Blackmoor Vituperative

Never content to twist US law into pretzels, the media robber barons also attempt to use their power to make other nation’s laws as bad as those we have here….

In accordance with US trade law, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) is required to conduct an annual review of the status of foreign intellectual property laws. This review, which is referred to as Special 301, is typically used to denounce countries that have less restrictive copyright policies than the United States.

The review process is increasingly dominated by content industry lobbyists who want to subvert US trade policy and make it more favorable to their own interests. [...] One of the organizations that plays a key role in influencing the Special 301 review is the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a powerful coalition that includes the RIAA, the MPAA, and the Business Software Alliance (BSA). The IIPA, which recently published its official recommendations to the USTR for the 2010 edition of the 301 review, has managed to achieve a whole new level of absurdity.

University of Edinburgh law lecturer Andres Guadamuz wrote a blog entry this week highlighting some particularly troubling aspects of the IIPA’s 301 recommendations. The organization has condemned Indonesia and several other countries for encouraging government adoption of open source software. According to the IIPA, official government endorsements of open source software create “trade barriers” and restrict “equitable market access” for software companies.

[...]

The Indonesian government issued a statement in 2009 informing municipal governments that they had to stop using pirated software. The statement said that government agencies must either purchase legally licensed commercial software or switch to free and open source alternatives in order to comply with copyright law. This attempt by Indonesia to promote legal software procurement processes by endorsing the viability of open source software has apparently angered the IIPA.

In its 301 recommendations for Indonesia, the IIPA demands that the government rescind its 2009 statement. According to the IIPA, Indonesia’s policy “weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness” because open source software “encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations [and] fails to build respect for intellectual property rights.”

The number of ways in which the IIPA’s statements regarding open source software are egregiously misleading and dishonest are too numerous to count.

(from Big Content condemns foreign governments that endorse FOSS, Ars Technica)

“The IIPA — destroying your cultural future to line our pockets today!”

OpenOffice.org 3.2 is now available, with a handful of new features and improved ODF compatibility.

If you haven’t migrated from MS Office to OpenOffice… what are you waiting for? Hello? It’s 2010!

I recently encountered a mapping program intended for role-playing games, called Hexographer. It is an easy to use application that makes colorful game maps. There is a “free” version (not free as in speech — free as in beer), and a pay version. The free version is pretty nifty. However, there are several problems with Hexographer that make me strongly advise people not to use it — not even the free version.

The online (free) version is a Java app. Under ordinary circumstances, you can simply download a Java app like this, and run it on your own computer. Why would you want to do this? Because web sites go down. They go away. (Remember Ar-Kelaan Hexmapper? Their Hexmapper software is available elsewhere, but the Ar-Kelaan site itself is no more.) It is a fact of life. If you want to be able to open your maps a few months from now, it is mandatory that you be able to run the app locally. Unfortunately, the author of Hexographer has crippled the app so that it can only be run on his server.

Strike one.

The pay version of Hexographer coms in two flavors: a “one year” license, and a “lifetime” license. A reasonable person would assume that the “one year license” means that you get free updates for a year, and that after that, you would need to upgrade or buy another license. That would not be ideal (open source is ideal), but it would at least not be unreasonable. However, the author of Hexographer has planted a time bomb in Hexographer — the software self destructs after 365 days. You paid for it, and it simply stops working. This is completely unacceptable.

Strike two.

The “lifetime license” is the cherry on top of this fruitcake. You might think a “lifetime” license entitles you to free updates for as long as the publisher continues to support the product. That is what a reasonable person would assume. A reasonable person would be wrong. In fact, the software will self-destruct after 365 days, unless the publisher sends you a new license EVERY SINGLE YEAR, FOREVER. “Defective by design” does not even begin to describe this mad scheme.

Strike three.

If you value your time — the time you spend drawing maps, and the time you spend role-playing with your friends — I strongly urge you not use Hexographer at all, not even the free version, until these horrendous licensing problems are corrected.

In the meantime, here are some viable alternatives, which may or may not fit your own particular needs:

• Arr-Kelaan Hexmapper (download, additional tiles)
• DampfKarte
• HexMapper
• HexReMapper
• Inkscape with the boardgame extensions
• Maptool
• Tiled

P.S. The Welsh Piper has a nifty article on using hex maps to facilitate world building. Check it out.

If you are considering migrating from another office productivity suite to OpenOffice (and if you are not considering that, you should), check out this Sun Microsystems on-demand webinar: tips and strategies for moving to OpenOffice.org.

Red Hat has filed an amicus curiae brief in a major Supreme Court case. In the brief, Red Hat makes a strong case against software patents, arguing that the legal reasoning that led to software patents was flawed and that the pending Bilski case provides the Supreme Court with an important opportunity to rectify this long-standing problem with the patent system.

[...]

“Far from encouraging innovation, this proliferation of patents has seriously encumbered innovation in the software industry. Software is an abstract technology, and translating software functions into patent language generally results in patents with vague and uncertain boundaries,” wrote Red Hat VP Rob Tiller in the brief. “Under the Federal Circuit’s previous erroneous approach, the risk of going forward with a new software product now always entails an unavoidable risk of a lawsuit that may cost many millions of dollars in legal fees, as well as actual damages, treble damages, and an injunction that terminates a business. Only those with an unusually high tolerance for risk will participate in such a market.”

(from Red Hat tells Supremes: software patents stifle innovation, Ars Technica)

The issuing of patents was an experiment. That experiment has unequivocally failed. Getting rid of software patents is a good start.

I discovered why the tabs in Firefox suddenly started moving themselves to new windows — and I found an addon to disable this annoying new feature.

We all learned in grade school that the odd root of a negative number is also negative. The cube root of -8 is -2, for example.

Mathematicians will tell you that -8 has two more roots, but these are not “real” numbers, and unless you are a mathematician, you will never need to know what they are. If you are a real person using real numbers, the answer you want is -2.

Unfortunately, if you try to find the odd root of a negative number in OpenOffice Calc, it returns an error, because of a bug which has been present in OpenOffice since its creation: it uses logarithms to determine the root, which is perfectly fine, but it does not take into account the sign of the base, which is the bug.

This is a ridiculously easy to fix bug, and it mystifies me that the OpenOffice folks have let it stay broken for so long. However, there is a workaround:

SIGN(A1)*(ABS(A1)^(1/3))

What this does is find the cube root of the absolute value, and then applies the sign of the base against the result. Be careful with your parentheses.

There is a new version of SmartDefrag. SmartDefrag is an excellent, free disk defragmenter for Windows. I highly recommend it.

I don’t recommend installing the Yahoo toolbar, but that is up to you.

I ran into a problem with VMWare Server 2.0 the other day. I have VMWare set up to start the virtual machines when machine starts. This is a Windows XP Pro machine (the final version of Windows, as far as I am concerned). From looking at the event log, it appeared that the virtual machines would not start because the VMWare Host Agent service was not starting, and the VMWare Host Agent service was not starting because it had several dependencies which were not yet started themselves when the VMWare Host Agent service was being kicked off by Windows.

I did quite a bit of research on this, and tried some very clever solutions, none of which made any difference (changing the service’s dependencies, etc.). What I finally did was to create a small batch file, vmware_host_agent.bat

:: pause sixty seconds, then start VMWare

ping 127.0.0.1 -n 60 >nul

net start “VMWare Host Agent” -x

And then created a link to that in the Startup group.

Problem solved. It’s not elegant, but it works.

Forrester Research has come out with a report stating, among other things, that half to two-thirds of businesses have “concerns” about open source security.

The problem with empty headlines like “Companies still concerned about open source security” is that they tell you nothing and yet imply everything. You may as well say, “Study Reveals Pittsburgh Unprepared For Full-Scale Zombie Attack“. What does this headline tell you? Is any city prepared for a full scale zombie attack? Is a full-scale zombie attack even remotely likely?

The answer to both is “no”. Yet the headline implies that the answer to both questions is “yes”.

Should companies be concerned about the security of open source software? Of course they should — and they should also be concerned about closed source software, as well as the firmware in their hardware, their physical security, and the safety of their employees in the parking lot.

Should companies avoid open source software for “security” reasons? Of course not. Open source software is, in general, more secure than closed source software, and security flaws in open source software are more quickly corrected when they are found.

The problem with polls like Forrester’s (and those who conduct them) is not that the results are inaccurate (although they may be). The problem is that you won’t get the correct answer if you do not ask the correct question — and you have to understand the topic in order to ask the right questions. Forrester Research clearly doesn’t.