Owens L'ill Slice of the Web

Nice products, but when I arrive at the collection counter and get ticket 160 I thought ‘great’ since they had just brought out number 157.
30 Minutes later I got the 36×40 cm piece of wood I needed to collect. It could of quite easily been in the self-service part, like the other 8 pieces of the small cabinet I was buying.
Needless to say I did not buy anything at the food counter which is ‘conveniently’ nearby.
Well, you transparent and crap prats, there are lots of nice furniture shops and I’ll go elsewhere next time.

MS critisizes Openoffice for being ‘behind the times’.
No bad thing say I, as one Slashdot poster puts it:

“Precisely; it is remarkable the number of people who hanker back to the Word or indeed Wordperfect of the mid 90′s. This was a time before feeping creaturitis had led to a situation where the user could spend several minutes navigating menus looking for a particular function.

Sadly, if I were to be brutally honest, I would say that this is one area where OO.o really isn’t 10 years behind MS Office, it is jam-packed with seldom used functions, that however is the price of getting involved in a tick-box war with MS Office (which open office really has to).“

- Angostura

Bill Gates thinks all people who think differently from him on Copyright are communists. Bill, you’re a prat.

Now Microsoft have managed to achieve a ‘zero-day‘ exploit for web browser users where all you have to do is look at a jpeg image. What a bunch of Useless..etc..

I know there was a reason why I didn´t buy a NetGear router..

I’ve got a Orange SPV E200.

Despite having fantastic features, this is a very hard to use phone.

All the wonderful hardware is let down by a User Interface that is clumsy to use and buggy. Multiple button presses to get to basic operations, sounds that play LOUD when you set system sound level Low, Inability to stop the SMS incoming message tune (which has to be looong since it only plays once..) The Media Player turns screen light on when changing tracks (if in belt clip all this does is drain the battery more), and then turns light off while watching movies.. Bluetooth kills battery and is 7 keystrokes to turn on and off.. Phone Microphone stays on while using supplied handsfree headset. And so on.

There is also really good stuff, but it’s negated by silly bugs and usability mistakes.

So, If relaxed operation is important to you, get a Nokia/Siemens/Lg.. But then you’ll miss out on the cool functions…

Finally the Battery life is pathetic, 10 hrs of moderate use, claims of 100hr standby (from Orange NL) are not realistic in real-word situations.

The Sad Spammers are still forging my domain.. Fortunately some are now getting their due rewards. HarHarHar.

I just stumbled across a nice paper detailing why companies are able to get very trivial stuff patented, which they then use to extort money from people who did not ‘steal’ any ideas, they just did something the bloody obvious way. Of course some patents also cover genuine creativity

Lindows is a Linux based Operating System, with a name amusingly similar to Microsoft windows. Microsoft, unable to bear the thought of competition, has been suing them all over the place, claiming that they ‘own’ the word ‘Windows’. Which is funny since 1) my apartment has ‘windows’ (south facing, lovely view..) and it was built before Microsoft was even founded. And 2) ‘Windows’ on computers have been around for a long time, ‘X-Windows‘ interfaces on Unix predate Microsoft’s adoption of the word windows by years. My Unix based FreeBSD server has ‘X-Windows’ for one of it’s interfaces, it’s still a very active technology.

When Microsoft tried to use the courts to destroy Lindows in the US, they failed.

So they went shopping worldwide for a more sympathetic court. And found one, not just sympathetic, but pathetic. In Amsterdam (where I live) unfortunately, so now Microsoft is trying to bully http://www.lindows.com/ out of existence. The Lindows CEO might be annoyingly brazen, but he’s still putting up a good fight. Go for it Michael!, don’t let our language fall into corporate hands..

From Hans Blix, regarding the period just before the Iraq invasion:

He says of Mr Bush and Blair that it was “probable that the governments were conscious that they were exaggerating the risks they saw in order to get the political support they would not otherwise have had.”

He’s written a book, I don’t think it’s likely to end up on Blairs coffetable..

Apparently what is happening is known as ‘Joe-Jobbing‘, after the poor soul who first documented it, 7 years ago.. These days it’s quite common.

I really, really, hate spammers, they’re just sad little morally and ethically corrupt gimps.

One of these antisocial idiots is using my ‘owen.demon.nl’ domain as a faked from: and reply-to: domain in their garbage e-mails at the moment, peddling crooked money schemes and internet casino’s.

Nothing I can do about it I’m afraid, my condolences to anyone who came here after receiving one of these mails. Please be assured that I did not send them.