Fernando Cassia is a computer geek, the nerd cowboy of the South American pampas. Living down in Buenos Aires, Argentina, his articles on software, hardware and the Net can be read on the pages of the UK based IT news site The Inquirer. Welcome to his progressive and humanist view of the world.
Wow... since about 4:00 PM local time, it's SNOWING -albeit intermitently- down here in Buenos Aires. More precisely in Almagro, as I can only speak about the view from my Windows... :)
How rare is this...? VERY rare. It "never snows" in Buenos Aires. According to what I found in the Net, the last recorded snow wasJune 22, 1918!! The day started chilling cold, and it was only a handful of foreign tourists and myself at the Plaza de Mayo and surrounding areas...
And by later aftenoon, first a timid then full snowfall decorated the tops of the highest buildings
By night, even the international media started paying waking up to the newsworthyness of this ocurrence:
Unless you've been living in a bottle, let me tell you that we had ellections down here for city mayor and the right wing candidate won.
"Moderate" Right candidate Mauricio Macri danced and was carried around by his supporters at PRO
¡Poor joke Mauritzio! ¡Saying that Argentina must get on its feet, with Michetti on wheelchair next to you!! Very inconsiderate of you with your loved Free Trade Agreements expert at the WTO
¡"Speaking less" is "PRO" !
¡Speaking about "not speaking" is even more PRO!
According to "Mauricio" the middle class or "so-so class" as Mafalda called it will be able to "drink mate again in front of their homes" and Buenos Aires will turn overnight, by the power of his "magic" into a city "without security fences in parks, no security bars in shops, no security bars at homes, ENOUGH! Buenos Aires is not our (loved) city anymore!" .
Well, Mauricio, it's your turn now to see how you perform. That assorted bag of leftovers from different right wing factions that is PRO with people from the far right UCeDe, allong with collaborators of former finance minister Domingo Cavallo (or Sunday Horse as I like to call him), succeeded in convincing the -once again- "so-so (middle) class" that a businessman like you is more experienced and more trustworthy than someone from the academia.
And that your work experience "working on dad's firms" after a brief 6 months tenure at Citibank are better attributes than the vast academic experience of Daniel Filmus, someone with a remarkable background.
¡Thank the heavens your campaign manager Rodriguez Larreta was "very succesfull" at handling Social Security and even your conservative colleagues remember him!.
I'm sure you will turn the city upside down and that Utopian vision of grandmas drinking mate in front of their homes (with the door open behind them as was the earlier XXth century image), will become real. Yeah, right. I specially like your compaign promise about the parks without fences and the shops and homes without security bars at windows.
¡If you believed Mauricio's empty promises above, let me tell you I have bridge I could also sell you!. No city as big as Buenos Aires is without crime. That simply does not exist. For some reason (I suspect the reason but I'd be accused of being a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist) the local media seems to have established the notion that "the crime wave doesn't stop" assuming that it's even possible for crime to "stop". IF that would be the case, there would be cities around the world with no police, and that doesn't exist.
In fact, crime has been going up in the US of A in the last few years...
----- Violent crime up again, more murders, robberies - US http://news.monstersandcritics.com/usa/news/article_1313133.php/Violent_crime_up_again_more_murders_robberies
"The report showed that murders in big cities jumped last year by 6.7 percent. Robberies, an important indicator of crime trends, increased 6 percent nationwide. Cities with big increases in the number of murders included Orlando and Miami in Florida; Oakland and San Diego in California; Phoenix, Arizona; Corpus Christi, Texas; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Reno, Nevada and Little Rock, Arkansas.
Even though the higher violent crime numbers had been expected, they still represented bad news for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has targeted violent crime as a top priority for the U.S. Justice Department. A department study released last month of 18 metropolitan areas cited more violence by local gangs or street crews, a greater prevalence of guns in the hands of criminals and younger, more violent offenders as key reasons for the rising crime rates. ------
But I digress...
¡Here comes the New Politics that is "non-partisan" ! ¡The new "sweetened" right! ¡Hooray for PRO! Hooray for the UceDe! Alvaro Alzogaray must be smiling in his rotting grave...
Two weeks ago I received one of those e-mail chain letters, forwarded by someone not too bright that I know, the kind of person who cannot send e-mail with bcc: and always copies his entire list, in plain view to everyone who receives each message, you know the kind of middle-class "so-so class". The mail content was 100% anti-Kirchner and had by subject line "I don't give a damn about politics!" and called upon the reader to "vote for change" and babbled about the 'new politics', pointing the blame on the K administration for everything from 'drugs and pickpockets' to car accidents and 'soccer hooligans'(!)".
But hey... we cannot ask the average Mrs. Jane Doe to distinguish between the current Mayor -who was not elected to the post but rather "landed" on it after Ibarra was ousted- and Kirchner's candidate.... Mrs. Jane Doe was ANGRY, angry at...well... something... and she voted for "Saint Mauricio!".
I end this analysis with a quote I've seen on the Net, used as forum taglines...
"In this town 5% are fascists, 30% indifferent, and 40% not interested in politics. Total: 75% of fascists." From "The school of Barbiana."
¡¡So, let's enjoy the coming "City without fences" headed by the "New Politks" which are really oldskool rightwing!
Two years ago, I read this interesting comment about an unknown plant dubbed Stevia. I saved the post.
I was surprised this week to read that Coca Cola is going to use it as natural sweetener to replace controversial/unhealthy artificial sweeteners like Aspartame.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2005: " Why not a STEVIA coke.. its about time these large companies got on the back of the FDA and got stevia legalised... its a sham that i dont have the choice to have that natural sweetner in products i like. Call your congressperson!"
Coke teams up with Cargill to launch new sweetener "Giants of food and drinks aim to develop their own natural rival to NutraSweet and sucralose, to meet health demand"
"Originating in Paraguay and Northern Argentina, Stevia is produced in the country in industrial scale only by the Tobbaco Cooperative in the province of Misiones, which in 2004 used 100 has of land for the plant, and plans to produce about 500 tons. This co-operative associated with a laboratory from Mar del Plata for Stevia post-processing". -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So... I would start investigating this Stevia plant if I had a piece of productive land. Since I don't... I'll leave this exercise for young entrepreneurs like Mike... :). Who knows, maybe this natural sweetener without the health problems of Sugar or Aspartame could be even used in Cookies!. ;-)
Good for people like me with bloody chronic liver disease... my doc told me to avoid artificial sweeteners whenever possible, and it's harder to do every day as the profit-hungry companies are starting to add it to more products every passing day, from cookies to 'flavoured water' to gelatin (even the non-Diet ones, damn you, Royal!).
PS: This is the closest to an admission about the dangers of artificial sweeteners (if those were safe, why would they need to change to something "healthy"?.
If you think that artificial sweeteners like Aspartame are 100% safe over long term use... you are not aware of all the material casting doubt on artificial sweeteners.
I have to recommend two blogs from Americans who have settled down here in Buenos Aires: Frank' s Sugar&Spice -check out his cookies!- and of course Mike from "YanquiMike.com.ar".
¡Gracias por sus posts inteligentes!.
Estaría bueno que EE.UU. los tenga de embajadores.
Last time I did a BASH (linux shell) script was, I think, back in y2k. I ran Caldera Openlinux in an ancient underpowered 233Mhz Pentium I, and the desktop was then bloated KDE. Nowadays, I run Blag, based on RedHat's Fedora Core 6. But now I was fed up with having to manually seek, download and install "pptpconfig" to get a friendly-easy to use PPTP VPN applet. (Blag includes PPTP but for some reason pptpconfig is not included).
So, I spent a couple hours tonight reading -once again- about bash scripting HERE and HERE, and thanks to a great tutorial on Gnome desktop integration at RedHat's site HERE - I was able to code a simple script which downloads the required RPMs from Fedora repositories, calls the YUM system updater, and installs everything required for PPTP VPN networking into blag, creating a default launcher with nice icon in the desktop. It's a pretty simple script, but nobody had done it before. So here it is. I have released it under the GPL, for what it's worth.
WOW,I can still code stupid little shell scripts!. What an ego boost!. ;-)
Specially since my attention defficit personality usually makes me leave my programming projects incomplete at the first sign of trouble... this time that didn't happen and it was kinda fun, reminded me of my first babbling with OS/2 Rexx...
He must be on medication, I mean God, look at the blurred pictures! -or perhaps he was sweathing and shaking in fear while walking the streets with his armed bodyguard expecting an attack at any minute!!- LOL
I nominate Mr Oracle expert as the laughing stock of the Year!!!
"Buenos Aires is a city of contrasts, with virtually no middle class"
"Argentina has a history of civil unrest and the wholesale killing of foreigners dating back for centuries." [!!!]
" and let's not forget the Americans who were tortured and killed in Argentina over the past decades. " [huh? maybe he means the 30,000 disappeared thanks to Mr. Kissinger's attitude towards Latin America and the U.S. supported military coup in Chile and later the U.S.-tolerated military government in Argentina?]
"Buenos Aires has lots of police, but many are veterans of the Falkland invasion, so don't expect too much sympathy."
[huh?? Military =! police!! 90% of the soldiers who took part in the 1982 war were 18 year olds doing the mandatory draft]
"Simpson's re-runs are on the local television stations constantly and the translations are true to the English originals, and you can recognize Marge and Lisa even though they are speaking Spanish."
[Gee, has this guy ever heard of globalization and the concept of the international TV? Guess it' s not the same in every other country around the world huh? Only Argentina airs the Simpsons dubbed into the local language?? I have news for you: we grew watching "Knight Ridder" and "Get Smart" in the 80s, shocker!]
"Buenos Aires is plagued by “Ladrones”, local pickpockets who are found in all major tourist areas." [No, stupid. Ladrones is spanish for Thiefs. What you are referring to is "pungas", local slang for pickpockets]
" Puerto Madero was built in-response to the complaints from the Buenos Aires women about all the streets of Buenos Aires having all-males names." [AAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ROF,LMAO!!! Yes, the women complained so much that we created Puerto Madero just because of their complaints... LOL] ===
I will leave aside for a moment the stupid and inaccurate references to the Falklands/Malvinas issue, but suffice to say that: a) it was a stupid act ordered by a military dictatorship trying to stay in power and supported by Washington at the time, b) the invasion of the islands was completed on April 2nd, 1982, with ZERO deaths on the part of the islanders, and one Argentine soldier dead. All further deaths were caused months later in the fight by the UK forces to retake the islands.
A couple months ago, the nice folks at Neodigits were kind enough to send me a sample Helios H4000 upscaling DVD player for testing.
The small black H4000 over a Philips DVP9680
I'm holding out my review publication on the INQUIRER until I see if they release firmware fixes or not (I already emailed them some of my suggestions).
Another design win: vent holes!
However, that doesn't prevent me from wholeheartedly recommending this DVD player. If all you need is a DVD player for DVD movies and MPEG4 avis (DIVX or XVID) which also is capable of doing High-Definition (HD) upscaling to 1080i over component video, then look no further!.
Surprise: a VGA out!. You can hook it to a SVGA monitor, projector or anything with VGA input!
The H4000 is well constructed, has an internal 5.1 audio decoder (no need for an external box!), a nice, big remote control with keys that glow in the dark (hurrah!), and ... get this... a POWER SWITCH in the back. This means you can actually turn the device completelly off, it cuts the AC power from the power supply!. No need to waste power in "standby" mode!. It also protects the unit from power fluctuations when not in use.
A built-in 5.1 audio decoder, to boot!
The player works flawlessly. It played every Region-1, Region 2 (Europe), and Region 4 (South America / Australia) that I threw at it. No need to enter region codes, the player arrived as "Region Free"!.
The H4000 hooked to my HD-ready 29" Philips CRT TV which notably lacks HDMI inputs, so HD over Component is the only way. To my knowledge the H4000 is the ONLY DVD player capable of bypassing HDCP and doing HD over CVI.
So, do I recommend it? Yes.
Are there things that could be improved?
Yes. If you plan to use it for mp3 playback or if you have audio in .ogg (Vorbis) format, or if you plan to look at high-quality (2MP and upwards) photos with this player, be advised that these features leave a lot to be desired.
The Helios boot logo. Notice how the Philips TV shows HD 1080i mode!
R.E.M. DVD player in 1080i mode
For instance, photos look as if they are reduced to 640x480 then displayed (with visible dithering). MP3 and general data cd-r or dvd-r file browsing is limited because it doesn't support long filenames (Joliet). The names are shortened to the first few characters.
That's why I'm waiting to see if they fix these issues via a firmware update.
However, if all you want is a DVD player that does HD 1080i or 1080p upscaling via component video outputs, this is a must, get one while you can!.
This card supports dual displays, and HDTV TV-Out!
The nice folks at VisionTek sent me one of the company's X1600 PCI graphics adapters for review.
While I AWAIT (until hell freezes over?) for Microsoft to ship me a sample media evaluation copy of Vista, I want to give you a sneak peek of this impressive graphics card.
Front View. Yes, it' s PCI bus!.
In a nutshell, if you need to use Vista (I prefer Linux, yet I understand that people have no choice for work reasons), and want to experience "Aero" (the 3D interface eye candy), I suggest you get one of these cards. At $210 [Updated June 1st : $154 at TigerDirect, here!], it' s a LOT cheaper than replacing your whole motherboard, graphics card, and probably RAM as well.
I have used it and it works very well. Vista Aero works beatifully, on my 2.4 Ghz P4 (800Mhz FSB) in the Supermicro P4SCA mobo. 3DMark scores and screenshots will be published on my INQ review. I would have published this months ago if it wasn't for the Vole. [Hello? Anyone reading?].
In short, if you have a machine with no AGP or PCI-X, just plain old PCI bus, I suggest you get one of these cards. I had no previous experience with this company, but from the way they communicated with me, the firm looks top notch!.
www.visiontek.com, and also www.froogle.com. Use Google, it is your friend!.
I mean... STOP ADDING SPANISH LINGO that is written in Spain's Spanish. Try to use a more "neutral" Spanish (ask the guys who do TV and movie translations, they do know what a "neutral" Spanish translation is... that is, one free from Iberic terms and South American words).
It all started when I suddenly found my Blogger interface "automagically" switched to Spanish. Suddently I read "no tenemos mas Beta" instead of "we're out of beta!".
That is a POOR LITERAL TRANSLATION that can be read as "we no longer stock beta". The correct translation would have been "ya no estamos en Beta" o "salimos de la etapa Beta", o "ya no es Beta".
And now, the dreadful "que mola mas que una caja de lapices de colores..." advert, trying to promote Blogger's new customization features. Well, guess what Google? "mola" doesn't mean anything for us down in South America. "Molar" as a verb does not, in fact, exist in our vocabulary.
I guess the original English language text was "what rules more than..." and you hired someone in Spain to do the translation, so it ended up as "que mola mas que.."?.
If you had used a NEUTRAL Spanish translation that could have been translated as "¿Qué es más bueno que...?" or "¿Qué es mejor que una caja de lápices?". And it would have been understood BOTH by people in Spain and people in South America.
PLEASE, P-L-E-A-S_E, Google, start taking these localization issues into account when you start translating things.
Joe Born from Neuros Technology wrote something nice about me on his company blog. It's good to see a small company like his listening to constructive criticism from a computer geek like me.
Still... I kinda blushed when I read him calling me " prominent South America blogger...".
No, I don' t mean I want it removed. No, please keep it there. I always need an ego-boost.
I' ve been using computers since I have memory. It all started with a TRS-80 Mod III, so I have quite a lot of memories from every OS and software configuration, from CP/M, Commodore's Basic, AmigaDOS, Workbench, DR-DOS, Windows 3.1, OS/2, the Workplace Shell, Linux 2.2, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, Win2k, WinXP, Gnome, JDS Linux, Solaris x86, etc...
So... I have little space in my brain for new stupid acronyms and silly product names. Lately, I've grown increasingly fed up with the silly 3-letter or at best 4-letter names of open source utilities, APIs and products. When they don't name something 'ufck' (I made this one up to mean 'ugly f*ck'), they make up completely bogus names just because they sound 'nice' and giving no idea of the function of the software.
Increasingly rare exceptions are 'gconf-editor' -Gnome configuration editor- or 'gpdf' -a PDF viewer-, or 'system-config-soundcard', which needs no further explanation, and are a rare pleasure.
But that's not the trend. The trend seems to be to 'never name something for the function it does'... no, some developers would never name something 'runasroot' or 'gnome-visualprompt' or 'filesystem-hook', or 'linux-hardwaredetector', no, they create things like Gksu -about whose naming I complained over here, or the Red Hat "new hardware detector", dubbed "Kudzu", the name of which I keep forgetting and just refer to as "that RedHat thing with Japanese sounding name that detects hardware changes".
And if that wasn't enough, here comes yet another Open Source piece of code with a japanese sounding name that is also similar to Kudzu, just to destroy and wreck any chances I could have of remembering which one is the one: Dazuko, the 3rd party library for file-access control.
Couldn't they just name it linux "fileaccess-control-api", "open-filecontrol", "open-file-access api", "log-filesystem-access"?? No... DAZUKO. Sheesh!
I don't know, maybe I'm 32 and getting too old to remember this craziness of Gksu, Kudzu and Dazuko...
I was surprised to find Jerry Pournelle still writing about IT, this time at Dr. Dobb's Journal. [Thanks to JohnO for forwarding me that stack of "dead tree" IT magazines].
I had a great respect for Jerry in the late 80s and early to mid-'90s, when I was a subscriber of the legendary printed edition of Byte magazine. But lately I've read his "Chaos Manor" web page and found that he sounds like those classic right-wing wackos.... half-supportive of the Iraq war ("since our troops are there, we now must support them" kind of arguments), and spreading skepticism about Global Warming, by buying the arguments of -and forwarding them- every article that questions it.
Back to the war topic, for instance on "The view from Chaos Manor" you can read: "The proper way to occupy Iraq is to build a comfortable enclave with good defenses and secure perimeter, garrison that, then bring in a client army to do the actual occupation. The client army should be from a state in which, or near which, we maintain a substantial garrison, so that the homeland is held hostage (although we would NEVER say it that way) to the good behavior of the field army doing the dirty work. There are plenty of countries that would like to rent out their soldiers and would actually welcome a substantial US force in their mids".
I remember that his writing style was always somewhat convoluted and at times hard to follow. He sometimes seemed to trip on his own words and make a long tirade out of nothing, describing everything -down to the hotel he was staying in- in painstaking detail and branching the "line of thought" several times.
But getting back to the point, I finally found something in Pournelle's January 2006 Dr. Dobb's article that caught my eye, because I surely remembered that from some of his past columns: Pournelle's amazing Double-Negatives!.
The last paragraph of his Jan 2006 Dr.Dobb's article reads:
"There is NO CHANCE you WON'T learn something important from reading this book".
Wow. Why not say "Chancesareyou will learn something by reading this book?". Amazing, simply amazing!. ROFL.
I swear there is NO CHANCE I won't save time by NOT READING Chaos Manor ever again!.
David Berlind of ZDNet asks in his blog"If you could ask AMD anything, what would you ask?"
Since my reply requires room for the explanation, here goes my analysis:
Given these facts:
1. AMD is in a UNIQUE position, with its low-power, low-cost CPUs, to challenge the Microsoft-Intel push for Windows Media Center and the insane "VIIV" ""solutions"", that locks consumers into Microsoft's proprietary codecs, and with windows-only DRM-infected "media".
2. AMD is very linux friendly, in fact, MIT's "OLPC" effort is proof that linux+AMD can bring great technological solutions to the marketplace.
3. AMD, along with Sun, could develop an OPEN ALTERNATIVE to challenge VIIV, based on: a. AMD's low-cost, low-power CPUs b. Sun's cross-platform java for the media server software on PCs c. Linux as the OS for the "media players", set top boxes and "entertainment centers".
The only thing missing is the WILL, on AMD's part, to create an open platform, co-develop with taiwanese and chinese hardware makers a "reference platform" and then once the cross-platform, open software side is polished up, sit batck and watch the competition among hardware makers for differentiation and features do the rest.
Prismiq, the company now closing shop after a number of bad strategic decissions, showed the way with its Prismiq Media Player, which 3 years ago won the "best of Comdex" prize. It had great potential and I'm surprised that neither AMD nor Sun saw the potential and acquired the company and its ideas, which would have paved the way for an open alternative to VIIV based on AMD, Linux and Java, which is what I'm proposing today.
Prismiq's mistakes? Let me summarize:. 1. choosing a low-horsepower NEC CPU, and a low-ram configuration on the hardware side 2. choosing to do the back-end software of their media player in cross-platform java, and then attempting to re-code a GUI in C++ for each native platform they wanted to support (Windows, MacOS, Linux). 3. Attempting (and failing) to get a "community" of hobbyst programmers to do #2 above for them, without putting enough resources or paid programmers into the effort. 4. Throwing a lot of money down the drain trying to release a Prismiq video recorder on top of the low-horsepower base hardware configuration (see #1 above).
Despite this, and trying not to lose focus and get back to the subject... THE QUESTION FOR AMD IS:
DEAR AMD... -AMD is already collaborating with Sun, and have a great relationship with them. -Sun is promoting an open alternative to windows-only, platform-locked DRM, they call it DReaM, and is based in Java. -Consumers want CHOICES, and a DRM-FREE (and/or open-DRM, could be up to the hardware makers' choice) solution that is comparable to Intel's VIIV but doesn't lock them to a single vendor or desktop platform would be warmly welcomed into the market. -There is an open mpeg4 video codec that AMD's alternative to VIIV could use: THEORA -Your main competitor, Intel, is in cahoots with the Evil Empire of Redmondia to help extend the Windows desktop monopoly to the Home Theather and living room market of consumers....
... SO WHAT IS AMD WAITING FOR TO GIVE INTEL's BRAINDEAD VIIV SOME SERIOUS KICKING and help promote the use of low-power AMD CPUs and OPEN SOFTWARE and CODECS on the consumers' home???
I'd like to hear what AMD execs have to say about this...
"Great Minds think Alike"? It's amazing how the Web allows people who share a view to get in touch with one another in a short timeframe (aka synergy). For instance, as soon as I wrote my article on Google's infamous "Picasa for Linux" snafu (disclaimer: I generally like Google!, I use almost all of their web services), I received a note from Hubert Figuière a.k.a. "Crazy French", who's also active in the Gnome community, it read:
"I like your Google Picasa article. I myself did post something like that last week, and I got flamed for doing. Nice to see that I'm not the only to think that Google did a bad job."
I specially like one of the comments on his blog: "it is not a native program. It is just a packaging trick. Here is what dpkg -L picasashows: /opt/picasa/wine/drive_c/Program Files/Picasa2/Picasa2.exe.
Obviously you have been fooled. It all just run under Wine like a native Windows application. Wine does not run on PowerPC, for obvious technical reasons." Then I received another comment:
Fernando,
I think Googlites have made fools of themselves with this Picasa for penguins release. The one thing that may be good is that the WINE project stands to benefit a lot from this ; however, a native application (using either GTK+ or wxWindows, like ... Xara LX (xaraxtreme.org)) would have been a lot better... LX is a good example of a cross platform application that works perfectly. I met the Xara team at LGM (libregraphicsmeeting.org) 2006 in Lyon, France. They took the wxWindows route because, well, it was the easiest, fastest way to port (I bet using WINE never crossed their minds...). 2 years ago they were all Linux-unaware. Google has been using Linux for as long as it exists, and yet... Oh well. Greets, Francois Not only that, by googling on "Picasa Linux Wine" I landed this morning into this great article on the web site of Australian magazine APC:
So... someone was thinking about the same thing and writing an article about at the same time I was writing mine!!. I call this "collective mind reading!". :-)
I sweartoGod I had never read it before this morning -and I didn't even know about that Australian magazine, either!. Thank God one of my screenshots I took while writing the article shows the May 28 date, and most of the rest show May 29. That proves that *I* started working on my article earlier than the Aussies!. :-D.
What's that common phrase they say... "great minds think alike"?. ;-)
(Also on http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/enron/2544757.html ) "the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military intelligence officers and CIA agents to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."
"CIA interrogation manuals written in the 1960s and 1980s described "coercive techniques" such as those used to mistreat detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to the declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The Archive also posted a secret 1992 report written for then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney warning that U.S. Army intelligence manuals that incorporated the earlier work of the CIA for training Latin American military officers in interrogation and counterintelligence techniques contained "offensive and objectionable material" that "undermines U.S. credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment.""
Meanwhile, George W. Bush, son of CIA chief George Bush, said back in Septiember, 2001:
I don´t know what the Sun hardware engineers were thinking, but if you ask me, the new Sun Ultra 20 workstation has an UGLY case, unlike its predecessor, the w1100z Java Workstation which was beatiful, in my book.
Such attractive hardware specs (AMD Opteron CPU, etc), with such an ugly case, WHY OH WHY??.
And I´m not the only one who thinks so.... Floyd Marinesc and others at TheServerSide, said: "It is amazing to me how consistently ugly Sun workstations look in comparison. They must work hard to maintain such standards. The irony I find in this is that I will pay more for good industrial design. (I'm typing this on my Powerbook G4.) I wish Sun would respond to my want to pay more."
I think the w1100z case was beatiful in comparison to the new Ultra 20´s case design.
I hope the Sun guys have a sense of humour, because this is how I predict the Ultra 20´s succesor will look like, given the current trend: :-)
Tech columnist at the NY Times David Pogue writes in his review of the Internet Explorer 7 beta:
"ABOUT 85 percent of the Internet population uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser to surf the Web, even though it's relatively ancient, crusty with neglect and about as secure as a screen door. In what other industry would 85 percent of consumers choose such a product — when better ones, also free, were also available? Trick question. Those consumers aren't actually choosing Internet Explorer; in fact, they're not choosing. They just use what came on their Windows computers."
It was about time someone told it like it is!!
However, some folks at the Evil Empire of Redmondia need a reality check.... specifically Microsoft India´s guru Rishi K Srivastava who only weeks ago claimed just the opposite, that the "bundling" had nothing to do with IE´s market share (yeah, right!).
“IE’s success cannot be attributed to its access through Windows. The reason why people are not opting for other browsers is because of IE’s superiority. If you have access to a better product why you would not choose it. IE is much secure and only a large corporation like Microsoft can invest so much into security,” What a good joke.
See Srivastava... you can fool some people a long time, but you cannot fool all the people, all the time.
Who would have thought... the solution is in this ~40 yrs old song by Tom Lehrer....
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the world seems in tune On a spring afternoon, When we're poisoning pigeons in the park. Ev'ry Sunday you'll see My sweetheart and me, As we poison the pigeons in the park.
When they see us coming, the birdies all try an' hide, But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide. The sun's shining bright, Ev'rything seems all right, When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.
Thanks to Forbes Magazine we learn (as if were a good thing!) that the combined company after Alcatel's acquisition of Lucent will put axe-professional Patricia "Pat" Russo at the task of laying off people at light-speed.
===========
"Patricia Russo, who eliminated 30,000 jobs at Lucent Technologies Inc., says she will move quickly to reduce the workforce when she takes over as head of Alcatel SA after the French company's $13.4 billion purchase of the biggest U.S. phone-equipment maker.
``We clearly intend to have speed as our bias,'' Russo said yesterday on a conference call after announcing the sale to Paris- based Alcatel, where she will become CEO. Russo aims to save $1.7 billion after three years at the enlarged phone equipment company.
Russo plans to eliminate 10 percent of the combined staff, or 8,800 jobs, after reducing the workforce by 50 percent at Murray Hill, New Jersey-based Lucent.
===========
Will this "promising" merger, and Russo's job end up over time looking like HP's tenure under "Carly" Fiorina?
"Forbes magazine recently listed her among the 15 most powerful women in the world. As early as 1998 Fortune Magazine had listed her as one of the "50 Most Powerful Women in American Business." http://www.vonmag.com/issue/2005/nov/features/pioneers.asp
Henry Kissinger gave his approval to the "dirty war" in Argentina in the 1970s in which up to 30,000 people were killed, according to newly declassified US state department documents. Mr Kissinger, who was America's secretary of state, is shown to have urged the Argentinian military regime to act before the US Congress resumed session, and told it that Washington would not cause it "unnecessary difficulties".
Behind this Dirty War and its excesses stood the slight, well-dressed, gentlemanly figure of Gen. Videla. Called "bone" or the "pink panther" because of his slim build, Videla emerged as a leading theorist for international anti-communist strategies in the mid-1970s. His tactics were emulated throughout Latin America and were defended by prominent American right-wing politicians, including Ronald Reagan.
Videla rose to power amid Argentina's political and economic unrest in the early-to-mid 1970s. "As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure," he declared in 1975 in support of a "death squad" known as the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. [See A Lexicon of Terror by Marguerite Feitlowitz.] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Human_Rights/VidelaArgentinaTerror.html
What is your favorite book," a journalist asked Gen. Rafael Videla, after he ascended to power in Argentina in 1976.
"Book?" Videla replied.
The journalist was perspiring. He didn't think it was a hard question to ask someone leading the nation. But suddenly the journalist felt that the question could jeopardize not only his career but his life.
It was embarrassing that the new president could not come up with at least one title of one book. So the journalist tried to help out with suggestions: "The Bible perhaps? Martin Fierro (the most important book in Argentina's literature)?". Videla said something about his first-grade reading book, but ... he could not remember its title. [Diario Perfil, an article by Omar Bravo, July 10, 1998]
"Videla, known for his English-tailored suits and his ruthless counterinsurgency theories, stands accused of permitting -- and concealing -- a scheme to harvest infants from pregnant women who were kept alive in military prisons only long enough to give birth. According to the charges, the babies were taken from the new mothers, sometimes by late-night Caesarean sections, and then distributed to military families or shipped to orphanages. After the babies were pulled away, the mothers were removed to another site for their executions."
“IE’s success cannot be attributed to its access through Windows. The reason why people are not opting for other browsers is because of IE’s superiority. If you have access to a better product why you would not choose it. IE is much secure and only a large corporation like Microsoft can invest so much into security,” counters Microsoft India WindowsClient director Rishi K Srivastava. http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=120295
This is the same outspoken guy who seems to be BillG's mouthpiece, a caped crusader defending in the media everything the Corporation does. He recently said"Vista is a platform, Google is just search".
Slashdot | Analysis of .NET Use in Longhorn and Vista: "Richard Grimes analyses the ratio of native to managed code in Microsoft's upcoming Vista Operating System., and concludes it's a classic example of 'Do as I say, not as I do'
According to the analysis of Microsoft Vista and .NET, 'Microsoft appears to have concentrated their development effort in Vista on native code development. Vista has no services implemented in .NET and Windows Explorer does not host the runtime, which means that the Vista desktop shell is not based on the .NET runtime. The only conclusion that can be made from these results is that between PDC 2003 and the release of Vista Beta 1 Microsoft has decided that it is better to use native code for the operating system, than to use the .NET framework.'"
I understand what Intel is up to... they want to put their kit inside set-top boxes, and make intel kit the centerpiece of the new buzzword: the connected home, the "entertainment center", whatever. In other words, they expect people who are sitting on their favourite couch looking at the TV to shell out a few thousand greenbacks more and enjoy Intel's vision of the "connected home", listening to music, watching video, and the like, all from their INTEL-POWERED computer running WINDOWS MEDIA SERVER, to the TV.
There is a problem with this scenario: instead of listening to what the consumer really wants, which is a digital experience free of DRM-infection, they have partnered with the Beast of Redmondia. But it doesn't stop there... they have come up with this meaningless "VIIV" marketing nonsense that leaves people -ok, at least myself- scratching their heads. And if this wasn't enough, the adverts for "VIIV" have started popping up on the web. I've spotted the first today, while visiting AOL's Nullsoft division to download the latest Winamp 5.2x mp3 player.
Want to know what the ad shows? It looks like this:
in other words, an Asian man (or woman, depending on the randomness of your visit) doing the famous "V" sign with his index and middle fingers, with both of his/her hands at once. Which makes me wonder... is "VIIV" victory of... what?. So far, I conclude it's "Victory of the idiotic marketing drones". ;-)
(Just for the record, the flash file shown on the winamp.com page is hosted at this url).
I don't want to spoil Intel's "VIIV" maketing push, but I'll let my blog visitors know that I've been streaming video files, surfing the web, and listening to music, all from my favourite couch and into my TV, not only from my AMD computer, but my AMD64 computer which is running LINUX as well. All DRM-free, with no stupid and dirty tricks to promote the iNTEL brand over another.
There's a nice community of techies and Prismiq users providing peer-help and developing code for it, over here. Too bad the company responsible for it didn't give it the needed resources to fully develop and enhance the product, so it has been relegated to techies.
Look at Prismiq screen on your TV. Windows and DRM-free...
Another look at the Prismiq screen
It's based on the open source FFMPEG open source transcoder, and a NEC risc cpu with built-in MPEG decoder. Full details on the hardware are over here. Oh, did I mention the PC-side server software is cross-platform java so it can be run on Mac OS-X and Linux as well?. An old FAQ can be found here. If you're a techie with a desire to explore -and beat intel's closed solution- I suggest you grab one while you can. Or experience Wintel's "VIIV"ctory ... over your wallet.
I suspected for a long time that some high ranking members of the Mozarella Foundation are not really linux believers but rather linux-skeptics.
But to say "Mozilla is linux skeptic" is far better than saying "Mozilla is fooling around with Linux". So I get up in the middle of the night, head to my small home office and what do I see?
Mozilla fooling around with Linux!.
Poor tux never said a word after that... And about Mozilla... *f*ck* ... I'll never be able to look at the green cute stuffed-plush beast from Mountain View with the same innocent eyes...
"Throughout this week, several Google offices, including New York, Kirkland and Mountain View, have been hosting a couple of hundred girls from local middle schools and high schools to come visit us for the day. The girls have the unique opportunity to shadow a Google engineeror two (!), go to interactive workshops, eat in our yummy cafes (the pizzas are a hit!) and get an insider's tour of the Google offices".
Bastards!
Young, curious, and eager to learn: Apparently this is the kind of engineers that Google expects to attract.
[joke, joke! if someone lacks a sense of TheOnion kind of humour, go elsewhere]
Just finished watching "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" on DVD. This film shows the true story behind the "Enron scandal". The accounting tricks, the inflated stock price. Andersen Consulting's role in conveniently approving the shady books, the "get rich at all costs" mindset promoted within the company, the role of "deregulation" ideology in pursuing those goals, and how politicians bought it when they thought deregulating the energy markets was "for the better" while the company profitted at the expense of people in California and "moved energy to the desert" to cut supply and increase prices.
It's a dramatic movie. For instance, you can not only hear former Enron chief Skilling calling an investor an "Asshole" during a conference call with investors as one analyst confronted him over the company's murky earnings releases. In another segment, you can hear Enron's "energy traders" cheering after seeing fires on TV below one of California's main power lines "the price per kWatt is going to go through the roof"... "burn, baby burn" you hear them cheering.
This movie, along with "The Corporation" should be mandatory viewing at high school before anyone gets his/her degree. Gives the "Free Market needs no regulation" religious zealots and corporate mouthpieces like the guys at the CATO Institute a very well deserved spanking.
I went through pda-repair hell a couple months ago, trying to get Sony to repair my broken PalmOS PDA, a beatiful Clié NX80V with mp3 playback, swinging LCD screen and 1.3MP digital camera. The device fell from a table to the floor and it just died. Swapping the battery with a new one didn't help, nor did fiddling with the power switch.
Luckily for me, it was still under warranty, and it was purchased and registered in the U.S., so I shipped the dead PDA from South America to a friend in California, and then called Sony USA trying to obtain a RMA#. My friend would ship it back to Sony and when the repaired unit is received, he'd re-ship it down South. Easy right?. Wrong.
Sony's tech support number is an insanely designed speech-recognition IVR system where the system tries to outsmart the customer. For instance, I called from overseas, so there's no caller-id info present on the inbound international call -that I know of- so the system must have identified my call as "# not available". The IVR greeted me with a message along the lines of "are you the same person that just called from that same number about a Sony Handycam?". Bloody hell I was not!.
When I finally got a chance to speak with a "customer care representative", he insisted on painfuly slow pace trying to walk you, the idiot user, through all the joy of "resetting your PDA". Hint: telling the genius that you're fairly knowledgeable on PDAs and that you already tried everything including a new battery, that you left the PDA charging for weeks, and that you're on a long distance call and that you're paying through the nose won't help: "we still need to go through all the required steps" was the answer.
If you manage to skip the ignore the babbling from the other side, you'll eventually be turned to a tier-2 tech support, that is, someone who supposedly knows about the product instead of just reading from a workflow chart. I managed to convince the person that the PDA was efectivelly dead, and no ammound of fiddling or tinkering with it was going to bring it back to life. So he issued me a "work order number" (Sonyspeak for RMA), and told me I'd be receiving an empty prepaid box from Sony by Fedex, at my registered U.S. addres. I then told my U.S. friend to wait for this box from Sony... which never arrived, actually, it did, but it wasn´t sent by Sony.
Since it wasn't labeled "Sony" anywhere my friend's secretary never realized it was the very important box from Sony they were expecting. Ok, so it wasn't technically Sony's fault. But by the time the box was found by him, the PDA was already out of warranty by a few days, and the Fedex prepaid postage on the box expired. That left me with two options: tell my U.S. friend to throw the pda away or auction it as non-working. Definitely I didn't want to spend any more greenbacks on long distance international phone calls to the Sony IVR hell to obtain a new RMA#.
Luckily for me, I found about Chris Short. He´s a guy from Mankato, Minnesota, who runs his own PDA repair shop from home. Not only he enjoys a "100% positives" rate on eBay, his services are also inexpensive: you only pay for USPS shipping if you don´t agree with the quoted price.
In the end, I was able to get my NX80V PDA back in working order in a few days, and only spending $49 US dollars on it. While Sony´s official repair service wanted $150 -apparently their "flat fee" for out-of-warranty PDAs.
Many people might be wondering "What is George W. Bush doing down there in the Mar del Plata, Argentina's favourite beach destination???".
Well, this humble correspondent has the answer.... away from the spotlight and on an almost DESERTED CITY under siege due to the presidents' get-together party dubbed "Summit of the Americas", George W. apparently used this time to have a good time alone, and reflect on his administrations' latest scandals.
Media reports "The Argentine city is virtually seized by security forces; some 200 blocks have been fenced off and movement there is restricted" but that didn't seem to bother young George.
Images courtesy of my old school pal and Mac advocate #1 Pablo X.
Click to enlarge each image....
(For those who sadly don't know Mar del Plata, these are actual Mar del Plata sights in the background. My kudos to Pablo X for his great photoshopping).
While George W. enjoyed the beach, the rest of Mar del Plata's inhabitants wrestled with the police trying to get to their homes, or trying to send George their greetings and salutations....
And by later aftenoon, first a timid then full snowfall decorated the tops of the highest buildings
