Problem with the avahi daemon during the boot

This page has been moved to my new blog on Linux, here.

Problem with Grsync and (partial) remedy

The post is now moved here, in my other blog about Linux greplinux.net.

Progresso

La mente è uno degli strumenti più sofisticati di cui disponiamo, ma non lo prendiamo in considerazione e, con un atteggiamento tipico dei nostri tempi "moderni", facciamo fare alla chimica quel che invece potremmo, almeno in parte, far fare alla mente. La chimica è sempre di più la soluzione di tutto. Si è depressi, si è stanchi, si è sterili, si è magri, si è grassi? C'è sempre una pillola inventata - e messa appunto in vendita - per risolvere il problema. Un bambino è agitato? Non serve andare a capire perché. Il Prozac lo calma sia che all'origine della sua irrequietezza ci siano i genitori divorziati che lo trattano come un pacco postale continuamente rimandato al mittente, sia che la scuola cerchi di far di lui quel che lui non è. Il Prozac viene oggigiorno prodotto in confezioni per l'infanzia e negli Stati Uniti decine di migliaia di bambini dipendono ormai dalla somministrazione quotidiana di questo tranquillante per poter funzionare "normalmente".
Lo stesso avviene col dolore. La sconfitta del dolore è considerata una delle grandi vittorie dell'uomo moderno. Eppure anche questa vittoria non è necessariamente tutta positiva. Innanzitutto il dolore ha una sua importante funzione naturale: quella di allarme. Il dolore segnala che qualcosa non va e in certe situazioni il non avere dolore può essere ancor più penoso dell'averlo. Un orribile aspetto della lebbra è che distrugge i nervi capillari dell'ammalato e quello, non sentendo più alcun dolore, non si accorge quando le sue dita sbattono e si spezzano contro qualcosa o ancora peggio, come avveniva nei lebbrosari dei paesi più poveri, quando le dita gli venivano mangiate dai topi, di notte, mentre dormiva.
E poi: eliminando la sofferenza al suo primo insorgere, l'uomo moderno si nega la possibilità di prendere coscienza del dolore e della straordinaria bellezza del suo contrario: il non-dolore. Perché in tutte le grandi tradizioni religiose il dolore è visto come una cosa naturale, come una parte della vita? C'è forse nel dolore un qualche significato che ci sfugge? che abbiamo dimenticato? Se anche ci fosse, non vogliamo saperne. Siamo condizionati a pensare che il bene deve eliminare il male, che nel mondo deve regnare il positivo, e che l'esistenza non è l'armonia degli opposti.
In questa visione non c'è posto né per la morte, né tanto meno per il dolore. La morte la neghiamo non pensandoci, togliendola dalla nostra quotidianità, relegandola, anche fisicamente, là dove è meno visibile. Col dolore abbiamo fatto anche di meglio: lo abbiamo sconfitto. Abbiamo trovato rimedi per ogni male e abbiamo eliminato dall'esperienza umana anche il più naturale, il più antico dei dolori: quello del parto, sul quale da che mondo è mondo si è fondato l'orgoglio della maternità e l'unicità di quel rapporto forse saldato proprio dalla sofferenza. Ma questa è la nostra civiltà. Ci abituiamo sempre più a risolvere con mezzi esterni i nostri problemi e con ciò perdiamo sempre più i nostri poteri naturali. Ricorriamo alla memoria del computer e perdiamo la nostra. Ingurgitiamo sempre più medicine e con ciò riduciamo la capacità del corpo a produrre le sue.

Tiziano Terzani - Un altro giro di giostra (One More Ride on the Merry-go-round, 2004)

Shower

Having a shower is a relaxing moment of the day. Some people sing, others just imagine, but whatever you do, the mind is surely free to think about anything and fly (freely) over a lot of disparate topics, often non-related between each other.

I don't know how, but when I was showering, today, I happened to think about an awesome quotation from Tanenbaum (besides, a Physics doctorate and one of the man that "triggered" Linus Torvalds to write his famous UNIX operative system):

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

What's so interesting about this expression?
Even if it has been used in 1981 on a different context, its irony could still be up to date, since Sneakernet is a still very common practice and couldn't (still) be easily substituted by virtual data transfers (p2p, ftp...).
I've heard new versions of this quote with "hard disks" instead of "tapes", indeed.

The next step on my train of thoughts - during the shampoo - was the realization that I can calculate the actual bandwidth, a kind of average in kb/s, of a car bringing an hard disk.
How? Dimension analysis, obviously!

The dimensions of velocity are: [Length] / [Time] , so to obtain the dimensions of bandwidth [Data] / [Time] it is just necessary to multiply by the data carried and divide by the distance covered.
The result is a formula for the bandwidth depending on velocity of the car v, the distance travelled l, and the data carried d.
${b = \frac{v \cdot d}{l}}$
(if you see incomprehensible signs enveloped by dollar signs, Latex script is not working properly)

If we pick a car travelling a distance of 1000 km at 130 km/h carrying a Terabyte:

${b = \frac{130}{1000}\,TB/h \sim 133\,GB/h \sim 38\,MB/s}$

Quite satisfying.

This is useful (maybe not) but it's not finished.
If you can calculate the bandwidth of a bunch of data travelling in a car, why don't we calculate the velocity of a bunch of data travelling through the wires knowing the bandwidth?
In this case data should be considered like a solid packet, and d is the distance between the host and the server. After some easy math:

${v = \frac{b \cdot l}{d}}$

Wow, you're still reading... crazy. Anyway, that's not all, not yet:
if you pick a value for d (data) smaller than b (bandwidth), it almost doesn't make any sense and the result could be a velocity higher than the speed of light, indeed.
Since the speed of light is an upper limit:

${v = \frac{b \cdot l}{d} \leq c}$

and so:

${b \leq \frac{d \cdot c}{l}}$

that is the absolute upper limit in bandwidth.
If we put numbers, the result still doesn't make any sense.
For example, since the net works in small packets, for a 64 byte packet from a server 7000 km far, the upper limit speed is about 2.7 kb/s.
This result could be useful if we make a small modification to find the time required to transfer that packet at c (dimension analysis again):

${t = \frac{d}{b} = \frac{64\,byte}{2.7\,kb/s} \sim 0.02\,s}$

That is 20 milliseconds: the lowest time physically possible needed to receive something from a distance of 7000 km.
Real timings are about 150ms for good servers, to send and receive, so about 75ms one way, that is in the limits...

Now I ended the shower and then also this small trip around physics and the internet. The result of this brainstorming thoughts? I really don't know, but I still like it.

100 points for the first who analyse relativistic effects on the packets and find how much kilobytes the file loses travelling at that speeds.

Mankind

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.

Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Moonset and Jupiter again

Same telescope as in the previous post, different situation: waxing moon.
After some time wasted (the temptation to point the telescope to the ground and spy innocent people from the top of my house is unimaginable) I convinced myself to watch the orange setting moon a little nearer (20mm eyepiece):

 

And after I proved that Jupiter's moons (obviously) move and then (indirectly) that gravitational laws are true. As you can see in the pictures below, with the same telescope (20mm eyepiece) the moons have a different configurations and it agrees with Stellarium. (mouse rollover to circle the moons):

Stellarium (mouse rollover to name the moons):

I've seen what Galileo saw

Clear sky, Tramontana (a Northern wind known to be very dry in Southern Italy), new moon, neighbourhood lights off: perfect occasion to dust off my brother's telescope and do some night-sky observations.

A refracting telescope, 10cm objective lens and two 34mm and 20mm eyepieces; not so bad for the Moon and planets.

I tried to spot some stars but they were too faint because of that damn light pollution, so I decided to see one of the most luminous astral bodies in the Northern Sky: Jupiter.
After some focusing, I spotted Jupiter with its prominent lighter-hued zones.
But I also noticed what at first sight I thought were some refractions/reflections. There were smaller dots aligned near Jupiter, with different brightness. They were too strange to be some optical effect, so the second assumption was: the Jupiter's moons!
That dots were quite far from Jupiter, in my opinion, to be its moons so I wasn't so sure about that, but they were four (as the Galilean moons), aligned and with different sizes.
I took a picture with my phone (one of the most difficult things in my life, but I was determined to take it) and the result is a very fuzzy and dirty image. Unfortunately the view through the telescope was much clearer and defined, but it can get the idea across (click on the image to enlarge):

After reversing and some photoshopping (or better "gimping"):

Then I immediately checked with Stellarium what kind of bodies they could be, whether Jovian moons or stars. This is the screenshot:

Fascinating.

Stellarium: night sky simulation software

Exploring the educational section of softwares for Gnome, I stumbled upon this incredible program: Stellarium.

You just enter your location and it simulates the sky over you at that moment. Very useful for amateur astronomers or night sky passionate.

There are also a lot of cool features to make the sky similar to the real sky: you can regulate the magnitude and the light pollution, or you can accelerate or choose the time, you can label costellations, stars or nebulae (so you can learn star's names or costellations), make zooms and a lot more.

Practical, easy to use and interesting.
It is also available for Windows.

Incremental Backup using BATCH commands

There is an easy and geek way to make incremental backups in Windows using just the bloc notes and the command-line. There are just a few steps, easy to follow:


Copy this string into a new text file with bloc note or your favourite text editor:

@echo off

xcopy “C:\Folder 1” “D:\Backup Folder 1” /E /H /R /Y /I /D

xcopy “C:\Folder 2” “D:\Backup Folder 2” /E /H /R /Y /I /D

xcopy “C:\Folder 3” “D:\Backup Folder 3” /E /H /R /Y /I /D

pause

Save it with the .bat extension (it can be done in the bloc notes selecting "All Files" as extension and naming the file such as backup.bat).

It's done!


If you run the file just created, a command-line will open and it will make an incremental backup of Folder 1,2 and 3 (the source folders) into Backup Folder 1,2 and 3 respectively (the destination folders).
You can remove or add more folders to make simultaneous backups.

New files in the source folder will be written in the destination folder, existing files will be kept, updated files will be overwritten, deleted files wont be deleted in the destination folder (from this the name "incremental").

Firefox and Thunderbird Backup folders (Windows and Linux)

Making backups periodically is a very good habit.

Personally I've lost a lot of data thanks to thunderstorms, super-heated HDDs or just random broken hardware, enough to make backup of every single bit of data on my notebook.
Sometimes it's like a curse: if you don't make backups, some thunder will burn your hard-disk... and it happens... regularly.

I find very useful to save settings, especially those on my web and mail browser, that is full of themes, add-ons, feeds, bookmarks and other preferences that I wouldn't really like to lose.
I use Firefox and Thunderbird as internet browser and mail platform and I find them the most customizable and fluent software in that field.

So I'd just like to remind you to make a backup of your settings (yes, don't be lazy, make it now!). The profile folders (that contain almost everything) are located in:


Firefox

Windows XP: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\ (note: %APPDATA% is equivalent to C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data)
Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/


Thunderbird

Windows XP: %APPDATA%\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
Linux: ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/


A very good tool to make automatic and scheduled backups in Firefox is the FEBE add-on.

From Windows to Linux?

I haven't been writing for a while here, since I've been busy particularly with installing, using (and enjoying) Linux.

I decided to install the Fedora distribution (a free Red-Hat product) in a dual boot with the intention of using Linux sometimes and keeping Windows as the main OS. I also decided to try Windows 7 RC, so I built 3 partitions and installed each operative systems:

The reaction to Windows 7 was not so exciting as I thought. The user interface is very similar (if not the same) to Vista. Yes, it was much better than Vista under a lot of aspects, so I was almost convinced to swap to Windows Seven, even if it did not really bring many improvements from XP.

What really shocked me was the compatibility with hardware and software. A lot of programs were not working under Seven, and this is quite acceptable since it is still a RC. But what made me upset were the ATI drivers for Seven, made only for the newest graphic cards (and not for my ancient but still working Radeon X600).
Without the drivers, the "powerful" Windows 7 didn't even recognize the resolution of my display (1440x900) so I was constrained to use a crappy 800x600.
I immediately removed Seven.

Then I installed Fedora 11! In less than 20 minutes the OS was on the hard drive ready to be used, with all the components installed automatically (and the right display resolution).
There are no accurate words to describe it: flexible, light, fast, user-friendly.
I'm not planning to use Windows again from that day.
Maybe one of the few drawbacks is the lack of programs (untrue! I could never be more wrong, repositories are full with programs and much cooler ones than Windows) so I decided to keep Windows for that, but often there are good, if not better, alternatives and there are a lot of more interesting applications.
I can't list the benefits of using Linux here, it is seriously difficult to list them all!

Anyway, I'm not using Windows any more, so I'll write quickly some post about some Windows programs that I planned to write and then I think I'll begin to write IT posts exclusively about the Linux world.

Are you right or left brained?

Procrastinating on Youtube, I ended up on this video. Watch it first, following the instructions (and then come back!).

The aim of this video is spotting the rotation direction of the silhouette (clockwise or counter-clockwise). There is no right answer, because it works either way (being a silhouette), and with some effort you can switch her rotation direction.
Surprisingly the first time I saw this video, the dancer was rotating clockwise and it took me some effort to let her rotate anti-clockwise. I say surprisingly because the maker of the video claims that people seeing the silhouette rotating anti-clockwise are right brained and then imaginative, religious, impetuous, risk taking and so on. That doesn't really fit my personality, I would say, but is this test valid?


There aren't any sources about who created this test, then I decided to read some material myself about the sides of the brain and what do real neuroscientists think about the asymmetry of the brain.
Unfortunately, the result is that now I am even more confused.

What I inferred from the small research is that even scientists are not sure if someone can have a dominant part of the brain and there are a lot of contrasting opinions, being the brain one of the most difficult parts of the body to understand.

What is surely known, is that brain is not merely divided in creative side (right-side) and logic side (left-side). Both sides cooperate when someone is thinking, but one can be used more when doing some specific tasks.
Experiments have been done on people who have damages on one side of the brain or on people who have the corpus callosum surgically cut off (such as to alleviate epilepsy). The corpus callosum is the structure that links right and left side of the brain, so missing it, it is like having two separate brains.
It has been discovered that, in general, left brain hosts (for most of right-handed people) most of linguistic skills, and the ability to see details. The general view and the "emotional" side of language are host by the right brain. It is unclear if someone can have a remarkably dominant side of the brain.

However, that is not linked to how much you are creative or logical.
An individual with a certain dominant side of the brain is not necessary inclined to have innate skills in what the dominant side hosts.
We know that there are people more "emotional" and people more "analytic", but it is wrong to consider that the more emotional individual has a right dominant side of the brain and vice-versa.
If you are doing maths you are not only using your left brain and if you are doing arts you are not only using your right brain.

So the answer to "Is this test really valid?" is no.

Nonetheless, the video is cool as it represents how humans perceive shapes and link them to familiar situation. I'll explain:
we see the dancer rotating but it isn't, actually. The image shown is a 2D image, then if you see it as a plane image changing shape, all the parts of the figure are just oscillating.
Since our brain recognize the image as a human, it is seen as a 3D object, so our brain gives her a rotation that could be clockwise or anti-clockwise because the original image is not making any rotation.

The claim of associating a brain side to the interpretation of the rotation is an far-stretched and there is no evidence about it.
What is surely wrong is to presume that a "right brained" person is creative and a "left brained" person is logical.



Main source: New Scientist

Microsoft makes a comparison chart of its own web browser

This is one of the most hilarious things done by Microsoft so far:

here

(after this and this, of course)

It is a (ridiculous) comparison chart between browsers in which Microsoft compare its browser with Firefox and Chrome.
The result is that Internet Explorer is the best browser in 7 comparisons out of 10 and in the 3 comparisons left is almost at the same level as Firefox and Chrome.

I am not entitled to doubt IE performances, but would you trust a comparison made by a developer of one of the products compared? It's like writing a review to your own product (which is what advertisement is).

Modify background and transparency in Blogger templates

I decided to change template: the old one was too opaque and most importantly it was just a default template.
I made this template by myself modifying some pieces of the same template with a computer-graphic program and the result is not so bad.

For those who are interested, I suggest a few tips to modify colors and background images in the layout, editing the html and css.


In the "Edit HTML" menu there is the source code of the current template.
After the body tag there is the interesting part: the strings for the graphic of the blog.

body {
background:#123 url("LINK OF THE BACKGROUND PICTURE HERE");

is the main background and you can substitute the link with another picture to change it. The picture will be repeated automatically over the page.
If you are interested in just a color as background, this can be helpful:

body {
background-color:#000000;

in which #000000 is the hex color code.

The background in the panels can be modified too using the same procedure; the links for their backgrounds are situated under the "Page Structure" section. I modified: outer-wrapper, main-wrapper (the panel for the blog), sidebar-wrapper (the panel for the sidebar), post header, comment-link, sidebar bullet.

Transparency can be obtained for the wrappers pasting this code after the link or color for the background:

filter:alpha(opacity=70);
-moz-opacity:0.70;
opacity:0.70;

in which the number in red are the grade of transparency and they should be equal (50-0.50-0.50 or 30-0.30-0.30 etc...).

Hope this helps a bit.

Why aren't there any green stars?

Sun, green wavelengths filtered

I've wondered for long before studying physics why there are no green star. There are many beautiful picture of stars around, but why green is always missing? Has Nature decided to discriminate green?

The simple answer is: no, but we don't see it because of how we perceive colours and because there are no stars that emit only green wavelengths.
Not satisfied?

Good, because we need to use some physics to understand why we don't percept green in stars.

Firstly, we see the stars because they emit light.
Light is an electromagnetic wave, also know as radiation and the different colours of light emitted depends on its wavelength. The visible range of wavelengths can be seen here.
Stars, for an empirical reason (but there is also an explanation for that), emit a spectrum, that is a range of wavelengths. Then, for example, a red star does not emit only "red wavelengths", but a specific range of wavelengths that include the red.
The star colour depends on its temperature: higher temperatures correspond to shorter wavelengths, that is "bluer" colours, and lower temperatures correspond to longer wavelengths, that is "redder" colours. Then, even if red is a warm colour and blue is a cold one, a blue star is actually much hotter than a red one.
Is this range of colours emitted with the same intensity? No, the intensity of each colour emitted follow a specific path, discovered with quantum physics, called blackbody radiation curve and you can find a cool toy (applet) to play with it here. For each temperature, there is a different path that includes a different range of colors.

Now let's see a bit how our eyes interpret spectra.
When we see a color of an object, we are actually seeing the composite color, that is the mix of the colors emitted (or reflected). Black and white are not really "colors" since black is just an absence of color, while white is formed by all the colors. A prune has that nice purple color because it basically reflects red and blue wavelengths and our eyes mix them up.
The same applies for stars, but you have to mix up a very large range of colours with different intensities.

Known that, let's use those information to answer the question.
The applet used before helps a lot: it mixes the colours under the curve and shows the composite result. You can change the temperature in Kelvin of the curve (i.e. of the star) on the bottom (our Sun has a surface temperature of 6000 Kelvin, very roughly).
When the temperature is low, the star is evidently red because there is almost no blue at all in the spectrum (or it has a very low intensity). It is clear also why very hot stars have a bluish colour, since in the spectrum the red colour has low intensity in respect to blue.
It is interesting to see what happens when we choose the peak near the green wavelength. The sum of the colours is white, not green!

You can't see green stars because of the nature of the star emission, in which the green color is included, but is not perceived by our eyes because it is mixed with all the other colors to form white.

Weird

As usually, click on the image to enlarge. I drew this during the exam period, when I was too tired to study.
Oh, the exams, yes I'm done with them and all seemed to go well (I hope so), thanks for asking (or thinking).

Quote from an impossible quoter

Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student.
- George Iles

I've read this in the "Quote of the day" on my iGoogle and I liked it. It's interesting, though, how it appears to be no info about the author George Iles on the internet. Where does this quote come from, then? We all know that the internet must be true (irony on). After a quick search on gugol, his name only linked to websites about quotes, so that another guy had my exact same question.

I'm not dead

Even if I haven't written for some time, this blog is still on, but now I'm spending the whole time to study.
I've got exams in May, and I hope to pass (decently) this first year studying physics at UCL.
For those who are interested, this is the list of the exams:

13 May - Thermal Physics
18 May - Mathematical Methods II
19 May - Waves, Optics and Acoustics
22 May - Classical Mechanics
26 May - Mathematical Methods I
27 May - Physics of the Universe
28 May - Communication Skills Talk (Coursework)

See you soon.

Thermal Death

This is the second part of the sketch, made the same evening (have a try to do that holy problem sheet wasn't an option).

Skydiving or Chemtrails?

When I saw this image, I couldn't hold out against thinking that those people were sent from the NWO and that it's a new method to create chemtrails. If you don't know what the "New World Order" or the "Chemtrails" are, just google them yourself and you'll find how much ridiculous that theories are. Anyway, skydiving has always fascinated me. Seeing the world from an uncommon perspective with your own eyes (not a satellite) and feeling the adrenaline for being in free fall should be amazing. I think it's worth to do it sometime in your life. At least it's a good way to prove directly Strokes' Law.

Entropy

This is a small sketch made during a boring evening trying to do the last Thermal Problem Sheet of the term. That's very xkcd-style and I know it's not very funny but the idea is mine (at least!). Enjoy (click on the image to enlarge).
P.S. Happy Easter!

Google Maps: Street view in London

Firstly only in the US, but now Street View is spreading out in a lot of countries and from the beginning of 2009 is also available for London. Basically, it's a very fascinating Google Maps gadget that permits to have a street view instead of the traditional satellite view, such as you are walking in the streets. This is not only funny, but in some situations could result very handy if you have to move in unknown places. Yet the problems faced with privacy (360° street photos are patiently taken using a car and it obviously takes also pictures of people walking... or robbing) Street View became popular in the US and in few months it issued from the States to approach Europe, but also Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Alaska. In particular, I've tried Street View in London and I've found it very useful. I've noticed the photos date back to last summer (some clues such as movies ads on the buses or works on buildings that now are finished can prove it) so they are very recent. I really admire the patience to take photos of almost all the city, that's a tough work (not for the multimillionaire Google, obviously). Now enjoy some funny things found with street view (almost like the odd things found with Google Earth in some YouTube videos) here!

Why this blog?

Facebook is one of the reasons that led me to open this blog.

I've often been thinking about facebook recent success and my conclusion is that facebook is an instrument that can and should be avoided. Maybe every social networking website has to be avoided.
Everyone has facebook, why I do not? Why do I hate it? It's cool. Am I strange?
Maybe, but I discovered that many people actually hate facebook, even though that is a tiny faction compared to the majority.
There are many reasons for which I deleted my facebook account and I'll try to explain some of them. I already know that most of you will disagree with me or will just think: "Duck the privacy, facebook is fun".
That's fine, if for "fun" you mean "addiction, waste of time, stalking, be stalked, tolerating plenty of ads and invites, permitting that your personal data are sold, strutting about having hundreds of 'friends', playing silly games" and so on...
I'm not being drastic. Facebook, for some people, could be seriously dangerous, and do not think that you're definitely safe.
A small example: weeks ago I've read about a crazy guy that stole a notebook from a woman "to login into facebook" and has been jailed.
I don't know the psychological mechanisms involved by the use of a social networking, but honestly it smells fishy to me.
But let's start from the very beginning:
I was a facebook user last year. I've heard about facebook here in London, I don't remember if someone has ever mentioned it before in Italy, but it's unlikely.
I was in London around last September and it was quite exciting having a "book with all the people you have met", in which you can chat, leave messages on the wall, keep in touch with everyone you want, share links, photos and videos.
These are the only things that i still appreciate about it, but they are meaningless when the system doesn't care about you and your privacy, even if you are its source of money.
It cannot be that much money, you can be wondering, but it is more than a billion (and the founder has also been sued for stealing the idea of facebook... a great idea, to be developed, needs luck and a clever mind).
Anyway, facebook was cool and user-friendly, innovative. One thing that I never liked were that stupid games or tests that I admit, were very attracting, but the first time i received one and I decided to click on it, I saw the "Privacy request" and i said NO. It was the first and the last time i clicked on that games or tests.
Anyway, facebook was good and i used it more and more, at the point to check it daily and when i wanted to relax a bit. Without really knowing it, I was already depending on facebook.
However, I've always felt something wrong with it, something slightly insidious... "Nevermind, it should be just an impression" and I continued facebooking for a while.
That's some months ago that I realized how pathetic it was. I realized what facebook really was.
I can do a survey, just having a quick look on the computer displays in a cluster room at UCL: 60% of the students are wasting their life on facebook. It's not so bad if they were chatting or talking with someone, but most of them they were "spying" other guys photos.
But on facebook the word "spy" doesn't exist. It is called sharing... What a fantastic thing, sharing something with the entire world... unfortunately something that should be private. "Whatever, I have got nothing to hide", neither your privacy? It's not so funny to be tagged on a shameful photo that everyone can see.
It's so easy to destroy one person's life on facebook. Just disseminating something he doesn't want to do so, but also divulging fake news about someone.
I was also fed (RSS) on one of the most interesting blogs I actually read: "Il disinformatico" (I recommend it, if you understand Italian) and Paolo Attivissimo, the founder, gives a lot of reasons to be against facebook.
All these revelations convinced me to delete my facebook account, and now I don't regret that choice.
To be clear, I'm not writing to convince to delete your facebook account, even if I assure you that would be better, but just to let you think more about it and above all using it prudently. Basically, use your brain when you are on facebook.
In fact, I don't hate people who are on facebook, but how most of people get use of it, wasting time on games, being happy to be spied and feeling cool.
Initially the idea of facebook was not bad at all. Unfortunately, in not so much time, facebook became more and more popular (also in Italy) in the younger generation.
Nowadays, facebook is popular all over the world, and I'm just asking myself when it will be more popular than some brands like Coca-cola or Microsoft (maybe it is).
This is not good, obviously and its popularity led people to be addicted (and unfortunately it charms adolescents, that are too young to be involved in something like facebook) and to get the attention of the media and of companies that are only after money.
One of the result is that there is a huge number of groups in facebook and should have been better if most of them would never existed.
There are groups about companies that use facebook as free advertisement, groups that inspire violence and other things that is better not talking about (if you're asking right now, yes, facebook has also be sued for this, but if you have money, a trial is like a midge for you).
On the whole, I've never liked facebook groups... I've been in very few groups and I have always hated invitations (oh, god, how I hated them)... but you should forgive me, because i couldn't resist to the "Pepe means perfect" group!
Facebook's popularity led also to some funny (and very interesting, according to me) projects, like the Whopper Sacrifice. The project was easy: with every deleted friend (whom would have received a message like: you have been sacrificed for a sandwich), burger king decided to offer a free sandwich. This experiment worked so well that this project was forced to close (they gave 232,566 free sandwiches in a week).
This is very interesting because it is clear how much does a "friend" worth on facebook. They're just contacts (as they were always called before), not friends.
By the way, I conclude here (if not I would speak endlessly about facebook) with the last try of cheat by Mark Zuckerberg. He tried to sell to some companies user's data to do marketing researches (that were, without any doubt, very powerful on facebook), but he has been fortunately forced to change his mind, because of the groups of protest:
try to sell customer's privacy for money (privacy that is already well-violated, since simply googling you can find someone's friends and interests). No further comments.
In conclusion, you have an idea of what I think of facebook. If you want to know if I'll be back on facebook sometime, my answer is: maybe, if something will improve or if it will be necessary, now I'm too disgusted to commit this error again. I'm opening this blog to underline that there are other methods to keep in touch with people, to share multimedia and have fun in a bit more productive way, and blogs are a very good method to share ideas.
Thanks for your attention, negative or positive comments are welcomed!
Take care.