A very close friend of mine had an issue. He needed to use a web application which provided a service necessary to get some work related tasks done. It simply was not working. Despite his hardest efforts, he could not turn that around. Although he is a very smart and capable person, he does not posses technical knowledge on this particular area of expertise. Like so many other people confronted with issues utilizing their PC’s, I completely understood and offered to diagnose the problem.

His lovely web app, needed to install an Active X control in order to work. It doesn’t offer any alternative. I personally don’t like to install these things, except the really necessary ones, like the ones from Microsoft. Yet I don’t know why they don’t come out of the box to begin with, but that’s another story. He insisted that he trusted the source and he needed the info on this web app, so I installed the control and proceeded to reload the page.

Then a lovely error message stated that the application only runs in Internet Explorer 6.0 (he was running 7.0). Ay-ay-ay! Their own crap doesn’t support their previous crap. Let’s step back for a moment. One thing is to make your own, non-standard-complaint crap. But to make your new non-standard-compliant crap which is not compatible with your last non-standard-compliant crap? Are you really trying to give us a great big collective headache? Was that one too many ‘crap’s? Great, I Google instructions on how to downgrade the browser.

This  took me to the Microsoft support site, which forced me to installed the lovely Windows Genuine Advantage (and other updates). I have read all the horrors this introduces, but again, my friend was in a pinch and I was  here to help him. I installed, and restarted the machine. According to WGA I had a valid and legal license, no problems there. I sighed in relief, confirmed the install of the rest of the updates and restarted the machine.

When the machine booted up again, half of it’s functionality had been disabled. I could not access my network, or the internet. I could not access the system hardware configuration. So much for being confirmed BY THE SOURCE that I have a valid license. The owner was basically locked out of the machine and OS he paid with HIS MONEY for his use. I tried to troubleshoot the problem, but without the assistance of my Google to look up any occurrences of similar issues, I had little options.

Luckily there was not a lot of important data on the machine. After a while he finds his Windows install disk (again, paid for with a valid license). I format the drive to get rid of all that gunk and reinstall Windows. After about an hour, I have a clean machine, which is running a bit smoother (simply because it still has no apps and a lot less DLL’s to load) and is ready to go. I load up the site again, reinstall the Active X control and give it a whirl. Instead of seeing results, I get another error message. This time, he wants me to install Service Pack 2. Now this is one of the old disks which doesn’t even have SP1.

I go to the Windows Update site, select all the updates and direct it to download and install. Keep in mind this is a fresh, untampered with machine. After the process was completed, at least half of the updates weren’t installed!  Log files, explanatory error messages, troubleshooting options? Ha! In your dreams! I had to iterate over the process 3 times in order to get everything installed. After the fourth reboot, finally SP2 appears as an option in Windows Update. Downloading and installing SP2 alone consumed more than an hour. Not to mention a period of about 10-20 minutes where the SP2 installer simply became unresponsive. I had no idea if it had crashed or hit a snag. I didn’t kill the process in fear that it would render the machine useless… again.

We haven’t had the time to go back to the site and see it’s next complaint, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised other issues have to be resolved before being able to utilize the service.

Do you know when was the last time I encountered a problem like this utilizing applications and operating systems that are built on open standards? NEVER! It doesn’t happen! There is no obscurity, and therefore, all the processes necessary to get the service you require to work is much smoother. Since it is widely known how the protocols work, everyone can support it, regardless of what your OS or client application is.

If I could leave one message to the 10 people that take 5 minutes of their day to read this it would be this: The alternatives to Windows are better! Really! Stop being afraid! You will thank me if you at least try to make the switch. I have been happy ever since. The sad thing is that I have a very very very small, yet loyal fan base with one or two strays every once in a while. 8 of the 10 readers are already using an alternative. I already know this for a fact. If I could only convince the ninth guy to switch, then maybe… just maybe I would have accomplished something worthwhile with my day.

More than once, I have the same advice handed over to technical readers. Especially we the oh so lucky nerds in the computer science and related fields of knowledge. Alternate reading technical books with fantasy, science fiction or any other type of creative works. Technical books tend to put in a specific frame of mind. They box you into a specific way of thinking. While their knowledge is necessary, exposure to that influence alone will create a very square person. Fiction works help develop your creativity. Making your mind soar, it helps develop the skills of creation and “out of the box” thinking. While this is not as documented as the former, in my field it is just as important.

It might not have been the best decision, but instead of going with a fiction book, I decided to take up an MMO. While not as stimulating as the former, it definitely will help stimulate my long abandoned creative juices, and offer enough interactivity to keep me active and motivated. While I will not specify the game, let me just say it is NOT Warcrack. Although this can be said about most MMO’s, Warcark is simply too time consuming, too addictive, and too absorbing.

I went with a game which I had a little previous experience with, making my transition into it a bit easier. I invited a couple of my friends which have played it in the past, but have now abandoned it. Only one has showed up till now. The game, like many others, forces you to look for allies in order to complete cooperative quests and missions. While you can attempt to do them yourself, or utilize AI driven helpers “henchmen” (as they are called in the game), most of the time this just isn’t good enough.

For those of you that have not had the pleasure of playing an MMO, I really, really recommend you try it out. If only to experience a very important cultural phenomenon of this decade, if not century. The game boasts a huge number of players. These players are not only interacting with the environment presented to them in the game, but also amongst themselves. These players are all simultaneously attempting to complete quests and missions, scouting good players to have them join their guilds, buying and selling goods, negotiating prices, trying to upgrade their armor and weapons, playing against each other. Any sociologist would have a field day analyzing all of this interaction. I am pretty sure a couple already have.

I quickly found myself in a very inhospitable environment. A bunch of people trying to sell me stuff I didn’t want or need. I was asking for help with a couple of missions, and the little help I was offered came with a price tag (in game currency) attached to it. I had little resources at my disposal, therefore there was little I could do. Sound familiar? All of a sudden this seemed like the “real” world, all over again. Thoughts of The Matrix popped in my head. I quietly grinned and tried to make the best of it with the resources I had at my disposal. I had already set out to make this the best experience possible, and I wasn’t about to quit now.

I had managed to gather a little bit of money from the small entry level ventures I was able to successfully accomplish. I was offering a small amount of money in exchange for help in the completion of a quest. As you can imagine, most of the people in that area simply ignored me. One particular fellow walked up to me astonished that I was offering money for help. I simply responded saying that was the only way I saw that I could get help. He laughed and offered me his free services. When we set off on the quest that I had to complete I realized this was an experienced player who had already maxed out the potential of his character. When we set off in the quest, he quickly and easily dispatched any enemies that popped up in front of us. There was little for me to do, but to pick up the money and loot left behind by the enemies.

After completing a couple of pending missions he promptly invited me to become a member of his guild. I was honored and quickly accepted. This guy was my hero. He was a master at the game, he selflessly helped me get through some hard parts of it, and now he was inviting me to form part of his group! I mean, how bigger than that does it get in the context. I was happy. I was playing. Probably a bit more than the conservative couple of hours a week I proposed myself to do so. As I mentioned before, these games are highly involving and addictive. If you let yourself get immersed in the fantasy world it projects, you can dedicate a couple of hours to it without even realizing it. In any case, I have corrected this, and I am back to regular more healthy dosages of the game.

One day I was hanging out with a couple of guys in the guild, doing some missions. We talk about a lot of stuff, related to the context of the game, but also mundane matters as well. My personal super hero and another one of the members were talking about how happy they were that they had gotten through their final exams and the school year was finally over. I froze in my tracks. After a couple of seconds I snapped out of it, and asked them “what grade are you in?”. They happily responded “10th grade”. They whipped back the same question at me. A bit ashamed I let them know I was an “old man”. This did not change my relationship with any of the guys in the guild. I still highly respect then, and love to play with them.

What this did do for me was make me think about the social implications of this type of game. You are represented and perceived by others by you in game character. When you start a campaign, you create a character. This character has a profession, a sex, a color of clothes, and particular physical characteristics that you specify. This gives you your own custom image in the game. Yet it is simply made to distinguish you from players which are nearby. The truth is that these are all false. Since from the get go everyone knows this is just a digital representation of the person behind the keyboard and mouse, no assumptions are made based on their appearance. Do you have any idea how big this is? Say goodbye to any discrimination based on color, sex or race. People are judged by how good they are at the game, what items you have available, what strategic support you can offer. Not by their characteristics. We’ve been trying to do that in our own society for at least the last 300 hundred years and have yet to be successful. Yet thanks to this online interaction, it has happened as a side effect no less.

I didn’t know that my partner in crime was simply a 15 year old child. I still have no idea what’s his race, color of his skin, or if he has any the ability to speak any tongues other than English.This has not changed in any way how I perceive him. He is still the leader of the group, and I still gladly follow him in the game. Yet in our world, the couple of laps around the sun that I have as an advantage would have probably given me seniority over the group. Irrelevant of the fact of weather I actually deserved or not. I am not even going to go into other discriminatory implications.

This, in part, explains the massive popularity of these games. It provides you a world where a man is quite literally “Not judged by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character”. How many times have we been discriminated in our lifetimes? How many times have we been considered to be less adequate for some task just because we didn’t fit into “the profile”?. Even if you, my dear reader, fit into the 18 to 34 young, thin, white, healthy, English-speaking male (arguably the demographic which less suffers the injustices of prejudice), I am pretty sure this is still an alluring world. Even for you.

Sadly, I came to this realization a bit late. There are already 4+ million people playing Warcrack, which is by far the most popular MMO today. There are countless others in other games and franchises. This will sound like old news to most of you. Yet it was a marvelous moment of realization for me.

At first this seems like a very convenient tool. The Internet has a wealth of information on just about every topic there is. With the new advances in social networking and user generated content, the amount of information grows exponentially. Weather the quality of this content is good or not is another subject all together. Yet this information is not very well categorized. Even if it was, there is so much to go through that it would be humanly impossible to actually find what you are looking for if you don’t already know where it is to begin with. In short, Google is the best thing since individually wrapped sliced cheese.

Where lies the problem? People no longer are using their brains. They are not trying to remember everything. They assume Google will always be available to them. It will always give them a zippy response with accurate results. Why bother remembering anything to begin with. I must admit, there are a lot of sites I visit frequently which I don’t even bother bookmarking, whenever I doubt how to spell a word correctly I use it, it’s my first stop for any investigation no matter it’s size, scope or objective.

This argument is true. It is true but only under a traditionalist context of education based on memorization. For the folks reading from the good ol’ U.S. of A., your education definitely has been influenced by this, but it is not so bad. If I am so lucky to have readers from other industrialized nations, it’s pretty safe to assume your education level is superior (if not at least equal) to that of the U.S., so again, you were probably exposed to it, but not in extreme measures. I had half of my education in the lovely Caribbean paradise some call the Dominican Republic. Creativity, spontaneity or problem solving or not high on the priority lists of most teachers. Their method is very simple. The teacher speaks, the student listens. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, the student will have the lesson scarred to his brain, and use this valuable “learning experience” in the walks of life where it may become necessary. This is applied for every subject, from math and science (where some of this could necessary due to the nature of the disciplines), to religion and music (where it simply doesn’t make any sense at all).

The student would repeat, memorize, and spit out everything they stored the next day. This is essential in order to please the teacher and achieve acceptable grades. The better you are at memorizing yesterday’s lesson and spitting it out with as little help or resources as possible, the better grades you got. It was never about your skills in a certain science, or your understanding of the complexities of a certain circumstance, or reflexion on how the elements work. It was repetition. If you can repeat, you are an excellent student! Needless to say, this caused me more than my fair share of frustration while at school, but that’s another story.

What is wrong with this approach? The student is given a task. That task is to repeat what he/she has been order to bottle up. Once this is done, the student has proved his/her worth, and their is no need to maintain this so called “knowledge”, so it is simply thrown out for more relevant information. It is the natural order of things. You remember how to eat and sleep. They are essential to your survival. You might not remember the name of that guy you bumped into last week, if it didn’t make much of a difference in your experience. If that “knowledge” is simply replaced with the next week’s lesson, then what is the whole point of the education system in the first place? By the end you leave high school, you will simply remember the last lesson of the year, if that at all.

The tendency to think that if you cant remember a URL that means that you are stupid comes from a base in education under this system. It is only natural. That is what has been defined as “being smart”. If you can’t do it, it means you simply do not posses that quality. And stand back! Because the person scolding you has harvested their unique memorization abilities for years! He/She will put it in just to impress you. Have no doubt.

It’s very simply to see at a glance what is wrong with this system, but, what do we replace it with? It’s called “critical thinking”. The important thing to teach is not the Who, Where, When, or What. The important things are the Why and the How. The value of PI = 3.1416. You insert that into the formula, and it will give you the answer. Great! You can even pass the trigonometry test if you can remember the number, but did they bother to explain to you, why that value? Why not 5.2345 or 9.18938? Where did it come from? What does it mean? When an interest is sparked in knowing what happens behind the scene it is assimilated as a valuable lesson. This sticks with you because you understand the concept. The understanding of a concept is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the memorization of a constant.

Does Google make me stupider (pun intended)?  No. It doesn’t. It relieves me of the necessity of remembering things. Since we’ve already covered the topic detailing that remembering things does not enhance your abilities, we can draw upon the simple conclusion that it does not affect your intelligence. I would even go as far as to counter argue that it is a stimulant to make you smarter. You don’t have to dedicate time to memorization, it does it for you. You can dedicate your time to what’s really important. Finding out the Why and the How.

In my wet dreams I become appointed the Secretary of Education of my country. I lead an education revolution which emphasizes critical thinking in schools from kindergarten to PHD’s. In the long run this change makes my country more competent in it’s  economical, cultural and social contexts. There is more probability of me winning the lottery with a couple of million dollars than that happening. Now a days I limit myself to try to teach this to the people around me. I do believe that if we all try we can make a difference. The question is how long will it be until a favorable impact on society as a whole can be perceived?

One of the most interesting things I found from the initial demonstration of it, is that King Jobs insisted that this was NOT carrying a stripped down version of Mac OS X. This was the full fledged, complete with bells and whistles version of Mac OS X. They did some work for the user interface and a couple of custom applications to fit the form factor, but in essence the underlying operating system were the same. As a developer (and nerd) I immediately had a vision: I could run all of my favorite applications on this slim and sexy device. I could have all of the stuff I wanted on the go. It was almost something out of the page of a science fiction book.

Lessons have been learned in the past about third party software. Sadly they tend to break and ruin the experience which was very carefully developed for the base platform. And mobile computing platforms are not the exception. Anyone that has had a Palm or Windows Mobile cell phone can probably concur and share a couple of horror stories. There is simply no way to control this 100%.

As a new product, it is utterly important for Apple that the iPhone make the best impression possible. They have an unbelievable amount of hype behind this device. Once you promise the moon and the stars it is impossible to deliver upon that promise, but you try to get as close as possible anyway. Doing as much as possible to maintain the usability and stability of the phone itself is a very important factor in this respect. If third party applications are permitted unto the phone, this could (and probably will) lead to some crashes here and there. Jobs has publicly stated a scenario where part of ATT’s network would come tumbling down due to an application on one of the phones. I think this is a drastic exaggeration. Yet, it may become troublesome for them. This will lead to higher support costs, due to applications that don’t generate them any income. Not to mention the legions of unhappy customers which will probably blame Apple for the frustrating experience.

On the other side of this discussion, the iPhone is an excellent platform for delivering a wide range of applications. While the applications that Apple distributes are always very sexy, have an excellent user interface and are generally very popular, they don’t fulfill all needs. The phone will come with 11 pre-installed applications. All developed by Apple. It is fairly safe to assume that in the near future Apple will continue to release other applications which can be executed on their product. What if I want something else? What if I want to consume media in a format that is not supported by the available applications? What if I just want to tinker away at it?

This would also contribute to adding more developers to the Mac platform. If it really is the same base operating system, applications could be easily ported from the mac pc, to the phone and vice versa. You could interest developers in developing for the phone, and have them stick around for the other platforms. It would only help the Mac developer community to grow. Not that there is a small group of Mac developers, but their numbers are easily dwarfed by Microsoft’s group in comparison.

It would also help to make their phone platform even more popular. I could make any distributed system I want using the phone as the client interface. This gives me great flexibility. I can already dream up a couple of scenarios where this could help out tremendously.

There have been some recent rumors stating that there might be a possibility of an SDK for the device. Sadly King Jobs or Apple PR have never taken a solid stance on the matter to begin with. This just added to the rumor flames.

Then the day arrived. The day of the WWDC conference. Where we have been promised to get more enticing details on the beloved phone. Let me jump straight to the point: Regarding to this much anticipated issue Mr. Jobs responded: “We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of the iPhone so developers can write great apps for it, but keep the iPhone secure. [...] we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone. [...] And so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. [...] They’re secure, and they run securely sandboxed on the iPhone. And guess what, there’s no SDK you need! You’ve got everything you need if you can write modern web apps”. (From Gizmodo. For full article click here).

I’ve heard opinions on this matter that qualify this statement as “patronizing” or “condescending”. Let me add my own two cents. How about INSULTING?! Tell me that you will not develop and SDK for security reasons, but I can always run web apps on the phone. I will feel bummed out, but will ultimately understand their posture and try to make the best of it. Sticking a web app in my face, assuming I’m stupid, and telling me this is just as good as and SDK? Sure, let’s make a web app! I can access the phone’s wi-fi, bluetooth, multi touch and other hardware on it, right? I can have applications that run offline right? My app can live independent from the cloud, right? I can consume media that is not supported by Apple’s application standards, right? WRONG. They gave me Flash and AJAX (with whom I’m already pissed off to begin with), and told me it’s better than an SDK. At a develpers conference no less. Where people with half a brain, that actually understand half of the specs that are put on the slide show sit. C’mon Jobs! I expected more from you.

Yes, there are a bunch of great web apps. Innovation in web applications is great. Yes, Google Gears is the coolest thing sinced individually wrapped slice cheese for web developers, because it might automagically turn them into real application developers. So please don’t comment saying these things. They are old news. The fact of the matter is simple: A web application is a web application. It does not replace my local counterpart. I don’t care how cool, or fast, or interesting it looks.

Jobs has done an unparalleled job in the past of swaying the masses in his favor. He has a cult following like few other communities in the industry. He is a master in the art, and I will not try to chip away at that. One simple miscalculation though. It’s one thing to assume your users are stupid. That is very necessary for application development. I do it with every new application I build. It is quite another to say it in their face.

Will less iPhones be sold? I highly doubt it. Will I still buy mine? Sad, but probable. Yet Apple has one more unhappy camper to add to their list.

This reminded me of “Pirates of Silicon Valey”, which is a top movie for any nerd, and yet I have not seen it. I took it upon myself to utilize the occasion and watch the land mark film, since these two behemoths will probably not rejoin any time soon to offer me inspiration, or for any other reason. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie it tells the tale of the surge of Apple and Microsoft, although that’s not really important right now.

I was very surprised at how Steve Jobs was portrayed in the movie. He’s eccentric to say the least, and some of the things he did were unreasonable to say the least. I don’t really know how much of the movie is fact and how much is fiction. Again, unimportant detail. The one thing that really caught my eye was the passion that the character of Steve had in the whole movie. This passion has also characterized Jobs himself in the few press conferences and communications I have seen in the recent past. I’m guessing it may be more fact than fiction. He took risks, he stuck with them. He is today one of the most successful and charismatic men in the industry. He has an almost cult like following that will defend him at any cost. A real Cinderella story, if I’ve ever heard one.

This reminds me of one of the many failed attempts I have had in this short but interesting life. Like many others I quit the day job in order to pursue a start up company. As for school, I had already dropped out a couple of years ago at that point, so don’t even bother questioning that. I got together with a couple of my friends and started working on software that we identified that was needed in the market. Software that was inexistent in the market for the most part, and if not, fundamentally flawed.

I was the self appointed software architect. I would dream up most of the designs, and try to plan the stuff to the best of my ability. This does not mean by any extent of the imagination that I had the credentials, experience or know-how to actually do an adequate job. I simply was the guy in the role. I designed a couple of applications, and swiftly started working on them. I was full of life, full of passion. I was glad I had escaped the corporate shackles. I was living my life, my way on my terms. In the end, everything would be alright, or so I told my wife (at that time still girlfriend), every day.

The idea of doing your own thing was very appealing to me. My current day job, considering the market, didn’t have a too bad salary. Yet it got to a point where it was a simple repetition of outlined steps. It quickly became very redundant and boring. To make matters worse, corporate politics, company oversights and bad management made my experience there a whole lot worse. I was escaping all of this. I was going to do what I wanted to do, AND GET PAID TO DO IT. If you add to that family and friends, you’re set! What else do you really need to be happy? Aaahh… the eternal unanswerable question.

Yet the dude (that’s my cute nickname for God) is not without a perverse sense of sarcasm. My planning skills, as I have mentioned before were not stellar. Therefore implementation time was becoming more and more extended due to unforeseen complexities. Discussions turned into fights. People started pointing at my code, ridiculing it. Saying I was a fanboy of a particular technology or a particular construct of a language. I did my best to keep my cool and keep working. After all, our survival was at stake. I had alredy quit my day job, and a couple of the other guys were on their way to do the same.

Then an defining day arrived. One of the guys popped. I don’t know why. I have several theories. Maybe he felt unimportant. Maybe he felt ignored. Maybe he felt that his contributions were not taking into serious consideration. Who knows? Up to this day I still haven’t asked him. He sent a very beautiful email insulting everyone in the group and their mother. The group was already in a tense state. This was just adding a tank of propane, bathed in gasoline, to the fire. Keep in mind I had invested a lot of my creativity and time to the group’s objectives. Hell, the current code base was at least 80% all my own handwritten code. All the designs were mine. Never the less, I promptly quit, wished everyone good luck and started to look for potential job opportunities. I was simply too frustrated and didn’t want to put up with it anymore.

I know have another job, at another corporation. This one seems to be much more friendlier, flexible and comfortable to work with. They try to keep bureaucracy to a necessary minimum and make their employees comfortable. This is a world of change in comparison to the old job. Yet I still feel the same sense as before. I am repeating the same steps over and over again. I am doing a job that in the end will not positively influence someones life. I am simply there, because justification is necessary.

Steve Job’s character (in the movie) in the beginning said that their objective was nothing mediocre, but to make a dent in the universe. He was out to make a difference. He was out to change everyone’s life. I had that kind of passion once. Probably not to the extent of Mr. Jobs, but definitely something palely comparable. I think it’s still lurking down there somewhere. Yet I have lost hope. Not in the group, but in myself. To actually get a start up going takes a lot of hard work. To do it while maintaining a day job, going to school or having other major responsibilities makes it near impossible. Yet there was a day where I laughed in the face of this feat. That day is long gone. I miss being fearless. I miss working to reach objectives I truly believed in, not just for the next paycheck.

Now, making a dent in the universe is pretty big deal. While there are some talented few that are meant to lead, most of us have no choice but to follow. I wanted to be a leader. Apparently I did not have the chops to make it happen, or maybe I gave up too soon. Who knows? Can I still turn it around? Or will I just be another sheep gladly following the herder, reminiscing of a short period of time in my life where I made my own rules, before it all crumbled down to the ground?

It’s too late for me to try to turn this post into news, this is relatively old. Yet this begs to ask a couple of questions:

Why are they not specifying the patents that are in breach? We know that Microsoft has patented everything from the Recycle Bin to the Double Click (yes Microsoft, I said “Recycle Bin”, sue me!). It almost seems like something out of science fiction that they were awarded these patents, but what’s done is done. Is that they know their patent claims are so ridiculous that no one would take them seriously? Is it that, even though I’m sure there are infringements, 235 is just a pretty number and they haven’t actually made the necessary research?

Why wait until this moment? These infringements are nothing new. What is so lovely of this time of year to bring it up? Was their legal team slacking and got assigned some new homework?

Why just make an announcement but take no real legal action? No official suits have been presented in court. Who will be sued? The Linux foundation? Open source companies? End users?

To find the answers to these questions one must analyze the recent history of Linux and some insight might just pop up.

First you have the lovely deal between Microsoft and Novell. According to the B.S. Steve Ballmer and Ronald Hovsepian the plan was to “their companies planned to work together to improve interoperability and increase the viability of enterprise virtualization technology”. What they tried to undertone in the announcement, but everyone focused on anyway, was “As part of the deal, the two companies created a controversial patent indemnification pact: both companies agreed not to sue each other’s customers”. Or more importantly, Microsoft would not sue Novell and it’s users. Novell made a pact with the Devil to avoid patent hell.

This has several implications. Microsoft is saying that while open source software is evil and a detriment to the industry, Novell has been awarded a “get out of jail free” card. This two sided blade continues to emphasize what they’ve said about open source all along. They also clearly reinforced their intentions of going after Linux users in the future. If not, why would this deal be important?  At the very least scare Linux vendors into similar agreements.

Then you have the top U.S. desktop computer maker deciding to sell computers with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. When a vendor like system76 it really doesn’t worry Microsoft. Hell, even Lenovo did it. But when the top computer seller in America makes this move, it will have serious repercussions. It all started with a project called IdeaStorm. It was a digg clone that Dell customers would use to tell the company what they wished for in new hardware, what they were unhappy about, how they could better their products and services. The folks at Dell were amazed when they got hundreds of thousands of petitions for open source office suite alternatives, firefox set as the default browser, and ship Linux preinstalled. Dell has had a recent history of very bad press. Ranging from the laptop battery scandal, to poor service for paying customers. Actually going through could be a way for them to get a bit of good publicity.

Now, I doubt this will be a best seller. They will probably sell some tens of thousands of computers with Linux. Let’s hope I’m mistaken and the number jumps to six figures. Microsoft is not worried that this will curb Vista sales. That won’t happen in a very, very long time. But it will raise awareness of Linux in the everyday mortals who don’t know better. It’s effect will be measured in the future, not the present.

You also need to take into context all of the litigation that has been in the press recently over online media trading. I’m not going to go into that right now. I actually wrote an article on it recently, not that it wasn’t an over covered subject anyway. Basically “free music” or “free movies” are being portrayed as evil. While they are convenient to you, they are adding to the collapse of the media industry as a whole. Your favorite artists will all be forced to stop producing media and get day jobs. The complete entertainment industry faces demise. Or at least that’s what they want you to think. But the important thing is that a concept is being induced into people’s minds. Something that isn’t a new concept, but is getting more traction these days: free is evil.

Of course they are referring to free as in beer (free of charge), as opposed to free as in speech (you are granted the liberty to remix and redistribute). There is a very fine distinction. Most products in the OSS spectrum are free as in beer, but the few that have a price tag attached to them don’t get their freedom revoked. Yet, as anyone working in advertising will probably suggest, since both concepts are expressed with the same word it’s easy to add your own little twists on top of the already massive ignorance and confusion.

Is Microsoft just using these patent infringement allegations to further shed shadow over the Linux community? I think so. There really is no plan to sue anyone. They just need to do something to hurt Linux on the public relations front. They have been getting too much light recently. This has to be stopped before the snowflake rolls into an avalanche! You know what Microsoft? This may just be a classic case of too little, too late.

I am going to take the politically incorrect stance here. People, really, the whole stealing thing. It’s a marketing campaign. It’s being overblown, taken out of proportion to serve the interests of the big corporations which distribute media. They publicize astronomical numbers in losses, sue innocent people, raid servers in foreign countries. All to get your attention. All to make you fear your dastardly activities and lead you into a path of redemption.

It is very hard to take any large group of people and place them all under a single category or specification. Yet it has been done. The millions of people that trade digital media around the world in P2P networks (this is the most notorious example, but there are other technologies at work here as well) are all labeled universally as thieves. Is this an accurate description? Let’s try to take an unbiased look at the evolution of the “illegal” distribution of media to try to find out. I’ll concentrate on movies and music, since they are the two types of content that tend to get most attention.

Ten years ago you could also get movies and music illegally. The internet was still in it’s infancy. A 33.6 or 56 KiBPS dial up modem was the hottest thing since individually wrapped sliced cheese. The widespread use of audio and video encoding that we see today was science fiction at best. There was still a very tight coupling of content and medium. To acquire and consume the content you had to accept the medium it was being distributed on. This was no exception for the pirated distribution as well. Let’s sum up the characteristics of the content and medium that was being distributed.

• The pirated medium sucked. The packaging was sported a very bad copy of the originals logo or front label. Usually never had a back label. The tape, or CD itself usually also had a bad copy of the imprint or nothing at all.
• The content quality was bad. The audio and video was usually very bad. The VHS tapes presented static on the TV, the image looked less sharp. The sound sounded muffled.
• The location of transaction was informal. You had to go to a flee market, or meet up with someone selling pirated content on the street. You never walked into a respectable business with a nice presentation. There was no support, no number to call, no promise of customer satisfaction.
• It was more cost effective than buying the original content. Despite all the negative elements previously mentioned, the strong motivator is that it was significantly cheaper than the legal alternative. Legal and illegal product offer more or less the same thing, with a big price difference. Obviously the market is going to respond to that. Keep in mind that there were no HDTV’s or 7.1 surround systems, so a focus on quality was not the big factor it is today.

Jump to the present. The internet has taken the world by storm. We have tiny devices that we carry around all day that can connect our calls, play music, and announce next week’s forecast. Appliance costs continue to decline and an overall growth of technological related product consumption grows. The media market is at the center of this growth. With the supply of all those media devices, content demand rises as consequence.

People want content. It’s that simple. As always, the market will give them a different choices on what and how to acquire it. How have the illegal offerings evolved during this time?

• There is no medium. I can no acquire my content without the need of it being tied to a to a physical medium. I no longer have to worry about a CD or DVD scratching and ruining my favorite song or movie. I no longer have to worry about that big disc pile in the corner of my room. I no longer have to worry about having a CD and a cassette only radio. With digital content, I can have it with me wherever I go. It’s versatile enough to be played on a wide range of devices, not just my radio or TV. I can quickly and easily share it with anyone irrelevant of geographical position. This freedom is a very powerful concept. Especially when compared to the previous status quo.
• The content quality is excellent. Most of the time on par or above legal offerings. I can download movies and TV shows in HD resolution in a wide variety of formats. I can get MP3′s in 320 KiBPS or lossless formats.
• The location is the best place on earth. You can acquire everything you want from the comfort of your own home. No need to deal with traffic. No need to wait for the half hour it takes you to get to the store and the other half hour it takes you to get back. Instant gratification!
• It still is more cost effective. It’s not free as some people think or promote. You pay for the bandwidth necessary to download the content. Those resources are dedicating the acquisition, so they are part of the cost. Even though, it is still considerably cheaper, probably even more than before.

Before I had to choose between “good price and bad quality” or “not so good price and good quality”. Now it’s simply a no brainer. The illegal offering is superior, and it’s cheaper. There is simply not enough to motive you to “step out of the dark side” so to speak. That is why the MPAA and RIAA are crazy suing people and companies and spending millions of dollars in lobbying. The only motivator they can count to favor them is fear of prosecution. So the judgment now becomes: “good price but I’m in danger” or “not so good price but I can sleep at night”. This introduces a little more balance to the equation. It’s not the best method. They are not stupid. They are aware of this, but it’s the only thing they can resort to.

We all know they have made attempts to follow the new distribution mediums. They have been hindered by poor quality, awful DRM schemes, non competing release dates, etc. If you look at piracy as a competing company, not a menace, and you compare each offering… again, no brainer.

Markets react to the products and services that are presented to them and under the circumstances they are offered in. It’s not that we wont pay for content! We will. Make it worth our while. Not by driving us into fear. Do it the old fashion way: actually offer a superior product. When you do, you’ll see me in line with everyone else.

What the hell. If Quentin Tarantino can get away with it, why can’t I? By the way, if you have never heard of this guy before, you really, really need to rent Pulp Fiction! That scene at the end where Sam Jackson hits his monologue… that’s gold right there! In any case I’m rambling here. Let’s jump back in time a few months. I was living in Santo Domingo for a while and had to move to the good ol’ U.S. of A. for reasons I will not discuss right now, but it’s effects are definitely things I will blog about in the near future. I had lived in the U.S. in the past, but it seems that things have evolved a lot during my absence, which is about half a decade, give or take a year.

Now, if for some reason some one outside of my usual subscriber list accidentally found this article and is reading it I have two things to say to you.

• I apologize. Please withstand this bad writing. It will be over soon.
• Aside from the obvious economic differences, the third and first world are vastly different places. The law, culture, habits, people, it’s all different. It’s almost like if you are in a different world, which is also populated by humans, but which have grown different over time due to the evolution and adaption to this new habitat. I will admit that the third world countries, especially the ones relatively near the U.S., imitate and consume American culture to some extent. This makes it a bit more familiar, but still a world apart.

Since all the clarifications necessary for any stray readers that may appear have been presented, without further a due, let me get back to my story. Jump back to the present again. As expected, the cashier scans all the items I picked up. Her cash register checks the bar code, automagically gets the price and adds it up. At the end of the process she gives the grand total of my purchase.

OK, wait, freeze time. Can we think for a minute what just happened here? The purchasing process is automated to such a great extent that the cashier does not need to recognize the product. She does not need to read a price tag off the product. She does not need to manually or with the assistance of a calculator add up the total of the purchase. She simply passes the items through a scanner and the rest is taken care of. Now, it can be argued that this can be done for the sake of efficiency, security and proper information handling. During office hours, I can be the person that pitches that slogan to you. Lucky for you I started writing this after I got off of work. It’s done for a simple thing.

Any non-programmers that may be reading this may be surprised, but YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO ASSUME THAT THE USER IS STUPID. I’m not talking a little clutzy. I’m talking retarded, finger up his ass, eyes crossed, slobbering, shuddering, can’t-remember-how-to-spell-my-name stupid. And this is done for a simple reason. You cannot predict who the user of your system will be. You might have a demography that may give you an idea depending on the how focused the product is, but that still doesn’t narrow it down enough. This assumption serves as a least common denominator. This leads to a significant reduction in the potential of error. Therefore your information, which in the end is always your money, will be protected from it. Or so we like to tell our clients so they are able to sleep at night.

All of these things I have seen before. They were here before I left. They exist in Santo Domingo in certain big chain stores and super markets. They greeted me in my return. OK, roll time again! She gives me my total. I whip out some cash and hand it to her. She inputs the amount into the register, hands me some bills, but hands me no coins which I was expecting. Then I hear a tinkling sound. Let’s put time in slow motion please. I notice a small device next to the cash register facing my way. It’s a black box, with a nickel plated orifice pointing up. After a couple of seconds something astonishing happened. It spit out the exact change I was expecting. Stop time again! I had a brain freeze. It’s sole purpose is to calculate which coins it has to give you depending on the amount of change you are to be returned! I couldn’t move. I was standing stupefied. Lucky for me the friend that accompanied me, whom I mentioned earlier for this reference, gave me a slight nudge which served the purpose of waking me from the trance and giving you the last queue to roll time again. “Dude, pick up your change and let’s get out of here!”, he said. I picked it up, put it in my pocket, and then walked silent for a couple of minutes.

So now the cashiers aren’t even expected to count coins? They cannot be relied with the responsibility of adding and multiplying four (soon to be only three) types of coins. This is unbelievable!

Now you have to understand. The all life forms on this planet naturally adapt to their surroundings and their circumstances. Darwin is the grand daddy of these theory. If you are reading this that means you probably went to school, which means that you should know who he is and what I’m talking about, but these days you never know. It happens all around nature, and it happens within human society as well. By giving the cashier the aid of the cash register, she no longer needs to be adequate with simple arithmetic operations, so she doesn’t do them. Since she doesn’t do them, she is no longer capable of doing them at a rate acceptable to efficiently process a purchase. I will be straight with you. Ever since they let me bring a calculator to a test back in high school, I haven’t been the best guy in the room with arithmetic, but I can defend myself most of the time. And believe me, I CAN’T COUNT MY MONEY! Keep in mind that the cashier has been stripped of most of responsibilities anyway. Now she doesn’t even count change? What does that tell you about how she will adapt to this new circumstance? It’s simple. If she doesn’t have to think, then she won’t.

I recently saw a very funny movie called Idiocracy. It depicts a future where everyone was so dumbed down due to all the automation and lack of intellectual responsibility, society as a whole got to a state where the average person had the IQ of a 3 year old. I interpreted the message as a moral for how we are living today’s life and the things we should change. After what I’ve seen today, I fear it might very well be a prediction of the future.

Some argue that the tests on the vaccine are not 100% complete. Better understanding of the potential side effects are necessary in order to make a qualified decision on it. They have my moral support on this matter. Others argue that the cost of the treatment is far too high for developing nations. Being a native of one such nation, at 360 American dollars a treatment, I wholeheartedly agree. I would even dare add that even within the United States, under certain situations it would pose some difficulty as well.

All this is well and good, until I got to the part of the article which says: “Some conservative groups complain that by cutting the risk of catching a sexually-transmitted disease, the vaccine would encourage sexual activity in young girls.”. At first I thought I had misread the sentence. I rolled my eyes over it again. Nope. Still there. Then I got angry and started shouting at my poor innocent monitor, who looked back at me with a confused glance. “Why the hell are these people doing this?!”, “They prefer those girls to get sick, spread disease and collectively die?!”, “The moral of the story is more important than saving lives?!” were some of the quick things that came to mind.

After I calmed down, I remembered another organization which functions in very similar fashion: the catholic church. They have an almost identical doctrine. Well, come to think of it, they probably invented it. As a kid, when my mother forced me to go to church. I was less interested in it than I am today. I remember clearly that they did not emphasize the need to become a man of good, or a personal relationship with God, or respect to your brothers and sisters on this earth, or peace with once self. Nope, all of that played second fiddle to the primary slogan: “You gotta do what I say, or you’ll burn in hell”. It’s not for the good of society, or your family, or the people around you. You are in a fight to save yourself, and you are losing the battle! Repent now or face eternal damnation!

Now, keep in mind I was a only a kid. The closest thing to eternal damnation that my feeble mind was able to grasp was getting my behind whupped by my father. I had no idea what these people were talking about. And yet instead of cultivating customs and ideas, simple at first and then progressing over time, that would make me a better man for my immediate society as well as society at large, they just attempted (and failed) to cultivate fear into my “soul”.

What is the relation? Different subject, same approach. Sex is a bad thing! Never mind how we all came to be on this earth. It’s evil! You should never ever ever do it! it’s how Eve got Adam kicked out of the eternal garden (yes my friends, it all goes back to the catholic church again). It’s why people suffer, it’s why you should be punished, and above all in this case, it’s the source of STD’s. Cultivating knowledge amongst the teens so they are aware of the potential dangers and know how to protect themselves? Nah! Explaining what an STD is and how to recognize symptoms in themselves and others? Over rated! Telling them the simple truth: Sex per se is not a bad thing, you just have to do it under the right circumstances? Hell no! Grip their hearts with fear. That’s the fool proof plan!

Ummm… has anyone checked how the rate of teenage mothers is doing? Or the increase in the transmission of STD’s among young people? How about the use of anti-conceptives early and often? Yeah… is it me or are things just getting worse? But since humans naturally fear change, these “conservatives” prefer to continue their outdated ways instead of evolving with the times and feeding this generation the knowledge they really need. Sad thing is that the people with the power to make a difference are paying attention to them and hesitating.

You can’t save the world if you can’t save yourself first. Please my brother and sister. I beg of you. Never let the shadow of ignorance cloud the light of knowledge. It will not shed any positive results in your life or the ones of your immediate surroundings. Never has, never will.