The Mojave Experiment: Fake Results?

Last week, Micro$oft gave the results of an interesting experiment. They tricked 120 diehard XP users into testing a "new" version of windows codenamed Mojave then asked for their opinions. Of course, there was no such version, it was just Vista SP1 with a new theme. According to Micro$oft, over 90% of them where impressed with what they saw, even citing the reaction of one of the test subjects as "oh, wow!". Of course, and faster than people could blog about it, Micro$oft created a website for it, as a marketing move, no doubt. But after taking a look at it, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes made an interesting discovery:

At first blush, I think that you’re supposed to believe that you’re being presented with the views of all the participants, but when you actually count the screens, you see that there are only 55 on offer. OK, 55 out of 120/140, not bad... but...
...
Once you eliminate the montages and people who appear in more than one clip, you end up with 35 participants who actually appear on screen [...] Given a pool of over 100 participants, I would have expected to have seen more faces, and definitely no duplicates. The way it looks to me is that Microsoft had a hard time filling the 55 available spaces with good commentary about Vista.

Funny, eh? Make your own conclusions, but my guess is that Micro$oft's PR people are, as usual, lying to us.

Placing Your Secrets Online? Don't Cry Later...

Gary McKinnon is a British hacker accused of hacking into 97 NASA and military computers in 2001 and 2002. He was caught in 2002 and, following a extensive legal battle, was chosen for extradition today (The USA government requested his extradition sometime in 2005). But what hit me as interesting is not the fact that a hacker will be extradited, neither is the fact that his is considered the "biggest military computer hack of all time" by the USA government. No, what hit me as interesting is that the USA government is STUPID. That's right, stupid. I mean, they go and place their secrets -their most important secrets- on a computer and then go and plug it to the intertubes. Now, I'm no computer security expert (yet), but even I know that whatever you put in the intertubes is not considered safe anymore, despite all the effort you place in securing it. If they don't want their secrets stolen, then don't give network access to the computer they are stored in, simple as that.

Embrace, Assimilate, Destroy

In the past months, Micro$oft as shifted from being extremely hostile to Open Source, to being very friendly to it. At first it came as a surprise, but now I can see the (possible) strategy they are following: embrace, assimilate, destroy. Call me anti-Micro$oft, but I refuse to believe in a company that has, for years, expressed their literal hate towards Open Source. This here is the latest move in that "embrace" part of the plan:

Open Specification Promise: Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.
...
Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

The open specification thingie is something that they have been playing with for a while now, but it still doesn't clarifies how future versions of Micro$oft code will be handled. It does cover some of the loopholes it had, so it IS a move in the right direction. The sponsorship to the ASF is less interesting, because it is just one of the many monetary contributions Micro$oft has made to the Open Source movement. One important thing about the contributions to the ASF, however, is the fact that they are doing their best to make Apache (the popular web server, and the flagship product of the ASF) work better in Windows than it does on, surprise, GNU/Linux. And here is where it all starts making sense. The point of all this "flattery" to the Open Source community might as well be only for the sake of establishing Windows as the best platform to work on, to make GNU/Linux lose all the ground it has gained so far. And when they are done with that, the killer blow:

PHP on IIS + SQL: Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications. The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team. ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD. This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.

In other words, their ultimate goal is to make people stop using LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) in favor of WISP stacks (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, PHP). And given their advantage over Open Source in terms of user base and raw amounts of money, I can see it happening in the near future.

Drinking Like Animals

German scientists discovered several species of mammals in Malaysia that drink fermented palm nectar, with an alcohol level near that of beer. It wouldn't be surprising except for one little fact: it's their major food source, which means they are heavy alcoholics (in human standards). I wonder why they drink? Too much stress? Or maybe they have Irish pals? (with apologies in advance to any and all Irish reading this).

ACTA? No, Thanks, I Like My Freedom

The "Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement", or ACTA for short, is "a proposed plurilateral trade agreement that would impose strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods." (according to the Wikipedia article).The problem with it (actually, it is just plain wrong, but this is the biggest problem) is that this is an invitation-only club. This means it's being discussed secretly by the G8 and by a few big companies - precisely the ones more interested in implementing the most strictest of regulations. So what does this means? This means they can pretty much push whatever stupid laws they feel like pushing, without consulting the more directly affected: the ones paying for the services. But why should you believe me? Our friend Glyn Moody from across the Atlantic has a better analysis than I could ever give you.

Micro$oft And It's Quest To Destroy Google And Apple

Kara Swisher has a very good analisis of a memo Steve Ballmer, CEO of Micro$oft, sent to his employees. It's funny how he actually BELIEVES that they'll be able to develop a better phone than Apple. Specially when Apple has positioned itself with the iPhone (it's no secret that Apple's customers have the highest brand loyalty ratings in the industry) and Micro$oft has such an history of NOT doing a good job at defeating Apple at his game (Zune, anyone?). The other point he touches is Google, where he makes a good point (the only good point, IMO): Google's search result page is boring. Still, Micro$oft is not known for it's ability to innovate so, I doubt they'll be showing us anything new for a while... unless they "steal" from someone else, as usual.

Won't Somebody Think Of The Children!?

This is just plain stupid (though it doesn't tops the stupidity level of some Boston residents and police force). It seems in the UK you can't take photos of EMPTY pools, without being labeled a pedophile, as Betty Robinson (82 years old) discovered. Great job guys, but I think you should be looking for pedophiles somewhere else. Like where THERE ARE CHILDREN, for example.

Firefox Tablet

The idea is simple: build a light, slim device with an as big as possible touchscreen, half a gigabyte of RAM, 4 Gb solid state hard drive, Wi-Fi, maybe Bluetooth, add some other details and running a Linux core with a Firefox "OS", all of that for US$200. Like the sound of it? Well, TechCrunch wants to build it but needs help to do it. Go ahead, you know you want to. If this goes gold it may easily sell millions. I, for one, would buy a couple.

Funny IRC

Ran across bash.org last night and I've been reading some random quotes from it. This is one of the best I've read so far:

lib1790: so, at this college there was an extra credit question "Is hell endothermic or exothermic"
lib1790: this is what one kid wrote:
lib1790: First, we postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass.
If they do, then a mole of souls can also have a mass. So, at what rate are souls moving into hell and at what rate are souls leaving? I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.
lib1790: As for souls entering hell, lets look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to hell. Since, there are more than one of these religions and people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to hell.
With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in hell to increase exponentially.
lib1790: Now, we look at the rate of change in volume in hell. Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in hell to stay the same, the ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs to stay constant.
lib1790: So, if hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter hell, then the temperature and pressure in hell will increase until all hell breaks loose (i.e.,Hell is exothermic).
lib1790: Of course, if hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in hell, than the temperature and pressure will drop until hell freezes over (i.e.,Hell is endothermic).
lib1790: So which is it? If we accept the postulate given by Ms.Therese Banyan during my freshman year, "That it will be a cold night in hell before I go out with you," and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having a relationship with her, the second case cannot be true. Therefore, hell is exothermic.
lib1790: the kid was the only one who got credit

That kid rocks!

Here We Go!

So... new blog. I had another one before, you know, but I didn't keep it updated much. The reason is simple, though: I only posted what happened to me that I thought interesting, but the truth is that, after I had to go over a few problems, I just don't think that anything that happens to me is interesting anymore. But I digress, this new blog won't be about me, it will be about stuff that I think is interesting that happens to someone else (read, the rest of the world). I'll also use it to post my reviews on whatever I've watched, read, listened to or played, as well as political rants and details on some other stuff I like. What does that mean? That means you can expect posts about:

- Anime
- Manga
- Music
- Video games
- Open Source
- Politics
- Weapons
- And lastly but not less important, amusing stuff I might crash into while exploring the intertubes.

And... that's that, I guess. Oh, I almost forgot, make sure to poke me if you don't hear from me, I might have forgotten about this blog... again...