Jacob's Last T-Ball Game

Jacob played his last tee-ball game yesterday. Here are some pictures
of young Jacob in action. More pictures frm the game are at...

http://picasaweb.google.com/Brett.Wallihan/TeeBallDodgers20090530?authkey=Gv1sRgCN76_Zyci8rHEg#

Microsoft vs. Novell (just for you Trav)

There is an ongoing lawsuit between Novell and Microsoft in which Novell has accused Microsoft of using its monopoly position in operating systems to gain an advantage in office productivity software. Novell alleges that Microsoft withheld or delayed publishing interface information to Windows 95 that would allow the seamless integration of the office suite offered by Novell. As a result the Novell office suite appeared unfinished and clunky compared to MS Office. This ultimately killed the Novell office suite that had at one point held a 50% market share.

The actual complaint against Microsoft can be found here
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/NovMScomplaint.pdf

This story by Groklaw rightly points out that the tactics alleged in this case are similar to the tactics used to fight and discredit the ODF format.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090523231352189

This article describes the process used by Microsoft to pack supposedly unbiased standards committees. The Microsoft memo outlines a deliberate coordinated process to pack committees such as the one used to develop the MS OOXML standard they tried to compete against ODF.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071023002351958

To be perfectly clear there is nothing wrong with trying to make your product more popular or better. There is nothing wrong with hardball tactics as long as they are ethical and legal. The issue at hand here is that many of the tactics used by Microsoft to achieve these legitimate goals are neither ethical nor legal.

If you Google for a while you will see a lot of documents supporting this. If you just search this blog for the keyword "Microsoft" you will find a fair number of linked articles too.

Microsoft Fails in Implementing ODF

Microsoft has a broken implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) in Office 2007 that will leave many users thinking that ODF is an inferior format to MS Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt).

http://www.odfalliance.org/blog/index.php/site/microsofts_odf_support_falls_short/

This could be incompetence or it could be malicious, but it is not the first time Microsoft has used these kinds of tactics to fight competition. In fact these are the kinds of practices that have earned Microsoft several anti-trust judgements against them.

Because they are the biggest player in office productivity software, most people use MS Office software and formats. Those people will likely judge the quality of the ODF format based on their experience with it in MS Office. They are not likely to install OpenOffice just to find out if the format or MS Office is to blame for poor performance. Therefore they will simply discount ODF as unfinished and amateur.

This is strikingly similar to what MS did with Java where they created their own Java developer tools which would not work well with the original version of Java from Sun. See the section titled "Microsoft’s Attempts To Extinguish Java" in this report from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems.

http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf

Places I've Been

visited 19 states (38%)
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visited 29 states (12.8%)
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Cousin Karina

I met my cousin Karina earlier this month. She was passing through LA on her way from South America to Canada. We ate dinner at Hard Rock Cafe in Hollywood then went for a little flight. That flying stuff is harder than it looks.

Apple is Worse than Microsoft

Read this one carefully.

http://www.eff.org/cases/odioworks-v-apple

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has a provision that makes it illegal to circumvent Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is intended to prevent people from removing copyright protection from music and movies since there is no way to technically perform that feat. Even when used as intended this is a flawed provision, but Apple has stretched the interpretation of this law to the edge of believability. Apple claims that since they have software to prevent you from doing things they don't want you doing with hardware that YOU PAID FOR, that anything you do to circumvent their efforts is in violation of the DMCA.

Internet Explorer Critically Flawed, Switch to Firefox

Microsoft classifies IE8 upgrade as a critical update and forces IE8 to be default browser. Apparently IE7 is critically flawed and you should not be using it. Switch to Firefox (www.firefox.com). They are not perfect, but they are honest about their flaws and very quick to fix them.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/01/002237&from=rss

Deregulation 10 Years Later

This article from the New York Times in 1999 made some uncanny prediction about our current financial crisis.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/business/congress-passes-wide-ranging-bill-easing-bank-laws.html