Blackmoor Vituperative

Chile Hardware informs us that Intel has launched its Classmate PC in Chile:

Intel has just launched their educational portable computer, Classmate PC, in Chile. This is the first country that has available this sub-notebook which features a Celeron M at 900MHz, 256MB RAM, 2GB of NAND hard drive and runs either Linux or Windows. The retail price is something near 500 dollars and it can only be purchased by government offices. The distribution is in charge of Olidata, the regional partner of Uniwill, an ECS Elitegroup company.

Personally, I’m not sure why anyone would want this PC for $500. For just $100 more you can buy a notebook with significantly better specifications.

(DarkVision Hardware, Intel launches Classmate PC in Chile)

This is not a very good deal, in my opinion. I don’t know, though: maybe laptops cost a lot more in Chile than they do here in the USA.

77.4 percent of all email sent in February 2004 was spam. That is a 2 percent increase from January. (source: MessageLabs)

Personally, well over 90% of the email I get is spam.

In today’s Let’s Be A Little Overdramatic file, a newly released report from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suggests that networked file and music sharing could harm children and threaten national security.

The November, 2006, report, entitled “Filesharing Programs and Technological Features to Induce Users to Share,” makes two main points across the span of its 80 pages:

• that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults, exposing those children to copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those who protect their copyrighted material appear antagonistic, and
• file-sharing software could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job

Interestingly, the report makes numerous references to RIAA and MPAA legal actions against file-sharing activity, as well as cites a 2005 Department of Homeland Security report that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge.

(from Shadow Monkey, File sharing a threat to children and to national security)

Well, now, we wouldn’t want RIAA and MPAA to appear antagonistic, would we? Why, that would be like making Wilhelm Marr look antisemitic. What a gross injustice that would be.

As for the danger to national security, anyone who has ever held a security clearance (me, for example) knows who is to blame for any such security breach: the nut behind the keyboard. Or, to put it another way, what we have here is a poor workman blaming his tools. I can’t even comprehend how anyone could put classified documents on a workstation connected to the Internet, and then install file-sharing software on that workstation, without being aware of the security ramifications. The very concept just baffles me. Were the InfoSec people asleep?

Anyway, here are links to the report. I wonder how much MPAA and RIAA spent to underwrite it?

PDF version
HTML version

Microsoft Office program manager Brian Jones, whose work has centered around the Open XML document format, now says the “format war” with OASIS OpenDocument is officially over. The winner, he claims, is both.

Jones made the statement in a blog post over the weekend following the release by Novell of an Open XML translator for OpenOffice.

Personally, I think this reply in the blog’s comments sums it up nicely:

There never was a war between ODF and OOXML. To declare that the war is over is therefore disingenuous. ODF was designed to be a comprehensive standard for document interchange. To that end, it has been adopted as an ISO standard and mandated by a growing list of organizations and governments around the world.

OOXML, on the other hand, was designed to fit a particular niche. It does that reasonably well, although even a cursory reading of the spec will reveal its poor design and even poorer architecture. There is little likelihood that it will be adopted as an ISO standard.

(from MSDN Blogs, OpenOffice support for the OpenXML formats)

While the US courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft’s FAT patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just dismissed the patent for use in Germany. According to a report in the German news publication Heise Online, the court has denied the protection that the European Patent Office granted to Microsoft under EP 0618540 for a “common namespace for long and short filenames”. This was based on Microsoft’s U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352. The German Patent Court stated that the patent claims Microsoft made are “not based on inventive activity”.

(from OSNews.com, Microsoft Fails to Patent FAT in Germany)

It gives me some small hope for the future when I learn of isolated pockets of good sense out there in the world. Way to go, Germany.

AT&T told an appeals court in a written brief Monday that the case against it for allegedly helping the government spy on its customers should be thrown out, because it cannot defend itself — even by showing a signed order from the government — without endangering national security.

A government brief filed simultaneously backed AT&T’s claims and said a lower court judge had exceeded his authority by not dismissing the suit outright.

(from WIRED Blogs, Spying Too Secret For Your Court: AT&T, Gov Tell Ninth)

Ah, there we go: my cynicism is now back in place. I was feeling disoriented for a moment there.

In a new setback to Microsoft’s public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker’s Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.

Tech staffers at NIST, a part of the Department of Commerce charged with promulgating technology standards, are scheduled to meet on April 10 in Gaithersburg, Md., to discuss their concerns about the new operating system, which Microsoft released to consumers in January amid much fanfare and to businesses in December with lesser flair.

According to the formal agenda for the meeting, NIST technology workers will attend a session entitled “Windows Vista Security” to discuss “the current ban of this operating system on NIST networks.” NIST officials weren’t immediately available to comment.

Word of NIST’s Windows Vista ban comes a week after InformationWeek revealed that the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration have both imposed similar blackouts on the operating system, as well as on Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

(from InformationWeek, Microsoft Suffers Latest Blow As NIST Bans Windows Vista)

If this keeps up, it’s going to restore my faith in the competence of government employees (which I lost when I was around 16). What’s next? Dry water? Chaste teenagers? Proof that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago by an omnipotent creature suffering from MPD?

So-called Daylight Saving Time doesn’t save anything. It costs the USA hundreds of millions, if not billions, in lost productivity and wasted man-hours as people fiddle with clocks, miss appointments, correct scheduling errors, and otherwise observe this completely fatuous ritual.

It most certainly does not save electricity. This isn’t the 1940s: and homes and businesses keep their lights and heat on throughout the day, regardless of the time displayed on the clock. It doesn’t save lives: studies have shown that it actually costs lives as people’s sleep schedules are disrupted for days, causing an increase in traffic accidents. It doesn’t help farmers: farmers rise with the sun. It doesn’t help children: is it better for them to be going back and forth to school in the dark in the afternoon, when people are wide awake, or in the morning, when people are still groggy from having their sleep disrupted by this foolish Daylight Saving Time? In the middle of winter, it’s dark in the morning and in the evening anyway! So what does so-called Daylight Saving Time “save”? Nothing! It costs, and it costs us dearly.

It is time to put an end to this ridiculous ritual. Write, call, and email your federal and state representatives (DST is a federal scheme, but states can opt out of it), and tell them to stop screwing around with America’s clocks!

In December of 2001, BBSpot published the article, Publisher Cleared in Pop-Up Book Trial, which describes a lawsuit against Random House brought by people who… well, just read it:

Publishing giant Random House was cleared of all charges in a lawsuit stemming from a fatal accident involving a pop-up book of sexual positions that they published from May 1999 to December 2000.

The class action suit was filed by Skrelnick, Callard, and Associates law firm in the Spring of 2001 when several people were injured trying to duplicate one the positions found in the book. It seems that a folding error on page 27 caused a number of couples to inadvertently snap their partners spines when attempting that position.

It took a few years for the real world to catch up, but in 2006 Melcher Media published The Pop-up Book of Sex. It appears to have received a number of positive reviews. Just be careful with the pose on page 27.

The FSF today released a paper that details the ways that hardware manufacturers can help the Free Software Community, as well as themselves. It all sounds like common-sense to me.