i-sako.com

Our laptop just died.

I’m actually quite surprised it lasted as long as it did, considering that it has been running Windows Me for more than two years now. Windows Me, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, was without question the worst operating system Microsoft ever made. So why did we use it, you ask? That’s a fair question. 

When we moved to Kanagawa a couple years ago, we decided to switch to ADSL (which was just then starting to become available in areas outside the big city, even though it’s everywhere now) to save on the horrendous cost of dial-up access. The modem provided by our ISP at the time required Windows 98SE or later for configuration purposes. At that time, there were no copies of 98SE available on the market, but there were plenty of copies of either Windows Me or Windows 2000. I bought the upgrade version of Windows 2000 first, thinking that it would be the better choice, but could never get it to install—even though Microsoft’s own compatibility wizard indicated that it would be no problem. 

Reluctantly, after several fruitless attempts to install Windows 2000, I went back to the store to get a copy of Me. Fortunately, the points I had left over from the purchase of Windows 2000 were enough to get Me for only 501 yen—which was still a whole lot more than Me was really worth. Upon getting home from the store, however, the Me installation was relatively painless, so we decided to live with it.

When Windows XP came out, I discovered that there would be no way for our little 233MHz/128MB laptop to run an operating system as resource-hungry as XP, so another upgrade was out of the question (besides, I already had serious reservations about Microsoft’s latest offering for other reasons). So, again, we decided to live with Me, although we weren’t terribly happy about it.

Recently, though, Me has started acting up. A lot. Much worse than usual. Tonight, after a long battle against the inevitable, Windows Me suffered a major aneurism and has become a complete vegetable, so I’m left with little choice but to pull the plug on this patient.

The time of death was 9:10 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2004. Goodnight, Me, may you find peace in oblivion.

Fortunately, all of the hardware on the laptop seems to be in good working condition. I’ve run Knoppix and Knoppix knock-off Berry Linux from the CD-ROM drive with no trouble at all. With any luck, we should be able to transplant a new brain in the laptop that will allow it to enjoy life after Me. 

The only question right now is which flavor of Linux to choose. Fedora Core builds on Red Hat 9, which I use on my desktop, so it’s already familiar. SUSE plans to enter the Japanese market later this year, and I’ve been hoping to give it a try. I’ve heard good things about Gentoo’s Japanese support, but is it easy enough for my wife, who doesn’t care much for computers and technology in general? In the few times that she’s used the desktop machine, she hasn’t been happy with the default IME, which is admittedly not intuitive. I haven’t tried installing ATOK X for a while, but that might take care of her IME worries. Suggestions welcome.

I’m not sure if I will be able to find Linux drivers for some of my peripherals, though, so as of right now I’ve got a CanoScan FB 620U flatbed color scanner and a Fujitsu 640USB3 MO drive (and several 640MB MO disks!) for sale, along with a few other Windows-only devices, if anyone cares to make an offer on them.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have started using XFN when I make links to people I know and think highly of. The idea (that you can identify your relationships with friends and colleagues in your hyperlinks) is interesting enough, and it’s easy to do, so why not? (Well, actually, I can think of a few reasons not to, but I’ll get to those later.)

XFN in brief
In my previous post, I identified Zachary as an acquaintance, someone I know by name and have had a few conversations with. I also indicated that we have never met in person and that we work in the same field. I didn’t explicitly say any these things, however. I simply embedded them in the link to his site (as I have done again in the link above). My tech-savvy readers are probably already aware of this technique and how it is done, but it involves adding specific attributes to the XHTML <a> tag. The XFN specification provides a number of different attributes for identifying friends, sweethearts, relatives, coworkers, neighbors, “muses,” and just about anyone else you might have a positive relationship with. Different relationships get different attributes, which can change over time as the relationship evolves (i.e., that cutie at the office might have been identified as your date last year, but this year she’s your spouse). Although this information is transparent to the casual reader, it can be read by search engines and other things that can parse XHTML (like geeks who view the source of their friends’ sites—not that I am, er, that I know anyone like that or anything).

It seems kind of intriguing to think of the possibilities that could result if this becomes a widespread practice. Years down the road, people could do a Google search for information about their genealogy, for example. Or, as a slightly more near-term example, companies might be able to better tailor product pitches to your unique social situation (and they won’t have to pester you for information about your friends and family, because they would already know). Although the current XFN specification doesn’t touch on this specifically, it would be an interesting experiment to see if regular use of XFN could cause, for example, a Google Images search for, say, “Sako’s coworkers” to actually turn up images of the people I work with. (See, there I did it again!)

The Hazards of Friendship
On the other hand, I know from personal experience that making assumptions about relationships can be tricky. In fact, the title of this entry comes from one such experience. There was a girl I knew in high school (we’ll call her “RM”; if blogs had existed back then, she would have qualified as a “crush” in mine, but I would not in hers—an example of an XFN asymmetrical relationship) who really wanted to set me up with a friend of hers who had just recently enrolled at UC Berkeley (we’ll call her “NB”; her relationship with me was similar to mine with RM). I hung out with NB sometimes, and we even flirted a bit—okay, more than a bit, but always in jest, or so I thought—but my real aim was always to spend time with RM. Anyway, one day I made the mistake of referring to NB as an “acquaintance,” a label that really seemed to hurt her deeply, which I felt really bad about. Our once-playful friendship never recovered, which also caused my relationship with RM to suffer. “Hell hath no fury...” and all that. 

You assume too much!
That experience made me a little leery of using that particular term, but the reverse is also possible. Have you ever met anyone who become way too friendly way too soon? Around the same time as the RM/NB fiasco, I had a neighbor who was irrepressibly gay. I knew this because he asked me if I would like to sleep with him less than an hour after we first met. He was quite charming about it, in his own way, but I’m just not that kind of guy—really, just ask my wife. That can be uncomfortable when it happens in person, but if it happens online, now all of a sudden you’ve got search engines caching it and what not. Messy.

Also, what are the implications (both ethical and technical) of implying that a relationship that does not, in fact, exist? I’m not sure at this point what, if anything, would come of such behavior, but it’s kind of interesting to think about. 

Anyway, please don’t be offended if I assume too much (or make to little) of any relationship we may have, dear reader. In return, I promise not to flip out if you don’t return my crush. 

Incidentally, XFN is partly the work of Eric Meyer, after whom we middle-named our son (so obviously Eric qualifies as a muse). Hmm...Eric and I both do Web-related work, does that mean I should also list him as a colleague? Choices, choices, choices. 

DPReview reports that Microsoft now intends to start charging manufacturers of flash memory card devices $0.25 per unit to use the FAT File System, which Microsoft developed in 1976 and has since become the standard file system for nearly all digital cameras. I suppose this small amount really isn’t something to get worked up about, but it is illustrative of a disturbing trend at Microsoft to let something be free only until it dominates the market, at which point MS starts charging for it. There were times when Microsoft hinted that MSIE would eventually become an application you would have to pay for, just like any other. Now we see that this is happening for Mac users, who will have to pay for a subscription to MSN to get current versions of MSIE from now on. (Windows users, of course, pay for MSIE as part of their operating system.)

Sure, it’s good business sense, but given Microsoft’s dominating position in the software industry, do we really want to allow the company to do the same thing in hardware? I fear that this sort of thing will become more and more common as Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management technology starts to require more restrictive hardware/software combinations. Before the end of our lifetimes, you might be forced into a situation where you have to pay Microsoft $0.25 every time you open your own documents or something similarly insidious, albeit well within the company’s legal rights.

Microsoft’s ownership of the patents for the FAT File System gives it the right to do whatever it wants, but I think this kind of behavior is yet another example of why the current patent system needs to be changed. Patents are supposed to be the government’s way of ensuring that innovators are duly rewarded for their work, but in practice the system is more about large corporations gobbling up patents to either defend their existing business models by preventing competitors from getting a foothold in the market (in which case the older, established businesses get to smack down newer, more innovative ones) or to milk an uncontested market for as much as it will bear (as is the case with what Microsoft is doing). Although Microsoft is well within its rights to charge for the use of its file system, I don’t see how doing so provides any additional innovation—which is supposed to be the point of having a patent system. It’s not entirely dissimilar to the process of copyright holders lobbying Congress to increase the terms of their copyrights. It provides them with additional financial benefits, certainly, but does it actually serve the purpose copyright laws were originally intended to serve?

In addition to being in favor of a ”copyright tax,” put me down as also being in favor of a “use it or lose it” rule for patents. Consider, for example, the long-term implications of this new patent. Sure, Microsoft claims that it has no interest in enforcing the patent—at least, not today. What does that mean for tomorrow? Look at what Microsoft has done with FAT and draw your own conclusions.

These days I’ve been too busy with other things to get much blogging done, but I thought I would take this opportunity to write about a few new-ish applications that I’ve been quite pleased with recently.

Firebird 0.7
I find it highly ironic that once Microsoft won the browser wars, it stopped updating its browser. The reasons for doing so are of course many and varied, but the result is simply that the world’s most commonly used browser is one of the least sophisticated. (I regularly encourage Windows users to stop thinking of MSIE as a browser, but instead as a component in the operating system that does an adequate job of rendering HTML.)

Much more sophisticated browsers abound, but almost nobody cares about them. (This is particularly true in Japan, where everyone seems to assume that “browser” is a synonym for MSIE.) Mozilla is, of course, one of the best in its class, but even it has drawbacks, which is why the folks developing it have decided to break Mozilla into two separate projects, Firebird (which inherits the browser functions) and Thunderbird (which gets the e-mail and newsgroup functions), in order to focus on the specific needs of each application. The results so far have been pretty good.

Firebird recently reached the 0.7 level in its development (1.0 being the point where it is ready for the general public), but it is already good enough to replace Mozilla as my primary browser. It’s lightweight and fast, standards-compliant, and it comes pre-configured in a way that most users would appreciate (it blocks pop-up windows by default, for example). By all rights, Firebird deserves to be the leading browser, but until Microsoft gets around to producing MSIE 7, I’m afraid most of the world won’t have anything even close.

FeedDemon
If you are still one of those folks who still visits individual sites one at a time to find out what is new, I’ve got news for you: This is the 21st century. People don’t do that anymore. 

So what do they do instead, you ask? They install a news reader and gather updates via RSS, of course! News readers, although insanely popular among the weblogging community, don’t seem to have caught on with the general public to the extent that they probably should. (I’m sure they will, though, because just about every site worth visiting has its own RSS feed these days. Heck, even I have one.)

In the news reader category, there are a lot of different applications to choose from, but the best one I’ve found to date is FeedDemon, which is produced by Nick Bradbury, the same guy who gave us HomeSite and TopStyle. Even though FeedDemon is still just a release candidate (RC4a at the time of this writing), it already beats the pants off several other applications I’ve used in the past—even the ones that I’ve purchased.

One of the coolest things about FeedDemon, though, is that it makes it easy to post incoming news directly to pMachine, which is the blogging tool I use for this site and several others—so not only does it help me get information quickly and easily, but it enables me to share it quickly and easily, too. (Need instructions on how to set up FeedDemon to do this? Or how about for Movable Type/TypePad users?)


<oXygen/> XML editor
This one is a bit more esoteric than the first two. Everyone needs a browser, and everyone who has a clue (or simply wants one) needs a newsreader, but not everyone needs an XML editor. 

XML, being simply a way to mark up text, doesn’t really require a full-featured editing program (even a simple text editor like WordPad will do the job), but the features are a nice perk for people who work with the markup a lot. The project-management features, in particular, make it easier to keep track of large-scale projects, which is something that WordPad simply cannot do.

The best feature, though, is the license, which allows the user to install the software on any number of computers, so long as only one copy is in use at any given time. That means I can use the same copy at work (where I use Windows) and at home (where I usually use Linux), all for the same price! I wish more software developers would adopt this approach. I’d buy a lot more software if they did.

It seems that Microsoft is worried that some Asian countries are not playing the software game according to rules that Microsoft thinks are fair. Not long ago, the governments of China, Japan and Korea announced plans to “codevelop an open-source operating system to replace Microsoft Windows.” These governments, thinking that over-reliance on software produced by a foreign company is not in their national interests, have banded together to create an alternative where there currently is none. Microsoft is naturally less than pleased.

Microsoft: Asia not playing fair over OS

“We’d like to see the market decide who the winners are in the software industry,” said Tom Robertson, Microsoft’s Tokyo-based director for government affairs in Asia.

Then, in an unrelated article, Microsoft shows a somewhat different attitude. Microsoft is preparing to release a new version of its dominant Office software, which includes new features that control how documents created in Office can be used. Although there are significant security reasons for introducing this new technology (called ”Information Rights Management,” or IRM for short), it is also widely believed that this technology will be the first step toward locking users into an all-Microsoft system, presumably forever.

New Office locks down documents

“When you dominate a market, you change that market,” Rosoff said. “Office already has all the document management features people could possibly want. The only way to add value to Office is to make it part of this larger system that adds value.”

So on one hand we should allow the market to make our decisions about what software to use, but on the other hand we are expected to acknowledge that Microsoft dominates the market, effectively precluding any other choices. Translation: You Asians have no right not to buy our software. We own the market, fair and square. Now pay up.

That would be fine, I guess, if you excluded the fact that Microsoft’s domination of the market has been anything but fair. You would have to overlook, for example, the ruling in that Microsoft has abused its monopoly in the United States and that the company is currently being sued in Europe for similar misbehavior.

So my question for Microsoft (or anyone who cares to answer) is simple: What recourse do governments have to rectify markets that are unfairly dominated?

Perhaps Microsoft would prefer to be sued instead. The company has shown a remarkable willingness to settle disputes, so long as it is allowed to continue doing business the way it always has. (Recently with Be OS.) If history has shown us anything, it is that Microsoft hates competition. Anything is preferable to a competitor, even a lawsuit (deep-pocketed Microsoft’s favorite tar baby).

I hope these countries will remain firm in their resolve, because what Asia needs is a bit of competition, not more Microsoft Dominance™.