Found in another blog, here is an English test.

Being impatient, I did it pretty fast and got 94. English is not my mother’s tongue.

I was being a bit sloppy, so having looked at the solutions, doing this more carefully I would have eliminated 2 or 3 of these 6 mistakes. The rest are too subtle for me to correct based on my own second judgment.

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

recently got engaged in a conversation where the roots of my disdain for Microsoft were reminisced.

Specifically, I was asked about my “original reason for deciding that Microsoft is not a force for good.”

A friend inquired: “Have you written an article describing it? All I remember was that you said that you were a Microsoft user for quite a while and you were ignorant of how that company does business. Surely, there must have been something which became your tipping point.”

Well, I was acutely aware of the company’s issues in the US courts, but was never a big ‘hater’ (that’s a daemonising label to be avoided) as a young teenager. GNU/Linux, which I was encouraged to learn at college, showed me not only that there was choice; it was better, and yet it suffered from Microsoft’s standards snub (mainly file formats). This was probably the tipping point.

My friend explained his own reasoning: “Once my view of Microsoft changed, choice became the whole point for me. I already knew about Unix from my college years, so I knew that it is technically possible to do better than Windows. When I had that network administrator job, I didn’t have a home computer. Once I could afford to buy one, I made sure that it didn’t run Windows. I chose an Atari ST, which worked well enough for me. It even had a multi-tasking Unix-like system available called MiNT. When that company went kaput and my computer didn’t work anymore, I bought a PC. The first thing I did was to install Slackware on it. I considered it a shame that this system came with Windows, which I never used.

“My father bought an original IBM PC with DOS. Some of my first programming experiences were with Microsoft BASIC. At that point, I was inclined to have a positive view of the company. That started to change as I began to see the limitations of DOS and I saw the years go by without any significant improvements to it. Eventually, I landed a job as a network administrator and all of the clients that I had to support were running DOS and Windows 3.x. That was something of a nightmare as constant client crashes were the norm. I came to the conclusion that Windows was not ready to be released at this point and, of course, then I was inclined to have a negative view of the company responsible for this. Windows ’95, the anti-trust trials and any other subsequent products or events have only reinforced my negative view that they are a ruthless company that only cares to maintain or increase its dominance.

“When the PC with Windows became dominant at the expense of IBM, Microsoft also took over one of IBM’s marketing tactics – FUD. Of course, it’s easy to see that the smears are self-serving and, in many cases, the substance behind the smear can be traced back to Microsoft itself (i.e. incompatible file formats or network protocols? Microsoft makes sure they are not compatible by refusing to publish specifications.)”

Ironically, as I said many times before, it’s the smears from Microsoft that encouraged me to do more to study — and discredit where appropriate — the company.

By exploring Microsoft’s misbehaviour one ascends to find corruption at even high levels. Once the knowledge is gained, why not share it with more people?

I watched the film Mamma Mia a couple of days ago with my 12-year-old sister. it was only then that I discovered this song, which dates back to older days — prior to my birth.

So, the song now reminds me of my little sister. I too will have children when I grow older, but the lyrics can be generalised to other family relationships.

Direct link

Ogg Vorbis/Theora Support Makes the Web and Makes Google stronger

• Ogg demonstrates a commitment to open source, which Chrome has made a good start at
• Firefox already does it, so it’s likely to become a reality
• Opera shares similar goals, so it’s likely to join in and perhaps commend Google
• Google Video downloads were a failure that got shut down and annoyed Google customers, proving the DRM hasn’t much potential anyway
• Altruistic value, demonstration of commitment to the World Wide Web
• Enabling YouTube to use Ajax and requiring no binary downloads of Flash
• It weakens Flash and Silverlight, which harm Google’s ‘bread and butter’ by stifling crawling and indexing

If you have a moment to spare, please visit the following page and put your name down. The world needs your support to ensure elimination of the main legal barrier to the triumph of Free software.

You want to get your software association, software company, software consultancy, software project involved in the 24 September World Day Against Software Patents and are able to speak in the name of your organisation? Please give us your contact data below. Your organisation gets the opportunity to be listed as a supporter for the announcement of the World Day Against Software Patents.

Considering the following:

1. The issue of software patents is a global one, and several governments and patent offices around the world continue to grant software & business method patents on a daily basis; they are pushing for legal codification of the practice, such as currently in New Zealand and India, and via the misappropriation of Free Trade Agreement instruments;
2. Previous initiatives as the Noepatents.org petition (approx. 400 000) at the EU level are outdated (notably on the issues of the central EU patent court) and not open for signatures anymore.
3. Companies still view software patents as assets. They have yet to understand that software patents should also be considered liabilities, especially if they are in the hands of trolls.
4. Time is on our side as litigation gets spread wide: Markets learn the hard way that you may not leave reform to patent professionals. Patent litigation is becoming wide spread in key markets such as the financial sector, and will be more wide spread in the software sector in the forthcoming years due to the number of applications pending;
5. The United States lacks a coalition of business and civil society against software patents

• The lobby gap makes Congress and Senate, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) and the Supreme Court susceptible to lobbying from patent industries, holders and patent professionals. American software creators have been intimidated by the patent establishment and have failed to make themselves heard.
• Companies affected by software patent litigation have been lobbying for reform, but their advocacy for “quality” and “lower damages” aims at symptoms rather than the roots of the problem.

For these reasons,

We declare the 24 September as the World Day Against Software Patents, in commemoration of the European Parliament First Reading in 2003 with amendments stopping the harmful patenting of software, guaranteeing that software programmers and businesses can safely benefit from the fruits of their work under copyright law.

A Global Petition will be launched which asks to stop software patents, with some localised versions of the petition for specific regions, such as New Zealand, India, United States and Europe. The public will be invited to comment on the draft between the 1st and the 23rd September.

You can vote for it in Slashdot to help promote the cause.

have been a KDE user for 8 years. KDE 4.1 was only released some weeks ago and I thought about testing and writing about it shortly. I will probably wait though.

I realise that the project has many critics at the moment. Bruce Byfield already handles the controversy side of it.

KDE sees a transformation that’s a simplification. Version 4 is different, very different. It’s revolutionary, not just evolutionary. It’s designed to attract new users rather then scare or overwhelm them and also to integrate a raft of attractive visual elements.

KDE as a power user’s environment will face pressure against change. ‘Toolbox mentality’, where the file manager, Konquerer, is also a Web browser, an FTP client, a photo gallery generator… you get the picture… this needed to end or a substitute offered. Dolphin is now there by default, but Konquerer is still available, so nothing is lost. Why complain?

At this early stage, the latest release (4.1) is available in the form of a Live CD or updates from the repository and it will earn a permanent place on my hard-drives once it is integrated into a major GNU/Linux distribution.

All changes are hard. They require learning and adjustment. Many Mac and GNU/Linux users have gone through the process of change. It now needs to be coped with also at a level of desktop environments, not just operating systems. At the end, you look back and wonder why you liked that old environment all that much. You accept a new home.