Category: Software

Not Much Posting Tonite Period

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I was trying to backup my February posts, and it kept breaking the archive page into little bits.

It looks like this is a feature because a few bloggers had huge front pages, with lots of blogger images, and they decided to have an algorithm break up the pages into digestible chunks.

They are all “It’s going to make everything so much faster.”

The problem is that for some blogs, it made them single posts on the first page.

Luckily that did not happen to me, because I use Imageshack®, which significantly reduces the load that “the Google” sees, and because compared to some of the photographers who blog there, it’s pretty much text based.

On the other hand, means that the monthly archives that I save to a MS Word® file are now broken up into 5-10 separate pages, and it means that it breaks Google’s searches that access archive pages, because it will serve a page that now has only a 15% or so chance of having the post in question.

So, yes, the good folks at Blogger, which is owned by Google, broke Google search, and yes, many of the folks who use blogger are pretty incensed, and the response of the PTB at blogger is that the users are blogging wrong somehow.

Apparently their motto, “Don’t be evil,” is orthogonal to, “Don’t be incompetent and arrogant assholes.”

[on edit] I am looking at moving to WordPress, but I will give it a month or so and fiddle.

This is a Case to Watch

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Sergey Aleynikov, a senior programmer for Goldman Sach’s high frequency trading software, has been indicted for software theft.

It’s alleged that he took the software, and sent copies of it to a server in Germany.

This case is odd.

First, the entire high frequency trading thing smells of corruption: The idea is that by having servers colocated in the market, you pick up a few milliseconds speed, and so can execute trades between when someone else requests a buy, and when their transaction is actually executed.

To my, admittedly untrained, gut this sounds identical to front-running, which is illegal.

Additionally, the twists and turns of the trial, where Aleynikov’s lawyers made some fairly routing requests for things like his personnel file to show that he was not a disgruntled employee, had the squid’s* lawyers seriously freaking out, and suggesting that charges should be dropped.

I think that there are some very real bits of corruption that might be uncovered in the trial, though the prosecution, defense, and judge might very well find a way to suppress that, because, after all, it’s Goldman Sachs, and rule number 1 of Goldman Sachs is that Goldman Sachs has friends in high places, so it always gets what it wants.

My prior posts are here.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

Special Software Gives JSF 50% Lethality Boost for JSF

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Unfortunately, as Bill Sweetman laments, the software in question is:

While we’re going back and forth about the supposed sixfold advantage of the JSF over anything except the F-22, see this from a year ago:

“U.S. Air Force analyses show the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is at least 400 percent more effective in air-to-air combat capability than the best fighters currently available in the international market.”

And now it’s 600 per cent. This does of course prove convincingly that Lockheed Martin is right to suggest that the F-35’s capability will be able to be vastly improved through software alone.

That software being, in this case, PowerPoint.

…

(emphasis mine)

Mr. Sweetman owes me a screen wipe.

Court Reaffirms Right of First Sale for Software

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And once again, the plaintiff trying to claim that software is a license, and not a physical product is Autodesk, and the court just ruled that the software in question had been legally purchased from a legal licensee, and that the purchaser had an absolute right to then resell the software:

“The Autodesk License is a hodgepodge of terms that, standing alone, support both a transfer of ownership and a mere license,” said the ruling. “Autodesk expressly retains title to the ‘Software and accompanying materials,’ but it has no right to regain possession of the software or the ‘accompanying materials’. Licensees pay a single up-front price for the software. Autodesk can require the destruction of the software, but only as consideration in the later purchase of an upgrade.”

“The court concludes that Wise leads to the conclusion that the transfer of AutoCAD copies via the License is a transfer of ownership,” it said.

The EFF is crowing about this.

Lamest Product Launch Ever

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The Windows 7® House Parties, and their launch video.

As noted by Slashdot, “If Microsoft had been put in charge of marketing sex, the human race would have ended long ago, because no one would be caught dead doing something that uncool.”

It’s not as bad as that Tommy Seebach video, in that I think that the probability of rectal bleeding being induced is much less than his disco cover of Apache, but great googly moogly, this is lame.


On the other hand, Randall Munroe is amusing, as always”

People Who You Cannot Trust

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Are They Selling Your Child’s Data to Junk Food Makers or a Child Sex Ring?

The publishers of the software known as nannyware:

A software product sold to protect children from predators, cyberbullying, and visiting inappropriate Web sites is also collecting information about what the kids are saying, and its publisher is selling that data–in aggregate form–to other companies for marketing purposes.

In an interview, Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene said that the company doesn’t collect or report the names or any identifying information about the children. “We never, ever, ever can identify who the kid is who is saying it. In fact, we don’t have any information about the individual child,” he said.

Yeah, sure, as has been noted with Netflix, bits apparently innocuous data frequently make it trivial to identify a user.

In the case of Netflix, by knowing a couple of their video likes and dislikes, you could extract their entire video rental history with a probability of 28 standard deviations (99.87% probability, or a bout 1 in 800)

You know, if this were video rental data from adults, as opposed to conversations online by children, this would be illegal.

An Idea So Good, that It Can’t Happen Here

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But it appears that the EU is getting ready to give people the same basic rights with software as they have with other consumer products:

Software companies could be held responsible for the security and efficacy of their products, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal becomes law.

Commissioners Viviane Reding and Meglena Kuneva have proposed that EU consumer protections for physical products be extended to software. The suggested change in the law is part of an EU action agenda put forward by the commissioners after identifying gaps in EU consumer protection rules.

This would invalidate the bullsh$# license provisions which say, “What, you expected this sh#$ to work? Your problem!”

It would, of course, put Microflaccid out of business.

So, Tell Me How You Really Feel

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A review of the Windows Vista™ successor beta, Windows 7:

So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft’s follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.

Ouch, though some of the things that it breaks may very well just be the fact that it’s beta, but the final analysis, which uses some fairly deep level diagnostics to see how the OS works is that, “We can now say with some certainty that Windows 7 is in fact just a repackaging of Windows Vista – an “R2” release, to use Microsoft’s nomenclature on the Windows Server side of the house.”

The folks at Microflaccid still do not get it. They don’t need a software upgrade drop, they need rewrite.

Brazil Also Lodges OOXML Complaint

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I think that the Bum’s rush on OOXML pushed by the US and Microflaccid may end up backfiring:

Now Brazil has become the latest country to put the boot in by objecting to what it claimed was a flawed BRM that saw processes rushed through in favour of Microsoft gaining approval for its document format.

….

Marcia Cristina de Oliveira, manager of the standardisation process at the ABNT claims in a letter to the ISO (a copy of which is provided by Andy Updegrove here) that “the Brazilian delegation was not allowed to present an important proposal regarding the legacy binary mapping.

“Brazil had tried to present this proposal, during the debates, on the first day of the meeting… On Friday, when USA ended their part of presentation and asked for Brazil to present its part of it, the convenor denied this opportunity to Brazilian delegation.”

According to Updegrove, that’s quite a serious allegation. “While this latest appeal overlaps the South African objections in part, it also raises new concerns, some of which are particular to the interests of Brazil, rather than applying to the process as a whole. “As a result, it raises not only additional issues, but also ones that present a categorically different basis for appeal as well,” he said.

Interestingly enough, OOXML is already out of compliance, as the standard, DIS 29500, is supposed to be published no more than one month after approval.

Right to Resell Software Reaffirmed

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The court case, Timothy Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., was fairly simple: Mr. Vernor bought old copies of Autocad, one at a garage sale, and three from an architectural firm, and Autodesk sued, claiming that he violated the terms of the license.

Mr. Vernor asserted the right of first sale, which allows a person who has purchased a copyright work to resell it, but Autodesk claimed that it was not a sale, but a license.

The judge was having none of it, see here, here, and here, and ruled on behalf of Timothy Vernor, noting that Autodesk does not require an annual payment, or to return it when done.

Additionally, Autodesk was done in by their own sales literature and web site, which referred to purchase options for buying the sortware.

Note that this is bigger than it sounds:

If Jones’s ruling is upheld on appeal, it will have important consequences for the software industry, where the legal fiction that software is merely licensed is widely employed. In addition to discouraging the market for used software, software firms have also attempted to use the “licensed, not sold” theory to enforce restrictions on reverse engineering that would otherwise be fair use under copyright law. If software is sold, rather than licensed, then no license is required to install and use the software, and the terms of shrink-wrap licenses may not be legally binding.

Of course, the vendors could get around this by going with a real annual license, but in the real world of PC software, with a very few exceptions, you would eliminate 90+% of your customers if you did that.

Verizon Supports Linux for Handsets

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Verizon’s joining the LiMo Foundation (Linux Mobile)

Some people were expecting them to go with Google’s “Android”, but there are some reasons to go LiMo:

  • It’s further along, with some handsets deployed.
  • After Google’s driving up the bidding high enough to require open access in the spectrum auction, Verizon wanted to do a “screw you” to them.

According to my friends in the biz, Verizon is the most locked down of the carriers….We’ll see how it proceeds.

Bummer of a Birth Mark, Hal: Microsoft Edition

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Bummer for Steve Ballmer not only has the XP SP3 update been delayed because it breaks an obscure piece of Microsoft software, but it also delayed Vista SP1.

What’s more, Dell, HP, and Lenovo will be offering a free “downgrade” to XP on their systems.

I can’t remember a product that was more of a disaster than Vista.

What’s more, in addition to issues with Norway, it now appears that the high court in the UK has decided to review the British Standard Institution’s decision to vote for OOXML as an ISO standard.

More OOXML

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It appears that ISO is now working on “harmonizing” OOXML and ODF, and the Norwegian protest continues, though switching that vote would not be decisive.

However, there does appear to be an EU anti-trust investigation regarding their lobbying, (Note: the link is two months old, and so might be mooted by the vote).

My guess is that the fat lady has sung.

My other guess is that if OOXML were to become a real standard, Microsoft Office would not be certified as complying, if the experience of Internet Explorer is any guide.

OOXML Saga Gets More Confusing, and Possibly More Corrupt.

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It looks like Microsoft won the vote on OOXML at the ISO, but as I’ve noted, the voting in a number of places seemed to be highly irregular.

Of note, at this point, there are no OOXML compliant applications, including Office 2007, for which it was written, and as I’ve detailed before, the entire spec is a bloody mess, see here.

Of course, I thought that the ISO would reject it, chalk up another one for my blown predictions.

OOXML News

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Microsoft’s attempt to abuse the international standards process has gotten even more bizarre.

Beyond the fact that this standard sucks, with tags for things like color varying from application to application in the suite, the ISO is now delaying an announcement on the vote.

It could be that they don’t want to make an announcement on April fools day, but more likely it is the fact that the legitimacy of various national votes on this have been disputed, in particular Norway, which voted 4:1 against accepting the standard, but was recorded as voting for the standard.

To the degree that I understand such things, which is limited, this standard sucks, which is part of the problem. Additionally, there is a very real issue that Microsoft will use IP laws, and “undocumented features” to leverage their control of the office suite.

Microsoft’s “promises” to allow OOXML be used by all are cut out of very thin cloth.

ISO Looks to Reject OOXML Again

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Mouthful, huh?

The short version is that the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are having a vote as to whether to adopt Microsoft’s Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format for its office suite as a formal standard, and Cuba and India just voted no.

Microsoft had this voted down before, largely because there already is an ISO standard format out there, Open Dcument Format (ODF).

Microsoft, of course, uses OOXML, which is a proprietary format, notwithstanding its name, but with increasing numbers of users, particularly in government, demanding open formats to prevent vendor lock in, they want to be adopted as a “standard”.

Microsoft’s whole business model, of course, is vendor lock in.

Furthermore, as is made clear here, OOXML was written around the specific internals of Microsoft products:

Here is the Microflaccid office way of making text red:
Word: <w:color w:val=”FF0000″/>
Excel: <color rgb=”FFFF0000″/>
Powerpoint: <a:srgbClr val=”FF0000″/>

Here is a standards compliant way.
ODF text: <style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000″/>
ODF sheet: <style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000″/>
ODF presentation: <style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000″/>