Very amusing. Take the test and see how well you do!
The Political Compass
Interesting… read the first page, then take the test. The results might surprise you.
“Vista fiasco continues with retreat to XP”
Microsoft finally woke up and realized that people aren’t going to pay their usual rate for OEM copies of Windows when the PC itself is under $200, so they’ve decided to allow those computers to run Windows XP — the previous (and in many peoples’ opinion, better) version of Windows — instead of ceding the market to Linux. I don’t think it’s going to help them though.
Rumor has it that they’re frantically pushing to get the post-Vista version of Windows (presently simply called “Windows 7”) out as quickly as they can. That might help them stave off obsolescence, if they drop the user-hostile DRM code and produce something at least as good as Windows XP SP2… but I wouldn’t take bets on it.
Microsoft’s OOXML Now An ISO “Standard”
Speaking of Microsoft’s arrogance when it comes to following existing standards, the results of the ISO vote on their unnecessary OOXML have been leaked, and it looks like they won approval… though a number of people in the know are saying that they played fast and loose with the rules to do so.
No surprise there, they had to win in order to keep MS Office relevant to governments. Many large businesses have to use it because governments do, and many small businesses and individuals have to use it because larger businesses they deal with do. And everyone has to use Windows — Microsoft’s only other cash cow — in order to use MS Office.
MS is trying desperately to stop, or at least slow, the open-source domino effect that’s taking an ever-larger bite out of their business and profits. Winning this vote was crucial to that, so they couldn’t have played fair even if they were inclined to do so. So we’re now stuck with yet another standard, something we needed “like a goldfish needs a bicycle.”
At least MS will have to turn it over to a standards body now.
UPDATE: The EC is looking into the irregularities.
I’m Being Spammed By “IDG Connect”
I received an odd newsletter e-mail this morning. Odd because it looked like a perfectly legitimate newsletter, but it was from an outfit calling itself IDG Connect and claiming that I’m a “valued customer.” I’d never heard of the company before this, so far as I know, so I did some research.
It’s hard to find much information on them, other than their own website, but I finally discovered two comments on a mostly-unrelated Computerworld blog post. The first says:
I just happened on this blog, Googling to see if anyone else has trouble and/or was entered into the “challenge/response unsubscription loop from hell” while trying to unsub from IDG Connect…a newsletter I never subscribed to.
Well, these things do happen, and it might still be a legitimate mistake. But directly under that comment was this one:
I am unable to unsubscribe to IDG as well – I’ve tried using the option they listed in the email since they appeared to be a legit operation, but the only result is that now I get emails from them every day, not just once in a while.
So much for the theory that they’re legitimate. I’ll start training my spam filter to block their crap.
I’m writing this entry in the hopes that other people looking for information on this company (or trying to find out why they’re being spammed by them) will discover it, since there’s so little easily-accessible information about them.
Microsoft Going Open-Source?
This has to be an April Fool’s gag — Microsoft would never put anything into the public domain, no matter how minor, and Office (one of its two major cash cows) most especially. But it was fun for the first couple paragraphs.
“Get your German interior minister’s fingerprint here”
Politicians that back biometrics (as a way to thwart crime and terrorism) now have reason to be a little terrified themselves: a hacker group has copied the fingerprint of a German politician who has been pushing that technology, and published it in a form that can easily be used to fool fingerprint readers. Fun, fun, fun.
“All That Got Stolen Was Microsoft’s Thunder”
It seems that Microsoft has realized the foolishness of last year’s unsubstantiated assertion that Linux “violates 235 of [MS’s] patents.” Failing to scare corporations away from Linux, and failing to scare Linux distributors like Red Hat into paying them extortion money, they’ve backed away from that claim and are making friendly overtures to the open-source community (though I suspect, with a dagger hidden behind their collective back). We’ll see how it goes, though I’m happy to see that people have gotten wise to MS’s time-worn tactic of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
“Cat Ownership Correlated With Heart Health”
Yesterday evening, through a bizarre set of circumstances, our front door was left open for about three hours without us realizing it. Our three pampered and indoor cats reacted to this in various ways… Oliver Bert-tholomew Purrington (the youngest and smartest) came upstairs to let us know about it, and when he was unable to make us understand what he was trying to tell us, explored the outdoors until he got cold, then came back in on his own.
The other two apparently stayed in the house, and were visited by at least one of the neighborhood’s several outdoor cats. Predictably, they were traumatized… Winston (“Winnie the Pooh,” an extremely nice cat, but to put it charitably, is as thick as two short planks, as well as being the original fraidy-cat) hid under our bed until we pried him out late last night, and then hid in the basement until we made him come out and eat this morning. His sister Salem, a.k.a. “Fluffzilla,” recovered much more quickly… she was herself before we went to sleep.
All of that is fairly irrelevant to the purpose of this post, which is to point out this Slashdot posting describing recent research that suggests that cat owners are one-third less likely to die from heart attacks. I just wonder whether human ownership by felines does the same for them… for Winston’s sake, I hope so. 🙂
“Doomsday fears spark lawsuit over collider”
Sorry, but I don’t buy it.
In my work with compression theory, I learned a lot about probability. If any of these doomsday scenarios were possible, they would have happened somewhere in the universe already — probably a lot of somewheres — and science would have seen some evidence of them.
Like most good scientists, I hesitate to categorically deny that anything is possible, but the extremely remote possibility that any of these scenarios has a grain of truth should not stop people from experimenting.
Before automobiles, I understand that there was a firm and widespread belief that going more than fifty miles an hour would cause your head to spontaneously explode — but we all routinely travel at speeds above that now without a single cranium doing an unprovoked firecracker impersonation. Fear of the unknown is both natural and prudent, but you have to learn to identify and handle unjustified fears if you want to make any progress.