World Domination Today | Public BETA

I've been working on a little project for the last week, something to get my creative juices flowing, and found inspiration in one of the blogs I read. I decided there was a gap in the market for a subversive-but-silly internet magazine devoted to megalomaniacs, so I set about building one. It's still very embryonic, but I've been gradually adding material to it and feel that it's ready for a kind of public beta. So, have a look around the snappily-titled World Domination Today, and I hope some of it is at least mildly diverting. There's a mixture of real science, speculation on future technologies, and general tips for would-be overlords. I hope to add some profiles of historical tyrants, and possibly features on some of the best fictitious evil geniuses.

If you like what see, it'd be great to have other people joining in. Maybe we'll build a cult following, or it'll just be another one of my stillborn projects... who can tell?!

Softwars

Apologies. This post is very, very geeky.

I've been banging on about the philosophical benefits of free and open source software for quite a while, but lately I've come back into contact with the closed, proprietary Windows empire that my Desktop PC came loaded with. It's a bind. 2 years ago I stuck with it simply because certain things were impossible in Linux (BBC iPlayer, Audacity & recording support, etc). But now - and this is a credit to the brilliant pace of open source software, Linux in particular - these are no longer problems. The only reason to go back to Windows is because certain of my files live there.

And here's the issue. At idle, Vista uses about 1.2 of my very generous 2GB of RAM. Linux uses about 0.3GB, performing roughly the same tasks. My computer is a relatively fast one, crippled by Vista, but freed by Linux. The free operating system makes my system work better, faster, seamlessly - very unlike the expensive, paid-for Windows.

Worse still, every time I go back to Vista - simply to retrieve my data - it mostly takes a good 30 minutes or so to get to the Desktop. The constant updates seriously hamper productivity. In Linux there's no such problem. Re-starts are sometimes required by updates, but since they happen in the background, they never get in the way. Snap. Linux reboots in 40 seconds. Vista? I was waiting for 2 hours tonight.

Now, there are some who're put off by Linux because it's apparently a very demanding system. You have to know a lot to be able to work the thing. But it's simply not true. Ubuntu is a very user-friendly Linux flavour, and will seriously improve the performance of any computer. Why pay for sub-par software, when you can get more done, better, for free?