"Piracy" - the polls are over.

I'm taking the polls regarding alleged copyright infringement down. After what happened, the votes got back to be on Google. And they were messed up again. I was suspecting something for a long time, but now here's "proof":

Screenshot of the results, taken in September:

and today (December):

 votes are disappearing, huh?

Well, I don't really care anymore, I assume my point as taken. If anyone wants to dispute the results, well, I really would like them to make a "real poll", and study this seriously.

For the record, the results are:

• 18% don't do so-called "piracy"
• 2% would buy everything they "pirate", if they couldn't pirate it
• 54% would buy some of the things they "pirate"
• 16% "pirate" stuff but they wouldn't buy it otherwise anyway

So, for one of the possible uses of this numbers... remember: being the most conservative possible, 34% of the population aren't "taking money from artists", in any possible sense.

Switched from Blackberry to Optimus Boston (Andoid)

Since I have this blog that I write here about each cellphone swap I do, even if this is the first time I'm writing about it only after the switch has been made. Part of the reason for that is that I wasn't really planing to swap phones: I've been really happy with my Blackberry Pearl, even if the 2 years old telephone was starting to ask for an update: GPS for the occasional walk in the city in places where I need Google Maps (I need that a lot more than you might think: I don't drive, and I don't have any kind of orientation skills - I lived 6 years or so in Coimbra, and with an effort I still can get lost in that city; curiously, now that I have a GPS on the phone, I didn't tried it yet) and HDSPA are welcomed. Yet, it was this phone appearing that made me change it - that and the fact that Paula was craving the Blackberry for herself (spoiler here: she now wants another one like mine). For comparison, here are two movies of both the phones:

Blackberry Pearl


Optimus Boston

But's not what you want to know, right? Is it worthy? Well, the summary is: Boston kicks ass. Two possible disadvantages, and my worries, are:

• I'm switching to a cellphone without physical keyboard, and I am used to type a lot on my cellphone;
• It was impossible for me, whatever I did to try it, to use up all the Pearl's battery in less than 24 hours. I'm not asking for 24 hours, but I would expect a phone to manage to stay on for the duration of a day - minimum 16 hours. I still didn't have one "usual day" with my phone to make sure of how much does it take to discharge to the point of shutting down, but I'm starting to think that possibly it won't stand on that long, for the kind of use I expect to do with it.

More stuff: migrating was totally easy - there a Google App called "Google Sync", available for lots of cellphones including Blackberries, that send your stuff (in my case contacts and calendar) to Google.

I just installed it, run it on my Blackberry (via EDGE, so I left my SIM card on Blackberry and started playing with Boston without SIM), and it just started uploading contacts on one side, and they were appearing on the other side. How? Well, one of the first questions the cellphone made me was something like "do you want google stuff?", so I said yes, inserted my credentials, et voilá - contacts, calendar, mail, all on the phone at once. Oh, of course it needed connectivity, so when it said to me "do you want to use wireless?" I said yes, configured the AP (because it isn't open WiFi), and I was online. What about exchange or other "corporate-stuff" Blackberries are so known for? Well, painless is the word. Boston comes already with Roadsync applications installed by default, with their icons and widget on one of the three virtual desktops. The name of the apps "roadwhatever" made me not to touch them, but touching on the widget it just told me "do you want to configure your exchange account?" Now, setting up an exchange account usually sucks, right? Not this time, it was just next-next-next-done. There, calendar and mail on the phone.

I am planing on writting a more interesting blogpost on the future (including pros and cons of this phone, Android, why isn't running Debian yet ;-) and stuff like that, but that will have to be for another time :-) If you don't want to wait, well, I sometimes kind of talk about it on my friendfeed...

Piracy talking? Hush! (Or how Google doesn't like what I have to say)

Last month I wrote about "piracy" - you know, the non-authorized download of copyrighted content - in this blog post. For it, I made a poll, using blogger tools (that uses a Google service to create polls), where I was asking questions about "what would you do if you couldn't do non-authorized download of copyrighted content". The options were something like this:

• I don't do non-authorized download of copyrighted content
• If I couldn't do it, I would buy everything I now download
• If I couldn't do it, I would buy some things I now download
• If I couldn't do it, I wouldn' buy anything I now download anyway

I now came to my blog to see something else (don't ask me what, I can't remember), and I just noticed the big 404 you probably see on it:

I don't know why the poll was deleted, I heard nothing from Google regarding it, but I'm surely not going to quit doing this just because Google doesn't like my polls. No, I'm creating another poll. For the record, and I have nothing but my word on this, last time I've checked more than 40 votes where in it, and 0 of them were in the "I would pay for everything I download if I couldn't download it" option.

So, here's the poll, again. If you had voted previously, please vote again, and help spread the word... Thank you.

[UPDATE:] And then, the Google poll is back online. Just to be sure, please vote on both...

Opera Mini 4.1 beta

Opera Mini is already aiming for its next release - 4.1 - and its beta is already out. If you follow this blog you know that I'm an user and fan of Opera Mini, but I'm still using Opera Mini 3, since Opera Mini 4 doesn't have an option of having the "mobile view" sliced in pages, like Opera Mini 3 has, and v4 eats too much memory trying to load an huge page at once, failing to do so and stoping me of using it to browse in my Motorola E1 cellphone.

Now that Opera announced the beta version of Opera Mini 4.1, I just had to try it. It comes with great new features:

• autocomplete of URLs
• offline access
• search for text within a web page
• download and upload files

The default search engine switched from Yahoo! back to Google (which is great, for me at least). Also, it is way quicker (enhancements were made server-side), and consumes a lot less memory (so, 4.1 fixes my issue with 4, and is going to replace my Opera Mini 3 installation). Yet, Opera Mini 4.1, even in "mobile view" mode, is slower than Opera Mini 3.

Regarding to the "beta" state of this release, like what happened with Opera Mini 4, beta really means beta: just to test out all this things, but nothing more than that, I had to fire up the browser four times because it kept crashing. So, it's still not to use, but I'm surely upgrade as soon as the final version is released.

Microsoft to buy Yahoo! ?

Is today the sad day? Last May I wrote:

According to NY Post, Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo!, in a move that speculation sees as to make a force against Google dominance in some markets. It makes a lot of sense to me Microsoft wanting this, but I surely hope Yahoo! to fight against it. And if Microsoft manages to buy Yahoo!... It will be a sad day.

In fact, when Google acquired YouTube in October 2006, I said:

I mean, why are you all worried about Google's relations with Fox (MySpace owners) when the real Google competitors nowadays are Yahoo! and Microsoft?

And, as a matter of fact, 2008 begins with

• Microsoft and Yahoo! being the two direct competitors of Google
• Google, Yahoo! and Apple being Microsoft's direct competitors
• Microsoft and Amazon being the direct competitors of Apple

Now, if Microsoft buys Yahoo!... Who will compete with it? Google and Apple? Separately or together?

Microsoft just made an hostile Yahoo acquisition proposal for $31 per Share, in a $44.6-Billion Deal. Hostile means that Microsoft isn't asking Yahoo nothing, instead telling its shareholders to sell at their target price.

Yahoo! stocks are rising and Microsoft stocks falling, but Google's stocks are falling too.

What's going to happen? I'm surely waiting to see, if this acquisition happens the IT world will change violently the next months or even years.

Google Knol - Wikipedia and Wikia killer?

From http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only.

...

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

From http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/12/wikipedia-and-w.html:

Still, with this move Google is clearly targeting Wikipedia (which is perhaps their biggest rival) and quite possibly is trying to ensure that Jimmy Wales' forthcoming social search engine, Wikia, is dead on arrival. Consider the timing of this announcement.

From http://www.asourceofinspiration.com/2007/12/14/do-you-knols/:

authors have earned their recognition as the most important source of knowledge, and if they choose to abandon the academic walled gardens, then Google will be one step closer to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“.

From http://coolmel.zaadz.com/blog/2007/12/integral_knol:

This is Google’s direct assault at the “walled garden” of knowledge like Wikipedia, Wikia, and Squidoo. Knol will attempt to solve the problem of chaotic collective anonymous editing (and vandalizing) of wikis and its unfriendly user interface by providing a more user-friendly editing tool for knowledgeable authors “who will put their reputation on the line.”

From http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/12/google_knol_tak.php:

The big distinction with Wikipedia is that Knol relies on individual authors rather than "the crowd." Each article, or "knol," will be signed and owned by the person who writes it, and articles on the same subject will compete with one another for viewer's eyes. In contrast, Wikipedia builds a single version of each article in a communal way with many edits by anonymous contributors.

Finaly, my favourite, from http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2007/12/google-attacks.html:

There is a large web world out here, with gazillions of people -- like me -- who are disinclined to play in the Wikipedia sandpile. While I agree that things can be messy, I don't think that the messiness of our understanding of the world is an implediment to Google's idea here. All that is necessary is people willing to author snippets within knol, and for others to read and rate them. That's the core dynamic of all social media-based activities on the web. Google is the just the first to be in a position to be able to make a credible effort to blogify human knowledge, just as Wikipedia has been working to wikify it.

I vote for blogifying, instead of wikifying.

I don't know how to you feel about this, but I do think there are wikipeople and blogopeople, and if for ones wikipedia is better, for the others Knol is going to be better. I think that they'll cohexist, but in the long term I think that Knol is going to "win". Not that it matters, tho, what's important is to have more and better data, and Knol is even helping improve Wikipedia's quality on the long term. I, for one, am going to be a Knol writter for sure, and my (few) contributions to wikipedia are going to keep diminishing.

AxsJAX vs. Hijax

Google decided to Open Source yet another tool: a Javascript framework called AxsJAX, which aims to "add accessibility to AJAX-powered web apps". AxsJAX is already used in a couple of Google Apps, and is a set of Javascript tools that add accessibility tags to your AJAX webapp. This means that AxsJAX, spelled "AcessibleJAX" (to rhyme with AJAX), is only used if you have a recent web browser that has Javascript enabled and implements the drafts of W3C-ARIA, which, in other words, isn't an acessible framework at all. If you take into consideration the W3C Accessibility guidelines, you'll quickly see that depending on some yet-to-be standards (ARIA) or even in Javascript isn't being Accessible. Yes, you can add AxsJAX to your AJAX-powered webapp, but you must take into account that it will not make your webapp accessible... As a matter of fact I think it would be nice to have webapps using it, but on already accessible webapps.

Now, there's this silly idea that it's too hard to make an AJAX-powered webapp accessible. Developers talk about painful code to allow graceful degradation, and some are even crazy enough to actually prefer mantaining two webapps: one AJAX-powered and other AJAX-less. What's really wrong about this scenario is that it's pretty easy to design accessible websites, even AJAX-powered. Welcome to the world of Hijax.

Hijax (which is nothing more than a way to use AJAX) is just the way to design AJAX-powered websites. The steps are pretty simple:

• Design your webapp well


• Add all the AJAX you want by hijacking the requests

Now the thing is, what is "design your webapp well"? Welcome to the wonderful world of standards. You know, all those things that people hope to comply with without really trying? If you first understand standards, their design and purpose, you'll see that's really the easiest way to do things. On the web, the trick is simple: you have

• the data layer (HTML)


• the presentation layer (CSS)


• the interaction layer (Javascript)

Now, what standards teach you is that in HTML you should put all your data, and nothing more than that; in your CSS files the presentation layer and nothing more than that; in your Javascript all of your interaction layer and nothing more than that. Remember allways to avoid some mistakes: an anchor belongs to the data layer and not to the interaction layer, so doing stuff like <a href="javascript:"> is just shooting yourself on the foot. Now, if you have this scenario, you have your website (still without AJAX) and you can do all the funny stuff you like to do with Javascript. The good thing about this scenario is that if you disable the Javascript (or if you use a Javascript-less browser) all the blings, bells and whistles disappear, but all the data is there, and presented the way you design it to. Now, if you go one more layer and disable your CSS (or if you're using a web browser without CSS functionalities) you have all your data there (again), just as it should be, only without that stylish presentation you wanted to (which is pretty but useless to someone blind, anyway).

So, the thumb rule is simple: build your app as progressive enhancement, 'cause progressive enhancement automaticly guarantees graceful degradation.

Now, let's add AJAX (or the XHR component of it) into the equation. Most developers agree with all I've said until now: the need of a clear separation between HTML, CSS and Javascript, specially if you're talking about CSS's or DOM scripting. But when we talk about AJAX... they suddenly cast it aside. The problem is, basicly, that you're with the wrong mindset. Instead of thinking that AJAX is just a way to update parts of a page without refreshing, or, in the other hand, you think that AJAX is the spetacular awsome cool new thing that lets you update parts of a page without refreshing, you should look at AJAX as this new way of talking with the server asyncronously and deal with the page accordingly. Leave that "it's not a page, it's an app" thing, the app is what you built, but what you're serving is a page... even if it dynamicly changes itself over time (thanks to AJAX or not).

But I still didn't explain the Hijax part: how to add AJAX to the equation. Well, it's pretty simple indeed: just pick your non-AJAX pages, with links and forms that do requests, and just use JavaScript to intercept those requests and transform them into XHR.

This isn't meant to be an in-depht post about Hijax, more like "why you shouldn't be that excited with AxsJAX" than everything else. Anyway, if you liked the concept, just read Jeremy Keith's "DOM Scripting Blog" [1].

[1] - http://domscripting.com/blog/

Is Google getting evil?

If you read my posts about Google [1] you'll see that I keep writing about the general feeling of distrust on Google: not only I'm feeling more and more bewildered with the possibilies they have with the data they collect, but I also see that the feeling is getting generalized. Cory Doctorow wrote a short Sci-Fi novel [2] called "Scroogled", were he envisions a dark Google in a not-so-distance future. The frightning thing about the story is that it is really possible, just a matter of them wanting or not to "do no evil". Now, today Vitor wrote [3] about a new "feature" that "frightened him a bit", and I can't but ask... Where should they stop? Are you also getting afraid of Google?

[1] - http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/search/label/Google
[2] - http://tinyurl.com/yudbmh
[3] - http://tinyurl.com/23mkey

Google News - a case of bad usability

There are several things in any Google service I use that I don't like. This turn I'm going to write about Google News.

Signed on or signed off, each time I go to news.google.com via my laptop's Iceape or my desktop's Seamonkey I see what I expect: Google News. When I go to news.google.com, signed off, via my cellphone's Opera Mini I'm redirected to news.google.pt without being questioned about it. They assume, by some unknown to me reason, that since I'm Portuguese I probably want to read the Portuguese news, which I don't. That wouldn't be bad if I had an easy way to change to the International Google News... But I don't. As a matter of fact I'm fed up with this problem for a long time now and I still can't find a way to, in news.google.pt, to go to news.google.com. What really pisses me off here, tho, is that at the end of the "Google News Portugal" page I have the sentence "Versões internacionais do Google Notícias disponíveis em:" (meaning "International versions of Google News available in:" with a list of countries. The problem is that clicking in one country there does not redirect me to the countries' Google News, but instead it redirects me to what I suppose should be a translation of the actual Google News Portugal into another language. What happens in reality is that if I click in "United States" I go to a Spanish Google News!



WTF? This kind of usability problems just make Google News completely unusable to me if I'm using my second most used device to get news. Way to go.

Google buying Apple? nah...

Rumours started about Google wanting to buy Apple... But I just don't believe it, at least not in a couple of years...

Draft Blogger

If you use Blogger (or Blogspot) Draft Blogger might be for you. This alternate link will give you an alternative version of your blogger dashboard, where upcoming features are tested before going out for production. Using their words,

Blogger in draft is a special version of Blogger where we try out new features before we release them to everyone.

Do you have a Google Account?

Do you have a Google Account? Something like a Blogger account, or Gmail, or Orkut, or... anything? I bet you do. And did you read this?

11. Content licence from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this licence shall permit Google to take these actions.

11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above licence.

I tried to find this a couple of days ago in a discussion on why using GMail was really bad privacy-wise, but it seems that I had to come to the general Services TOS... Yet, this still applies for those. All Your Base Are Belong To Google?

DOG - Distrust of Google

Google is too secretive. Too unwilling to engage. Too aloof. Oh, and Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has lost touch with how normal people think (if these quotes are correct, and that’s a big “if”). If they are correct I think it’s evidence that he’s been hanging around too many advertising execs lately. Their goal is to put impulses into your mind so you take certain actions (like buy Diet Coke instead of Diet Pepsi). Believe it or not advertising execs talk like that. So, when Eric is reported to have said, during a visit to Britain this week: “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’” we all get a little freaked out. We don’t want Google to know that much about us.

This is a quote from an article that talks about DOG: "Distrust of Google". He says that "Fear Of Google. FOG. It’s all over the blogs today.". Finaly - I've been talking about this for quite a while... It's an interest reading, indeed.

Here.

Ripple

In January I talked about GoodSearch, a search engine that, if you use, per each click you are giving money to some charity entity of your choice. It's a preety damn idea - users do the same they did but in the process are helping good causes. I said "I'm off using Google Search", and I was... for three or four days. Why? Well, basicly because GoodSearch is Powered by Yahoo! Search, and, even having trying a damn lot, I came into conclusion that either Google Search is terribly better than Yahoo!'s search, or I'm completely addicted to Google Search ways of doing it's search and giving the results. I bet on the second. Anyway, I quit GoodSearch and was back to Google... Until today, where I heard about Ripple. To make a long story short, Ripple is basicly the same thing, but it is powered by Google and not by Yahoo!. So I've changed: it takes one second to click in a button and install Ripple search on your browser, and 30 seconds to change your default search engine from Google to Ripple. Awsome! Then I changed back to google. Why? Well, it seems that my search habbits changed this last couple of months. When I was trying to search for Ripple reviews I couldn't do what I'm now used to: search for "Ripple", click on "News", and then on "Blogs". Yes, Google offers more than Ripple as a search engine, for my needs. Yet, Ripple might be the perfect search engine for you.

A more extensive review on Ripple is here.

The Big Brother state

After seeing a dystopian movie yesterday, having an e-mail discussion during the day about how much are into it right now, and the new "Google History", that, as stated, can be evilly used, I remembered of this video that shares my vision on what are some of the dangers of our future.

Predicting the tech-future

Following my yesterday's post about predictions of the tech-future (one predicted a Dystopian world controlled by Linden Labs in 2016, the other an overall controll of the tech-world by Google in 2017), now here's a link to an article talking about an upcoming paper that represents the result of a summit and they will "define/predict" a "metaverse roadmap". Yes, I know, having a bunch of folks in the industry "decide" a roadmap for such a thing is, well... ahem, anyway, the article is quite interesting, and gives us some food for thoughts. They predict that we'll have such a world and metaverse (first self, second self and mixed self) in 10 years from now (2017). They think that the upcoming tech-world is going to have four basic metaverse kinds:

• dubbed augmented reality
• lifelogging
• virtual worlds
• mirror worlds

For starts, I really don't think that you can apply the world metaverse for any of those items but the third: virtual worlds. The concept of metaverse appeared with the excelent book "Snow Crash", and defines a Virtual World with certain characteristics, but it is a virtual world.

But let's talk about those four items there.

Dubbed augmented reality is a concept where technology enables you to have an allways-persent body-widget that lets you know more about the reality that envolves you. Think about Plazes on steroids, in a allways-present device (like the eye-screening we see on GiTS), that enables you to have any kind of info about where you are, realtime. You can enhance the concept and think about stuff like getting info about people as you look at them and that sort of stuff. Possible? Yes, even probable, but that isn't a Metaverse, it makes me recall more other aspects in Snow Crash...

Like lifelogging. Remember that guys on Snow Crash that did something like wearing a full-body gadget-suit that was used to stream images into the future version of YouTube? Well, consider that lifeblogging with a little of the previous item (correlation between video footage and the people in that footage, and stuff like that).

On virtual worlds, it seems that what's been talked is about a more immersive version of Second Life, as the previous predictions also talked about. On a side note, while the previous prediction talked about Linden Labs (the company behind Second Life) buying google, in this event the general ideas were on whether would Google create GoogleOS and Microsoft would buy Linden Labs, positioning Google as the developing mega-softwarehouse with the future of Operating Systems, and Microsoft as less a technological company and more like a big pocket of money available to investiment, which isn't really surprising if you notice that we have really nothing innovative from Microsoft for years (the Wow from Vista is a big pile of FUD about a defective Operating System with nothing innovative compared to the alternatives). I intend to write soon more about my own visions of the future of Virtual Worlds real soon. And no, I don't believe that Second Life will turn into the "final and perfect VW", as much as I don't think that WOW (not Vista's Wow but World of Warcraft) is to be the ultimate MMORPG. Oh, and the nobody-knows-what-this-is extremely-hiped areae isn't going to have persistence, which is a big no-no for me (even if I usually agree with his vision on VW's.

Last but not least mirror worlds, which makes me remembers this list of Games on Google Maps. Mirror worlds are defined as virtual worlds like ours, with places like ours: a real representation of the "first world" but where people are only virtually, without meshing virtual with real people. I really don't see this happening unless you're trying to do something like Idlewild.

The final article is yet to be released, but I'll surelly be a reader of it.

(Second Life + Google == world domination)?

I pointed out some time ago this article (in Portuguese, sorry) that does some predictions how Second Life (and their creators Linden Labs) will evolve, in a kind of dystopian way. While I don't see things as dark as they are painted there, I think that people should be alerted to this kinds of possibilities. Two days ago, this article appeared, doing a different kind of prevision: it's basicly a press release from Google in May 2012 (5 years from now) telling that they just bought the Internet. Notice that in the first prevision, Google was bought by Linden Labs in 2010. It would be interesting to make a mash-up of these two previsions with a new touch of realism... Do you also envision that the Internet is going to go to such a dystopian prism? Or do you think that we're heading to something different, like the world of GiTS, or instead Avalon, or instead Snow Crash's metaverse? Or even other?

GNUnet on SoC 2007

A few weeks ago, Google announced that there will be a Summer of Code 2007. "SoC" is a program where Google pays students stipends to work on open source programs over the summer. Each student is paired with one or more mentors from the open source community and works on a project over the summer.

Just as last year, GNUnet and its related projects will take part this year again. More info about that here.

Back to action

From: Blogger Help
Subject: Re: [#118892598] Blogger Beta non-spam review and [...]
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 18:01:34 -0000
Mailer: Neotonic Trakken/frontend-2.42.1

Hello,

Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that
it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and
sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your
patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

I had my blog blocked for more than 24 hours because Blogger's folks thought that a blog with so many links as mine is probably a "Spam Blog". Ugh...

I remember one reader of mine telling me, one year or so ago, that I didn't post as many links as I should: basicly when I'm talking about something I should link to some references. I knew he was right, but I didn't do it (and sometimes still don't) since I write lot's of stuff offline, and because linking takes time. Yet, I allways try to, without overlinking, link whenever possible to useful references that readers might find usefull. But now, with all this, I wonder... Do you think I overlink?

PS -> This post has purposedly no links ;-)

Microsoft Windows Vienna

I'm not sure why, maybe it was because this will make people stop talking about how bad Windows Vista is. Microsoft filled a patent application, obviously describing what are they planning to release as the next version of Windows, formerly known as Blackcomb, now named as Windows Vienna, and scheduled to be released between 2009 and 2012.

I read it yesterday and almost choke on my dinner, and probably my humor got affected by it in the Lisbon.pm social meeting that happened after it.

What's all this fuss about it?

Imagine a world where you have a really limited choice of hardware to buy. The brand and manufacturer doesn't really matter, so you'll ignore those. You'll just have the "bad motherboard", the "good motherboard" and the "awsome motherboard". And they're expensive - more than now. After buying your computer (and by computer I mean - for the desktop market - a black box, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse), you'll have to buy the operating system. No, listen to me, you have to pay for it: your hardware won't run anything else but this Operating System. Right. Now, you bought it (well, probably it came bundled with the machine you just bought as well), go home and turn it on. WELCOME TO MICROSOFT WINDOWS VIENNA! And there are those... err... four big buttons: "Install Software", "Install Hardware", "Suspend" and "Shutdown". They can even do something like the actual Nintendo Wii interface: you have a square for one of those things and free space for some more. Now, you want to buy a word processor, because you bought this computer to write some documents, and you want to do it online because you don't want to get out of home. So, you connect your USB modem on your computer and you're notified "ILLEGAL SOFTWARE DETECTION - THAT MODEM ISN'T VIENNA CERTIFIED". Yup, welcome to the Trusted Computer Era. So, you call to your retailer and ask for certidied Vienna modems, you reserve one and the next day you go to the store to buy it.

Now, I could continue this story (I have better things to do, sorry) for a big load of time, to show you how desparetedly bad this is. If hardware manufacturers want to sell hardware where Windows runs, they'll have to pay - a lot - to Microsoft. If a user wants one functionality - any functionality (yes, including minesweeper) - will have to pay - a lot - to Microsoft. This is valid to any 3rd-party software: it will only work on Windows if Microsoft DRM system accepts it: pay. It will limit your hardware usage: if you want to have high bandwith you'll have to start paying twice: still to your ISP and now to Microsoft so they unblocks your hardware and let's it use another well-defined bandwith. It will even act on your harddrive space and speed, your processor, your motherboard, your life. Every site you visit must be "trusted" - by them. Maybe this will stop the worries of Google and Yahoo! on censorship: Microsoft will do it for them. Of course that, in this scenario, both Google and Yahoo! are useless... but I digress.

If you think that this dystopian view is way to exagerated, please read about this issue from some people that are better explaining the issue than me, or from those that are good in giving your a legal interpretation of the patent.

I have to start to agree with Paula about all this thing going around the "social web" - services instead of products and the lack of privacy and ultimately freedom that comes with it. Microsoft is aiming it fiercily - maybe it's time to really act and actively do something to fix Ubuntu's bug #1... Before 2009.