After a nice comment from Medivh1984, I thought I'd give him/her a little update as to what happened shortly thereafter . . .

My tribulations began after seeing that KDE 3.5.x for Mandriva was becoming available . . . I have wanted this very much and I am also looking forward very much to KDE 4.x, whenever it arrives . . . anyway, I have since had to reinstall the OS three times (firstly because of trying the "Mandrake Enhanced version" and crashing headlong, second after downloading and installing from Mandriva Kiosk TWICE). Should I risk even the official Mandriva Bundle a third time??? The thing was functioning fine this morning but this evening, when I came home, it would not start KDE with ATI Radeon flgrx (or whatever) and I had to go to plain vanilla Radeon instead, although there seems to be no difference . . .

Anyway, it seems that the kids had problems downloading the mp3 files. Why? My Boss (for it was He, praise de Lawd an' hide de silber) told me that it was a problem on their PCs at home, but I had my doubts, and I was right . . . a few days later I came across a report linked to http://www.slyck.com/ from the English pages of the Chosun Ilbo (http://english.chosun.com/) here in Korea (an article which I missed, but I suppose that's easily done), to the effect that owing to the huge traffic across the Internet of "illegal" mp3s, the ISPs here had voluntarily installed software on their systems to prevent it!

Now, I don't know about you, but this strikes me as utterly typical. I record and translate recordings of my own voice, for free and with no intended copyright restrictions, and then the ISPs do something to prevent them being transferred. So yet again, a completely legal activity is thwarted by some silly idea that someone, somewhere, is breaking the law and therefore an illogical blanket ban is imposed. Just imagine what would happen if, following the same logic, the sale of notepaper was banned because "people who buy it might copy from their textbooks, ooh, that's illegal, that's a breach of copyright!!!" . . . what a bunch of freaks. This would kill all the universities and other centres of learning across the whole friggin' world. Even my editor back in Stevenage, England, was surprised, and that was someone who is a commissioning editor with a specialist publishing house (and with stern, if perhaps ultimately illogical, views regarding copyright)!

Thankfully, perhaps, maybe, possibly, as a person who has many times sat up late into the night (or early into the morning) re-installing the same OS (Win 3.x, 95, 98SE, Mandrake 7.0, etc. ad nauseam), I was not to be put off by this, and discovered that it was easy to get around it either courtesy of my personal Yahoo storage space (next to Carlos Castaneda and pictures of various parts of Taiwan) or courtesy of my own mp3 player. But therein lies the real problem . . . commercially-available digital music players of the portable (i.e. not software on yer PC) type are almost completely dedicated to mp3s. My own will make voice recordings but this seems to be in a very uncommon file type; Apple gave us AAC players with sucky DRM attached, but where are the portable Ogg Vorbis, FLAC etc. equivalents? If I buy a decent capacity iPod, can I mod it very easily?

I will end with one minor correction regarding the apparent lack of mirrors for Linux in SK: this is untrue. As I discovered with KDE.org, some bits of the system can be downloaded directly here, but not Mandriva, for which I have to set up rpmi to go to places like Taiwan (lovely place, liked it enormously, for all its faults), Japan (even better, must get back there ASAP!) or Oz (not been there yet but I'm always thinking about it . . .). Of course, I could set up my own PC as a mirror, I suppose, but then my ISP would probably go berserk at the bandwidth usage . . . but each time recently I have had to reinstall, I have been doing something similar in terms of choking the network neighbourhood, a Linux install is much less of a laughing matter than sucky Windoze.

Finally, for tech entertainment both serious and rib-tickling, I have yet to come across anything better than Lucian's offerings from California. Go to http://www.dailyplanettv.net/ and you can download video offerings in Windoze and Quicktime formats as well as mp4. And Linux can play all of these, or so it would seem. Ain't a Linux life great? ^_^b