Blackmoor Vituperative

Although nobody’s crystal ball is clear on the impact that the change in the daylight-saving time rules will have on enterprise IT systems and applications, the problems could be bigger than most people realize.

That’s because IT shops have had less notice in dealing with the time change than they did for Y2K, and because the issue doesn’t have visibility at the highest levels of an organization as it did for Y2K.

“We are likely to see more issues than we did with Y2K because there is no visibility at the board and the CEO level, yet it’s a similar risk to the business,” said Tim Howes, CTO at data center provisioning provider Opsware in Sunnyvale, CA.

“Only server administrators and application support teams know what could happen if time stamps get misaligned. A lot of these administrators are sweating bullets right now,” said Swapnil Shah, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at mValent, a configuration and change management provider in Burlington, Mass.

(from eWeek, Daylight-Saving Time Change: Bigger than Y2K?)

So-called “daylight-saving time” is a colossal waste of time and money. How many millions of man-hours are squandered on this madness? How much productivity is lost, not just due to the foolish exercise of re-setting everything with a clock in it, but from the missed appointments and conflicted schedules that invariably result? How many people die needlessly in car accidents because a driver got too little sleep due to damnable “daylight-saving time”?

In fact, our societal sleep debt is so great that simply losing one additional hour of sleep due to the spring shift to daylight savings time can increase traffic accident rates by 7% (Coren, 1996b) and death rates due to all accidents by 6.5% (Coren, 1996c).

(from Psychiatric Times, Sleep Deprivation, Psychosis and Mental Efficiency)

People die as a result of this nonsense. They DIE. More importantly, it’s an inconvenience to me, personally. So it’s time to do something about it.

Write your senators and representatives about this. A simple letter or email from enough people will get their attention. Just tell them you want to STOP re-setting all of your clocks and disrupting your sleep patterns twice a year.

Here is how you can contact your congress people:

Contacting the Congress
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/
Congressional Email Directory

You might also refer them to http://www.standardtime.com/.

Here is something worth a chuckle, if you find oppressive government mis-management amusing: Jim Rapoza names the worst tech-related bills of all time.

A federal jury in San Diego has ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent dispute over MP3 audio technology used in Windows.

[…]

Microsoft said it believes that it properly licensed MP3 technology from Fraunhofer, paying that company $16 million. Fraunhofer, which helped develop the MP3 compression technology along with Lucent’s Bell Labs, has licensed its intellectual property to companies that want to use the audio format in their products. Fraunhofer has since handed the MP3-licensing duties over to Thomson.

Scores of technology companies, including Apple, Intel and Texas Instruments, license the MP3 technology, according to Thomson’s MP3licensing.com.

(from Tech News on ZDNet, Microsoft hit with $1.5 billion patent verdict)

I am no fan of Microsoft, but this is ridiculous. They licensed the technology from the accepted licensor, Fraunhofer. Maybe if enough cases like this go to court, large software companies like Microsoft will get a ticket to the clue train, and realize that software patents are expensive, absurd, and should be abolished. Maybe if companies like Microsoft start lobbying against software patents, our well-meaning government officials will do something in the public’s interest for once.

While on that track, I read an interesting essay by Paul Graham, who makes the argument that software patents are really no different than hardware patents — that embodying a process in hardware is not intrinsically different than embodying a process in software, and that as time goes on more and more of what “used to be done with levers and cams and gears are now done with loops and trees and closures”. He makes a good point. He has nearly convinced me that all patents should be abolished. But don’t assume that this was his intention. It’s a well-constructed article, with much food for thought. Read it.

The British government has rejected a petition from UK residents to ban DRM. Their response was preposterous in its naivety. The UK government suggests that DRM adds value for the customer!

“Boo-hoo-hoo, people have caught on to our scheme to hold the world’s documents hostage. Boo-hoo-hoo, people are finally waking up and realizing that paying for MS Office for suckers. Boo-hoo-hoo, our sacred cash cow may only bring in 95% of the king’s ransom we expected because a few people have been educated thanks to IBM. Boo-hoo-hoo.” — Microsoft

See: Microsoft Accuses IBM of Limiting Choice for Interop, Standards

And what the hell is “interop”? Are people so lazy that they can’t be bothered to type “interoperability”? This is the same kind of sloppiness that gave us “donut”, “nite”, “thru”, and “tranny”. Still, Simon Jenkins does have a worthwhile counterargument.

This was London Fashion Week, a week-long show organized by the British Fashion Council, a consortium of major fashion retailers and publishers. Here are a few photos from the show that support my belief that fashion is stupid.

However, sometimes it is entertaining.

Microsoft’s goal of getting governments across the globe to embrace its so-called “Open” XML format has hit roadblocks in both the United States and abroad.

In the United States, legislation was introduced in Texas and Minnesota the week of Feb. 5 to mandate the adoption of open document formats that will essentially preserve all documents in an open, XML-based file format that is interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications.

The formats will also need to be fully published without restrictions, available royalty-free and implemented by multiple vendors. In addition, they will have to be controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard.

These new legislative moves follow the decision by Massachusetts to switch to the Open Document Format for its official documents, with sources telling eWEEK that even more states are likely to follow suit if these bills pass.

In fact, the ODF Alliance reports that Bloomington, Ind., has already moved to the format, while government leaders from California and Wisconsin have spoken publicly on the value of open standards and/or ODF.

Adding to the bad news for Microsoft is the fact that 19 countries have submitted “contradictions” to the bid to get fast-track approval of the standard by the International Standards Organization.

(from eWeek, Microsoft’s Open XML Format Hits Roadblocks in U.S., Abroad)

Way to go, Texas and Minnesota! Time to step up to the plate, Virginia….

I just heard that Anna Nicole Smith is dead at age 39. So far, there’s no reason given.

I feel sad for her. It sounds like she hasn’t had a very nice life the last few years, with her son dying, the TrimSpa lawsuit, the paternity suit over her daughter, and the son of her dead husband being a spiteful, greedy, malicious prick (he died last year, thankfully).

I mentioned the Julie Amero case the other day — the substitute teacher being sent to prison because the computer in her classroom was infected with malware. Lest you think that small-town America is the only place this sort of thing happens, listen to the case of Russian teacher Alexandr Ponosov:

[…] the police in Russia have arrested a software pirate, prosecuted the malefactor to the full extent of the law and are preparing to send the miscreant to a Siberian prison camp.

[…] the Russian courts have convicted Alexander Ponosov, the principal of a middle school in a remote Ural Mountains village, for unwittingly buying PCs for his students that were loaded with unlicensed copies of Microsoft software.

(from eWeek, Sentenced to the Intellectual Property Gulag)

Just to clarify something here: what Ponosov is accused of is not “piracy”. It is not “theft”. There were no cutlass-wielding brigands or black-masked burglars. The crime of which Posonov has been convicted is copyright infringement: the same offense committed by the MPAA when they copied Kirby Dick’s documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated“. For this heinous offense, Ponosov faces a fine of 266,000 rubles, or $10,042, and up to five years in a Siberian prison camp. That’s not a metaphor — that is a literal statement. It is a prison camp in Siberia.

The media robber barons could, in theory, show some mercy to Mr. Ponosov and retract their complaint against him. But sending people like Mr. Ponosov to Siberia is exactly what they want. These are not simply businessmen and women trying to compete in a marketplace — they are monsters.

Mikhail Gorbachev published an open letter on the Web site of his charitable foundation, calling on Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to intercede on Ponosov’s behalf on the grounds that the teacher wasn’t aware that PCs contained pirated software. The letter describes Ponosov as a teacher “who has devoted his life to educating children and who is getting for his work a meager salary that can in no way compare with the income that your company average executives are paid” at Microsoft.

“But under the circumstances, we are addressing you with a plea of leniency and withdrawal of claim against Alexandr Ponosov,” said Gorbachev’s letter.

Microsoft cares about children, right? Microsoft isn’t evil, right? Certainly they’d do something, right?

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Microsoft’s public relations agency in London released a statement that the company was “sure that the Russian courts will make a fair decision.” The statement also lauded the Russian government’s effort to prosecute software “piracy” cases, according to the Times report. “We do respect the Russian government’s position on the importance of protecting intellectual property rights,” the statement said.

I am sickened. You should be, too.

eWeek reports that the Digital Rights Mafia is still bitching and moaning about how digital music is slowly replacing CDs, even though people still buy 10 times as many CDs as they download. The media robber barons blame so-called “pirates” — which is to say, their customers. They ought to look closer to home.

As long as the Big Four music labels and the Digital Rights Mafia insist on infecting their products with DRM, people aren’t going to buy it. Even Steve Jobs has finally realized what many of us knew back when he was pushing DRM in 2003 — that DRM is a colossal waste of time and money.

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

(from Apple.com, Thoughts On Music)

When the Digital Rights Mafia gives up on their jihad against their customers, maybe they’ll realize it, too. Then we’ll all win.

Don’t hold your breath.