Windows Vista

Our little company has one product for Windows, and of course we have tested it under Vista. The first "quick'n'dirty" test back in January showed that it worked, no problem. We thought no more of it, having no intention of moving to Vista ourselves. The Vista installation sat quietly on a virtual machine and wasn't opened again.

Then someone reported that they couldn't install our product under Vista. Time to shake the dust off that installation and have another look.

Digression: once upon a time, Microsoft took good care of its developers. In the last couple of years that's been less and less the case. This proves to be a case in point:

We started up the virtual machine, but we hadn't ever bothered to "activate" Vista, and the 30 days trial period had expired. In this situation, Vista will let you enter a valid product code, or purchase a license. That's it, nothing else works. Of course, we have an entire sheet full of valid codes - part of the developer stuff.

The only thing is: Vista wouldn't accept them. Microsoft provided its developers with an "upgrade" version of Vista, but we had done a clean install. What else would a developer do? These licenses are provided mainly so that developers can test their products. You always test in a "clean" environment - no developer in his (or her) right mind is going to install Vista over some other operating system, and then test in that environment, unless he is doing something very unusual. So why are the developer codes only valid for upgrades?

But there was nothing for it: this Vista installation was trash. Reformat the disk, re-install, and (this time) activate immediately. But how to solve the upgrade problem?

This is well documented in the Internet - lots of other developers have had the same problem. All you do is install Vista - without activating it - and then from inside Vista start the install process again. You are then allowed to "upgrade" your installation. The upgrade spends lots of time preserving your existing data and settings, and takes far longer than the original installation.

But the pain isn't over. After the initial installation, everything basically works: networking, video, etc. After the upgrade, this isn't the case - there are a number of problems. One example: after the upgrade, Vista could no longer find a suitable network driver. This, as with all the other problems, is soluble - but it is passing strange, given that both installations were carried out from the same installation DVD.

Final result: it took one person an entire day to get us back where we should have been when we first powered up the machine. Now it's Easter weekend, and we won't get to the testing we needed to do until next week.

Why? Why does Microsoft make this process so difficult? It is fair for a company to try to prevent illegal copies of its software. But when this impacts your legitimate customers, it's too much. We, as a company, have no intention of running Vista on any production machine. As far as we are concerned, this is one more nail in the coffin of Windows: our next major release will be developed independent of Microsoft, most likely in Java. Our internal network is moving to Linux. While we will obviously support our customers who have windows, we will also encourage them to make the move.

As another blogger has put it: Microsoft is nailing their own coffin shut, from the inside.

Copyright law is a mess

Copyrights were originally intended to encourage authors by granting them a limited monopoly on their creations. In a nutshell, if one creates an interesting work, one has the right to earn money from it - you can prohibit others from copying and selling your work, you receive the proceeds from sales and distribution.

With the advent of media giants, copyrights have become something else entirely. The interests of a company are very different from the interests of an individual, and companies never die. This has led to laws such as the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), first enacted in America and subsequently in many other countries. First of all, the DMCA criminalizes copyright infringement (which used to be a purely civil matter). Second, it prohibits attempts to circumvent copy-protection methods - even where these methods restrict legitimate uses of the work. For example, if you purchase a CD, it is completely legal for you to copy the music to your MP3 player. But if the CD has some sort of copy protection on it, the DMCA calls you a criminal if you have circumvent this to make your copy.

What needs to be done, to return sanity to copyright law? Let's take a step back and look some underlying principles:

One important principle that has been forgotten (or deliberately ignored) by the lawmakers is this: while it is right and proper for the government to regulate what happens in the town square, the government has no business trying to control what you do in privacy.

If you take great pleasure in intricate programming, why shouldn't you crack a copy-protection scheme? If you do this at home, affecting no one else, why should anyone care. Of course, if you start distributing the result, it's a different matter - a straightforward case of copyright infringement, for which the old laws were perfectly adequate. But the DMCA is not really about copyright protection, but rather about coming into your living room and telling you what you can and cannot do on your own computer.

The second tangent: a fundamental principle of our legal system is that we are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. And yet, on every DVD-recorder, on every copy machine the purchaser pays a fee. This fee is supposedly to recompense artists for copyright infringement. If you purchase such a device, you are presumed guilty. You cannot possibly prove yourself innocent - you must pay the fee!

There is now serious talk (at least in Europe - if it's not in the States, it will be soon), that there should be similar charges on any device capable of storing and replaying music or films. If this presumption of guilt is not offensive enough, think of the counterproductive effect. Imagine: if a teenager pays a $40 per gigabyte fee (that's the proposed amount) on a new MP3 player, said teenager is going to be damned sure to pirate at least $40 worth of music!

To summarize: the law - and enforcement of the law - should respect our basic rights. In particular:

1. Privacy. As long as our activities do not directly impinge on others, they should be of no interest to the law. In your own house, you should be able to do anything you like with copyrighted material: copy it decrypt it, encrypt it, nail it to the bathroom wall. As long as your activities remain private, they are of no interest to anyone else.
   
   
2. Innocent until proven guilty. No law or regulation should presume that we are going to behave illegally. We should pay no fees for infringement we haven't done. Content providers should not prevent us from making private copies (i.e., DRM) without notifying us in advance on the outer packaging so that we can choose not to buy their product. Our computers should not be able to disable our hardware because some hacker somewhere pirated content using the same model.
   
   
3. A fine but important point that follows from both of the above: merely possessing illegally copied material should not be punishable. The punishable activity is the distribution: the person who copied and passed out the material. Too many end-consumers have been sued for downloading something in good faith - this should not happen.

Three simple principles that would return a bit of sanity to copyright law...

George Bush and Hermann Göring

Hermann Göring discussed war with an American journalist, shortly before his suicide. It was his view that the population of a country can always be led into war, even against their better judgment. And he should know - after all, the Nazis did just that, with calculated manipulation. Here is the relevant passage in full:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Note how relevant this is to America's attach on Iraq. President Bush led the country into war using just this technique. And even added to it - after all, he never bothered with the congressional part.

In modern times, a comparison with the Nazis is anethema, and usually the end of a discussion. That is a shame - remember the old saying "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it". An uneducated populace, unaware of how cynical leaders can manipulate it, is ripe for the plucking.

Of course, it's still not clear what George Bush and company were seeking in Iraq.

• It wasn't oil - else he would have secured the oil fields first thing.
  
• It wasn't terrorists - Iraq was just about the only country in the area that did not actively support terrorists, being too wrapped up in its own internal affairs.
• It wasn't WMD - there weren't any, and it was obvious to any objective observer that Bush's data was cooked.
• It can't have been to bring democracy to the region - could anyone really be that naive?
• It can't just be that Saddam Hussein was a despicable dictator - there are plenty of those in the world, with Saddam far from the worst.
  

So what was it?

Critical thinking?

I tend to read more right-leaning blogs than left-leaning. One thing strikes me about both: the uncritical acceptance of any event that happens to fit their point of view.

Take the recent case of a man assaulted in London by three men, apparently muslims. His story of the assault is upsetting enough, but the way the police refuse to follow-up makes the blood boil. If he insists on pressing charges, the police say that they will charge him with a violation of the race relations act.

Well, maybe. Every story has two sides, and one wonders what a fly on the wall of the police station would have seen. While the description of the events is calm and factual, how did he handle himself at the time? Were the police perhaps persuaded that he, himself was a loony? Was he ranting on more about the *ç%&* muslims and less about the assault? Clearly, he must have emphasized ethnicity, else the police would have known nothing of it.

I don't say his story isn't true. Perhaps it is just as he reported. The point is: the right-wing blogs that reported this event accept it "as is". They pose no questions, do not seek more detail. For example, if one knew the station where this took place, and the date and time of the report, one could ask the police for a response.

Bloggers are the new journalists. They demand critical thinking of the MSM - they also need to demand it from themselves...

Why not?

Random thoughts begin, in this case with Islam, and the furor over the innocuous Danish cartoons. Orchestrated insanity - and do believe that it is orchestrated.

In his almost unknown essay "The Prevention of War", Reginald Bretnor writes that we have all "swallowed several Great Simple Myths", one of which is that "All cultures everywhere are of equal value" (read a larger excerpt). Islamic countries are universally brutal and suppressive - culturally, Islamis stuck a millenium in the past.

Even so-called "moderates" of Islam, meaning those who do not advocate violence, protest that their religious sensibilities are more important than our freedom of speech. Note that the Danish cartoons were published in a Danish newspaper in Denmark. By what right to muslims in Lebanon, Turkey, or whereever else claim any right to dictate what we do in our own newspapers in our own countries?

Islamic extremists are right about one thing: there can be no peace here. Freedom is anethema to Islam - this is a fundamental conflict of cultures, and one of them must and will lose. Either Islam accepts the idea of individual freedom, or we must accept their right to dictate our behavior. Which will it be?