Blackmoor Vituperative

In a new setback to Microsoft’s public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker’s Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.

Tech staffers at NIST, a part of the Department of Commerce charged with promulgating technology standards, are scheduled to meet on April 10 in Gaithersburg, Md., to discuss their concerns about the new operating system, which Microsoft released to consumers in January amid much fanfare and to businesses in December with lesser flair.

According to the formal agenda for the meeting, NIST technology workers will attend a session entitled “Windows Vista Security” to discuss “the current ban of this operating system on NIST networks.” NIST officials weren’t immediately available to comment.

Word of NIST’s Windows Vista ban comes a week after InformationWeek revealed that the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration have both imposed similar blackouts on the operating system, as well as on Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

(from InformationWeek, Microsoft Suffers Latest Blow As NIST Bans Windows Vista)

If this keeps up, it’s going to restore my faith in the competence of government employees (which I lost when I was around 16). What’s next? Dry water? Chaste teenagers? Proof that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago by an omnipotent creature suffering from MPD?

So-called Daylight Saving Time doesn’t save anything. It costs the USA hundreds of millions, if not billions, in lost productivity and wasted man-hours as people fiddle with clocks, miss appointments, correct scheduling errors, and otherwise observe this completely fatuous ritual.

It most certainly does not save electricity. This isn’t the 1940s: and homes and businesses keep their lights and heat on throughout the day, regardless of the time displayed on the clock. It doesn’t save lives: studies have shown that it actually costs lives as people’s sleep schedules are disrupted for days, causing an increase in traffic accidents. It doesn’t help farmers: farmers rise with the sun. It doesn’t help children: is it better for them to be going back and forth to school in the dark in the afternoon, when people are wide awake, or in the morning, when people are still groggy from having their sleep disrupted by this foolish Daylight Saving Time? In the middle of winter, it’s dark in the morning and in the evening anyway! So what does so-called Daylight Saving Time “save”? Nothing! It costs, and it costs us dearly.

It is time to put an end to this ridiculous ritual. Write, call, and email your federal and state representatives (DST is a federal scheme, but states can opt out of it), and tell them to stop screwing around with America’s clocks!

In December of 2001, BBSpot published the article, Publisher Cleared in Pop-Up Book Trial, which describes a lawsuit against Random House brought by people who… well, just read it:

Publishing giant Random House was cleared of all charges in a lawsuit stemming from a fatal accident involving a pop-up book of sexual positions that they published from May 1999 to December 2000.

The class action suit was filed by Skrelnick, Callard, and Associates law firm in the Spring of 2001 when several people were injured trying to duplicate one the positions found in the book. It seems that a folding error on page 27 caused a number of couples to inadvertently snap their partners spines when attempting that position.

It took a few years for the real world to catch up, but in 2006 Melcher Media published The Pop-up Book of Sex. It appears to have received a number of positive reviews. Just be careful with the pose on page 27.

The FSF today released a paper that details the ways that hardware manufacturers can help the Free Software Community, as well as themselves. It all sounds like common-sense to me.

Although nobody’s crystal ball is clear on the impact that the change in the daylight-saving time rules will have on enterprise IT systems and applications, the problems could be bigger than most people realize.

That’s because IT shops have had less notice in dealing with the time change than they did for Y2K, and because the issue doesn’t have visibility at the highest levels of an organization as it did for Y2K.

“We are likely to see more issues than we did with Y2K because there is no visibility at the board and the CEO level, yet it’s a similar risk to the business,” said Tim Howes, CTO at data center provisioning provider Opsware in Sunnyvale, CA.

“Only server administrators and application support teams know what could happen if time stamps get misaligned. A lot of these administrators are sweating bullets right now,” said Swapnil Shah, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at mValent, a configuration and change management provider in Burlington, Mass.

(from eWeek, Daylight-Saving Time Change: Bigger than Y2K?)

So-called “daylight-saving time” is a colossal waste of time and money. How many millions of man-hours are squandered on this madness? How much productivity is lost, not just due to the foolish exercise of re-setting everything with a clock in it, but from the missed appointments and conflicted schedules that invariably result? How many people die needlessly in car accidents because a driver got too little sleep due to damnable “daylight-saving time”?

In fact, our societal sleep debt is so great that simply losing one additional hour of sleep due to the spring shift to daylight savings time can increase traffic accident rates by 7% (Coren, 1996b) and death rates due to all accidents by 6.5% (Coren, 1996c).

(from Psychiatric Times, Sleep Deprivation, Psychosis and Mental Efficiency)

People die as a result of this nonsense. They DIE. More importantly, it’s an inconvenience to me, personally. So it’s time to do something about it.

Write your senators and representatives about this. A simple letter or email from enough people will get their attention. Just tell them you want to STOP re-setting all of your clocks and disrupting your sleep patterns twice a year.

Here is how you can contact your congress people:

Contacting the Congress
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/
Congressional Email Directory

You might also refer them to http://www.standardtime.com/.

Here is something worth a chuckle, if you find oppressive government mis-management amusing: Jim Rapoza names the worst tech-related bills of all time.

A federal jury in San Diego has ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent dispute over MP3 audio technology used in Windows.

[…]

Microsoft said it believes that it properly licensed MP3 technology from Fraunhofer, paying that company $16 million. Fraunhofer, which helped develop the MP3 compression technology along with Lucent’s Bell Labs, has licensed its intellectual property to companies that want to use the audio format in their products. Fraunhofer has since handed the MP3-licensing duties over to Thomson.

Scores of technology companies, including Apple, Intel and Texas Instruments, license the MP3 technology, according to Thomson’s MP3licensing.com.

(from Tech News on ZDNet, Microsoft hit with $1.5 billion patent verdict)

I am no fan of Microsoft, but this is ridiculous. They licensed the technology from the accepted licensor, Fraunhofer. Maybe if enough cases like this go to court, large software companies like Microsoft will get a ticket to the clue train, and realize that software patents are expensive, absurd, and should be abolished. Maybe if companies like Microsoft start lobbying against software patents, our well-meaning government officials will do something in the public’s interest for once.

While on that track, I read an interesting essay by Paul Graham, who makes the argument that software patents are really no different than hardware patents — that embodying a process in hardware is not intrinsically different than embodying a process in software, and that as time goes on more and more of what “used to be done with levers and cams and gears are now done with loops and trees and closures”. He makes a good point. He has nearly convinced me that all patents should be abolished. But don’t assume that this was his intention. It’s a well-constructed article, with much food for thought. Read it.

The British government has rejected a petition from UK residents to ban DRM. Their response was preposterous in its naivety. The UK government suggests that DRM adds value for the customer!

“Boo-hoo-hoo, people have caught on to our scheme to hold the world’s documents hostage. Boo-hoo-hoo, people are finally waking up and realizing that paying for MS Office for suckers. Boo-hoo-hoo, our sacred cash cow may only bring in 95% of the king’s ransom we expected because a few people have been educated thanks to IBM. Boo-hoo-hoo.” — Microsoft

See: Microsoft Accuses IBM of Limiting Choice for Interop, Standards

And what the hell is “interop”? Are people so lazy that they can’t be bothered to type “interoperability”? This is the same kind of sloppiness that gave us “donut”, “nite”, “thru”, and “tranny”. Still, Simon Jenkins does have a worthwhile counterargument.

This was London Fashion Week, a week-long show organized by the British Fashion Council, a consortium of major fashion retailers and publishers. Here are a few photos from the show that support my belief that fashion is stupid.

However, sometimes it is entertaining.