OneAndOneIs2

(Image (c) UserFriendly.org)

In a "Life imitates art" move, Finland has ruled that the DMCA-like laws that state that it is only illegal to bypass copy-protection measures where the protection does its job: According to both Finnish copyright law and the underlying directive, only such protection measure is effective, “which achieves the protection objective.”

So, as I read it. . . It's illegal to bypass effective copy-protection. But that protection is only considered "effective" if it achieves the goal of preventing copying. So if you work out how to bypass it, it's no longer effective and therefore no longer illegal to bypass. Ergo the DMCA-equivalent in Finland has just been neutered.

Try as I might I can't read this any other way. Innit marvellous? :o)

Came across this here via a long series of links.

What you do is, you copy this bit of java and paste it into the "Location" bar, and then watch the graphics do interesting things.

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

At google.com it's a bit of a laugh, but it was at my "list of smilies" page that it gave really cool results.

Have a play and see what other websites work well with it :o)

They give you the function "strindex" that basically scans a line for a pattern, grep-like, and returns the location of the first occurrence of the pattern.

Then they tell you to write "strrindex" to return the position of the RIGHTMOST occurrence of the pattern - i.e. if it occurs twice, they want the position of the second occurrence.

I was going to take their code and modify it by adding variables to make a note of each time a pattern was found. But then I thought "Why not just start at the right and work leftwards? Then I only have to look for the first pattern."

So I sat down with pen & paper and worked out the logic. And then it seemed silly NOT to go ahead and write it to test it worked.

Took a few more scribblings to work out the exact logic because of the numbering that applies to strings: "abc" is a four-character string because of the '\0' at the end, but the position numbers of the four-character string only go up to 3 because numbering starts at zero, and so confusion can happen..

But once I got that sorted, and I'd slapped myself for using [i] instead of [i++] with the result that I had an infinite loop, the code worked flawlessly. To my surprise, it must be said.

Read more! »

There's a reason I watch very little TV. In fact, there's two reasons: Most of what's on is crap; and too much of what's on makes me angry.

The latter reason is the one currently on my mind.

Lou turned on the TV and did some channel-hopping this evening, in her ever-optimistic hope that there might be something worth watching on at the time.

There wasn't, but there was something on BBC 1 about traffic accidents and how not enough is being done to stop them. When we tuned in, they were showing a crash test dummy, child-sized, being hit by a car at 20 and at 30mph.

The fact that four year old children very rarely stand alertly at attention in the middle of the road facing a car coming towards them at 30mph and not braking was deemed an irrelevance, I assume, because it got no mention when the presenter was exclaiming in mock-astonishment about how much more damage was done at 30mph.

Then there was a load of tired old repetition of car-haters most cherished myths, such as how many lives have been saved by speed cameras (the figure they invariably quote is an outright fabrication - look up "regression to the mean" and you'll understand more than the people who came up with the number) and how many accidents are "speed related" (Which they pad mercilessly in order to make it seem significant: If a drunken thirteen year old stole a car and drove it at 40mph down the high street before careering off the road and hitting somebody on the pavement, they'll count it as "speed related" because he was going faster than the speed limit.) This was followed by an outraged example of how the local councils were failing in their duty by not putting reminders of the speed limit up near a school - something that's utterly unnecessary, since school roads are either deserted because the pupils are in classes, or so swamped with kids that any motorist on the planet will slow right down because we all know how fecking stupid kids near roads can be.

The constant message being hammered home was always "If cars slowed down, less people would be killed" and that is a message that really, really gets my back up.

Because in their constant attempts to show how much harm a car does when a pedestrian steps into the road in front of it, the focus was never once off the car. Never once did it occur to them to ask why, exactly, the pedestrian had been so fucking stupid as to step in front of a ton of metal traveling towards them at high speed.

They were so busy pointing out that a child's head would hit the bonnet of a car doing 20mph at 17-and-a-bit mph, as compared to a car doing 30mph resulting in a head-to-bonnet speed of 34mph, that they never spared a moment to explain what the child was doing in front of a car in the first place.

When I was a child, we were positively plagued by the big road safety campaign, the Green Cross Code. Every time we watched TV, Doctor Who or the Green Cross Code Man's daft robot was there, brainwashing us with "Stop look listen" messages. Every bus stop had posters reminding us to look both ways before crossing the street. As a result, in 30 years of crossing the road, I've managed to avoid leaping out in front of an oncoming car. (Just you wait, I'll be run down by a bus tomorrow now)

The road safety messages that they pester us with today is "If every car slowed down by 2mph, fatalities would drop by several hundred people a year" - never once do you see "If parents taught their kids to look before running into the road, they wouldn't be in a position where they're likely to get hit by a car"

Here's a simple example of the basic principles, guys:

Child A is standing on the pavement when a driver comes towards him at 5mph over the speed limit. Child A sees the driver coming and stays on the pavement. Result: No accident

Child B is standing on the pavement when a driver comes towards him at 5mph under the speed limit. Child B doesn't look and steps into the road. Result: An accident occurs

There was an article in the local paper last year. Some teenage girl had gone out for the night with friends, and on her drunken walk home, she stepped into the road without looking and was hit by a car, which happened to be speeding. She wound up, not surprisingly, in hospital. She was outraged, outraged, when the car owner's insurance company sued her for the costs that arose from the accident.

The paper tried to slant the whole situation in her favor, constantly highlighting the fact that the car was going too fast and reminding everybody how greedy insurance companies are, but the article was left profoundly unconvincing by the simple and obvious fact that she was the one who had caused the accident. The fact that the car was breaking the speed limit was an irrelevance: It was her own fault that she had been hit by it.

It's not often that you feel sympathy for insurance companies, but it must be said that if every time a Darwin Award candidate decided to pick a fight with a car I was insuring, I was expected to pay for it, I'd be pretty unhappy too.

The search for safer roads today is aimed at one single factor above all others: The speed of the driver(s) involved. Tailgating, aggressive driving, driving without due care and attention, you never hear anything about. And if a car hits a pedestrian, you'll never hear any sympathy directed towards the emotionally-scarred driver.

I blame the media and politicans, personally. But not for the obvious reason, that they focus on a single measurable quantity, speed. No, for their constant over-use of the "Think of the children" cry and the constant reminder that there are pedophiles loose in the world today.

You'd think that child abuse was something that only started happening a decade or so ago, if your only source of information was the headlines. It clearly isn't, as is made abundantly clear every time I go to the library or a book shop. It seems every week, there's yet another entry in the "Best Sellers" list that's the autobiography of somebody who was abused as a child.

(Am I the only one, by the way, who finds these books repugnant? I flick through them occasionally and every single one has read more like "erotica for paedophiles" with overtones of "A guide to molesting children without getting caught" than it has like "I want to raise awareness of this terrible crime in the hopes that it will stop others going through the same ordeal I did". The sheer graphic sexual detail they go into would put any hardcore sex book to shame - is that kind of information really needed in the type of book these are meant to be?)

The upshot of the huge surge in awareness about paedophilia is a whole generation of children is being brought up by parents afraid to let their children out of their sight. The kids that live next door to my parents play exclusively in their own back garden, unless their mother is watering the front garden, in which case they're allowed briefly out onto the pavement. They've asked to be allowed to go and play at a friend's house, only to be told no because (I kid you not) their mother wouldn't be able to see them if they went to somebody else's house.

Most parents don't go to quite that extreme, but they do bar their kids from going more than a few hundred yards from their home. With such limited range available to them, is it any wonder that kids are encouraged to think of the roads as playgrounds where it's suitable to play football and generally run around heedless of traffic?

We did the same when I was that age, of course, but we picked very quiet roads and we kept an eye out for cars. We didn't, as kids do today, act like the roads were ours and cars were the intruders who should get out of the way.

With attitudes like that being instilled in today's youths, is it any wonder that kids keep being involved in traffic accidents?

I'm a geek. I'm a fan of technology and when I have problems to solve my thoughts usually turn first and foremost to computers and other such gadgetry for a solution. And yet *I* can see that if you get hit by a car when trying to cross the road, the problem is that you picked a damn stupid place or time to cross the road, and not that the car was traveling at the wrong speed.

So why is it so hard for the people who say they really care about reducing accidents to stop focusing solely on the machines and start looking at where the real problems are?

Is there some kind of psychological blind spot involved? Or are these Speed Kills Campaigners really just a more vocal version of the grumpy old ladies that tut disapprovingly and shout "Maniac!" every time they see a car driven by somebody younger than they are at a speed faster than they can walk?

Amongst the various conspiracy-theorists who have nothing better to do has been the claim that Dell is trying to make selling Linux fail, and thus hasn't been doing much to promote it.

So given that they started actually selling yesterday, I went to look at their website today. What did I see?

I swear to God, this is genuine output from my Ubuntu PC right now. I can't believe this is business as usual...

dominic@ubuntu:~$ whois microsoft.com


Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.


   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.ZZZZZZ.MORE.DETAILS.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
   IP Address: 203.36.226.2
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.ZZZOMBIED.AND.HACKED.BY.WWW.WEB-HACK.COM
   IP Address: 217.107.217.167
   Registrar: ONLINENIC, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.OnlineNIC.com
   Referral URL: http://www.OnlineNIC.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.ZZZ.IS.0WNED.AND.HAX0RED.BY.SUB7.NET
   IP Address: 207.44.240.96
   Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM
   Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com
   Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.LIVE.FOREVER.BECOUSE.UNIXSUCKS.COM
   IP Address: 185.3.4.7
   Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
   Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
   Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.BE.SLAPPED.IN.THE.FACE.BY.MY.BLUE.VEINED.SPAN
NER.NET
   IP Address: 216.127.80.46
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.BE.BEATEN.WITH.MY.SPANNER.NET
   IP Address: 216.127.80.46
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.WAREZ.AT.TOPLIST.GULLI.COM
   IP Address: 80.190.192.33
   Registrar: KEY-SYSTEMS GMBH
   Whois Server: whois.rrpproxy.net
   Referral URL: http://www.key-systems.net

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.TOTALLY.SUCKS.S3U.NET
   IP Address: 207.208.13.22
   Registrar: ENOM, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.enom.com
   Referral URL: http://www.enom.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.SMELLS.SIMPLECODES.COM
   IP Address: 207.44.234.34
   Registrar: GO DADDY SOFTWARE, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
   Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.GIVE.UP.BECAUSE.LINUXISGOD.COM
   IP Address: 65.160.248.13
   Registrar: GKG.NET, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.gkg.net
   Referral URL: http://www.gkg.net

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.RAWKZ.MUH.WERLD.MENTALFLOSS.CA
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.OHMYGODITBURNS.COM
   IP Address: 216.158.63.6
   Registrar: DOTSTER, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.dotster.com
   Referral URL: http://www.dotster.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
   IP Address: 203.36.226.2
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.LOVES.ME.KOSMAL.NET
   IP Address: 65.75.198.123
   Registrar: GO DADDY SOFTWARE, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
   Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.LIVES.AT.SHAUNEWING.COM
   IP Address: 216.40.250.172
   Registrar: ENOM, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.enom.com
   Referral URL: http://www.enom.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.NOT.YEPPA.ORG
   Registrar: OVH
   Whois Server: whois.ovh.com
   Referral URL: http://www.ovh.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.NOT.HOSTED.BY.ACTIVEDOMAINDNS.NET
   IP Address: 217.148.161.5
   Registrar: ENOM, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.enom.com
   Referral URL: http://www.enom.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.NOT.AS.COOL.AS.SIMPLECODES.COM
   IP Address: 207.44.234.232
   Registrar: GO DADDY SOFTWARE, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
   Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.IN.BED.WITH.CURTYV.COM
   IP Address: 216.55.187.193
   Registrar: ABACUS AMERICA, INC. DBA NAMES4EVER
   Whois Server: whois.names4ever.com
   Referral URL: http://www.names4ever.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.HOSTED.ON.PROFITHOSTING.NET
   IP Address: 66.49.213.213
   Registrar: COMPUTER SERVICES LANGENBACH GMBH DBA JOKER.COM
   Whois Server: whois.joker.com
   Referral URL: http://www.joker.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.GOD.BECOUSE.UNIXSUCKS.COM
   IP Address: 161.16.56.24
   Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
   Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
   Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.A.STEAMING.HEAP.OF.FUCKING-BULLSHIT.NET
   IP Address: 63.99.165.11
   Registrar: THE NAME IT CORPORATION DBA NAMESERVICES.NET
   Whois Server: whois.aitdomains.com
   Referral URL: http://www.aitdomains.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.IS.A.MESS.TIMPORTER.CO.UK
   Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
   Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
   Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.ITS.OWN.CRACKLAB.COM
   IP Address: 209.26.95.44
   Registrar: DOTSTER, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.dotster.com
   Referral URL: http://www.dotster.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.A.PRESENT.COMING.FROM.HUGHESMISSILES.COM
   IP Address: 66.154.11.27
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.FILLS.ME.WITH.BELLIGERENCE.NET
   IP Address: 130.58.82.232
   Registrar: CRONON AG BERLIN, NIEDERLASSUNG REGENSBURG
   Whois Server: whois.tmagnic.net
   Referral URL: http://nsi-robo.tmag.de

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.DRINKS.LISTERINE.NET
   IP Address: 66.33.206.206
   Registrar: SPOT DOMAIN LLC DBA DOMAINSITE.COM
   Whois Server: whois.domainsite.com
   Referral URL: http://www.domainsite.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.CAN.GO.FUCK.ITSELF.AT.SECZY.COM
   IP Address: 209.187.114.147
   Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM
   Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com
   Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.ARE.GODDAMN.PIGFUCKERS.NET.NS-NOT-IN-SERVICE.COM
   IP Address: 216.127.80.46
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: MICROSOFT.COM.AND.MINDSUCK.BOTH.SUCK.HUGE.ONES.AT.EXEGETE.NET
   IP Address: 63.241.136.53
   Registrar: DOTSTER, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.dotster.com
   Referral URL: http://www.dotster.com

   Domain Name: MICROSOFT.COM
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net
   Name Server: NS1.MSFT.NET
   Name Server: NS2.MSFT.NET
   Name Server: NS3.MSFT.NET
   Name Server: NS4.MSFT.NET
   Name Server: NS5.MSFT.NET
   Status: clientDeleteProhibited
   Status: clientTransferProhibited
   Status: clientUpdateProhibited
   Updated Date: 10-oct-2006
   Creation Date: 02-may-1991
   Expiration Date: 03-may-2014

dominic@ubuntu:~$ whois google.com


Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.


   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
   IP Address: 69.41.185.195
   Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM
   Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com
   Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.ZOMBIED.AND.HACKED.BY.WWW.WEB-HACK.COM
   IP Address: 217.107.217.167
   Registrar: ONLINENIC, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.OnlineNIC.com
   Referral URL: http://www.OnlineNIC.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.WORDT.DOOR.VEEL.WHTERS.GEBRUIKT.SERVERTJE.NET
   IP Address: 62.41.27.144
   Registrar: KEY-SYSTEMS GMBH
   Whois Server: whois.rrpproxy.net
   Referral URL: http://www.key-systems.net

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.VN
   Registrar: ONLINENIC, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.OnlineNIC.com
   Referral URL: http://www.OnlineNIC.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.UA
   Registrar: DIRECT INFORMATION PVT LTD D/B/A PUBLICDOMAINREGISTRY.COM
   Whois Server: whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com
   Referral URL: http://www.PublicDomainRegistry.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.TR
   Registrar: DIRECT INFORMATION PVT LTD D/B/A PUBLICDOMAINREGISTRY.COM
   Whois Server: whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com
   Referral URL: http://www.PublicDomainRegistry.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM
   IP Address: 80.190.192.24
   Registrar: KEY-SYSTEMS GMBH
   Whois Server: whois.rrpproxy.net
   Referral URL: http://www.key-systems.net

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.SPROSIUYANDEKSA.RU
   Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
   Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
   Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.SA
   Registrar: OMNIS NETWORK, LLC
   Whois Server: whois.omnis.com
   Referral URL: http://domains.omnis.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.PLZ.GIVE.A.PR8.TO.AUDIOTRACKER.NET
   IP Address: 213.251.184.30
   Registrar: OVH
   Whois Server: whois.ovh.com
   Referral URL: http://www.ovh.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.MX
   Registrar: DIRECT INFORMATION PVT LTD D/B/A PUBLICDOMAINREGISTRY.COM
   Whois Server: whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com
   Referral URL: http://www.PublicDomainRegistry.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.IS.NOT.HOSTED.BY.ACTIVEDOMAINDNS.NET
   IP Address: 217.148.161.5
   Registrar: ENOM, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.enom.com
   Referral URL: http://www.enom.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.IS.HOSTED.ON.PROFITHOSTING.NET
   IP Address: 66.49.213.213
   Registrar: COMPUTER SERVICES LANGENBACH GMBH DBA JOKER.COM
   Whois Server: whois.joker.com
   Referral URL: http://www.joker.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.IS.APPROVED.BY.NUMEA.COM
   IP Address: 213.228.0.43
   Registrar: GANDI
   Whois Server: whois.gandi.net
   Referral URL: http://www.gandi.net

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.CO
M
   IP Address: 209.187.114.130
   Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM
   Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com
   Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.DO
   Registrar: GO DADDY SOFTWARE, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
   Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.BR
   Registrar: ENOM, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.enom.com
   Referral URL: http://www.enom.com

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
   IP Address: 203.36.226.2
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.AU
   Registrar: PRIMUS TELCO PTY LTD DBA PRIMUSDOMAIN/PLANETDOMAIN
   Whois Server: whois.planetdomain.com
   Referral URL: http://www.planetdomain.com

   Domain Name: GOOGLE.COM
   Registrar: MARKMONITOR INC.
   Whois Server: whois.markmonitor.com
   Referral URL: http://www.markmonitor.com
   Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
   Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
   Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
   Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
   Status: clientDeleteProhibited
   Status: clientTransferProhibited
   Status: clientUpdateProhibited
   Updated Date: 10-apr-2006
   Creation Date: 15-sep-1997
   Expiration Date: 14-sep-2011

Can't help but wonder how things are going in proprietary hardware manufacturer boardrooms lately.

Not long ago, they may have heard about the Linux kernel devs offering them official Linux drivers for free & under NDAs - a number of manufacturers have taken advantage of this offer, with at least one driver already having gone into the kernel as a result, and more on the way.

Then along came Dell, planning to sell Ubuntu PCs and therefore requiring hardware to at least have some Linux support. For hardware options not offered with this release, we are working with the vendors of those devices to improve the maturity and stability of their associated Linux drivers.

Even the stalwarts of the "You get open source drivers when you prise them out of our cold dead fingers" brigade are beginning to crumble - not long ago, you used proprietary drivers or you had little or no 3D acceleration. Now, of the big three graphics manufacturers, one already is open source and one has promised to be ASAP.

If you manufacture hardware and don't have it supported under Linux, even "Nobody else is doing it" isn't a valid excuse any more.

When things start to change, they do change fast, don't they?

Yes, it is apparently true, the open-source equivalent of MS Word viruses are now on the scene.

It's a rather better class of virus than MS ever got though: It doesn't screw up your files or spam everybody in your address book. No, it just downloads and displays somewhat unusual pornography. And you don't even have to pay for it

No, not a reference to the Tux500 - tho if you haven't donated already, you should at least consider it.

No, I'm talking about the US government's Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium - which aims to reduce road fatalities by putting computers into cars. And has picked Linux as the OS.

Living in a country run by a car-hating government, where they would only be interested in such a PC if it could measure your speed and fine you every time you broke the speed limit, it's actually quite refreshing to see some more worthwhile uses put forward.

For instance, we all know how important brake lights are on cars: A sudden sea of red lights in front of you is a good indication that you should be thinking very seriously about slowing down. Assuming you can see all those brakes, that is.

What if, as well as brake lights, you had a system in place that alerted you whenever a car in front of you braked hard enough to trigger the ABS system? When that happens, you'll very likely have to brake hard yourself, so the sooner you know about it, the better.

Ever been sitting in traffic, heard a siren, and thought "Where's it coming from? Do I need to move?" - wouldn't it be nice if your car could tell you what emergency vehicle was coming and in which direction?

Ever gone round a corner and had to hit the brakes because there was an accident just around it? Wouldn't it be nice if your car had told you as you approached that the last dozen cars that rounded the corner had hit their brakes sharply?

To say nothing of simpler matters like knowing that every car a few miles in front of you has its windscreen wipers on, so you should probably pull over and put your soft-top back up. And naturally, if you've got a computer on board, it might as well be able to play your music and upgrade your car's firmware while it's at it.

Top Gear showed an interesting gadget on a car a while ago: An infra-red camera put a fully-illuminated image of the road ahead onto the car dashboard. Most webcams can be easily converted to be IR (I've done it myself) so this would be a perfectly simple and not-very-expensive addition to the project.

All-in-all, an interesting project all-round. I shall have to keep my eyes on it..

...and we're here to help you!

. . .

Yeah, I never believed it either. But, credit where it's due, the lady at the Local Education Authority has indeed been very helpful in finding me a couple of schools to visit prior to starting my course in a few months time.

Having written to or emailed almost every school in the local area with very little luck, this is a definite result :o)

I tend to pay fairly close attention to my access stats. Not so much to the numbers of visitors per day, which doesn't change much, but more where they came in from and to.

Quite often, they've come in to that post on Linux and defragmenting. It's a very popular post, far more so than I ever expected. It's such a dry topic...

A new site showed up in the logs the other day, so I went & had a look. Turned out to be a forum where somebody had asked about the possibility of some defragger or other being ported to Linux.

There were a couple of fairly reasonable posts - the defragger relying on the Windows API and thus not being portable, and then somebody mentioning that Linux isn't supposed to need defragging anyway.

It went a bit downhill then, with comments like "Yeah, just like MS said NTFS wouldn't need defragging. Get real!" and "I don't actually know anything about the topic, but it stands to reason that Linux will fragment, and there are some defragging tools but they're old and not very good."

I usually don't bother with saying anything when I see I've been linked to on a forum. But I decided to make this an exception, so I registered & made a post saying that (a) it's not true there's no defrag tools for Linux, there are several, as listed in Wikipedia, and a new one, shake, is in active development right now; and (b) but in typical desktop use, Linux doesn't suffer from fragmentation badly enough to need one: My year-old ubuntu installation, for example, having only 1.5% of files non-contiguous. I also mentioned that if they really wanted to find out for themselves what the truth was, Linux can be installed completely free of charge, there was no reason they couldn't do their own investigations.

The end result?

Well, the 1.5% was rejected as being inaccurate even if true (which was considered unlikely) because it measured number of files rather than total data on the disk, and the claim that this tiny percentage would be at typical Windows level if measured by the right metric; The experiences of myself and huge numbers of other Linux users who've never experienced fragmentation problems were dismissed totally; and an unwavering conviction that Linux users need defrag tools every bit as badly as Windows users, we just refuse to admit it.

A light-hearted comment that, if they believed the problem was there, they should write the software to fix it, since whether they were right or wrong the community would benefit either way, was met with a frosty "You're the one saying there's no problem, YOU write a tool to fix it" - the logic of which I still struggle to understand.

But it does make you think. Encountering attitudes like that make it a lot easier to understand why people keep buying Windows. Despite all the BSODs, the viruses, the malware, the need for firewalls and defrag tools, they still maintain that Windows is the best OS.

No viruses? That's just because it's a smaller target! - You can accept this argument, at least, even if you don't agree with it.

But when the best response they can come up with is outright denial of the possibility that Linux just doesn't have some of the problems Windows does? Even if the alternative is free and has legions of admirers, they'll refuse to even consider trying it.

Some people deserve to be stuck with Microsoft products. I wish them all the joy that Vista can bring them. And their bank manager ;o)

There's another post on slashdot about global warming. Not that that's rare, altho unusually I do encourage you to read the article (New Scientist) because some of it is actually quite thought-provoking. Like "Plant and animal life puts 440gt on CO2 into the air, humans put 26.5gt into it. And CO2 only accounts for maybe 20% of the greenhouse effect. But humans are still the big cause of too-fast global warming." - if this doesn't make you appreciate the complexities of the subject and want to know more, nothing will.

But the rare occurrence I mention is that a link from one of the /. posts on the topic actually made me laugh. It was to this cartoon and whilst the art isn't up to much, I have to say the punchline cracked me up.

By pure coincidence, I was looking at the website of one of the UK's better-known politicians, Boris Johnson - It was linked from a Register story on an electric car - and on one of the forum threads on his website, where they're discussing global warming (as all politicians do these days) there's a line that a lot of environmentalists and green politicians would benefit from keeping in mind, IMHO.

It's on the subject of the efforts made to cut down on or eliminate our use of fossil fuels:
the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone

We stopped using stone for everything because we found better replacements. Similarly, if they really want people to stop using fossil fuels, they'll do a hell of a lot better if they offer an alternative that people actually want.

Tired old example tho it may be: We're happy to use low-energy lightbulbs because they're cheaper, longer-lasting, and just as good at doing their job as the conventional ones. Ergo we buy them and consume less resources, and not because we've been hammered with "The end is nigh" messages. And taxes.

*sigh*

The Beeb usually does better than this. I'm disappointed, I confess. More than one-third of business software used by companies around the world is pirated, they tell us.

They may even be right. But the conclusions they draw aren't very good. Not at all.

Firstly, the whole report is based on data from the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Would you believe, Microsoft is a member of this one. The BSA is also a supporter of software patents, and has been heavily criticised for its aggressive tactics and the yearly study it publishes about copyright infringement of software - i.e. the previous versions of this very report.

They have a track record of being accused of flawed, overestimated figures. No mention of that from the Beeb when they talk about those selfsame numbers.

They do grudgingly admit that "some nations, such as China, had made big inroads into the amount of illegal software companies were using" but go on to say that this is due to a "commitment from the Chinese government to only use licenced software itself and tougher regulations to make companies buy licences"

Right. . . It's all down to China behaving itself and buying more licenses. And nothing at all to do with, say, software that doesn't need licenses. China isn't a fan of Linux at all, and FOSS isn't a boom industry there at all. No. They're just ponying up with cash for MS, that's all.

See what I mean? It reads like a propaganda piece. The BBC is very well aware of Linux and FOSS, why has it published this piece of garbage?

In fairness, they have got one true gem of a quote from the BSA's vice-chair: "the industry could only go so far to lock down its products before interoperability suffered."

How very true. Somebody should have mentioned that to the Vista guys, it could have made their lives a lot easier

There's an interesting post on one of Sun's blogs in response to MS's recent patent FUD.

Sun still has its issues with FOSS, but nobody can say that they haven't contributed a lot. OpenOffice and Java, for starters. And the post has some advice for Microsoft that they'd be very, very well-advised to take.

Essentially, the article boils down to: Sun was badly threatened by Linux and FOSS too once. Instead of threatening our own customers to make them stay with us, we improved our game, took advantage of what FOSS had to offer, and here we are back on track: We have products that our customers want to buy from us.

MS is clearly panicking: Vista's sales are lousy and the barriers to switching to Linux are falling one by one: It's easier to install than Windows; it's going to be available pre-installed from a major vendor like Windows; It's got better hardware support than Windows; Gamers are switching from PCs to consoles so the lack of games doesn't matter much. And so on.

There was a time when MS could say "It's our way or the highway" - when you had to use MS Office because everybody ELSE used MS Office. MS was an island, isolated from everybody. But that was OK, because it was a big island and almost everybody lived on it - in fact, they were trapped on it.

But now they're not such a big island, and there's a lot of people living elsewhere. And there's all these annoying people building bridges between the two so the people living on MS's island can freely leave it. Multi-platform software like OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Public standards like XHTML, PDF, and ODF.

Nobody has to live on MS's island if they don't want to. MS can peddle FUD about how dangerous the bridges are and how undesireable life outside of their island is as much as they like, they can't stop people from crossing the bridges and seeing that it's a lot better away from their island.

Their only hope is to stop threatening people, stop acting like their island is as secure as it always was, and make it instead an island where people actually want to live.

Sun is one of MS' business partners. They've been through the exact "Linux is eating away at our customer base" situation as MS is having right now. They made the right choices and their customer base is growing again. Linux is now a valuable ally instead of an enemy.

MS could learn a lot from their example. Question is, will they?

1. Invest heavily in furniture (particularly chair) manufacturers in the vicinity of Redmond.

2. Be a big FOSS supporter/seller like Red Hat or IBM, and sue MS for slander over their claims that you are illegally infringing on their patents - so MS have to give details of all 235 of them to prove they weren't lying.

3. Profit

Two fairly big stories surfaced in the last day or two.

Firstly, ATI, recently taken over by the FOSS-friendly AMD, announced that they were going to release open-source drivers for their graphics cards.

There are basically three big players in graphics. Intel, which are good for basic uses but not for hardcore gamers. These have open-source drivers. NVIDIA, which are good for serious gamers and have what are reckoned as the best closed-source Linux drivers. And ATI, who pretty much equal NVIDIA in performance but have a less-good reputation for their closed-source drivers.

On the other hand, there are open-source drivers for some of ATI's older cards.

To be fair, ATI have been trying to improve their Linux drivers recently, with some success. But binary drivers can only get so good, so if they carry through with this, it'll be very good news: Decent drivers for Linux, plus it puts a BIG incentive on NVIDIA to do the same thing.

With 3D desktops becoming all the rage, it's more important than ever that the drivers be where everybody can get at them.

The other news is that Red Hat has just released some new fonts. This *is* important, because right now, too many of the standard fonts are MS-owned and can't be legally distributed with a distro. Fonts like Ariel and Times New Roman are too widespread to be unsupported.

Red Hat has finally taken away the need to use MS fonts by releasing their own equivalents under the GPL. I gather that they aren't fully anti-aliased yet, but the support for this is coming soon.

So RH deserves a big thank-you for what I know is a tedious and largely thankless task that will nonetheless make many default Linux desktops look just that little bit nicer. . .

It looks like Microsoft is finally giving up on its constant vague "Linux infringes our patents" warnings and moving to the next level: They're finally going to get into some specifics.

235 patents, they say, are infringed by FOSS projects. At long last, they're getting out of the empty generalities. A bit, anyway. It's actually quite a low number, considering how many thousands of patents MS owns.

They clearly don't have much faith in them, either. And they lie when they say, with all the piety they can cram in, that it's not vindictive or anti-competitiveness, it's a "matter of principle" - FOSS has to "play by the same rules as the rest of the business," says Ballmer.

Both are shown to be false by the simple fact that MS won't reveal what any of the patents are: "Gutierrez refuses to identify specific patents or explain how they're being infringed, lest FOSS advocates start filing challenges to them."

If their only worry is that FOSS isn't playing fair, then just saying "These are the patents you're infringing, either work around them or get the patents ruled invalid" would be the way to go. And if they had faith in the validity of the patents, they wouldn't have any reason to prevent the FOSS community from challenging them.

Reading further through the article, however, makes it clear what the point of this is. They want money from all the big companies that are using Linux, and that means threats of patent infringement. Like the Linux community, such places aren't going to take an MS claim of "It infringes lots, honest." very seriously, certainly not enough to stump up large sums of cash for patent cross-licensing. So MS is going to have to show them the patents, probably under NDA knowing them.

MS knows all too well what the result of a genuine patent war against FOSS would be: It would lose. The few patents that weren't ruled invalid (And if would only be a few - see a recent court decision on patents) would simply be coded-around so that the FOSS project(s) in question didn't infringe any more.

Result: MS would lose a bunch of their patents, and lose forever its "FOSS infringes our patents, so leave the free stuff alone and buy ours instead" FUD. To say nothing of the extra ammo it would hand the anti-competitive lawsuits that are already troubling them.

Frankly, I was more worried the last time I sneezed than I am by this latest patent nonsense from MS.

There was a run of Dilbert strips a while ago in which the company sold a bunch of keyboards that lacked the letter 'Q'. Dogbert wrote the apology script for the PHB. Going entirely from memory, it went like this:

It was wrong of us to sell keyboards without a letter Q. We're sorry. We're morons. We're dumber than squirrels. We hear voices and do what they say. I have broccoli in my socks.

This was the strip that went through my head when I read about some MS bloke attacking the Wii. Apparently, it's "not a great product" - in spite of the fact that it's flying off the shelves.

What makes him say this? Well, how can anybody take a GAMES CONSOLE seriously when it can't play MOVIES???

Seriously. He actually says that. A games console is only a good games console if it does non-games things like playing DVDs. You can tell he's a Microsoftie: only in Redmond do you find people who think that the best dedicated-purpose machine is the one that does a load of superfluous other things as well. The Xbox is a better games machine because all the Wii can do is play games. That's a real handicap in a games console, you know.

But the main problem, of course, is that while Microsoft created a new console by doing nothing more than blowing millions entirely on getting better graphics out of hardware that they sell at a loss, Nintendo created a completely different way of playing games and built it into a box that was cheap enough to make that they sell it at a profit.

The 360 does nothing more than play the same games as its predecessor, only with higher numbers of polygons, pixels, and FPS. That was all their investment in R&D could come up with. More of the same, only with a higher price tag.

The Wii, in contrast, came up with something genuinely new and innovative, with no requirements for cutting-edge (and therefore expensive) high-powered hardware. They realized something that the games industry has been ignoring for too long: Games need to be fun to play, not pretty to look at. Eye candy is a bonus, not the Holy Grail.

# A fun game with rubbish graphics will sell - remember space invaders? Pacman? Tetris?

# A fun game with better graphics will sell more. Doom wasn't the first ever FPS, but it was a huge leap ahead in terms of graphics.

So it's true that graphics are important. But what they seem to ignore is that:

# A crap game with superb graphics is still a crap game.

I've got Doom 1, 2, and 3. I mostly play 2 - it's got more levels, more weapons, and more monsters than 1. It's not got anywhere near the graphics of 3. But that's irrelevant because it's more fun to play. Graphics just aren't enough.

So I daresay MS is viewing the Wii with green-eyed envy as they sell their own best effort at a substantial loss and try to make an uninteresting cosmetic improvement sound like a radical new invention.

If only Dogbert were around to write a press release for them. . .

It was wrong of us to sell hardware for less than it costs us to make it. We're sorry we can't make an innovative product. We're morons. We're dumber than our helpful paperclip. We see sales go down and can't think of anything more than trying to make our games look prettier. I have a Zune in my socks.

Just weeks after Dell decides to start selling Linux PCs, ATI announces their determination to finally fix the problems with their Linux graphics drivers.

An uncanny coincidence? Or could it be that, exactly as I predicted, manufacturers are suddenly going to worry about Linux compatibility if they want Dell to keep buying their stuff?

Some people say Dell wants Linux PCs to fail. They might be right, I don't know, or really care. The simple fact that they say they're going to sell Linux will be enough of a scare for every major PC component manufacturer that they'll take Linux support a lot more seriously.

Right, let's see... chronological order would probably work best...

In order to get onto my place at university, a prerequisite is spending two weeks in schools observing first. Don't ask me why, when we spend most of the year-long course in schools anyway, it just is. So I wrote to every school in the local area asking if they could grant me a few days. I got one reply, which was "No" - the rest ignored me.

Helpful. So I wrote to one of the women who'd run the "taster course" I went on in January: They were, she had insisted back then, here to help. Maybe she could suggest some schools that were more likely to say "Yes"?

Well, maybe she could, but as the weeks ticked by it seemed unlikely. Then finally I got a reply - she'd been out of the office due to a broken foot. So that was a ray of hope. She asked me what sort of distance I could travel and how many days I still needed to do and so on, I wrote back and haven't heard anything since.

Whilst waiting, I figured I might as well try and get the funding part out of the way: There are grants and bursaries out there to apply for. And absolutely no clue anywhere as to how to go about it. In the end, I picked a phone number I knew was wrong, explained my problem to the nice lady who answered me, and she put me through to the right number. They pointed me at the website I needed to sign up with.

I tried to register at this website, but it claimed I already had. So I phoned them up and asked what they were talking about.

Apparently, I have had an account with them since 1995, when I first went to university. This is when I lived in a different county and didn't know what "email" was. And, being that it was before the dot-com boom, they hadn't known what a website was, either. But they'd modernised since then, and created accounts for all their PAST accounts while they were at it. Without ever thinking of actually telling the owners of those accounts, you understand.

So I got them to tell me my ID number, and between us we worked out which address they had for me (They couldn't tell me, and I had half a dozen to work through.) Then I told them my current email address, because I hadn't had one twelve years ago, which they put onto the system for me, and I was finally then able to work my way through all the possible combinations of my name and place of birth (With middle name, or without? A comma between town & county, or not? etc.) on their website's "Lost your password?" form in order to get it to send me a new password to replace the one I had never actually been issued with before.

The email came through, and I was at last able to log on and set up my various details correctly. Now it was time to fill in the forms.

Three hours later (No joke, no exaggeration) I finished, and submitted the data. They have now written to Lou, because they want to know all about her salary before they decide on how much of a grant I get. This means that she has to go through the exact same rigmarole as I did to get access to her online account, since she also has an account that was created after she graduated but was never told about.

They have also asked me to provide them with two lots of evidence to prove my claims are true: My passport, to prove I'm me - weird, since they've known me for twelve years; and all my share certificates or dividend statements to prove that my "unearned income" assessment is correct, which would be so much easier if I had any shares. Since my only unearned income is the occasional pound or two of interest my bank gives me when it's in a good mood, this could prove tricky.

In the meantime, neither of us has been sleeping very well because one of the springs in our mattress has broken and started poking through. Not a huge issue, you might say, as we can turn it over. True, except it's gone through on that side as well, and we have a "miracoil" system, which means there aren't a whole bunch of springs: There's one continuous length of wire that is bent into all the individual springs. This means that one break is all it takes to knacker half the mattress.

So it's crumpled and pointy and generally uncomfortable. We've made it tolerable by laying a sheet of cordura (very tough, puncture-resistant fabric) I had laying around on top of the mattress, and then put our spare quilt over the cordura, and finally the bedsheet over the whole lot. We've made it through the last week or two this way, and the new mattress should arrive tomorrow.

We might have opted to inflate our camping beds and give the whole thing a miss in order to get a good night's sleep, if only we hadn't had the other problem: Our block of flats has a system of vents leading to the kitchen and bathroom - both of which have no windows, you see. They replaced the whole roof-based system recently as the existing one was broken. This involved replacing the three small fans that were working on the three separate vents with one big one.

We live on the top storey of the flats. The power supply to the roof runs up on the other side of our bathroom wall. See if you can guess where they situated the large, noisy fan?

For the first day or two, the fan wasn't fully-connected, so we had a rare chance to enjoy all the smells of our downstairs neighbours as they wafted through the vents, whilst enjoying the experience of a nausea-inducing vibration coming down from the roof. Our neighbours smoke, and Lou has lung damage, so it's not a happy situation.

But then they got the fan fully-connected, and the smell died away as the air was sucked out of the flat rather than drifting into it. It is most definitely being sucked out. You could under no circumstances fail to appreciate this whilst standing in the bathroom, unless you were rather forgetful and assumed that you were in fact using a bathroom adjoining a large ship's engine room. It genuinely is THAT noisy.

So we got one of the Resident's Committee people in, and she agreed it was too noisy and must be sorted. She called the landlord, and he popped round and agreed it was too noisy. He phoned the people who had installed it, and asked them (a) why it was so noisy, and (b) why the Hell they had installed it directly above his flat?

So now we understand that the fan still needs to be "properly tuned" which will involve slowing it down, which will change the frequency of the vibration so that we'll hopefully no longer be made physically sick by it, and also result in quieter, possibly even silent running.

Which will be a great relief to us, and also mean that we don't have to keep going out into the hall and flicking the switch on the power supply to shut the damn thing down overnight so we can get what sleep is still possible on our broken mattress.

This has the downside of meaning that the place reeks of smoke come morning, but it's about our only option until they fix (and, with any luck, move) the blasted thing.

So all-in-all, this isn't going to go down as one of the happiest periods of our life, really. I'm maintaining my usual sunny disposition by gloating over how badly things are going to screw up at work in a few months time (after I and several of my co-workers have already left) as a result of particularly PHB-style management.

It's not doing much for the spirits of my less-nimble colleagues who are still going to be working in an understaffed office when a whole load of bad decisions land on them, of course, but you can't please everybody

Many people want to lose weight and get fitter.

Many people commute to their place of work on trains.

Many people who want to exercise thus spend hours every week sitting around with nothing to do.

Solution: Put extra carriages on trains and fit them out as gyms - a few jogging &rowing machines is about all you'd really need.

Hundreds/thousands of commuters get more exercise, train companies make more money, and they free up a few seats on the train as well. Plus people get to claim "I jogged from London to Birmingham yesterday"

Everybody who's heard this has said "What a great idea! I'd use it!" so there's clearly a market there.

So there you go, British Rail. Don't say I never did anything for you.

I've seen a few mutterings that Dell is deliberately trying to make selling Linux fail by only putting it on low-spec machines: If you've got blisteringly-good Vista performance and Linux that just grinds along, they say, how is it possible to compete?

Well... Let's face it, nobody has yet encountered the mythical beast that is "fast Vista" . But XP can run pretty well, and Dell are still offering that, so the point still stands.

Or does it?

No.

Allow me to explain: As I have (notoriously) said before, Linux is not Windows - and neither are its hardware requirements.

I have a laptop. It's an HP nc4000. This is a rather old model, it has a 1.6GHz Pentium CPU and low-end integrated ATI 340M graphics. It arrived pre-installed with Windows XP, and it was painful to use. Slow performance, and the hard drive never stopped paging. Ever.

Dell is apparently going to offer Linux on the Inspiron notebooks. The cheapest of which is the 1501, and the lowest-spec of which is a 1.8GHz 64-bit AMD with ATI RADEON® Xpress1150 256MB graphics.

I imagine this will struggle a bit to run Vista with its aero interface, and may not be all that fast with even XP. And this is going to run Ubuntu?

Yes. It is. Because my crappy old laptop, despite being the lowest-powered computer in the house, is running Ubuntu Feisty right now, with absolutely no problems. It has an occasional hiccup with the 3D desktop, admittedly, but other than that its performance would be considered perfectly adequate by any modern PC user.

A faster, newer, 64-bit CPU? It'll run like blazes!

Dell is putting Ubuntu on low-end machines because they CAN. Vista is the resource hog, the "Spend thousands or watch it crawl" OS. Ubuntu is Linux: It doesn't need high-end hardware, so why bother selling it on high-end hardware?

Why not instead say "Buy a $600 laptop with Ubuntu and get the same performance as a $2000 laptop with Vista" and see how many people suddenly decide that maybe that Linux thing is worth a try after all?

I daresay most geeks will have seen reports on Ballmer's apparent attack on the iPhone:

There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

Naturally, a lot of people have attacked him as "Not getting it" - Hell, Apple themselves have said that their target is one percent of the global market. Apple would be happy with ONE, and Ballmer says they'll fail and "only" get two or three. Good work, monkey boy...

(He also HUGELY overstates the amount of market share MS has on phones - 60-70%? In your DREAMS!)

But that's not, actually, what shows that Ballmer, and Microsoft, still just don't get it. Even the claim that Vista won't be the last Windows OS doesn't show that.

No, the quote you really need to look at is a bit further down:

We're in the Windows Mobile business. We wouldn't define our phone experience just by music. A phone is really a general purpose device.

Gahhhhhh! What is WRONG with you?? Why can't you get rid of this terrible mindset??

The world does not need, or want, yet more different-shaped, hard-to-use boxes running Windows. Did the Zune not make that clear? Marketed as an MP3 player that ALSO browsed the Web, did social networking, had high-def video playback, and virtually anything else Windows can do.

How has it done in competition with the totally-music-oriented iPod? Most of the world hasn't even heard of a Zune. Because it's a crappy, hard-to-use general-purpose box running Windows. Not even close to competing with an iPod.

Why can't they understand this? Why is their sole method of competing to cram as many features as possible onto a product?

They get occasional flashes that make you think "At last, they get it!" - the original Xbox. The focus on making Office easier to use instead of just cramming in yet more features. News articles devoted to explaining how MS is showing signs of an awareness that it needs to change to survive.

And then they let Ballmer out of his cage, and you get products like Vista - "Hardware-hungry XP SP3 with eye candy" marketed as a revolutionary new OS. The world is divided into people who don't know anything about it, and people who think it's a joke. If you look really, really hard, you might find a tiny number of people who know all about it and think it's good. (But you shouldn't let them write a book about it)

There are people who still believe the world is flat, too. I'm still waiting to hear about one single feature Vista has that makes it worth the cost of an upgrade. Given that Dell's reaction to Vista was to restart selling XP and invest in Linux support, I'm not alone in that view.

Maybe if the "Vista plus one" that Ballmer mentions throws out the "Cram in more features" mindset, Microsoft will be saved - He promises it'll be out in just a few years, so they've clearly written Vista off as a big flop already.

When KDE 4 comes out, it'll be running on a library that has lower system requirements than its predecessor. You won't need to buy new hardware because what you've already got will work BETTER with the new version. Contrast that with Vista.

When I installed the latest Ubuntu, the only thing I could point out as a "new feature" was the automated installation of codecs & drivers when I needed them. I genuinely can't tell you anything else that's changed, and yet I'm preferring my clapped-out laptop over my lovingly hand-made desktop right now, purely because it's 7.04 vs. 6.06. Both look and act the same in every noticeable way, but Feisty is quicker and easier in dozens of barely-noticeable ways. And still has the same hardware requirements.

FOSS projects take OUT complexity and as a result give you better performance for the same resources. Microsoft can't get their heads around this idea, and instead insist on you giving them ever-more resources so they can shove in ever-more complexity in the names of "user-friendly" and "general purpose"

If Ballmer & co. can't shake off this mindset (or get replaced with people who can), with Linux and Apple and Sun and ODF and all the rest snapping at their heels, they're in real trouble. And the world just wouldn't be the same if the geeks didn't have their "Great Satan" to complain about as the cause of their every problem.

Or, "Cursed to have to actually pay for advertising"?

Slashdot links to a story in which a few businessmen complain that, following their websites being mislabelled by Google's algorithms as spam-type sites, they lost huge chunks of revenue as they ceased to show up on the first few pages of Google searches.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it hard to have sympathy for these guys. In this context, Google is essentially providing free advertising. All they're seeing when Google reassigns their pages are the effects of having a business that nobody knows about because it doesn't advertise.

They could reclaim their "As seen on Google's first page" status easily, by spending the cash to buy an advertising slot on it. The people in the article sell diamonds. Plugging "diamonds" in as a search term yields the following ten results (using google.co.uk):

• Wikipedia
• Diamonds.com
• Original-diamonds.com
• approveddiamonds.com
• 4csdiamonds.com
• diamondgeezer.com
• qualitydiamonds.co.uk
• thediamondjeweller.co.uk
• cooldiamonds.com
• dejoria.co.uk

However, the top and side of the page, where the adverts are, link to:

• CoolDiamonds.com
• jf-k.com/diamonds
• purelydiamonds.co.uk
• bluenile.co.uk
• diamondgeezer.com
• RageStones.com
• zsdiamonds.com
• 77diamonds.com
• diamondsonweb.com
• TheDiamondStore.co.uk

Only two are on both lists. So all the other diamond sellers in the second list are probably doing a pretty good trade courtesy of links from Google, even though they aren't in the first page of results.

I'm sure the guys in the first list aren't complaining that they're getting the same amount of exposure for free, but their place is (as Forbes reports) considerably less secure.

If your business relies on people seeing you when they do a Google search, perhaps you should consider actually paying to make sure they DO see you?

Failing that, you could at least not whine about Google damaging your business when they stop giving you a top-spot for free.

Having said that, I'm frequently on the first page of Google's results, particularly if the search is something along the lines of "linux windows", so:

>--- This Space for rent --<

. . . absolutely nobody, I'd imagine: it looks like Dell will go with Ubuntu when they start selling Linux PCs.

It was the logical choice: Unlike Debian, Gentoo, Slackware & co, it's run by a businessman and so less prone to internal politics; and unlike Suse, Red Hat & co, it's completely free.

Yeah, I know, there's free (as in beer) distros available from Novell & RH, but that's beside the point. With Ubuntu, there's no difference between what home users download for free and what companies pay to install & run. AFAIK, OpenSUSE and Fedora can't make that claim.

And besides, a standard Ubuntu install uses less resources than a standard install of the others, because of the "One app. per task" philosophy. (I mostly like this, but when it means you don't get Firefox if you install Kubuntu because Konqueror is already there. . .)

And at the risk of getting flamed for saying so, RPMs still aren't as good as apt-get. Frankly, after the 'fun' I had with Red Hat a few years ago, I'd take manually compiling from source over RPM. I did just that, in fact, when I used LFS for a while...

Mind you, I'll be surprised if Dell's Ubuntu is completely standard. Whatever else you may say about Ubuntu's desktop, you can't say it's exciting. Why, why, why did they decide brown and grey would be the best colours for a desktop??? Vista is as ugly as sin, but at least the wallpaper makes it look excitingly new and interesting.

Until you start the first app, anyway.