What would happen if...

Music: Silverchair - Young Modern

Canada or the United States adopted the same concept that the Isle of Man is proposing for their citizens. As some background the Isle is in the English Channel halfway between England and Ireland, its self-governing, has its own taxes, flag, anthem, etc.

The government there has been in negotiations with the big 5 (or 4) record labels to see if they can work something out. Their goal is to charge their 80,000 residents a blanket tax every year in exchange... for unlimited downloading. 

Thats right, they want to legalize file-sharing sites for music in the country with a blanket tax. Now before you start thinking, remember that in Canada there has been a tax/surcharge on every single piece of blank media on the market. This includes blank VHS tapes, cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, and even some MP3 players. This money then goes to the record labels as payment for people who tape things off the radio and television (since thats piracy or something).

What if the USA adopted this policy?

Think about it for a minute. There is about 300 million people in the country. (I'm estimating) If the government charged everyone $2 in a "internet tax", the government would be able to give the record companies $600 MILLION dollars a year to help offset the cost of what they're "losing" for not thinking proactively and getting stuck in old technology (re: American automakers). Think of the trouble this would save.

What if I don't download songs? So. The RIAA has successfully sued people who don't own computers so that doesn't matter.

What happens if more people start downloading music? The RIAA needs a swift kick in the ass to get on the band wagon that people want to own the music they buy and not just rent it.

What about the artists, do they get any money? No. The artists make on average a nickle or dime on every $20 CD sold. Most multiplatinum sellers don't care, they make their money from touring and merchandise. (Kid Rock did an interview in Canada in the 90s and they asked him about downloading, his response (summarized): "I'm rich, why should I care?")

I personally think it would be a great idea. I'd willingly pay for that.

Now if only the government would step in and tell the cable company to stop charging me $90 just so I can watch 16 HD channels...

Sources: here, here, here, and everywhere

More on the island here.

And then there was South Africa

You know how I mentioned that OOXML was approved and I wasn't happy? Well neither is South Africa. They just filed an injunction/complaint with the ISO body to review the process and hopefully revoke the appointment of OOXML to an ISO standard.

All the information can be found:

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080523052458101

Who put them in charge...

Music: Thanatopsis - Cross Section

I've been following the headlines these last few months concerning Microsoft's attempts to create an ISO standard document. They are trying to get OOXML to become a world wide standard for sharing documents with a government or organization. The problem they're having is this:

1. Its complicated. The document used to describe the standard was almost 9,000 pages, most of the features and functionality will only be available when using Word. (Surprised? I'm not.)

2. Its been done. PDF was created and standardized as a document exchange format. Some might say that PDF won't allow for editing documents, well for that Sun (the people behind Microsoft's cheif competitor, Openoffice.org) had ODF standardized several years ago and has been supported by many companies including IBM and Corel. This will allow you to share your document and edit it. Voila.

During the process, Microsoft hijacked votes in countries like Sweeden which before the vote had 6 active companies and at the time of the vote an additional 22 joined. That makes me angry. But thats not the point of this.

The point is this. Microsoft announced today that they are NOT going to be supporting their own OOXML format (because they can't figure it out) until the next version of Office which has no release date (I can guess 2012 by past performance).

The kicker... their main purpose of the press conference was to announce that they are supporting ODF documents. The same format that they were fighting when they devised a scheme to confuse the world.

Talk about not knowing what the right hand is doing....

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2008-05-21-022-26-NW-MS-SW

Looking at the world, in rose coloured glasses...

Now, I've never really understood the meaning of that phrase. My take on it gives me the impression that people actually like walking around the world drunk to make it seem more interesting. Don't get me wrong, its quite a novel idea to attempt to see the world in a different light. Then again it might be better to see the world in a different light while intoxicated.

That rose coloured light could turn out to be a little bit skewed after the amount of alcohol that would need to be consumed in some instances.

My wife and I traditionally are good with money (*giggles*) and yesterday on a whim we decided to splurge on a new purchase. We managed to pickup a new TV. Thats right, we've joined the ranks of all of the other geeks out there and bought a new widescreen tv. It looks strikingly similar to the one pictured below.


As soon as we got it home the first thing that I did was to turn it on and toss in a widescreen movie. Transformers seemed like an excellent choice, I tossed it in and kicked up my feet to see in greater detail.

Turns out my wife is becoming a widescreen junky now too. She was at home watching a regular fullscreen movie today, and realized how much better it is on our tv.

There were other TVs there when we were looking at it, but a 32" TV is more than enough for most people, and quite frankly paying $1000 for a television? People need to have their head examined.

I love my TV. If I wasn't married I'd marry the TV and have little surround sound children.

















http://www.amazon.com/JL421-Badonkadonk-Land-Cruiser-Tank/dp/B00067F1CE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=miscellaneous&qid=1196440713&sr=8-2

70-290...

I'm moments away from writing my first MCSE exam for the company that I'm working for. And I'm nervous as F@CK. I don't know why I'm so nervous, more to the point I don't know why I'm writing the Microsoft exam in the first place, other than its required for all employees in my position.

I'm 2 days away from wiping out both windows installations on my home computers and installing Ubuntu Linux. I'm tired of denying myself the pleasure of using something thats free and doesn't require me or prompt me to validate or prove that I own the system. Screw that.

I recently saw a blog that was part of the Blogs of Note - PureDistortion who holds a Red Hat linux certification, which in all honesty has more appeal to me than the Microsoft stuff that they're making me write here. I might talk to my boss later on and see if they'll let me become Linux certified.

Nerves suck. They make you forget things. Such as my lunch, and my security pass. Which are both sitting safely and securely on the counter in my apartment. (Though, I've made a plan to run home after I've finished my exam to get them without telling any one.) The other thing about nerves is the fact that they make you doubt yourself, personally I'd like to know as I'm going along, question by question which ones I got wrong and what the correct answers are. This shit about getting the exam mark back at the end, thats just a waste of time for me. I want to know which ones I got wrong.

Alright, time to do some cramming.

T-Minus 1 hour.

Whats the point anyways?

Now, I'm not really much of a fan-boy for much of anything these days. My loyalty with software, hardware, and computers in general is only limited by what is going to offer me the best bang for my buck.

Case 1: I own an iPod. Yes, I caved and spent the money to get a 30GB iPod for myself after years of “thinking” about getting one. I absolutely love it. I especially love the scrolling wheel it makes playing with the settings that much funner. But, I've also been looking at other devices on the market, and at the time when I purchased mine there wasn't much in the way of competition to the iPod in a feature for feature comparison. In about 3 months I'll have changed my tune because I know there are newer items in development soon to be released to the market place that I would gladly replace for my iPod.

Case 2: I own my very first official copy of Windows. I loathe XP, and all subsequent Operating Systems offered by Microsoft. Its not the fact that they're the dominant OS on the market. I spent two solid weeks searching the Internet for drivers to replace my wifes installation of Vista with the more user friendly XP. I had almost given up and installed the latest version of Ubuntu Linux when I found one in a last ditch effort.

Case 3: I won't use Office 2007, ever. Now, I know that O2k7 was developed to be integerated seemlessly into the Vista environment, but you think they might have included a guided tour of how the new interface and “menu” structure correspond to the older interface. I know many people who can't find a bloody thing in the software and have given up completely on it. A good solid recommendation for someone like that would be OpenOffice, it fully supports Office 2003 files and even has a built-in export to PDF.

Case 4: OOXML. I'm of course referring to Office Open XML, which is Microsoft's attempt at an international standard for documents. Notice how its OpenOffice backwards? I think that they did that so that they could try to hook users of OpenOffice without knowing. Their first attempt at a standard failed as many of the voting countries refused to adopt it (Canada, India, China). The main problem, you can't have an open standard that requires a user to use one and only one product, that defeats the point of being open. Note: you should be informed that OpenOffice had their document format approved by ISO almost 2 years ago.

If you couldn't tell I'm a huge fan of Open Source software. Software should be free, hell, many people pirate software to begin with because it is too expensive to buy. Open Source software allows a community of users to develop and provide input in creating alternatives to off the shelf software. What people are scared of with Open Source is they feel it is not secure and contains spyware, Open Source contains less spyware and harmful code than regular off the shelf software. If thats true, what is everyone scared of? Their own shadow? Or Change?

I've given XP a deadline of 3 months to get the hell off of my systems so that I can use something a little more “real” and affordable. I'm referring to installing Linux on my computer. The only thing at this point that is holding back from installing is the lack of Wi-Fi support for my wireless card. I have a newer card that is not readily available, if I had a standard wireless card the installation of Linux would pick it up in most cases. The problem with mine is that there are NO drivers at all for me to use. My iPod works great, my camera card reader works great.

I've got time to kill while waiting for the new files to become available, until then I plan on finding all of the replacement software that I can find.