AMD is in a unique position to push a Windows-Free alternative to Wintel's VIIV

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...

FC

Google's Picasa-Linux affair - The whole "WINE is an API" idea is a trojan horse from Hell

"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 picasa shows:
/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:

Picasa for Linux begs a few questions
http://www.apcstart.com/site/admin/2006/05/168/picasa-for-linux-begs-a-few-questions

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 swear to God 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"?. ;-)

George W. wants the world to love the C.I.A. ...

CIA needs to restore public trust - Hayden
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=qw1147964943876B226&set_id=

"General Michael Hayden, US President George Bush's nominee for CIA director, said on Thursday the spy agency needed to restore public trust"

Oh yes it does!...

May 2004: "Iraqui prisoner abuse encouraged by CIA agents, report"
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1100414.htm

(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."

(September, 2004)
CIA May Have Held 100 'Ghost' Prisoners
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0910-20.htm

Prisoner abuse, CIA patterns from the past
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/

"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:

May 2006: CIA nominee defends domestic NSA spying
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1778313,00.html

"I've got a lot of confidence in the CIA, and so should America," Bush said.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/26/gen.america.under.attack/index.html

Should we believe the Agency's track record, or George W. Bush's broken promises??

I rest my case...

The uglification of the Sun workstation cases. I want the w1100z´s one back!

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: :-)

[Click to enlarge]

[Click on the image to enlarge it]

NYTimes´ Pogue is right: people do not "choose" IE

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.

The Solution to Bird Flu...

Scotland Probably Has First Case Of UK Bird Flu (H5N1)
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?newsid=41129

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.

Lalaalaalalaladoodiedieedoodoodoo
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
;-)

The Russo Treatment: Alcatel + Lucent = More Layoffs

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

1976 - 2006 (March 24) U.S. approved State Terrorism

March 24, 1976-2006. 30 years after the U.S.-approved military coup in Argentina
that gave a new meaning to the word "disappeared":

Kissinger approved Argentinian 'dirty war'
Declassified US files expose 1970s backing for junta
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1101061,00.html

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".

Argentine Military Believed U.S. Gave Go-ahead for Dirty War
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB73/index3.htm

"First we must kill the subversives, then their sympathisers, then the indifferent and finally the timid."
--General Iberico Saint Jean, governor by Buenos Aires during military rule.
http://www.lasc.ie/enlace/enlace3/argentina-year-of-the-scratch.html

The 'Pink Panther'

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."

http://www.consortiumnews.com/1990s/consor17.html

Videla's killer file
http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/videla.html

..and the dozens of subordinates:
http://www.yendor.com/vanished/junta.html

Microsoft India exec Rishi K Srivastava: joker of the year!

“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 Windows Client 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".

Google "not a platform, just search"?. Yeah, right.... then Picasa and all this Google software is a product of my imagination?. Oh, and incidentally:

Microsoft the Vole admits IE mess up
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30432

Microsoft complains UE is undemocratic
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30288

New zero-day bug crashes IE - March 17
http://www.informationweek.com/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=183700672&subSection=Viruses+and+Patches

Big Hole found in MS IE 6 - March 21, 2006
http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?NewsID=5608

Mr. Srivastava... I think the joke's on you.

Microsoft ".NET" so good Microsoft not using it for Longhorn and Windows Vista

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.'"

Intel's VIIV nonsense: Victory of what? Dumb marketing drones?

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:

Intel's advertising campaign for "VIIV"

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.

How? with the $125 Prismiq Media Player released in... 2003.



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.

Mozilla fooling around with Linux, shock!

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...

'Barely legal teens' day at Google? ;-)

Official Google Blog: Google, girls and engineering
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/google-girls-and-engineering.html

"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 engineer or 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]

Film shows Enron scandal and the dangers of unregulated markets

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.

Rumsfeld is Nostradamus, shocker!

AUGUST 2005:

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday tried to dispel concern over the possibility that a civil war could erupt in Iraq

CNN.com - Rumsfeld: "Iraq not fated to civil war"
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/23/rumsfeld.iraq/

February 23 2006:

Mosque attack pushes Iraq towards Civil War
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/23/AR2006022300159.html

Bush calls for restraint as fears of civil war rise
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/99d9029e-a411-11da-83cc-0000779e2340.html

At least 60 die in further Iraq violence
http://www.rte.ie/news/2006/0223/iraq.html

Single-man PalmOS PDA repair company is better than the official repair service.

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.

Recommended!. Find his ebay listings here.

George W. Bush in Mar del Plata: what is he doing?

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....

Expocomm Argentina: an expo worth seeing

Expocomm Argentina -the 2005 edition- came to an end last Friday, and I had a great time covering the event for the Inquirer this year.

Among the highlights was the deployement of WiMAX, the broadband wireless standard, by two local ISPs. This comes way before the U.S. starts trials of the technology, which according to reports won't happen until 2006.

Once again, Argentina shows the way, and the U.S. follows, later. . Ok, I'm just teasing american readers. Of course Argentina still has a way to go and improve in about every area, yet it's kinda ironic to see the U.S. lag so much in WiMAX deployment. Who knows, maybe in a few dozen years, there'll be a U.S. president who realizes the danger of climate change and signs the Kyoto treaty, as my country did years ago?. . Ok, enough teasing. :)

Here's a link that takes you to a list of my Expocomm 2005 coverage for the INQ. And I made a record number of articles as well!.

http://os2guru.com/expocomm2005.shtml

Happy reading, and I hope I'm able to meet some INQ readers in the 2006 edition!.
:o)

Peace Doves bomb innocent passers-by

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

This is not a doctored photo. I took it last Friday while shopping around for the best price of cat5e ethernet cable around town. This is what a particular block of the "Boulogne Sur Mer" street looks like in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It's an old neighborhood, full of electronics parts sellers, and as you see, in one particular block, packed with doves / pigeons. EVERY wire has a community of pigeons standing there, 24/7. Suffice to say that one has to be careful when walking around (or carry an open umbrella), because of the continuous fall of, well, smelly "liquid paper" (sheesh, I´m old!) alike poo...

I´m a peacenik, but in this instance, I think doves are going too far...
;-)

btw: while I can´t say it with 100% certainty, the exact location must be around here. Congrats to the guys at Maporama for the great site!.

Fernando Cassia makes it to Forbes shock

I can´t frigging believe it!. One of my Inquirer articles mentioned in Forbes.com

The "business" and "finance" magazine Forbes (the kind of magazines I generally despise due to their weak and oversimplified coverage of the Tech world and their promotion of the "get rich at all costs" kind of mentality - or as The Beast, would say, the kind of magazines read by "every rich asshole cokehead with a fast car" -even while I admit that there´s ONE business magazine that I can read without feeling contempt, and that´s BusinessWeek :), publishes an article titled "Top Ten Tech Articles worth reading".

And what article do we find mentioned in the first place?. My own INQuirer article titled "Top 10 Firefox Annoyances". Now that´s a surprise!. I don´t even know yet if to be honoured or outraged. But as someone once said "there´s no such thing as bad publicity". Yet at the same time I don´t feel to good about being used as a weapon against the Open Source movement ("see, open source isn´t that great", seems to be the implied meaning in Forbes´ mention of my article), because my article, while very critical, was meant to be well-intentioned, showing the flaws and shortcoming so it gets better.

I doubt that helping Open Source projects is in Forbes´ top ten interests. Forbes is the kind of magazine that is always glorifying software companies with proprietary products (and the more proprietary, the more market grip they have, and thus earn more, and thus shareholders benefit from it) are actually "Good for Society".

And one last thing.... the name of the author of that Forbes.com piece.... Penélope Patsuris sounds like a totally bogus name of the kind a phone pranker like Tom Mabe would make up.

"I´ve made it to Forbes, Dad, I´m famous!". (not ;-)