in writing this post, website traffic from China will, no doubt, drop off over the next few days until there are no visitors from china to report on in my statistics. I’m convinced I was previously blocked in China as for a long time I had no traffic what so ever from China and then, all of a sudden, I started receiving visitors again. Weird.

©2008 The Blog of Ross C Brown. All Rights Reserved.

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I’ve just been listening to Buzz Out Loud and I agree, crashes happen in cycles and I hereby predict the next to be in 2008!

The beginning of 2008 will see a global slowdown and by the third and forth quarters I’d expect to see a major slow down in investing in technology - think of it as the web2.0 bubble going ‘pop’!

©2008 The Blog of Ross C Brown. All Rights Reserved.

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