John Walker has been so kind as to write a demoroniser perl script for cleaning up documents produced by Microsoft applications. I have, too, abandoned use of any Microsoft applications (some time ago), and I go so far as to (politely) ask those who send me things such as MS Word .doc formatted documents to please resend in an open, non-proprietary format. It’s just rude to send documents to the public at large with the expectation that they will buy whatever monstrously bloated, virus ridden software the sender has deigned to choose, is it not? So, please, please: do not send Microsoft formatted documents.

The excerpt below is from the demoroniser script’s introduction, and explains better than I could why this, unfortunately, is necessary:

Many slick, high profile corporate Web sites I visit seemed to exhibit terrible grammar completely inconsistent with the obvious investment in graphics and design. Apostrophes and quote marks were frequently omitted, and every couple of paragraphs words were run together which should have been separated by a punctuation mark of some kind.

This remained a mystery to me until I wanted to convert a presentation I’d developed in 1996 using Microsoft PowerPoint into a set of Web pages. A friend was kind enough to run the presentation through PowerPoint’s “Save as HTML” feature (I have abandoned all use of Microsoft products, so I did not have a current version of PowerPoint which includes this feature). When I got the PowerPoint-generated HTML back and viewed it in my browser, I discovered that it contained precisely the same grammatical errors I’d noted on so many Web sites, and which certainly were not present in my original presentation.

A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. Western language HTML documents are written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own “extension” to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0×82 through 0×95–this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters.

These characters include open and close single and double quotes, em and en dashes, an ellipsis and a variety of other things you’ve been dying for, such as a capital Y umlaut and a florin symbol. Well, okay, you say, if Microsoft want to have their own little incompatible character set, why not? Because it doesn’t stop there–in their inimitable fashion (who would want to?)–they aggressively pollute the Web pages of unknowing and innocent victims worldwide with these characters, with the result that the owners of these pages look like semi-literate morons when their pages are viewed on non-Microsoft platforms (or on Microsoft platforms, for that matter, if the user has selected as the browser’s font one of the many TrueType fonts which do not include the incompatible Microsoft characters).

You see, “state of the art” Microsoft Office applications sport a nifty feature called “smart quotes.” (Rule of thumb–every time Microsoft use the word “smart,” be on the lookout for something dumb). This feature is on by default in both Word and PowerPoint, and can be disabled only by finding the little box buried among the dozens of bewildering option panels these products contain.

Groklaw’s PJ has the goods on SCO’s loss:

Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive!

Friday, August 10 2007 @ 04:52 PM EDT

Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here it is as text. Here is what matters most:

[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.

That’s Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that “SCO is obligated to recognize Novell’s waiver of SCO’s claims against IBM and Sequent”. That’s the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big picture is, SCO lost. Oh, and it owes Novell a lot of money from the Microsoft and Sun licenses.

One of the witty commentators at slashdot pithily summarized the whole sorry ordeal:

There once was a CEO called McBride
Who thought he could take on Linux in stride.
But the creep from Santa Cruz
Was destined to lose
And get fscked in the ass by New York Gay Pride.

In following some of the trackbacks to the ZDNet article, Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user, I stumbled across an excellent blog, Diary of a Mad IT Manager. As I was reading through the posts, I began to come across tales of the all too typical kind of disastrous, Microsoft-induced IT expenditures that I too had witnessed in my days as a tech support person, and later as a network administrator. For example:

A thought occurred to me today about the state of our computers here. We’re so used to rebuilding them, we’ve gotten better and more efficient at it. I mean, we’ve got all manner of support software designed to do nothing more than recreating and restoring an operating system and associated loaded applications on a computer in as efficient and timely manner as possible. Why? Because Windows sucks so much that we have to reload it on a regular basis.

And so I decided to put the question directly (though a bit profanely): why do corporations persist in using Microsoft products, when they so clearly cost so much more money than the alternatives? His reply, I thought, clearly articulated those reasons.

I replied in turn, and I think the exchange describes fairly concisely, at least in the corporate shop, the reasons for resistance to change: the cost, due to the weight of history, is too high. You may read the full exchange on Mad IT Manager’s blog here, or archived on my site here.

A couple of points (not in the order of your arguments) [with edits to my original reply]:

1. *Desktop* linux is brand new — it, and the dozens of application software projects necessary to make a desktop linux go has only begun to come together over the past two or three years. To wit: Ubuntu, now the most popular distro, is only four years old. Keep in mind this principle: once you written the third or fourth version of something like .pdf/web viewers, or word processors, little further innovation is needed. How much different is MS Word 95 from 98, 2000, XP, or 2007/8, or Abiword and OpenOffice for that matter? Not much. MS got the word processor gui right when it still was on the Mac, where it ironically began. So, there will be an open source equivalent for every type of software, and many are just now getting to an 85% to 95% equivalency to their proprietary cousins.

2. If you have any doubt as to the profound power of a monopolist to retain control of markets without juridical oversight, or of the mechanics thereof, it might be time to take a cursory review of Microsoft’s misdeeds, or of Standard Oil’s.

The latest catastrophe about to be visited on world wide consumers by the prostrate and corrupt US legal system? Vista’s draconian DRM.

Here’s an excellent run-down of what will probably result in the break-up of Microsoft, or the US loss of software hegemony: A Cost Analysis of Vista Content Protection, by Peter Gutmann.

3. Everything you say regarding Linux based Desktop environments’ need to pay attention to gui usability, and to test, is spot on. Gnome still feels clumsy, and KDE does fine, once cleaned up by somebody like the Ubuntu project. Gnome and KDE are vastly improved from even a year or two ago, as are many of the other window managers out there.

4. Diversity in Linux distributions is a strength, not a weakness. You badly underestimate the scale of development unleashed by open sourced software. In addition, what you’ve said is akin to arguing that the West has been hurt by the free exchange of knowledge that characterizes its universities; that a closed, peer-reviewless, proprietary system of academic inquiry would serve humankind the best. This is demonstrably false.

The US constitution of 1787 sought to balance the need to reward innovation with the need for open academic inquiry. From the the broken US patent system to the DMCA, to the moribund state of US Anti-trust enforcement, this system is now in dire need of reform.

The plethora of linux distributions, ranging from 50 MB fully functional gui’d desktop environments to multi-gig distros such as Ubuntu, openSuse, et al., to embedded systems vetted for stability — the Linux ecosystem’s diversity is a testament to the virtues of free inquiry, the absurdity of patenting software, and the novel scale of intellectual work made possible by the internet.

5. The command-line: this is just silly. The command line exists on Windows boxes. One can hack the registry or talk to the OS via the Windows API, or, conversely, one can never see a jot of code on a Windows box, same as on Linux boxes. If Linux desktop environment and application users too often are subjected to command-line fixes, that just supports your argument that desktop oriented Linux environments still need work. That work is progressing at an astonishing speed, thanks again to the scale of development made possible by the internet and open access to code.

What I have found, however, is that the Windows command-line environment is gravely impoverished compared to Unix/Linux. Yes, I have done extensive work on both platforms. The Microsoft command line environment has come a long way, but it still lacks the depth and richness that the Unix/Linux environment possesses.

The article that this post is a reply too: Five crucial things … .

I also posted the trackback above as a reply in the blog.

Personal computer monitor resolution trends and bandwidth trends. I should note that the site presents a view biased exclusively towards Microsoft products.

Marc Cantor has written a good summary of current open standards projects (maybe calling them ‘movements’ might be a little more accurate) in an article titled Breaking the Web Wide Open!

His description echoes my experience, which has been that although “incumbents” (Cantor’s term) may be using new technology, they often mimic what they know. Cantor says:

For decades, “walled gardens” of proprietary standards and content have been the strategy of dominant players in mainframe computer software, wireless telecommunications services, and the World Wide Web—it was their successful lock-in strategy of keeping their customers theirs.

And:

While the incumbents use cheap open source software to run their back-ends systems, their business models largely depend on proprietary software and algorithms.

Cantor gives an excellent and concise summary of open web services technologies, and lists areas being developed:

Today’s Open APIs are complemented by standardized Schemas—the structure of the data itself and its associated meta-data. Take for example a podcasting feed. It consists of: a) the radio show itself, b) information on who is on the show, what the show is about and how long the show is (the meta-data) and also c) API calls to retrieve a show (a single feed item) and play it from a specified server.

The combination of Open APIs, standardized schemas for handling meta-data, and an industry which agrees on these standards are breaking the web wide open right now. So what new open standards should the web incumbents—and you—be watching? Keep an eye on the following developments:

Identity
Attention
Open Media
Microcontent Publishing
Open Social Networks
Tags
Pinging
Routing
Open Communications
Device Management and Control

Cantor then discusses each of these in depth. Quite interesting.

I stumbled across an fairly good article, titled
Why Linux isn’t too fat & MS hurts customers, that enumerates reasons to switch from Microsoft to Linux (or, rather, to anything open source).

An excerpt:

The other big benefit is that companies can control their own destinies more finely by using Linux. When you use Windows, you get whatever version of Windows was shipping when you bought the PC.

Often, most of a company is using an older version of Office. Then someone gets a new PC with the latest Office, and starts sending around Word documents. People with the older versions of Office can’t read those, and pressure quickly rises to upgrade everyone to the latest Office. Microsoft could easily make the old and new file formats compatible, but they deliberately do the opposite to force unnecessary upgrades on the market.

The correct approach when your company stumbles into this situation is to take the opportunity to introduce OpenOffice into your company. Microsoft makes a big song and dance about “supporting what customers want,” but they really don’t support what customers want. Microsoft acts to protect its monopoly, rather than supporting what customers want.

At work, I tried to make the point that it might not be a good idea to encase the intellectual output of a thousand employees into formats whose proprietary owner not only has a record of extortionate capriciousness, but one who has broken the law to maintain its monopoly control of markets (I’m referring to Microsoft, of course), but I was ignored. One more reason to move on.

Luna (Microsoft XP) style in KDE

Just a little experiment in making a Linux/KDE desktop look as much as possible like the Microsoftian universe. Iused a KDE theme that I pulled from the web somewhere — probably from a KDE theme repository.

This post serves to memorialize a comment that I made, in the case that it disappears. The comment is still up here.

It was posted in the comments section of Joi Ito’s site, January 07, 2005, which was titled: “Bill Gates calls free culture advocates communists.”

27- Robert @ January 24, 2005 07:03 PM

I believe that the intent of the movement to reform copyright and patent law is to maintain a free society — one in which capitalism is possible. The irony of Bill Gates’ remarks in the interview Joi Ito cites is that Microsoft’s activities have stunted innovation through illegal monopoly.

Microsoft’s impetus has been towards control of markets, which is a perfectly predictable outcome, given the mandate of its constitutive documents. Nevertheless, Microsoft has more in common with Soviet-style ministries than Bill the propagandist would have us believe.

And this is why we have legislatures and courts: because some values cannot be represented fairly by truck in money alone.

One of those values is that for capitalism and “the useful arts” to flourish there must be some limit on their ownership. The progenitors of ideas must be rewarded, but so too must the benefit of their labor be dispersed to society as a whole.

It is precisely the belief of those who argue against irrational patent law and excessively lengthy copyrights that these benefits are not devolving to society in a reasonable period of time.

And, of course, there is nothing in the legal instantiation of property that forbids gifting, and volunteerism. The GPL and Creative Commons licenses are quite supportable legally, at least as supportable under international copyright law as any other.

I would argue that we are all the richer for the efforts of voluntary organizations; indeed, a good deal of liberty and civil society can be attributed to those who have given freely of their time, property — and ideas.

I neglected in the entry below to link to Eric Raymond’s The Magic Cauldron.