Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend

Posted by John Munsch at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The world's biggest dumbass has released Harry Potter early and he did it in a way that pretty much only helps those who want to spoil it for everybody and won't help anyone who actually wants to read it protect themselves. There is a huge ZIP file (72.5M) with a photo of every two page spread in the book. Now, lest you think the results are readable, they aren't. If you squint real hard you could probably make out what all the words in these low res photos are, but they are taken obliquely with a hand in the image holding the book open and the pages are way overexposed. So basically the idiots who want to scan through the book to figures out who dies and any other major spoilers are free to do so and start spreading them everywhere. Anyone who wants to read it will need to wait patiently for the printed edition or else risk blindness from trying to read this mess.

If you are wise you will be very very careful of where you go on the net in the next four days.

Posted by John Munsch at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Occasionally you read blog entries from people where they wonder aloud why Microsoft can be so easily bashed despite being so widely used. They seem genuinely puzzled that if anyone bashes Linux or Google similarly then a huge weight of fanboys decends upon them to berate them immediately via email and comments.

Well, if you're one of those people, pull up a chair and listen while I explain one of the reasons we get to bash Microsoft and will continue to do so until the day they change their ways (likely never).

You see recently there has been a big controversy in the Microsoft .NET development community about the availability of TestDriven.NET for Visual Studio Express. What the tool is and what it does is unimportant. What is important is why Microsoft chose to use lawyers to threaten the guy who makes this add-in available. It's because he made it available for not just the commercial software development tools they sell but also for the free version called "Visual Studio Express". This blog entry by a Microsoft employee over the Visual Studio Express product sums it all up with a lovely amount of double-speak: http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/05/31/visual-studio-express-and-testdriven-net.aspx

You see, in their eyes this is the way it had to be. At the end of the day, "Microsoft is a business", and that means they have to charge an arm and a leg for their "real" development tools (the ones that allow plugins that is). The free ones are just a favor for you and you should be damn grateful that they condescend to allow you to develop for Windows at all without paying them a fee for the privilege. It's probably best to ignore that IBM, Sun, Red-Hat, Google, and Yahoo are also businesses and successful ones who give away development tools all the time. "Microsoft is a business" and in the end, this is "a perfectly reasonable tradeoff to make that, in the end, provides the best tools possible to an entire class of customer that may never have picked up programming without it".

You know what? If people really want to write programs and they really want the best tools they should go get the Java development kit from Sun where they will give you an excellent IDE + development tools + documentation + application servers for free or go get Ruby on Rails and again get the software that they need to do excellent real development without someone treating handing them a crippled junior version of the tools as a huge favor.

Here's the links you need so you can avoid the developing anything using Microsoft's development tools. You won't be paying for Visual Studio or Universal this or suffer from only one buggy version of things being available. I did that time already for years on end and I'm here to testify like a preacher in a tent. Stay away from their garbage, there are better ways:

Sun's Netbean's IDE + the Java 6.0 Development Kit

Ruby on Rails

Posted by John Munsch at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Everybody had their own eulogy for Jerry Falwell's death, but this article does it the best. It's just his own words.

Posted by John Munsch at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, actually, not just Amazon thinks you're a sucker. So do all the major TV networks and the MPAA as well. See, they're all convinced that worthless services like the new Amazon.com Unbox Video are going to get you to pay just as much for a digital file that takes a long time to download, won't play on your TV, and you can't burn to a DVD as you would pay for the DVD of that same material!

Doesn't that make perfect sense to you? Just plunk down $13.45 and get either:

• Office Space - Special Edition with Flair on DVD and watch it on your TV or rip it using software to play on your iPod or other portable device. Watch deleted scenes, extras, etc. Even make a backup DVD you can put in your safety deposit box so you don't lose $1000 worth of movies if your house burns.
• Office Space - Next to Useless Edition and play it on one and only one PC (the one you downloaded it onto). You can also dump it to an approved portable device (translation, not an iPod, not anything that more than five people actually own).

Yes, it's a hard decision. I'm sure sales will be brisk.

Posted by John Munsch at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nicholas Negroponte wants to get laptop computers to kids throughout the world who do not have computer access today. His means to do so is a $100 laptop which the MIT Media Lab has designed and which various manufacturers and other contributors have lined up to help shepard into existence.

But not everybody is happy about this. Take for example Intel: Wired News: Intel: Poor Want 'Real' Computers

The gist of Intel's remarks is basically that a laptop with a megapixel screen, 500Mhz processor, wi-fi networking, and 1Gb of memory isn't a "real" computer. After all, processors in desktops these days start around 2Ghz (4x), they run Windows rather than Linux, and they have hard drives. Best of all, about half of them have Intel Inside! (insert bing bing bing bum notes).

This is about the saddest form of sour grapes I've ever seen. Both Apple and Microsoft approached the group about running OS X or Windows rather than Linux because if this succeeds it will obviously be a big boon for Linux. In the course of just a few years, Linux's share of the world OS market could increase dramatically and it could be second nail in the coffins of these two OS powerhouses (the first nail being the success that Linux has already had in the server environment). But Apple and Microsoft haven't chosen to make disparaging comments about the project.

But Intel is feeling threatened because not only are their processors not in the laptops but also, their major competitor AMD has signed on as a whole hearted backer of the project and has dumped a couple of million dollars in as well: The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality. Likewise Dell has chimed in with their negative comments, "It's important that a computer prepare students for the applications they'll be using after they get out of school."

What computers are those going to be in developing countries like Thailand, Brazil, Sri Lanka, etc.? The latest Alienware PC, a high end Dell desktop, or what? Are the kids going to turn up their noses at a laptop because it won't play Quake 3 or because the unit doesn't include a hard drive to hold their MP3 collection?

In a word, this is malarky. Any box that meets these specs will be ten times what my Palm handheld is, and that is a useful device already. This will have a full sized screen and a real operating system that will handle browsing the web where one connection can be gotten and shared among many students. Editing a paper, sending an email, playing a game, or many other uses. With the USB connections built into the box you can hook it to external storage so the kids can save their work. This is a real computer and real people will be better off when it is available.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This isn't my rant, it belongs to someone else but I can't find much to it that I disagree with.

I don't usually post doom-and-gloom predictions from anybody, I don't usually find much believable about them. But this time I have to wonder what we are going to get from the next generation of gaming consoles that is going to make everybody want to move to them and how are we going to get out of a rut where eight of the top ten selling titles for October are sequels to existing games.

Posted by John Munsch at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Want to see what's passing for commentary over at ZDNet these days (Ziff Davis is the parent of such well known magazines as PC Magazine). Check out John Caroll's blog over there. Here's a quick summary of some of his recent missives, "Isn't DRM great?", "Too much open source software is a bad thing", and "Anti-trust, monopoly, surely you aren't talking about us?".

Hysterically funny. This is journalism now? ZDNet has seen fit to have a limited number of bloggers (fewer than 20) who they feature but this thing from a Microsoft employee makes the cut. Great choice there.

Here's a particularly good example, "Okay, opponents of Microsoft will still hate us because we are the biggest and baddest boy on the block (and we rock)." Gosh, maybe they hate you because you've been ruled a monopoly that violated the law? Or maybe it's because your company has been found in violation of the law several other times? Does Stac ring a bell? How about the whole Sun Java thing that resulted in $2B in settlement? Or, or, how about this, that Microsoft only recently re-discovered that their browser hasn't been updated in years because they lost a significant amount of market share to a free competitor but until then they were perfectly happy to limp along with garbage that never was upgraded? Or, because they continue to charge thousands of dollars for the development tools required to develop software for their OS? Or any of fifty other reasons I can think of. WE ROCK?!? Substitute another word for rock there.

If Ziff-Davis wants to maintain a shred of credibility they need to dump this blog. If I were Steve Gillmor or John C. Dvorak I would insist on him being booted simply because being considered on the same level as this is damaging to ones reputation.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK. Microsoft is going to release something next year and call it a new operating system. It may not have much new in it, in fact every day that passes it seems to have less and less new in it. For example, they have taken out their new scripting shell called Monad, they took out their enhanced file system called WinFS, they dropped their fancy sidebar that was going to house all kinds of neat tools, and that's not nearly all the stuff they've removed to make sure it ships next year.

So, you ask yourself, "What is a high priority for them? Obviously Microsoft must be pouring time and resources into something else really cool that we are going to get that will come with the OS since they are dropping other features left and right." The answer is "digital rights management" or DRM for short. It will let you buy the new Microsoft excuse for an OS and be sure that if you get some kind of high definition video from somewhere that you won't be able to play it with the monitor you have today. NO!!! That would be too insecure. Someone might be able to connect something to the pinouts and record a high quality version of that high definition and make it available to other people. Instead, the supplier of video or audio should be able to dictate whether you can output to a plain old monitor or the video quality should be chopped down before you can watch it. Or maybe you can spend a bunch of money to buy an expensive new monitor with special DRM circuitry in it. Then you can't steal that signal! The monitor won't be one bit better than the one you had before, but you can buy it all over again and pay a lot more for it.

That is what Microsoft is prioritizing for Microsoft Vista. CNET had a quote of the day yesterday from a product manager at Microsoft, "The table is already set," said Marcus Matthias. "We can come in and eat at the buffet, or we can stand outside and wash cars." Their priority is pleasing Hollywood, not with improving their incredibly bad operating system.

Look for another five to ten years of viruses, adware, zombie machines, and every other kind of sad illness for your machine and millions of others. Microsoft was not happy with how slowly individuals and businesses moved to XP. In the case of many businesses they never (as in never ever) managed to force them to upgrade from Windows 2000. Since the only avenue they have for forcing you to take a new OS is a new machine sale where they can twist the hardware sellers arm and say that they can't have the old OS anymore they are having to resort to saying that you can't have the new version of Internet Explorer ("Now at least 2/3rds as good as Firefox!") unless you upgrade. But with less and less in the way of new features included with Vista to actually entice people and businesses to upgrade, expect them to start turning more to forcing upgrades and other means of making money. What will those new revenue streams be?

1. Stop supportting older operating systems no matter how popular they are. I mentioned above that many users and businesses still use Windows 2000. They have to make that stop so they are saying it has reached its "end-of-life". They can discontinue making patches for it to fix bugs or stop worms, etc.
2. Charging for support, patches, and "protection money".
3. Add even more authentication mechanisms to the operating system to get rid of pirated copies. Make sure that fixes for all the problems in their software are only available through the "Windows Genuine Advantage". That "Advantage" is that people who own a legitimate copy of XP can get to the patches for their swiss cheese OS.
4. Cosy up to Hollywood/the RIAA and hope to make money buy charging them to encode the video/audio in a way you can't copy it. Then, they make money from you and them.

Don't you want to rush out and buy it? Well, whether you do or don't want to, they're going to do everything in their power to make sure you don't get a choice. You'll either get it on a new machine or they'll stop supporting whatever you have now so you have to buy something new.

Not cursing during the course of writing this took incredible restraint...

Posted by John Munsch at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The article (picked up by numerous papers) Chicago Tribune | The Blake verdict and the 'CSI effect' is an interesting one. Well worth reading if, like me, you haven't bothered to follow yet another celebrity trial.

The part I particularly want to point out as a passage is this:

"Prosecutors across the country are very concerned about this." Marquis found it disturbing that Blake jurors "seemed very dismissive of circumstantial evidence," he said. "Well guess what? In most cases . . . you don't have physical evidence."

Um, then you shouldn't be getting a conviction. There are reasons why "beyond reasonable doubt" is enshrined in law as a protection against taking away someone's freedom. If you have proof that they did it, present it. They should go to jail and in all likelihood will do so. If all you have is circumstantial evidence then they may well get off... and they should.

I wasn't there at the crime scene. Neither were you. If the evidence given by the people who were there and the physical evidence are together not conclusive, you have to err on the side of innocence. Just because all the prosecutors "feel it in their gut" and the family has latched onto someone to blame just to have a focus for their anger, doesn't make it so.

Posted by John Munsch at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

These days, Apple is taking shots at Real (because Real has broken the lock on the iPod) and Real at Apple (for Apple not "opening up" the iPod to others) and now Microsoft at Apple (same rationale as Real). But it's all pretty much um, well, I won't use that word here. But it's not truthful and this article does an excellent job of pointing out just how misleading Microsoft is being on their website:
Daring Fireball: You Can Choose Any Color You Want, as Long as It's Black

At present, I love iTunes and I digitized every album Rockelle and I have into it. I plan to get an iPod sooner or later because they clearly have their act together on user interface, which is more than I can say for the RioVolt MP3 CD Player I own, or the Rio memory based player I used to own, or the Real One software I've used to play music and books on my Palm. One of the reasons I love the iTunes music store is that I can buy music and then I can use Hymn to unlock it. It is then well and truly mine. I paid for it and they can't tell me what I can do with it ever again.

Run everything you hear from all these companies through a filter:

1. Every time someone accuses Apple of not "opening up" the iPod, call them LIARS. The iPod is plenty open to the MP3 format, which is available to everyone. The truth is that they just won't have their "digital rights management" (code words for you never owning music again) in place on the file if they sell you an MP3.
2. Apple is not your friend either. They would love it if Hymn did not exist and they didn't have any competition in either the player or the online music sales arenas.
3. Any time any of the companies gets righteous about you the consumer and your ability to choose, know that they are only unhappy that they don't occupy the position of Apple at the moment. And if they did hold that position, their goal would be to figure out how to squeeze every possible penny from the situation.
4. Napster isn't Napster anymore. They are pathetic suits who purchased a logo and a name and they know and care as much about music as they care about the people who detail their cars. There is nothing indie, or authentic, or anything about them. Do not pay for their service and if your school is trying to ram it down your throat, you ram right back. They need to go out of business a second time.
5. Ditto Wal-Mart's music download service. The quicker that fails the better.

Posted by John Munsch at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(click to enlarge)

Apparently this is what passes for political discourse now. I passed this thing at a major intersection on my way home from work yesterday.

Posted by John Munsch at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Showing that they have reached a level of both desperation and total disconnection from reality that is almost unprecedented, the RIAA has decided to sue four individual college students for copyright infringement for trading music files. Even better is that they are asking for $150K for each instance of "copyright infrigement" (how they will calculate that without checking to see who owns which CDs is beyond me, I'm guessing they'll pull a number out of the air like they usually do).

College students are the people who go to the grocery store and try to decide whether they can splurge on both beer and the ramen noodles in a cup or they should just buy the ones in a plastic package they have to put in a bowl. $150K per "infringement". Yeah.

How they imagine this is going to acheive their desired effect of chilling file trading is utterly beyond me, but it does show that they are heading to utter irrelevance in the future. My best guess is that the next bizarre request they will make is for a handout from the government to stem the tide of their "losses".

Posted by John Munsch at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For some bizarre reason I see people write this little meme periodically about how C# and .NET will "catch-up" to where Java is now in the next year or two so while there might be social or philosophical reasons to go with one or the other, there won't be any tech reasons.

Whoa, whoa whoa, whoa whoa. I hope that I didn't give the impression that I believed any such nonsense the other day when I gave my list of reasons I hope .NET fails. I just said that I don't think the arguments get anybody anywhere. But if you are deluding yourself into believing that .NET is somehow going to magically "catch-up" to where Java is today in the next year, 18 months or even longer, you need to open your eyes.

What follows is a quick dump from an outline I keep using the Java Outline Editor. I call it my "Java Toolbox" and I keep and categorize links to technology that looks promising in it, this is a short list that skips mounds of stuff I have never had reason to look at and it also blows by reams of excellent commercial tools as well. Look at the length of this list and imagine the veritable army of open source .NET developers (who are apparently going to have to thicken from etherial vapor because I haven't seen them yet) required to build all of this stuff. But, and here's the part that I can't seem to figure out why people don't see it, do you think that Java developers are just going to sit there and watch them do it? Are we just supposed to halt all development and sit on our hands for a couple of years so they can catch-up? No. Catching-up implies that they have to be able at some point to outpace us and I've yet to see anything that has proven to me that that is even a possibility.

Posted by John Munsch at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The schemes of the RIAA to combat piracy are growing increasingly strident and accusatory of everybody: Wired News: RIAA's Rosen Sets Sights on ISPs

Eventually the music industry that funds this organization will shut it down and create a new one with a new name imagining that they can somehow get a fresh start and rub some of the stain off themselves. In the meantime you can enjoy it for the sheer circus value of it.

The best quote is the one from the end of the article, "I think we might need to stop fighting fire with fire and figure out something new to do, or we will end up with lots of ex-customers who swap files just out of spite." Oh pal, you're there, you reached that point for me when you shut down Napster only to let music companies open up new music "services" that treat me like a thief and an ATM for you all at the same time. I was buying CDs for my wife, my kids, myself regularly. When Christmas came around this year I didn't buy any for my wife. None. I'm hoping that anything she wants, she downloads. I know I'm going to.

Posted by John Munsch at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For some reason, one guy chose to fire up a flame war this week by writing 101 reasons why Java is better than .NET. Sadly, this is much like my doing a list of 101 reasons why cats are better than dogs. It's likely to "get a response" and, ultimately, it's unlikely to sway anyone's opinion one way or the other (or at least anybody who you care whether their opinion was swayed).

Here's one of the first "rebuttals" I've seen to the list and it tries to go point by point through the first list and say nah, nah, nah to most of it. Pretty much what you would expect and it features the equally non-inflamatory title of "25 pathetic attempts to make .NET look bad". Lovely...

So normally I'd just blow all this by as yet another useless flamewar like the old Amiga vs. Atari ST, Mac vs. Windows, etc. etc. of old but I think I've got a perspective that might be a little different on this. You see, I used to do Windows. Not in a little way, in a big way. I started developing for Windows when Windows 3.0 was in beta and I didn't stop until mid 2000. In that time I developed software on Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.1 Multimedia Edition, 95, 98, NT, and 2000. I used Visual Basic from 1.0 on. I developed in C++ using Borland and Microsoft tools. I've developed using libraries and APIs that Microsoft put together from COM and DCOM to TAPI and DirectX. I can go on and on about this but the point is that I've used Microsoft tools, software, and development kits up one side and down the other and because I worked for a long time at Tandy (now RadioShack) and Tandy worked closely with Microsoft I did a lot of it with beta stuff that the public never saw.

On the other hand, I only started using Java tentatively in 2000 and really went full bore with it when I moved to a .COM in 2001 so my history with it is relatively short. Nevertheless, the differences between the two environments is striking. There's an old phrase something like, "there's no religious man like the converted sinner." I guess that describes me in this case. I see what the hell was wrong with staying with Microsoft so long and now I feel like I should witness for a bit.

So let me look at this list from my perspective as: Lots of reasons I want .NET to fail and fail badly

1. It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.

   P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.

2. Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.

   If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.

   When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?

   I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.

3. When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.

   Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the .NET "rebuttal" that I linked to above, "For non-profit use VS.NET can be had pretty cheaply, especially if you know anyone that is in college somewhere." Pretty cheaply? For a non-profit (that means charities, churches, universities, the hobbiest who is going to give away his work for FREE)... pretty cheaply? Wow. That is well and truly pathetic. To try and justify it, and say, oh well, you can try to scam an educational discount so it won't be so dear, is even more pathetic.

4. Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the .NET commercials with William H. Gacy telling you how great it is without really ever telling you anything about it? Microsoft doesn't trust .NET to stand on its own technical merits and it knows it may go like cod-liver oil down the gullets of a lot of people who have seen how the company works behind closed doors even if it were the tech shiznit.

   So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.

5. They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to. Want to see what I mean? Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support .NET just in case there wasn't any grassroots community who actually wanted to do it. Or maybe just in case there was and they couldn't control it.

   Ever been to SourceForge? Of course you have, everybody has because that's one of the hubs of all open source projects. You can go there and get the source of thousands of cool open source projects and it really serves the community well. There's even hundreds of projects now that list C# among their programming languages. So why did Microsoft feel compelled to create their own GotDotNet Workspaces that is clearly just a ripoff of SourceForge?

   A few reasons are fairly clear: First, at many of their workspaces you don't get in unless they know who you are. Ever been stopped at SourceForge and asked for a name and password to look at a project? What about download binaries or source? No? At GotDotNet you will, lots of projects are marked with a lock. Second, forget about all those messy licenses that Microsoft might not approve of, you don't need to worry your little head about BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL. You've got the one true workspace license that you have to agree to, or else you won't be putting your project there. Lastly, well it's kind of obvious, but it's really all about control isn't it. After all, if you aren't under their thumb, that has to be a bad thing. So a SourceForge that they control is pretty much a requirement, isn't it?

6. It's a really sad way for a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time rebuilding that which already exists. Wouldn't the whole computing world be a lot better if there wasn't a team of people, maybe a couple of teams of people building complete copies of .NET for other platforms? If those same people were working on giving us new libraries and new tools for an already existing language instead of pouring in the thousands of man hours it's going to take to build a copy of the C# compiler or a .NET version of Ant and JUnit?

   In the end, we'll all just be left with another way to do the exact same thing only in a different language. Lord knows the world benefits now from being unable to share media between France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan because we can't all speak the same language. I benefit every day from the fact that I can't read a Japanese manga I might enjoy or understand a TV show from Europe. Once you are done building this tower, go build a few more right beside it using Perl, Python, and Ruby too. They're all trailing behind in certain areas, we need to make sure the same set of stuff is reinvented and rewritten for all of them too.

I'm tired now and I'm sure I can probably come up with some more stuff to add to rant but it's not really going to change anything anyway.

Posted by John Munsch at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Before you make the mistake of purchasing TurboTax this year be sure you understand that you are not buying their software, you are just "licensing" it. Intuit TurboTax Technical Support

Yup. I thought it was really neat when I got a CD case last month with the new TurboTax in it in my mailbox. I thought that somebody had finally clued into the fact that you can send a disc out for a small amount and get people to try out your product. They are especially likely to when it's something they've bought several years in a row. But I opened it up to find that the "deal" they were offering a long-time customer was worse than what I could get from going to the store. Thanks a lot Intuit.

But I made the mistake of thinking that was as far as the insult went. I was willing to forgive the attempt to gouge me and still buy the product until I found out that they've added a Microsoft Windows XP like "activation" system to the new software. So your installation is tied to a specific machine and you can't give it to anyone else or sell it after you are done using it (even if you uninstall)... So just kiss the doctrine of "first sale" goodbye. You no longer "own" the product, you merely "license" it now for just as much as you used to pay to buy it.

Whil Whim likens it to buying a book that you can only use with one lamp. Woe unto you should you change the lightbulb, break the lamp, or wish to get rid of the book but not the lamp.

All I can say now is "%&@) YOU" Intuit. I'm one long time customer who will NOT buy this years product or next years or any other years as long as this is the way you run things.

Posted by John Munsch at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've had it. I think today was the final, last, absolutely last straw on this camel's back.

First off, let me say that I do not like Microsoft Internet Explorer much as a browser. Instead I use Mozilla (some people use Netscape's branded version of Mozilla called Navigator 6) and I'm very very happy with it. Earlier versions had bugs that were unpleasant in one way or another but the latest versions have been making everything smoother and smoother. I really have no reason to want to use IE for anything anymore.

So, Microsoft decides that they should really own every iota of everything and it was decided a few weeks back that they should abuse the software that they provide called the Microsoft Critical Update Notification. It exists to give you a popup message and otherwise call your attention when Microsoft has a patch for a security hole or major bug in your operating system. But adoption of IE 5.5 Service Pack 2 (which shuts off Java) and IE 6.0 weren't high enough to suit Microsoft so they decided that they would just declare them "critical updates" and the notifier would go off EVERY DAY until you upgraded to the browsers they want you to run. That's how Microsoft's "Critical Update" software got uninstalled from my machine...

Then along rolls October 25th, 2001. The big release of Microsoft Windows XP! Whee...

Time for another decision to make things unfriendly for anyone not using the approved software. Normally whenever you leave HotMail you are shot over to the MSN homepage in order for Microsoft to get a little more traffic and a chance to shill for whatever their latest software or service is. That's fine to my way of thinking, HotMail is free, I can put up with a little advertising. But today I came up cold. As I logged out of HotMail and it attempted to throw me over to the MSN homepage, I was automatically redirected to another page telling me that my browser needed "upgrading". Upgrading? Hell my browser follows the HTML, XML, PNG and every other standard better than that piece of shit IE. But I can't go to MSN anymore because I don't use the Microsoft house browser.

Well, that's it for me. I have decided that I am on a new five year plan. By October 25th, 2006 I will not be using Microsoft software. Not Office, not Windows GLE/2006/whatever, not HotMail, nothing. I'm going to find solutions, write software, organize others, and work towards filling in every hole in the alternative operating systems out there so I can leave and it is an appealing move for anyone else as well. Hell, it's not like it is a huge stretch either. Linux works and works well, it just needs a big UI makeover to make it user friendly. Apple managed to do a gorgeous job of it with Free BSD, now it's time to do the same with Linux. OpenOffice is out there and getting better all the time, surely it can be made a world class Microsoft Office beater in five years. My development tools are all Java so they will already follow me wherever I go. One of the biggest areas that will have to change is gaming. At present Windows is the gaming powerhouse, every major personal computer game is written to DirectX and that kind of change just might take five years. But the end must come to this. Power corrupts and absolute power has corrupted absolutely.

Don jokingly refers to this as my "jihad" but I feel like I've been kicked one time too many. So far I've ignored most alternative to Windows and taken the abuse, but I'm not going to do it anymore. I've had it.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:07 PM | Permalink

By the way, bravo for this. It gently lays out every one note, one agenda, right wing, left wing, etc. nut from Jerry Falwell on down who has tried to capitalize on what has happened and twist and turn it to fit their within the framework of their own strident, endless tirades.

Posted by John Munsch at 2:24 PM | Permalink

The W3C has made Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) an official recommendation. Now we can expect Microsoft to implement it in IE two to three years from now and do so very very badly, just as IE 6.0 can't even handle XML and XSL 1.0 specs long long after they were released. Hopefully Mozilla will do much better.

In the meantime, Adobe has released a beta of the next version of their plugin for handling SVG in IE. If you aren't boycotting Adobe, as many people are for their DMCA actions, you can get it here.

Screwed up companies like Microsoft and Adobe aside, there are lots and lots of uses for XML vector graphics in applications. You can use SVG to lay out reports, generate images programmatically for websites, as a replacement for Flash, use it as a lingua franca file format to replace .CDR and .AI files, or you could even use it as the foundation of a graphics system like NeXT did with Postscript.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:03 PM | Permalink

OK. Let's talk about a scam that's being perpetrated on households across America (and probably lots of other nations as well) at this time of year. That scam is... the handheld calculator.

When I opened up the paper today and I saw not one, but two different office supply stores offering the HP 12C calculator for $70 my eyes popped out of their sockets, rolled across the room, and spontaneously started trying to bounce up and down on the 9, 1, 1 buttons on the phone to report the robbery. This is a calculator that cost around $100 the first year I attended college and I purchased my HP 11C (basically the same calculator but the 11C has engineering oriented functions rather than financial functions). That's 18 years ago people! Can you think of any piece of electronics in existence that hasn't either gotten massively faster and more capable or else had its price plummet in 18 years?!?

That is pure unadulterated bullshit... But it's not like the 12C is alone in its mystical fantasy pricing world. Just look at the prices on calculators like the TI 83 Plus. This is a calculator with a "large" 64 X 96 display (6,144 pixels) and 24K bytes RAM (160K bytes of data archive and application space). It costs almost $100 dollars? What?!? A Palm M100 with two megabytes of RAM and a 160x160 (25,600 pixels) costs $129 and that's probably too high!

Folks, you are being ripped off! Do not buy an expensive scientific graphing calculator. Your child will probaly not even be able to run it anyway. Do not buy into this magical pricing system. Buy a reasonably priced scientific calculator like the HP 30S and if the kid needs to do graphs, get him or her some software for the computer. If you absolutely have to have something that the child can take to school, buy an inexpensive PDA and find some software to put onto it to get the capabilities the kid needs. If the software hasn't already been written it should shoot to the top of the must-write list for open source software groups in order to break this ridiculous TI, HP, and Casio theft ring.

Posted by John Munsch at 7:38 PM | Permalink

Sometimes a company's "me, me, me" view is so tunnel visioned as to be amazing. Today Netscape introduced a new version of their my.netscape.com portal (you'll note I didn't even bother making it a link so you could go there, it's not worth the effort). One of their big improvements was to remove a feature that made it the best of the existing portals before. It could display RSS channels from all over the web. In fact, Netscape and my.netscape.com was one of the reasons that RSS was popular everywhere. If you provided an RSS channel for your website you could go list it with Netscape and their portal users could add all your news headlines to their portal page on an equal footing with news from sources like Reuters and Salon if your info was just as important to them.

Unfortunately in the process of removing this useful feature for the "new and improved" version of my.netscape.com they also removed the DTD file (the file describing the layout of an RSS file) that had been referred to by literally thousands of RSS files across the network. It was a file reference that Netscape told you to use in your RSS file as part of the spec they distributed. And when they deleted that DTD file they broke RSS files across the network. My own GameDev.net RSS channel no longer will parse in HotSheet because the DTD it referred to doesn't exist anymore. After all, if Netscape isn't going to be supporting RSS anymore then nobody else will be either, right? Uh, no, that would be wrong.

A demonstration of how self absorbed Netscape can be that is every bit as sad as some I've seen from Microsoft.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:03 AM | Permalink