It seems Microsoft have found it (with a little help from Dell). Better click it fast before they realise they haven’t, which is why I’ve included the screenshot below.
To be fair they don’t really claim to cure AIDS, but a PC can’t really be “designed to help eliminate AIDS,” so they deserve my misleading headline.
Vista sales must really be struggling along if Microsoft need to resort to this kind of thing. Not sure why Dell are playing along though.
I go on a lot about media and software freedom, but what do I actually do about it?
Realising that talk without action achieves nothing, I decided to put some of my hard-earned money behind some of my principles.
In recent times I’ve become quite disheartened by the record industry’s protection racket. Their business model is failing and, since they are big bureaucratic monoliths, they are struggling to adapt. Their approach has been to stick DRM on everything, which basically restricts your ability to do what you want with something that you paid for, and should technically belong to you.
They say all these measures are to protect their artists, but they really only protect the company profits (and seem to be failing at that anyway). This draconian nonsense caused me to boycott music. I just don’t buy it any longer.
That is, until I looked around on the internet a little and found a vast resource of independent “record labels.” A few examples are:
I purchased two albums from Magnatune, and 50% of what I paid goes directly to the artist.
But Magnatune doesn’t stop there. They tell you to share the album with three friends. They figure that if people are going to be dishonest, then that’ll happen anyway — regardless of whether record companies try to do something about it or not. Might as well encourage sharing — cheap marketing.
Another bonus is that you, as the consumer, get to choose what you think the music is worth. The price isn’t set you decide — but the more you pay the more the artist gets.
The albums I bought are
Take a listen. If you like them, let me know and I’ll give you the url and password to download them (or you can just come over to my house and copy the files — geography and familiarity permitting).
The other music sites have varying business models and they all work differently. Throughout though, the music is DRM-free, and that’s what really matters to me.
I haven’t stopped at music. I’ve extended my approach to software
I’m a big advocate of open source software, but I’ve never given anything back to the community. I use the software. I tell people about it. I lord its merits.
But if everyone only did that, there wouldn’t be any software to promote.
The logical way to contribute to open source software is to write some code and submit it to a software project. I suck at writing code — so there goes that one.
I’m not too bad at writing deciphered words, so I tried contributing to the Ubuntu documentation team. That didn’t last very long. Writing documentation quickly became tedious and mundane. Perhaps I’ll look back into it sometime.
No, the easiest thing to do is contribute money to a project. It minimises your time investment and optimises the value of the contribution because that money can be used to pay an expert to do what you would have done poorly.
I sent the team that develops the Firefox add-on, DownThemAll, a donation. It was really a sort of experiment. They sent me an email thanking me for the contribution. Now I intend to send donations to other open source projects which I find to be particularly useful, and well implemented.
It’s interesting to me that I was inspired to make these donation because my brother had registered a shareware application called Total Commander. It’s not open source, and it only works on Windows. Still, he spoke about how he was so impressed with it that he figured the developer deserved the money.
That sentiment seems to have had a lasting impression on me.
Don’t get the wrong impression about my enthusiasm for e-book reader technology from this post’s title. I’m very excited about it, I just don’t think it’s going to take off unless a lot of things change. I’ve had my eye on e-book readers for a while. Alas, they don’t seem to make it across those vast oceans down here to the southern tip of Africa.
This is probably because they struggle to make much of an impression on the markets into which they are introduced. Africa only gets things imported to it once they’ve been proven in developed markets.
I’ve mentioned Sony’s reader in the past, and I linked to this New York Times article on it.
For your convenience I’ll summarise the NYTimes article.
This brings us to why I’m writing about this topic again. Lately I’ve been giving Thought Leader a look, and the blogs there are interesting and insightful.
I noticed that Eve Dmochowska wants a Kindle for Christmas, and I decided to throw some of my thoughts into the fray. I could’ve just posted a comment on that blog, but I have a lot to say and didn’t want to chase her readers away with a tedious monologue. Waffle Group readers know to expect danger when that “rambling waffle” category is used — I doubt Thought Leader reader are properly equipped for the monotony.
Kindle is what Amazon.com have recently brought out to compete with Sony’s e-reader. As Eve says, Kindle has potential because Amazon.com already have the connections with book publishers to more easily distribute popular e-book titles. Even more sneaky is the fact that a PC is not required to use Kindle. It has a wireless modem and can connect to EVDO/CDMA networks (provided such network connectivity is available — something she admits would be problematic in South Africa at the moment), and thus can directly download e-books from Amazon.com .
That last sentence is where my optimism about this technology whithers, while Eve’s is nourished. Forget the connectivity issue. Let’s assume that’s all sorted out, as it probably will be in the market where the product is first introduced (the USA).
Eve waxes lyrical about the technology liberating writers from the publishing-house stranglehold. No need to get a publisher to print your novel, just self-publish digitally and you have a simple, cost-effective distribution channel with no overheads for your work.
I totally agree with Eve and the industry shake-up this has the potential to cause, except…
E-books can be downloaded from Amazon.com. Only Amazon.com. And they come in a proprietary format that other e-book readers cannot read. The books are also encumbered with brain-dead DRM.
Certainly Kindle supports some other formats, so one isn’t actually completely reliant on Amazon.com for reading material. Unfortunately some of those formats can only be read on the Kindle if they are converted to Amazon’s format, and to do that you need to email them the document and they’ll email it back in the proprietary format — for a price.
Here’s the problem with proprietary formats and DRM: if this e-book reader thing actually takes off, and Apple brings out an iReader, I might want to ditch the Kindle and go with their uber-cool design and user-interface instead. Sadly I won’t be able to read any of the books I bought in Amazon’s locked file format. That’s the proprietary format issue. Why do these companies use their own secret formats when there is an open standard available? I’m not answering that.
The DRM issue is even worse. Amazon allows authors to upload documents which will be delivered to the Kindle via their Whispernet service. The author chooses the selling price, and Amazon keeps 65% of it. Anyone can publish, and Rick Aristotle Munarriz has tested the scenario that Eve suggests will promulgate itself across the publishing world.
Glorious! I wonder if the Kindle and Whispernet support publishing work under a Creative Commons licence? I doubt it. DRM and CC tend to be an anathema to one another. If you think people don’t publish novels under a Creative Commons licence and make a commercial success of it, think again. Cory Doctorow is an excellent example. I doubt he’ll be distributing via this channel until the DRM stuff is ditched.
If the music industry is anything to go by, DRM just damages sales figures. People get pissed off when you don’t let them do what they want with something they purchased, and irrespective of copyright law, believe that they own.
People who are going to conduct copyright infringement will do it regardless of DRM, because there are always technical work-arounds to this kind of tomfoolery. People who would legitimately have bought the products won’t, because they don’t want the crap and would rather go without music than deal with the idiocy of big corporations.
Digital distribution of music still works though, because the peer-to-peer networks and associated copyright infringement by sharing digital music became firmly entrenched before the recording industry caught on and instituted the DRM foolishness. Now the portable music playing devices are affordable. They may have been expensive when they were first released, but MP3s could be played on a PC too. The compressed format was established and one needed to only wait for the early adopters to buy enough MP3-players to drive the prices down.
This isn’t going to work with books. The DRM is in place first. The e-book reader is too expensive, but unlike music, e-book formats for dedicated e-book readers are not suitable for PCs and laptops. The people who buy the e-books and the readers are going to get annoyed with the DRM thing and the vendor lock-in, and tell their other earlier-adopter friends not to bother. Thus the price doesn’t go down. Thus another e-book reader fails.
I hope I’m completely wrong, because those e-book readers are nifty. I’m not sure they’re “sexy” though (a term Eve favoured in her post).
Seriously, have you seen a picture of these things? Sexy has more curves. 😉
I received a call the other day from Ezra at Cell C [warning: site not Firefox friendly]. I greeted Ezra warmly as I considered the merits of asking him whether there might be someone better to speak to. I declined to do so assuming that either a) the joke would be old (from his perspective); or b) the joke would be too subtle — he sounded more like a hip-hop, R&B kind of guy
Ezra happily informed me that he had been assigned to assist me with my contract upgrade. How exciting!
Except, I hadn’t requested an upgrade. Was it compulsory?
No it wasn’t, but it was recommended.
Why would I want an upgrade?
Because I could get a new phone.
But I already have a working phone. Afterall, I was talking to Ezra using it.
Sure, but I could get a better phone, like a Nokia N73 (or something like that).
Are you implying that the phone I have is crap? (Wish I’d said that, but it didn’t occur to me until afterwards).
Eventually I told him that I saw what the problem was. I was on a contract that Cell C were no longer offering. It has really cheap rates, no free minutes, and no bundled in phone. It also has no monthly subscription charge. Basically, if I don’t use the phone at all, I’d pay R50 a month. If I only make R50 worth of calls, I’ll pay R50. If I make R100 worth of calls I pay R100.
Basically, Cell C aren’t making any money off me (or are making very little).
Eventually, Ezra gave up. Perhaps Cell C will try again with someone better?
I’ve often wondered about what happens to a person’s internet profiles and presences once the person stops living.
Let’s say Jimbo the Internet User dies. He has a Yahoo! for email, several accounts for on-line forums, accounts for AOL and MSN messenger, and accounts for the social networking site MySpace.
Yahoo! likely have a policy regarding dormant accounts. If the user fails to log in for a certain period of time, the account is tagged as ‘dormant.’ After a reasonable period of time,email in the dormant account is deleted. Perhaps Jimbo’s username is still kept in Yahoo!’s database, but for all intents and purposes Jimbo’s Yahoo! email account is as dead as he is.
Jimbo, being dead, stops posting comments on the Peculiarly Shaped Pieces of Dried Skin Forum. Nobody really notices since people’s true identities are not usually divulged in that kind of environment. If anyone does notice, they just conclude that Jimbo is no longer interested in strangely-shaped, dehydrated dermis (which is true in any case). The same is true for Jimbo’s other fora.
Jimbo stops logging on to AOL and MSN. Most of the people he interacted with here had met him in person, and hadn’t just got to know him through the internet. In all likelihood, these people know he’s dead, have attended his funeral, and are not surprised by his missing buddy-icon.
Jimbo stops logging on to MySpace, and stops adding stuff to his profile or his friends pages. This is where it all goes a bit weird.
Like the instant messaging technologies, people who knew Jimbo in the physical world interacted with him via social networking sites. These people went to his funeral and are saddened by his passing.
Unlike the instant messaging technologies, Jimbo’s MySpace profile is persistent (at least initially, since Jimbo was a very active user on the site). He doesn’t have to log into it for it to still be accessible by his friends and people who knew him. The friends still access his profile, and post public comments to him. They address the comments to him, and some talk to him as if he is still alive.
I hadn’t come across profiles of dead people before now. I’ve speculated about the stuff regarding email, forum, and instant messaging accounts. Thanks to an article in the Mail & Guardian, I am no longer speculating about MySpace accounts. A site exists which commemorates the deaths of MySpace users, and links to their MySpace profiles. It contains obituaries, which are mostly written quite tastefully.
Following links to the deceased person’s MySpace profile is where the oddness ensues. I found people wishing their dead friends a happy birthday, or happy Easter, a year and a half after the person’s death.
I suppose it is a way to express emotions and to be able to “talk” to a dead loved one, even though there will be no response. It feels like there might be, because interacting via MySpace (or Facebook) never required both participants to be present at the same time. Since the messages are visible to the public, it makes it feel like maybe the message will also get to the dead person. It’s unlikely that people would keep sending email to a dead person’s email account because no-one else will see that, and so how could you be certain that the communication ever took place at all. If there is no evidence of the communication, then the grieving party will have to accept more readily that their loved one is physically gone.
The presence of a dead person’s profile just seems to prolong the act of grieving. The profile is still there, just like it was when the deceased was alive. This is similar to the situation of a grieving parent keeping a dead child’s room just the way it was when the child died. Except, in the case of MySpace, the page is dynamic while the child’s bedroom is not. People keep posting to the page, keeping it alive, supporting the illusion that if the page is still alive, so is the person. The bedroom doesn’t do that. The bedroom is trapped in the past, and still a symbol of denial, but it’s quite clear that the living person is missing.
The MySpace profile of a dead person doesn’t show that. Although the dead person never responds, they didn’t respond when they were away on holiday either. Perhaps they’ve just taken a long holiday?
It took a while going through the various MySpace profiles linked to from MyDeathSpace before I found an error message, informing me that the profile did not exist or had been removed.
The profile was gone, in the same way the person was gone. This seemed much healthier to me.
During the last two weeks I’ve attended a course at the University of Witwatersrand on Environmental Engineering Topics.
It was run by the School of Mining Engineering (Wits have “schools,” not departments, in what I imagine is an attempt to emphasise teaching over bureaucracy) and so focussed on environmental issues with respect to mines. A very useful course which covered all aspects of mining, and how mines tend to break the pristine conditions of the world’s environments and generally annoy the people who live in them.
There were recurring themes of road blockades, pipeline sabotage, and civil unrest. A wonderful recipe for edge-of-your-seat learning.
Then, towards the end of the second week, an external presenter spoke to us about Acid Rock Drainage (ARD). Shortly afterwards I was overcome by a deep sense of the futility of my actions in attempting to get mines to manage the environmental impacts they create, or have the potential to create.
This is in the United States, but some South African rivers look equally bad.
Acid Rock Drainage (or Acid Mine Drainage) is a nasty bastard. The people over at Save the Wild UP appear to share my general horror at the situation, and are trying to make a noise about it.
They also have something more than horror. They have pictures like the one above.
Simplistically, material that is sulphide-rich (typically pyrite) gets exposed to water and oxygen when it gets pulled up from underground. This tends to happen on gold mine rock dumps (on the Witwatersrand which is a pyritic ore-body) and with coal mines (since there is plenty of sulphur associated with coal).
The water and oxygen causes oxidation, liberating hydrogen and iron ions and ultimately leading to the generation of acid. Secondary reactions keep it ticking along in a cheerful, self-sustaining manner. The reaction never reaches equilibrium and will continue until all sulphide-rich material has been oxidised. The time this will take is best measured on the geological scale.
The good news is that the reaction can be stopped. Take away the oxygen or the water.
If you have lived on Earth, you should easily see why that won’t work. To isolate huge mines or rock dumps from things as ubiquitous as water and oxygen isn’t going to be practical.
The real issue isn’t the acid. The real issue is that metals are very fond of dissolving in acid. Once they dissolve, they are very happy to travel along with water into rivers and reservoirs. Water is fairly important, so chances are that living beings are going to consume it, even if it is laced with all manner of dissolved metals.
If the living creature cannot process the metal biologically, it leads to bioaccumulation of the metal (or some slightly processed, but not entirely metabolised compound of the metal).
Animals eat other animals, which further concentrates the bioaccumulated metal compounds. It should be obvious that eventually, people will fit into this food-chain at some point. I mention people fitting into this, not because I think people are more important than animals, but because most people think they are. So when I say bioaccumulation ultimately leads to the onset of cancer those people, who don’t really think it significant if animals get cancer, will perk up and listen.
Global Warming. Bah! ARD is what we should really be concerned about.
Write about solving the problems Microsoft Word imposes on you.
To my dismay, the post relating the way in which to solve the portrait/landscape printing mix-up conundrum generates the most page views on this blog.
Closely following that are the meandering and slightly obfuscated GPRS on linux and migrate from thunderbird to evolution howtos.
Then, I think people are searching for Kelty the place, and finding pictures of my dog. An entirely unsatisfying result for them and me.
It would seem people on the internet want help. I suppose that when I next write a technical howto post, I’ll make an effort to keep it clear and concise. Easy to understand. I might even summarise the key points. I should put in the extra effort there because that’s what the random people are actually bothering to read. I should try to make it a rewarding experience for them.
At the end, I’ll add some links to more entertaining posts that I actually want people to read.
Here is the scenario. You have a document that is mostly portrait orientation. This is the normal state of affairs.
You want to insert a table, but it’s quite wide and you cannot easily squish it within the boundaries of the page. You insert a next page section break, via the Insert->Break menu. You set the page to landscape orientation via the File->Page Setup menu.
The table is quite long and spans several pages. At the end of the table you insert another next page break, set the new page to portrait orientation and go about your business.
All is well, until you press print.
You see, the problem is that Microsoft Word controls an evil empire of document-writer frustration. Word has lots of features, but if you actually try to use them, it gets annoyed with you. It doesn’t tell you it’s getting annoyed — it just does it on the sly.
You only find out that something is amiss when you attempt to print your document, and the pages arrange themselves in creative, novel ways, making the flow of the document confusing.
Is it art? Possibly.
Is it what the user wants? Certainly not.
To give Microsoft’s Office team some credit where it is due, Word 2003 does manage to print double-sided without any issues — as long as you don’t try to do anything too dynamic, such as mixing pages which have both landscape and portrait orientated pages. If all the pages are landscape — no issues. Likewise with portfolio orientated documents. However, cases (like the one above) occur where people would like to include both.
This eventuality seems to be have been something beyond the imagination of the Word designers.
I have suffered through a great deal of pain in order to give you this useful work-around to the annoying landscape/portrait orientation printing mix-up. I’ll avoid relating all of the pain, because if you googled in here, then you already know the pain and probably don’t want to relive it.
You made your mistake when you inserted a next page section break. The secret is to insert an odd page section break. In fact, it’s critical. And you need to insert on before and after the landscape orientated section.
If a landscape page prints on the reverse of a portrait page, everything will be screwed up. Inserting odd page section breaks is the only solution I’ve managed to come up with. It doesn’t solve the problem with page numbering (which will now be orientated with the landscape page — but you can’t have everything).
That should solve most of the issues, but when I implemented this I found that Word would often let me insert an odd page section break and then, once I’d moved on, automatically (and most unhelpfully) turn it into a next page section break. This didn’t improve my spirits. Especially since it would only come to my attention once I’d printed my 144 page document.
It took me ages to figure out why, and actually I still don’t know why it was doing that. I do know how to make it stop doing that, which ultimately gives us the same result — a document which prints as intended.
Here is how:
Make certain that for every section in your document, the section is set to start on an odd numbered page. Do this by clicking on a page of the section in the document, then clicking File->Page Setup.
On the window click the Layout tab, and select the Section start drop-down. Choose Odd page.
I hope that will ease your pain a little.
I suppose I should own up to inadvertently following useless links. There is an excuse, but it’s slightly feeble.
I decided to streamline my assertion to not follow random links from google reader by creating an Approved Reading list. In doing this, it was necessary to click on my technology in order to purge it of evil. No really…
The link at the top of the list was this: Free Software Movement Dead — Microsoft
How the hell was I supposed to ignore that?
Following that lead me to more vexation, with Microsoft claiming a whole bunch of patent infringements (that, by the way, is a good article for the non-geeks amongst my readers to have a look at), but it seems they’re just making a lot of noise with little to back it.
But, now that reader has been streamlined to provide me with my government approved reading, this sort of thing shouldn’t happen again.
I have a larny chrome kettle. It’s shiny. It’s spiffy. It goes well with the other brushed steel appliances and containers in part of my kitchen.
It broke.
Now, I’d like to say it was due to a design flaw, but that would probably be unfair to Mellaware. They do have a mark inside the kettle that indicates maximum water level. This guideline may have been ignored on several occasions by those in the family who embrace entropy, and all it’s associated chaotic effects, wholeheartedly.
I suppose I should try to fix it. I’m uncertain though: does it need welding or soldering? And what effect will the heat have on the nice shiny bits. Will they be permanently tarnished? Will the kettle get all bent out of shape (literally).
At any rate, I don’t have the required equipment, nor the desire to own it. Suggestions on a permanent fix to this problem are welcome, but in no way urgent. I’m using the kettle as a kind of performance art piece now.
Metal kettles full of recently boiled water get hot. One cannot pick them up to fill the teapot without insulation. Perhaps I’ll get Angie to help me take an action shot of the Dadaesque performance art kettle in use.
The Waffle Group 
