Friday, September 28, 2007

"iPhone too expensive, I prefer OpenMoko!"

Ryan Pollock:

So I've been drooling over the iPhone since it came out but I have some serious reservations about getting it. Yeah its awesome and slick and it will make women want me and men want to be me, but it costs a freakin fortune! Even after they knocked $200 off of the price it still costs $400 for the "cheap" version. Then they lock you into a service plan with AT&T. I'm not totally against AT&T but I don't like the idea of being locked into it for 2 years are whatever. Also it has wifi and internet access but no IM client. WTF is up with that? Also you can't just install software on it because its all locked down by Apple. I know that hackers have unlocked the iPhone and I'm sure that I could follow the instructions and do it myself, but why bother when there is going to be such a better alternative with OpenMoko!

OpenMoko, the pre-alpha buggy version costs $300. That's $99 difference with the very slick iPhone. Yes it's cheaper, but what you get half-done freetard software on an ugly device. Isn't reliability worth $99? I would say so.

Internet down all week

Dee's been doing stuff with the servers again. Probably blowing them up, or worse: installing Linux on them. The internal network works, but somehow we don't have access to the Internet. Apparently she's upgrading our version control system. We'll have to see.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

GNU Paranoia

Jose E. Marchesi-jemarch-conf.jpgEver heard of GNU Hurd? No, well that's not surprising. Hurd was/is going to be the kernel part of the GNU operating system.

"Don't freetards already have plenty of kernels? What about Linux?" You might ask. Valid question! The answer is quoted on understandinglimited.com. Jose Marchesi -- if you look on his website you can see the Free Software Fundamentalism dripping off it, King Richard will be proud -- has the following to say on Hurd:

I can tell you what is my idea about this. My interest in having a GNU kernel for the GNU operating system has nothing to do with technical aspects, but with polithics [sic].

The Linux development is managed by a person who doesnt agree with the ideals of the free software movement. I cannot trust that person. AFAIK the copyright holder for Solaris is SUN. I cannot trust that company.

Linux is released under the terms of the GPL version 2, and it seems that the Solaris kernel will be released under the terms of the GPL version 3. That is: free kernels. But the FSF may need to write a new version of the GPL in the future to face new problems. Will torvalds or SUN switch to that new license?

To be quite honest I sometimes wonder why I keep trying to find new crazy things some FSF-er says. Wake up people, isn't it obvious these guys are dangerous? They are preparing to kill capitalism and promote communism. The Russians are back. For now it's only software, but they're doing scaringly well. More and more people, and even some push-over companies, have turned to the dark side already.

Wake up people and remove all free software from your hard disk now!

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Fake Steve Responds to King Richard Interview

Fake Steve Jobs:

King of the freetards is starting to sound like a broken record. Check out this interview where he says, uh, the same stuff he's already said a million times. Microsoft is evil; patents are evil; Torvalds is a tool. Why do people continue to interview this dyspeptic coot?

Then again, you have to be impressed by the widespread adoption of Saint Richard's new GPLv3. I mean, see the list of adopters here. In just four months they've managed to line up hundreds of really important projects, like "Goggles Music Manager" "Groinc the simple network sniffer," "YeastsIdentification," (very useful at freetard conventions), "Zapto Richtext Editor (ZRE)," and "ZipSnap."

Rock on!

New iPods Lock Freetards Out

Corey Doctorow on Boing Boing:

The latest iPods have a cryptographic "checksum" in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players. This means that iPods can no longer be used with operating systems where iTunes doesn't exist -- like Linux, where gtkpod and Amarok are common free tools used by iPod owners to load their players.

He continues by whining over this. Personally I think this is a good thing. The vast majority of iPod owners use iTunes. And why wouldn't you, it's one of the best media players out there (with the exception of Windows Media Player). I don't have to make clear that Apple is no big fan of freetards, and freetards are the ones that create hacks to use other software to sync with the iPod.

It is important for Apple to keep using iTunes with their iPods, because it drives sales for their iTunes Music Store. This is their good right. This is what they worked for. They worked hard to make a great product -- they planted the seeds and get to harvest what grows out of them. And no anti-DRM boohoo whiny is going to stop them from doing that.

Monday, September 17, 2007

The OpenMoko Killer App: Erlang

It took them a while, but finally they found something. The application that will make all other mobile phones look silly and redundant. Is it a built-in fan? An awesome word processor? A speech transcriber maybe?

No, it's functional programming language called Erlang!
LShift:

This evening, after fighting bitbake (in the form of the capricious "insane.bbclass" class definition) for a good few hours, I managed to get Erlang version R11B-5 running on my new cellphone.

Running the interactive erlang shell on a cellphone is pretty cool.

So now, finally, while waiting our date to come back from the bathroom we can program cool Erlang functional programs on our phones. For example to create a welcome message for when she comes back, using sixteen nested map and reduce operations! "Welcome back Nancy!" That'll make an impression.

Fake Richard Stallman

richard.jpegThe Free Meme:

It just stroke me today: the Internet seems awash in Fake Secret Diaries and Blogs.

There is a Fake Steve Jobs, and look: a fake Billy G! We even have a (grin) fake Ballmer (throws fake chairs, and, occasionally, some stool).

But guess what. As of today, there is no Fake Diary of Richard Stallman! Wow. Is this because the guy is irrelevant and / or not funny? Shame on you if that's what you think.

My guess is that there is no fake RMS out there because he has placed his rotund image under the GPL (v3).

Someone must have told him "Hey Dick, go GPL yourself".

Here's three reasons why there's no fake King Richard blog:
  1. He's already fake enough by himself. Have you read his writing? It's essentially pure parody of himself.
  2. It would be dead boring. When you'd read some articles on his website (I don't recommend it) you already fall asleep half-way through. Why read a blog that is fake and boring?

The Dark Side of Linux

Some guy named Joel Adamson wrote a way-too-long-for-the-Internet essay on why he likes Unix. In this quasi-argumentative essay he argues that Unix is in fact easier to use than Windows.

Crap of course. Here's where he goes wrong.

After some screens of introductory bla bla he slowly moves towards making a point. He tells an anecdote of setting up a Windows computer for use of a router. The manual, of course, explains what to click to make it work.

Now, no problem if you are in fact using Windows. However, did you notice that there was no real information in there? If you already knew where that stuff was and which mouse button to use, this manual says you would know how to do it. Would you know what you were doing? Would you care? What if you’re using a different kind of computer and you need to accomplish the same thing? Would you be able to get the information out of that that you needed?

I don't follow. This manual is exactly the kind of manual someone needs. A router has to be set up. It tells you how to do that. It doesn't tell you anything about how routers work, how IP works, what the format of an IP frame is, the advantages of TCP/IP over UDP, about network devices, about DHCP. Not because it wants to keep the user "dumb" (as is implied Joel), but because users don't care. A few do of course, but the vast majority does not give a monkey's rear-end. Windows is a majority OS, it's not built for nerds, it's built for the average person.

At this point, of course, we expect to be dazzled by the killer argument about how Unix is far better. But instead we learn that it has manual pages "with no advertising" (which -- and this is a fun fact, apparently -- are formatted with troff, cool huh? Yeah I know, nobody cares). Yes, so I guess that solves all our problems. Do you already imagine your grandpa wading through the Unix manual pages after buying a router which simply says "RTFLM" (Read the Friendly Linux Manual -- your interpretation of the F may differ)?

Microsoft says that one of the perks of using a Windows server over a Linux server is that you can hire people for cheaper to administrate and help out. Let me repeat that: it's cheaper to hire people to run a Windows server than a Unix or Linux server. Why? Because they're less qualified.

Yes, how is this a problem? Isn't the point of the whole technology industry to make things simpler, to make things faster and more efficient and to abstract away from things so that we can focus on the task we're trying to perform? Thanks to the computer industry we can now print a letter to our mother without having to know how a printing press, or a printer for that matter, works. I don't know how a printer works do you? I do at a high level, but not the tiny technical details. Does that mean I'm not qualified to print?

If you have an operating system that needs you to have a Ph.D. in computer science to operate then it's going to be expensive to maintain. Yes, the person who operates it will be very qualified, but don't you agree that it is a massive waste of talent to have a Ph.D. operate a computer? Don't you think the more qualified should focus on challenging things in this world, and not on maintaining computer systems? Windows allows them to do that.

What follows in the essay is a very hypothetical phone exchange with an "unqualified" Windows system administrator that deals with a client that uses Emacs to read his mail. Yes. Emacs. Well Joel that makes your argument very strong. Everybody should run Unix systems so that those 17 cavemen in the world can use Emacs to read their mail.

Then we find out that Joel's favorite application is indeed Emacs, which figures. For the lucky ones who think that Emacs is the plural of Apple's eMac, I have bad news: it's not. It's an editor. And editor developed by -- wait for it -- King Richard. Emacs was one of Richard's first political devices to push the free software fundamentalist movement. Joel argues that, although Word can be extended with Visual Basic code quite easily nobody seems to do that. Instead people wade through Word's menus to find what they need. In Emacs, on the contrary, people do not use menus a lot, instead they program a lot in ELISP (a LISP variant developed especially for Emacs) to let Emacs do what they want.

Joel argues that this is because of the Emacs environment which encourages this. I argue that its the software's targeted audience that makes this difference. An average person cannot be expected to program. They can "program" a VCR, but even have trouble doing that. And now you would expect your mother to learn LISP so that she can indent a section of text? Nobody is going to write LISP code to do anything, ever. Nobody but the typical Unix audience -- nerds.

I'm sorry Joel, I'm not impressed.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Propaganda on Boing Boing

Cory_Doctorow.jpg

I like Boing Boing. It's a fairly nice weblog. Except when this dude Corey Doctorow is posting his anti-DRM propaganda. But I learned to ignore that. Now, however he's also started pushing Miro. Worse yet, he's asking people for money to pay developers to work on this freetard video player.

Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) is the best and most promising video player I've ever used. It's free and open -- licensed under the GPL -- and it incorporates three different technologies that make watching videos easier and better than any of the proprietary players like Windows Media Player or iTunes.

What a pile of biased crap. ("Disclosure: I am a board member for the Participatory Culture Foundation, the 501(c)3 charitable nonprofit that oversees production of Miro"). Oh how surprising, he's a board member of the organization that develops Miro and it's the most promising video player he's ever used! Shocking.

It's kind of sad that it's not even the best video player, according to him, but the most promising one. Promising? What does that even mean? It doesn't do anything, but the C code looks neat and I have good hopes that one day it will compile. That kind of promise?

Sorry, not good enough for me.

Walt Mossberg on Ubuntu Dell Laptop

Walt.pngRecently Dell has started selling laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled. I would never get one, but at least that solves the it-wiped-my-harddrive problem when installing Linux.

Walt Mossberg reviews the laptop. Here's what he thinks:

My verdict: Even in the relatively slick Ubuntu variation, Linux is still too rough around the edges for the vast majority of computer users. While Ubuntu looks a lot like Windows or Mac OS X, it is full of little complications and hassles that will quickly frustrate most people who just want to use their computers, not maintain or tweak them.

He just forgets to mention that you can't run any of the software that you like either, like Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer and so on and so forth.

He also found some tiny little problems that I'm happy to mention.
There is no control panel for adjusting the way the touch pad works, and I found it so sensitive that I was constantly launching programs and opening windows accidentally by touching the thing. Every time the computer awoke from sleep, the volume control software crashed and had to be reloaded.

When I tried to play common audio and video files, such as MP3 songs, I was told I had to first download special files called codecs that are built into Windows and Mac computers. I was warned that some of these codecs might be “bad” or “ugly.”

To get the computer to recognize my Kodak camera and Apple iPod, I had to reboot it several times. When it did find the iPod, it wasn’t able to synchronize with it. Playing videos was a bad experience, with lots of flickering and freezing. Oh, and there’s no built-in software for playing commercial DVDs.

It's so great they're selling laptops with such sucky and outdated software. Reminds me of the '60 when we all programmed in BASIC.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Another Interview with King Richard

richard.jpegThis time it's PC World's turn. King Richard speaks and the world listens.

Some quotes.

What's important about GNU is that it provides a way to use computers in freedom.

That reminds me of this story. The only operating system this guy could use in his cell was Windows. Tell me Richard, is this part of using computers in freedom?

Therefore, you should have these four essential freedoms for each program you use:

0. To run the program as you wish. 1. To study the source code and change it so the program does what you wish. 2. To redistribute exact copies when you wish, either giving them away or selling them. 3. To distribute copies of your modified versions when you wish.

First of all: how much of a nerd do you have to be to start counting at 0 in public. I mean, I know that many programming language's array indices start at 0, but come on, you realize there's a world outside your computer right? Second, only half of these freedoms apply to normal people (0 and 2). And even of those one can argue if people actually want to use freetard software. All of these "freedoms" may be irrelevant to 99% of people and growing.

Nobody knows who will win this fight, because the outcome depends on you and the readers. Will you fight for freedom? Will you reject Windows and MacOS and other non-free software, and switch to GNU/Linux? Or will you be too lazy to resist?

I have been using Windows for most of my professional career and I have yet to feel unfree. And yes, I am too lazy to "resist" I guess, I have no reason to spend hours and hours configuring and tuning a Linux -- ehm, I mean GNU/Linux -- system so that I can run its free and inferior software. So sue me.

Microsoft has frequently imposed non-interoperability; now, for example, it promotes the patented bogus "standard" OOXML instead of supporting Open Document Format. Microsoft believes it is so powerful that it can design an incompatible format, create obstacles to its implementation by others, and pressure most users to switch to it. Do you think users are really as foolish as Microsoft predicts?

Well I wouldn't call it stupid, but it's kind of true that Microsoft dictates the dominant file format. Microsoft Office is the dominant office suite so other have to adapt to that (if they feel they have to co-exist). Why would Microsoft adopt a free document format that is not their own? It would always decrease the product's quality. I mean, sure this ODF is standardized, still ODF documents look different in all software that supports it. Microsoft doesn't want to use a format that will mess its documents up, so pushed its own format. Both Microsoft and the consumer win.

Plus, the OOXML standard is much more impressive when printed.

OOXMLSpec.png

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Gimme Gimme Gimme



Britney Spears finally is back in the business with a new single and I think a new CD soon (can't wait!). A few days ago Britney performed on the MTV MVAs. Here's the video (yeah on YouTube, but ripped from commercial TV).



Not bad huh? I have been a Britney Spears fan from day one. She's one of the best examples of America's perfected pop star production lines. Great music. Nice girl. Very talented.

However, one of her so-called "fans" recorded a video supposedly defending her (don't ask me against who or why) and put it on YouTube. Here you go.



First of all, this is a guy. Yeah, you wouldn't say, but it is. Second, what a whiner. Third, this video was on CNN. Yes, on regular TV. Why? Why would you let a stupid guy having nothing coherent to say on TV? The result? Over a million people watched this video on YouTube.

What a waste of bandwidth. What a waste of time.

Nerd Wedding Cakes

nerd-cake.jpg

Someone just sent me a link to these nerdy wedding cake pictures. These eight are probably all nerd cakes ever made. Gosh it must be hard to have someone marry you when you're that nerdy, unless you're seriously loaded.

And yes, that's C++ code on that cake above.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Microsoft on Google's Web 2.0 Office

I'm no fan of this whole web 2.0 movement. One reason being that applications on web 2.0 are still on the same level as desktop applications 0.1. Microsoft agrees and has sent an e-mail statement in which the company lists 10 reasons why Google Apps is no good replacement for Microsoft Office:

1. Google touts having enterprise level customers but how many “USERS” of their applications truly exist within the enterprise?

2. Google has a history of releasing incomplete products, calling them beta software, and issuing updates on a “known only to Google” schedule – this flies in the face of what enterprises want and need in their technology partners – what is Google doing that indicates they are in lock step with customer needs?

3. Google touts the low cost of their apps –not only price but the absence of need for hardware, storage or maintenance for Google Apps. BUT if GAPE is indeed a complement to MSFT Office, the costs actually become greater for a company as they now have two IT systems to run and manage and maintain. Doesn’t this result in increased complexity and increased costs?

4. Google’s primary focus is on ad funded search. Their enterprise focus and now apps exist on the very fringe and in combination with other fringe services only account for 1% of the company’s revenue. What happens if Google executes poorly? Do they shut down given it will them in a minimal and short term way? Should customers trust that this won’t happen?

5. Google’s apps only work if an enterprise has no power users, employees are always online, enterprises haven’t built custom Office apps – doesn’t this equal a very small % of global information workers today? –On a feature comparison basis, it’s not surprising that Microsoft has a huge lead.

6. Google apps don’t have essential document creation features like support for headers, footers, tables of content, footnotes, etc. Additionally, while customers can collaborate on basic docs without the above noted features, to collaborate on detailed docs, a company must implement a two part process – work together on the basic doc, save it to Word or Excel and then send via email for final edits. Yes they have a $50 price tag, but with the inefficiencies created by just this one cycle, how much do GAPE really cost – and can you afford the fidelity loss?

7. Enterprise companies have to constantly think about government regulations and standards – while Google can store a lot of data for enterprises on Google servers, there is no easy to use, automated way for enterprises to regularly delete data, issue a legal hold for specific docs or bring copies into the corp. What happens if a company needs to respond to government regulations bodies? Google touts 99.9% uptime for their apps but what few people realize that promise is for Gmail only. Equally alarming is the definition Google has for “downtime” – ten consecutive minutes of downtime. What happens if throughout the day Google is down 7 minutes each hour? What does 7 minutes each hour for a full work day that cost an enterprise?

8. In the world of business, it is always on and always connected. As such, having access to technical support 24/7 is essential. If a company deploys Google Apps and there is a technical issue at 8pm PST, Sorry. Google’s tech support is open M-F 1AM-6PM PST – are these the new hours of global business? And if a customer’s “designated administrator” is not available (a requirement) does business just stop?

9. Google says that enterprise customers use only 10% of the features in today’s productivity applications which implies that EVERYONE needs the SAME 10% of the feature when in fact it is very clear that in each company there are specific roles people play that demands access to specific information – how does Google’s generic strategy address role specific needs?

10. With Google apps in perpetual beta and Google controlling when and if they rollout specific features and functionality, customers have minimal if any control over the timing of product rollouts and features – how do 1) I know how to strategically plan and train and 2) get the features and functionality I have specifically requested? How much money does not knowing cost?

Eudora Turns to the Dark Side

logo_eudora.gifEudora becomes open source. Eudora, for those who don't know, is an e-mail client. One of the earlier ones. I used quite a bit in the 80s. It was nice software. For the past many, many years I've been using Outlook, which, of course is far superior. To be honest, I forgot about Eudora altogether, apparently it still exists today.

But now the Eudora code has been donated to the Mozilla foundation. It's like bringing your grandpa, who's old, and doesn't walk and talk that well anymore to a religious sect that will "safe him" by infecting him with a virus, that according to them, will set him free. Guess what happens next.

Is this how we treat people that served us so well for all these years?

Monday, September 10, 2007

"GPL Has Bad Aspects"

A beautiful piece about what's wrong with the GPL.

One of the goals of GPL is to make everything GPL. Not good. Why? This can cause you to lose intellectual property.
In an article, Richard Stallman writes fallacious arguments as to why software should be "free."

(By the way, I do not GPL is free. It is very limiting in web applications and dismal for libraries, unless you allow everything to be GPL.)

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html


Here's his list of fallacies -- gotta love the first one:
  1. Using utilitarian arguments. If you don't buy them, his essay falls to pieces. Utilitarian arguments have been used to justify communism, nazism, and other nasties. It could be used to justify murder. It could justify anything that benefits the majority more than the minority.
  2. The arguments he calls an emotional argument is not an emotional argument. He just called it that and put a negative spin on it.
  3. He also denies intellectual property's existence. Intellectual property's existence would thoroughly demolish claims that people should be able to get the software they want for free.
  4. Furthermore, utilitarian arguments may be used against the GPL (Here goes):
    Argument: The GPL is supposed to be helpful for users and give them freedom. What about freedom to use other (GPL-incompatible) software? Suppose user X installs a forum on his (or her) website. Imagine X wants users to be able to log into a MediaWiki(TM) and a vBulletin forum at the same time, thus making it easier for site members to log in. This is illegal because of the GPL. (It probably would be illegal for other reasons, too , but go with me on this one.) The main problem is that GPL'd software cannot be integrated even with some open-source software, if it has GPL-incompatible licenses.

From the Comments

Two comments on two comments on the GPL to the Lay story.

rohitj says:

I am surprised that you are generalizing open office situation to other Open Source softwares (which I think is pretty silly of you). Linux is the future. And Dell's move of giving laptops with Ubuntu surely proves that. And you know that. Right?


Yeah, Dell's a weird company. Rumor goes that the only reason they are putting Linux on computers now is to be able to hire more die-hard nerds that can fix their PCs. Dell has a big problem keeping up with all the broken Dell's comin in. They simply cannot hire enough people to fix all these pieces of junk. So how do you become more attractive to the nerd crowd? Show Linux some lovin'. Pathetic, but that's how it works.

And as far as GPL is concerned, don't forget that it's GPL because of which open source community is becoming stronger and stronger. Don't forget how ODF defeated OOXML.

Yes, open source is growing strong and stronger because of the GPL. That's exactly my point. The GPL has to be stopped. Now. And ODF defeated OOXML? Says who?

And it's GPL which is allowing creative minds to do creative work. Right?

Sure, dream on. So far I haven't seen much creativity from any freetard.

The second comment is from Maciek:
As CONSERVATIVE you should respectsuch international authorities as ISO/IEC... and as for today: ISO/IEC 26300 (known as ODF; document format supported by Open Office) is oficially approved international standard... while Microsoft's file format was recently REJECTED

I do respect ISO a bit. But do realize these are very political organizations. Things are not ratified as standards because of their quality, but because of political reasons. This time Microsoft was unlucky (don't know the details, maybe they have to improve OOXML a bit). But many things Microsoft proposed (such as C# and the .NET framework) have been ratified as standards. Plus Microsoft makes the best implementations of ISO standards like C.

Why Apple is Great

iphone and jobs.jpg

Apple sure knows how to exploit its market position. First they sell lots of iPhones. They come with only a few ring tones -- you cannot add more. Not until the recent media event organized by Apple. Now it is possible to make and load your own ring tones on your iPhone. Can you just put any MP3 file as a ring tone? No, you can only extract 30 second samples of some iTunes music store songs. And for the service of cutting 30 seconds off a song you already paid for, you pay an additional $0.99. So that's $0.99 for the song + $0.99 for some audio editing.

Brilliant. Simply brilliant. You see, on the OpenMoko phones this could never work. Open platforms are no fun, particularly profit-making trick wise.

And I'm not even mentioning the $200 price drop of the iPhone. It is now even cheaper than the pre-alpha quality OpenMoko Neo1973.

Friday, September 7, 2007

How to Explain the GPL to the Lay

Next to my office is the secretary office. Helen, one of the secretaries there just came over.

"Hi, Dee came by and was criticizing me" she said. "What for?" I asked. "For my use of Word to send out the company news letter. She said it was much easier to do that in something called Open Office. Do you know what that is?"

Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen. Dee has started her crusade for free software, as I feared. This brings up the question on how one can explain the lay why Free Software Fundamentalists are the scum of the earth. Here was my attempt, send me your suggestions if you have any.

Here's why you shouldn't Open Office. There are two main reason, the first being that it's crappy software. It is not better than Microsoft Office. It was written by people with no social life, in their spare time, which, clearly, they have a lot. They were not paid for it, so the software simply sucks.

Open Office is Free Software. The people who create this kind of software, I call them Free Software Fundamentalists, like to kill puppies.



They believe that all software should be free. Not just the software that you can actually run, but also its source code. As you may know, software is written in text that is then compiled to 1's and 0's that the computer can understand, this text is called the software's source code. These Free Software Fundamentalists believe that anybody should have this source code so they can do whatever you like with it.

That seems nice at first, until you realize that the source code for mosquito-killing robots could then be easily modified so that these robots become puppy-killing robots. Free Software Freaks want to kill puppies.

Free software is also viral. Much of it contains the so-called GPL virus. What this virus does is make all software that meets also free. That means that if a puppy-killing robot meets a nuclear bomb, that bomb also gets contaminated with the GPL virus. Of course, the bomb will then start to blow itself up in order to kill puppies and before you know it the whole world blows up.

That's why you should never use Free Software.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

uncov: Worse Than Me!

I found out about uncov today, a kind of fuck everybody site that slaughters everything they want. It's a bit too much for me sometimes. But of course I enjoy web 2.0 sites to be flushed. Pownce for example. Epic.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Some Dude: "Free Software Will Not Be Free Anymore"

Don't ask me who this dude is or how this piece below makes any sense -- I surely don't get it. But hey it's on the Internet, so it must be true. He says that because of patent deals Free Software won't be free anymore. Great news!

ITC594 Research Blog:

Microsoft the software giant has highly patented its software products. Up until 2005, Microsoft has filed around 3,500 and registered over 1,500 patents (Microsoft cited in Parloff 2007, p.51) . As I myself works at a legal firm, I know that patents are very costly and not many sole proprietors can afford to patent their inventions. Many software developers has more or less included Microsoft's patented components in their products. Microsoft demanded them to pay the licence fees. For example, the Microsoft-Novell deal, Microsoft and Novell not only agreed to jointly develop and market products that allow Windows and Linux to work together more smoothly but also, Microsoft agreed to indemnify Novell Suse Linux Enterprise users from patent claims (Lemon 2007). This is definitely not a good news to the users. As a result, free software will not be free anymore. Probably, this is even a bad news to corporate users like AIG, Wal-Mart, AIG, and Goldman Sachs.

Network Down All Day

Well, our new sys admin is working out well. Last Friday at work I was about to submit some code to our servers and poof! Away was everything. Internet, e-mail, access to my network drive.

Turns out that Dee with her Linux tattoo is not that competent in operating systems as she thought she was. I'm sure she knows all about her toy operating system, but this is the real stuff. If you can't keep Windows running, well, what good are you as a sys admin?