Brief Notes
I must start this latest in my Brief Notes series with an apology to anyone that’s been wondering where Song Of The Day has gone. The last one went up on 7 January and there’s been no sign of it since. The simple answer is that I’ve been too busy to get round to putting anything up recently, but I’m hoping to get back on to it in the next day or so.
The frequency of SOTD postings may change for the future, too. I’m going to try as much as possible to get back onto the one song per day schedule, but where that’s not possible there may be a few days gap in-between. I’m also going to stop filling in the gaps where I miss days. For example, in the past if I’ve missed a two days, then I’ve done two date-adjusted posts to fill in the gaps. From now on, the gap will stand. I’m hoping that what this will help me to do is to write about each song a bit more.
I’m going to continue calling the feature Song Of The Day, because that’s quite established and it will still apply. It doesn’t say that I have to post a song every day….
So, on to some of the news stories that have caught my eye recently and which I’d like to comment briefly about:
1. The EU Commission are apparently going after Microsoft. Again. For anti-competitive practices. Again. Because Internet Explorer is bundled with Windows. Again.
Sorry, but haven’t we been there, done that? I didn’t get it before and I don’t get it now. Browsers are, generally, free. There are a number out there that can be downloaded and installed on Windows. So what’s the big deal? Can Microsoft really be expected to either not offer a browser with Windows, or permit other browsers to also be bundled with Windows? I don’t think so.
If the argument is that by bundling Internet Explorer, Microsoft have forced all other browsers to be free-to-own then is there any indication that anyone could ever have made money selling browser software? Personally, if I bought an operating system that did not come with an included browser I’d see that as a bad thing.
And why should Microsoft be singled out for bundling their browser? Apple do it with Safari. If it’s an anti-competitive practice, it should be applied across the board. But no, as we’ve seen before Apple get away with that sort of thing – even when they tie up the online music market with their iTunes / iPod stranglehold.
2. As I may have mentioned before, I work for a company that sells complementary medicine products – in our case, nutritional supplements. The complementary medicine field has become more and more popular over the years and you can now visit therapists for nutrition, reflexology, kiniesiology and many more. There have often been calls – usually from the tabloid press, or traditional medicine practitioners – for some sort of governing registration body to oversee them all.
Well, that day has come and the CNHC is now with us. Trouble is, it seems like it’s doomed to failure because it’s voluntary, doesn’t cover all disciplines of therapy and costs therapists a fee to join. I have an objection to such organisations when they take money to, supposedly, vet and approve members. It becomes in their interests to have more members, and that’s when you have the possibility of standards slipping.
I’ve always thought this about the Soil Association, one of the UK bodies that deals with organic registrations. Many people seem to think the Soil Association are the only people that can register a product as organic, but this isn’t the case – they’re just the biggest one. Unlike some of the other bodies in the UK, they charge not only a fee for their initial classification of a product as organic, but they also take a percentage of the sales turnover for that product. Therefore, they earn money for every unit of every registered product that is sold. To me, that makes it in their interest to register as many products as possible. And that makes me think that there’s the potential for the profit margins to take over.
3. Two stories about parents now. The first concerns a couple that have been told that they can’t adopt as the husband is too fat. Never mind that he’s not unfit, or that he and his wife could offer a good loving home to a kid that really needs it. No, apparently being too fat is just another item on the list that means you’re not qualified to be an adoptive parent.
4. Unfortunately, there’s no such list for natural parents and stories like this really make you wish there were. This story is really quite distressing, and makes me wish that we lived in years gone by where we would be able to properly punish these monstrous, inhuman scum. I’ve got friends who’ve got children of the same age, and I just don’t understand how anyone could inflict that sort of pain on such a helpless little one. One can only hope that a goodly amount of prison justice gets meted out to them.
Those Microsoft Ads
In my most recent Brief Notes, I commented on the first of the Seinfeld Microsoft adverts and suggested that it wasn’t going to convince anyone to go out and buy any Micorsoft. The second one came along a few days ago and was just plain confusing. Something about connecting with ordinary people, maybe? Whatever, it’s four and half minutes that I’ll never get back, and it still didn’t make me want to go out and buy any Microsoft products.
It seems that I was not alone in not getting what these adverts were trying to achieve, as despite supposedly originally being planned to be a longer series, the Seinfeld ads have now been canned. Allegedly, with a third one already in production. I’m sure Jerry isn’t upset – $10m for a few hours work? Nice!
But Microsoft have another ace up their marketing sleeve – the “I’m a PC” ads. And it’s here where I find myself in the unusual position of actually coming to Microsoft’s defence. I read several tech blogs and, being a Mac user, I tend towards the ones that are Mac-centric. Without exception, all of these blogs have commented on the new adverts and have torn them to pieces for jumping on Apple’s bandwagon, missing the point of the “Get a Mac” adverts, having to rely on spoofing an existing, successful campaign, and so on.
If you’ve only heard the basic premise of the adverts, and not seen them for yourself, then you might be inclined to side with these commenters so why not go and watch them? There are three – Pride, Not Alone and Stereotype – and they’re only short so it won’t take you long.
Done? OK. So, to me, what these three new adverts are showing is the diverse range of people that currently use a PC, as opposed to a Mac. It gives an insight into the sort of things that these people do with their PC and it helps to show that PCs can, actually, be a lot more than a biege box that sits in a corner being hated by everyone. I think it shows, much more than Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads do, that the PC can be used in many different settings, by people of differing abilities, and with a wide range of different goals that they want to achieve. Apple and Mac, I’m sorry to say, still have not overcome that image of being for artsy-fartsy graphic designers and too-cool people with money to waste.
But, say some, Apple are giving reasons to buy a Mac, which is their computer, but Microsoft are trumpeting the joys of being a PC, which is not their computer; why aren’t they talking about being a Window? Firstly, of course, Apple made the association between PC and Windows / Microsoft in their own adverts so – as these are intended to spoof the Apple ones – Microsoft have continued that association. But secondly, and more importantly, public perception is still very much that if you’re talking about a PC, you’re talking about Windows. Yes, Linux is making in-roads but the majority of PC users will be running Windows. So it’s a fair comparison.
Let’s face it, most people are perfectly happy being a PC. It does what they want it to do, it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and if they don’t mess with it then most of the time it won’t fall over. (So often, the reason Windows falls over is because the user has decided to delete vital files, or change settings he knows nothing about. Trust me, voice of experience). Mac’s don’t fall over, either, but that’s because OS X doesn’t let you get at the vital files so easily so they can’t be accidentally deleted. And, of course, OS X doesn’t have to support multitudes of different hardware in the way that Windows does.
On the whole, I think Microsoft have done something good with these new adverts and I’d hope to see a few more in this vein. Apple, on the other hand, need to think about retiring the “Get a Mac” ads – they were never as funny as Apple seemed to think they were, and they’ve gone on for too long now.
If Apples were.. well, Microsofts, actually
Just came across this story at TUAW, reporting that an anti-trust lawsuit has been filed against Apple for monopolising the online music industry with their tie-in of iTunes to iPods.
Most of the commenters seem to be of the opinion that this is a frivolous lawsuit that has no merit, and that the law firm that took the case should be despised for taking a case that will obviously fail. The contention is that just because Apple have been successful at what they do, why should they be punished?
It’s a valid point; why should a business be dragged through the courts just because they happen to be better at what they do than anyone else in their market? Why should they be forced to open up their systems to allow other companies access to the consumer-base that they’ve worked long and hard to build up? It makes a mockery of building a successful business.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment being put forward; but it does seem that these opinions are held because it’s Apple we’re talking about. Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of the stuff that Apple do (I’m typing this entry on an iMac, whilst listening to music through iTunes) but there does seem to be a commonly held belief in the wider computing world that Apple = Good and Microsoft = Bad.
But let’s face it. Microsoft have become as big as they are because they succeeded where others failed. And they get slapped down in courts all over the world and forced to give up their proprietary information for no other reason than other companies can’t do it as well as they can. But everyone seems to think it’s right they should be slapped down. And now Apple are being hit with some of the same treatment, but it’s suddenly different. I’m not sure I really see how.
Open Office and NeoOffice
A while ago, I wrote a post about my attempt to use Open Office to replace Microsoft Office, in advance of moving from a PC laptop to an iMac. I was looking for an open source alternative to Microsoft, as I couldn’t afford to re-buy all my old software.
On the whole, Open Office was good and on a personal basis was a viable alternative to Microsoft. The problems I had with it were that I couldn’t use it effectively for doing some of my work stuff; it didn’t like some of my Excel documents and was no good with the Access databases that I needed to work with. That really scuppered any chances of being able to use Open Office at work.
When I moved to the Mac, one of the first things I did was to download Open Office. To run on the Mac, Open Office requires something called X11, which is an extra part of the OS X system. OK, so I loaded that. Everything worked fine, but it seemed an inelegant solution. Open Office are working on Open Office Aqua for the Mac, which doesn’t require X11, but as it was described as currently being “very beta” I decided against it.
A Google search for “Open Office for Mac” directed me to NeoOffice. Using Open Office as a base, NeoOffice is a development for Mac that does not require X11 but is a stable release. Excellent; downloaded it, installed it, got rid of Open Office.
And there it stayed for the last few weeks. While I had it available, I didn’t actually need to use it. One thing I did notice with both Open Office and NeoOffice was that – when printing to my HP Photosmart 7762 – the top margin got ignored. Very annoying.
Then, a couple of days ago, I saw this post on Slashdot, saying that the latest release of NeoOffice was available. And guess what? All my problems are solved – it prints the top margin, it will open those big Excel sheets from work in five minutes instead of 20, it will keep the graphs when I re-save in Excel format and it’s more closely integrated with native OS X functionality like Dictionary. All-in-all, it’s brilliant.
If you use a Mac and you want something to replace Microsoft Office (and iWork doesn’t really cut it for you) then check out NeoOffice. You won’t be disappointed.
Usbport.sys – Update
Back on 29 June, I wrote a post detailing my experiences with a constantly locking-up Windows laptop. For no reason, it would freeze and need to be restarted. It would do this whether I was running one application or five, or even if the PC was just sitting there doing nothing.
By chance, I came across usbport.sys and changed the version of the file from the SP2 one back to the SP1 version. The result seemed to be good and that’s when I wrote the post.
This post is just to update you a little bit. Changing usbport.sys definitely helped the PC lock-up less and, initially, seemed to have solved the problem completely. That did not prove to be long-lasting, though. Whilst never going back to previous levels, the laptop did return to its bad ways. About once every four or five days of use I’d get an unexpected BSOD – usually with some reference to IRQL_NOT_ EQUAL – which seems to be quite common for Windows users.
My solution has been to change my old laptop for a nice shiny new iMac and it is a solution that has been 100% successful and I would recommend it to everyone.
Wolfs Helpers
