Microsoft: Bullying Europeans Again

Bill Gates got a meeting with the Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and told him that if Denmark doesn't help force through the software patents nonsense that the democratically elected European Parliament has rejected time and time again,
he'll put 800 Danish IT developers out of work. This, of course, is the same way that the Irish presidency got so enthusiastic about implementing the same stupid, broken system in Europe as they have in the US (Microsoft have put a lot of money into Ireland, and it would be a shame if it went to a more 'flexible' country).

Other companies that have tried this bullying/blackmail technique are Siemens, Nokia, Philips, Ericsson and Alcatel. At least they're European companies, but shame on them all. Software patents - sorry, computer-implemented invention patents - are the bottom feeders of modern technology in the US, with some companies existing purely to make things miserable and costly for small and medium sized business by waving patents and threats of litigation over their heads. The US Patent Office has a quota system in place with their clerks, so they have to get through as many as possible without looking into the claimed invention in depth, so you get ridiculous patents like Microsoft's double-click covering patent, Amazon's one-click-purchase patent (because nobody had rushed the idea of storing a credit card number in a database through a patent application before), and the huge spat between Adobe and Macromedia regarding tabbed dialogue boxes (which has been part of various GUIs for... years). Kodak pulled a fast one over on Sun Microsystems for its Java virtual machine, despite Kodak not coming up with the idea but buying a patent from someone else.

Grrr! It's all utter arse.

Nokia and Microsoft, sitting in a tree...

... K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

Nokia have announced a deal with Microsoft which will see their heinous Windows Media Player being shoehorned into Nokia phones from now on, allowing people to buy music downloads and play them on their phones in the evil WMA format (instead of less DRM encumbered formats like MP3). The thing is, do you really trust Microsoft to not put something into WMP, on the end of a GPRS or 3G line, that will routinely report 'usage data' back to them?

No, nor me. I'll stick with my Sony Ericsson and MP3s, thanks.

BBC NEWS | Business | Nokia announces Microsoft tie-up

Bit of a disaster

For reasons unknown, Gazmond and myself have lost everything we were hosting on his server, Munster. Everything. Nothing's survived. And, as is typical, we're lacking backups, so I'm scouring machines for copies I've worked on, and making the most of the wonderful Wayback Machine and Google caches to fill the gaps in the sites I had up there. Mr Mond is going to see if Bytemark, the hosts, can shed any light on what's happened - and possibly retrieve a backup from their systems.

Many expletives have been uttered from both Pontypridd and Overbury today as a result.

On an entirely different note, I've been making the house stink of aerosol paints today. The case that Ian's old PC (see earlier post) was functional at best, and I wanted to rehouse it, but couldn't really afford a flash new case. So, I've taken a can of red Plastikote paint to an old beige case I've had knocking around for a while, and got something that looks a little more special for the grand cost of £5.45 and a few thousand brain cells from the fumes.

Doesn't look bad, does it? I was racking my brain, trying to think what the colour's reminding me of, and it hit me - it's like a tiny Cray!

So now I'm going to get some black insulation tape on it to add the stripes (and conveniently cover the bits where the paint went wrong...) and pray that the motherboard will fit in the case!