Thursday, 30 May 2002
Queue Two
[politics] Had a comment today from a reader, who was happy for me to quote it, and after writing a long email in reply I think I will:
I think your views on the refugee crisis are quite narrow. I am all for assisting people who are less fortunate than ourselves by sharing our great country, but these guys have paid big money and jumped the queue to get here. What about the poor families that are still waiting in line, staying within the law to try and become citizens of Australia. Do we push them further and further down the line to make way for these queue jumpers? I think not. I understand that these people are desperate but that does not excuse their behaviour.
I assume this is in response to my post below, which isn't the full extent of my public comments or private views on the subject. There's more here and here. As for the popular Australian view that refugees are 'queue jumpers', it begs the question of whether there is a queue for refugees to jump.
Who creates a queue? Is it just the people in the queue? No: when there's a long queue in a bank and only one teller serving it, we feel annoyed with the bank itself for not putting more tellers on. Ordinary immigrants to Australia similarly might feel annoyed with the Australian government for not putting more people in place to process their applications more quickly. Deciding how many public servants to assign to that task is a political decision, and the decisions taken by the Howard government have the effect (and perhaps the intention) of discouraging all but the most patient of potential immigrants.
But that's just ordinary immigrants—the people waiting in line. Refugees are not ordinary immigrants. They didn't wake up one day and just decide they'd like to live somewhere else. They have been motivated by "a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group or political opinion" (1951 Refugee Convention) to leave their home country. Other countries have obligations defined by international law to take in refugees. Those obligations don't come with caveats about putting them at the end of the bureaucratically-dictated queue for regular immigrants, and they don't justify locking them up for months or years while processing their claims. See William Maley's article in this keynote [via Greg Restall]:
The notion of a 'queue' is unrelated to refugee protection: instead, it reflects the wish of governments to be able to 'pick and choose' which refugees to help (the educated rather than the unskilled, the healthy rather than the disabled, the quiescent rather than the 'troublesome'). The 1951 Refugee Convention is drafted as it is precisely to prevent such unscrupulous discrimination. As John Menadue, former Secretary of the Australian Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs recently observed, the idea of the queue 'was invented by bureaucrats in Canberra'. [Emphasis in original.]
'Big' money has nothing to do with it. If you're in fear for your safety, you'll do whatever it takes to get yourself somewhere safe. That's not the same as someone trying to use money and influence to distort the ordinary immigration system (although Australia encourages just that: bring a hefty slab of cash for 'investment' and you too can go to the front of the line; so much for the poor families).
The Howard government has done everything it can to redefine these people as 'illegals', 'queue jumpers' and whatever the hell else, all to divert attention from the fact that the vast majority of them are refugees and have rights by virtue of that fact under international conventions to which Australia is a signatory. They mostly come from Afghanistan, for God's sake, and if we can't recognise in 2002 that people have legitimate reasons to get the hell out of there by any means possible, then we should just admit that we have no intention whatsoever of treating refugees humanely and get used to the flushing sound as our international reputation goes down the toilet. Treating refugees humanely does not mean locking them up for a year in the middle of the desert and then grudgingly giving them a temporary visa that effectively forces them to live in poverty after their release.
But I'm well aware that 70% of Australians don't agree with me.
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Tuesday, 28 May 2002
The Short Occasionally Warm Summer
[site news] I was thinking the other day that Scotland is one place where you won't hear that advertising cliché of 'the Long Hot Summer'. Not when it's been struggling to get past twelve degrees this past week.
Still, sumer is icumen in, and it's time to get some more papers written, like one for a conference in July. As a result, the next couple of months will be pretty lean around here when it comes to new posts, although I'll probably sling in a Madagascar update or two to see that story through.
But for once I'm not going to close up shop and leave you with nothing to read. After all, what was always the best part of summer? That's right, sitting in front of the TV and watching repeats.
With Speedysnail coming up to its third anniversary, there's a fair amount of material stashed away in the archives—at least enough for a 'best of' once or twice a week. So from June 1, I'll be seeing how the old stuff looks in the harsh summer light of 2002. Who knows, I might even put on my George Lucas hat and turn out a Special Edition or two.
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Monday, 27 May 2002
Good Heavens
[weblog] A Star Wars personality quiz tells me I'm C3PO—the same result as a similar quiz last year. I suppose I must reluctantly accept my threepioness.
On the plus side, any of you who gets told you're an ewok has to worship me like a god.
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Three A.M. Haiku
strange new rumblings
in airing cupboard
boiler about to explode
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Sunday, 26 May 2002
Auld Reekie
[site news] Been meaning to do this for a while: Edinburgh in black and blue.
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The Ugly Australia: Queue Jumpers
[politics] The Guardian's weekend magazine has just run a major piece on Australia's treatment of refugees. Readers of Britain's highest-selling broadsheet have learned of detainees who "want to go back to Iran because at least there we will get tortured and imprisoned by people who speak our own language." A wonderful advertisement for the Australian sense of tolerance and fair-play. And such a bargain: at only several thousand dollars a head for a few thousand desperate people, you too can undo thirty years of putting the White Australia policy behind us.
And after you've taken an average of eight months to process their claims and grudgingly granted them refugee status, why not do your best to ensure that their new life is as difficult as possible?
Most employers won't take people on [temporary protection visas], so, despite an engineering degree and good English, Ali survives on A$182 a week benefit. He is renting a sparse flat in Cabramatta, infamous for being Australia's heroin distribution depot. Ali has not met many Australians yet. With the drug-related violence in his neighbourhood, he dares not go out after 8pm. Nor has he seen the sea in Australia. He can't afford the train fare to the beach for his family.
The article ends on a less damning but ultimately frustrating note:
As an inmate, Kerrim was told in Woomera that "the Australian people don't like you, they don't need any more refugees, they say you are criminals and terrorists". This was "rubbish", he says. "When we got released we met the nice Australian people. The majority of Australian people are friendly and feel sorry for us."
Fifty years of wave upon wave of refugees who faced initial hostility only to become accepted and valued members of Australian society, and we're still swayed by the scaremongers.
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The Ugly Australia: Dole Bludgers
[politics] The Australian reported a few days back that the Howard Government is "planning a crackdown on dole bludgers after research found 16 per cent of dole recipients enjoyed the welfare lifestyle and had no intention of genuinely seeking work":
Employment Services Minister Mal Brough said research by his department ... showed up to one in six registered job seekers were not really looking for work. "These people are content to seek a benefit from the Australian taxpayer and feel that work would have a negative impact on their quality of life and free time," he said.
It would be fascinating to see the responses to a survey of working Australians—or even government MPs—asking whether they were 'content' to seek a benefit from tax revenue, and whether they feel that work has a 'negative impact on their quality of life and free time'. Who knows, we might even find that the working population is riddled with covert 'cruisers' just waiting for the opportunity to soak the taxpayer to the tune of A$184.50 a week (less than the median rent in Melbourne).
"There was always anecdotal evidence about the existence of these cruisers, but this is the first genuine research that I am aware of that confirms the existence of a substantial body of non-performers in Australia."
Ah yes, that 'substantial body' of dole bludgers, whose existence justifies making life miserable for anyone unfortunate enough to be unemployed. The latest Bureau of Statistics figures show an unemployment rate of 6.3 percent and a workforce participation rate of 63.7 percent. So according to Brough, 16 percent of 6.3 percent of 63.7 percent of all adult Australians are non-performing cruisers. That's... let's see... 0.6 percent.
Six in a thousand adult Australians "did not want full-time work and supplemented their income with part-time or casual work"! Clearly a fine excuse to express smug disapproval and provoke general suspicion and vilification of welfare recipients.
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[whatever] It was one of those intense dreams you have on a weekend morning when you wake up at 6.30, realise it's too early to get up, and go back to sleep for another three hours.
I'm back in Hobart, on a bus tour through the rainforest—which is odd, seeing that Tasmania's rainforest is miles away from Hobart—when suddenly the bus, which has gradually been climbing its way uphill, reaches a stretch of road that ends in an upwards-curving ramp. The driver guns it, heading straight for the ramp and the sky beyond. I shout, "What's going on?", and the guy next to me says, "Don't worry, it's part of the tour," and the bus sails off the end, arcs into the air and hangs there, then plunges hundreds of feet into the Derwent River.
Luckily, I'm thrown clear on impact, and manage to swim free of the floating hulk, spluttering in the brackish water. "Jesus!" I cry, as the other bloke from the tour swims past.
"That's nothing," he says; "last time, the bus sank right to the bottom and we all nearly drowned."
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Thursday, 23 May 2002
[madagascar] Ravalomanana looks set to carry out threats that he made a week ago to use force to end Madagascar's stand-off:
There was a steady build-up of soldiers in two of Madagascar's provincial towns on Thursday as president Marc Ravalomanana reiterated his intention to take military action if the blockade of the capital, Antananarivo, was not dismantled within four days.... The Tulear airport, which has served as an alternative to the main airport in Antananarivo, has been shut down.
Other recent stories: European Parliament issues resolution on the 'situation'; cyclone death toll rises to 41; an interview with analyst Stephen Ellis; and BBC journalist Alastair Leithead follows the illegal fuel trail.
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[code] Owen's months of immersion in CSS must have given him Neo-like powers over arcane streams of code: how else to explain this serendipitous solution to a font-sizing problem that others have been addressing with javascripts and widgets?
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[weblog] KartOO is a compelling new search engine reminiscent of those world maps that distort the size of countries by population: it displays its results as a map, with visual cues to indicate their relevance and conceptual links to each other. An amazing tool for web research—it's gone straight onto my toolbar next to Google.
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Picture It
[language] The acronym 'IT' first abbreviated its way into my head in late 1996. I remember my new boss using the term, and remember wondering how long it had been around—it had been a while since I'd paid much attention to tech jargon. A few months later, it was everywhere.
Something about IT always irritated me. Sure, IT's short; but whenever you use IT, IT looks like your caps key is broken. And IT's meaning of 'information technology' seems an unnecessary substitute for its predecessor, 'computers'. It's as if cars suddenly became 'transportation technology' or 'TT'. After all, not everything involved in the vehicular transportation of people from point A to point B is a car: there are other vehicles, like trucks and motorbikes; there are the integral parts of the cars themselves, like tyres and headlights and windscreen-wipers; and there are add-on extras, like tow-bars and fluffy dice. All, in their own way, examples of TT—yet people insist on talking about 'cars' and 'the car industry'. How confusing.
For those who didn't know their ASCII from their elbow, the switch to 'IT' did nothing to clarify matters—which was perhaps the intention. Computers were becoming commonplace by the mid-1990s, and losing their capacity to dazzle the average Joe; the mystical power of acronyms reclaimed that potential for wonder and awe. "What's that," Joe would ask, "a computer?", and the tech junkie would reply, "No, it's a Palm Pilot, an example of information technology or 'IT'", and the awed Joe would wonder, "What's the difference?", and the tech junkie would say, "This has a small LCD screen and a miniature keypad and somewhat less memory and a less-powerful chip", and Joe would say, "It has a screen and memory and a chip?", and tech junkie would say "Yes", and Joe would say "Like a computer?", and tech junkie would say "Er... look over there!", and would point dramatically at his life-size cardboard cut-out of Captain Picard, and run outside to his transportation technology device, and cut and paste himself onto the other side of town.
But I exaggerate. Except about the Picard cut-out. There was at least one good reason to replace 'computer' and 'computing' as the dominant labels for the technology and the industry, and that was the advent of the wondrous and awful Internet. The Net was where the computer industry met the phone industry, and rebranding is inevitable in any corporate merger. 'Information technology', despite its roots in the term 'information science', can suggest both computation and communication; and 'IT'—well, IT can mean anything, can't IT. The term echoed Al Gore's rhetoric about the Information Superhighway, and the acronym reduced the temptation to make troublesome distinctions between information, data, knowledge, and wisdom. IT was the way forward, and soon we all used IT.
Well, most of us. By 1999, at least in Australian bureaucratic circles, there were pretenders to IT's throne: 'communications and information technology' (C&IT); 'information and communications technology' (ICT); 'information technology and communications' (ITC or IT&C). All attempting to shoe-horn the term 'communications' into the very acronym that was created in response to it.
"Ah yes, but it doesn't include it. Talking about 'information' neglects the communications aspect."
"So, you communicate stuff that isn't information, do you? Meaningless drivel, perhaps?"
"Um..."
"Or you create information that isn't intended for communication? Like, say, government reports?"
"Er... look over there!" [Points to cardboard cut-out of Sir Humphrey Appleby, runs outside, etc.]
By 1999, no-one needed to be told—least of all by the Australian federal government—that information technology involved communications from time to time. The extra word was clearly redundant—so why was it being tacked onto the mercifully brief 'IT'? It surely wasn't to beef up the character count of government reports.
Three years later, surrounded by yet more papers and reports that use 'ICT', I can think of only one explanation. It's completely daft, but it's an explanation: IT sometimes gets autocorrected to 'It' by Microsoft Word. Imagine typing 'IT' hundreds of times in a long document and having to fix Microsoft's helpful autocorrection every time. This wouldn't concern anyone who actually works in IT, because most such people either refuse to use Microsoft products, know how to switch off autocorrecting, or write software and company reports, not papers about 'IT'. But academics, journalists and bureaucrats do use Microsoft Word, often have no idea how to switch off autocorrecting, and write about IT in general terms. And once they latch onto a new acronym they have the power to propagate it.
In fact, forget the autocorrect theory. I'm prepared to believe that the bureaucrats did it out of pure love of acronyms. Bureaucrats use letters like Lego, building teetering towers of red and yellow blocks on lumpy sheets of green. The more redundant letters, the better—after all, you can never have too many clear blocks. Just imagine the acronymic possibilities of ICT: PICTURE; FICTION; INFLICT; ICTHYOSAUR. Acronyms that paint a thousand words; acronyms with bite! What committee chair could resist finding a way to turn ICT into DICTIONARY?
Whatever the reason, 'ICT' is now entrenched in bureaucratic and academic circles, at least here in the UK. It remains widely ignored by industry and the general public; but for how long? How long until the students of ICT users give IT the flick?
Well, not me. I'm drawing my line in the sand, right here next to my cardboard cut-out of George Orwell. Nicht bin ein ICT, as Herr Doktor would say. For every autocorrect function there's an all-caps search-and-replace.
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Friday, 17 May 2002
Surprise!
[film] Long weekend. Trip away. Cancelled because of air traffic control problems in Luton. The perils of flying BananaJet.
'Salright. We got our money back, and saved on hotels, and were feeling a bit weekended out anyway. It leaves a more respectable gap before the next one, to give us time to get properly excited.
Went and saw Attack of the Clones instead. I know: Phantom Menace sucked; you have a bad feeling about this; begun this Hype War has. I won't add to the critical mass, except for the briefest of notes (and if you think these need a spoiler alert, you really have too much invested in this movie):
- An army of Temuera Morrisons—how cool is that? As Jane said, it's a big boost for the population of New Zealand. Perhaps the next one will be Episode III: Once Were Warriors.
- The Yoda battle scene is impressive, but it's hard to take seriously a bouncing lightsabre-wielding hyper-muppet.
- Speaking of muppets, doesn't Ani in that losing-his-temper scene look like Evil Bert?
But it's fine. The dialogue stinks, but hey, it's a Star Wars movie. How quickly those who bag the whiny Anakin have forgotten the whiny Luke. And honestly, does anyone really believe the romantic scenes in Empire any more than the ones in Clones?
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Surprise!
[site news] Long weekend. Trip away. Penguin.
The most amusing comment left here in my absence wins my undying admiration.
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[weblog] Two years and counting.
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Thursday, 16 May 2002
Quattro Stagione Day
[minutiae] 1. Now that the twentieth century is behind us, evoking Adolf Hitler as the epitome of evil is looking as old-fashioned as quaking at the mention of Napoleon or Rasputin. No wonder we're so eager to dress Saddam or Bin Laden in his size 6,000,000 shoes.
2. Doesn't it feel odd to leave a comment on someone else's blog addressing not the blog author but one of the other commenters, when you know that a copy of the comment gets emailed to the author?
3. "... unlike this table made out of off-cuts."
"Yeah, but I'd rather have a table made out of off-cuts than one made out of a single piece of oak."
"That would be a bit wasteful, true."
"Unless it was a recycled piece of oak. Like from an old ship. Half the houses in England are made out of bits of the Spanish Armada."
"..."
"Okay, some of the houses. In a specific area. Built during a particular moment in history. Hundreds of years ago... Somewhat less than half."
4. In hindsight, is it all that helpful to leave a copy of Q in the donations bag for Help the Aged?
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[books] Finished reading Neal Stephenson's 'eco-thriller' Zodiac on the bus this morning, and was thinking how timely it seemed for a book published in 1988, what with all this talk nowadays of biological warfare, toxic chemicals, collapsing Antarctic ice shelves, and so on. Then I remembered that none of those are about to go out of fashion anytime soon.
It's a good read; don't know why I let it sit on my shelf for five years. (Yes I do: because I own about five hundred other unread and half-read books. Fortunately, four hundred of those are sitting in a storage shed in Australia, which absolves me of eighty percent of all feelings of literary guilt!)
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[weblog] All I Really Need to Know I Learned by Having My Arms Ripped Off by a Polar Bear. Via MetakineticFilaterie.
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Wednesday, 15 May 2002
[film] About a Boy is a surprisingly effective translation of book to screen, even though it diverges substantially from its source in the final act. The book, not Hornby's strongest, has been pared down to essentials and improved in the process: the one-liners have more snap; key moments benefit from being underlined by the visuals, actors and soundtrack; and a minor tale of pre-adolescent and eternal adolescent both facing up to adult responsibilities becomes—well, a minor film about same, but certainly enjoyable enough.
It's good to see Hugh Grant shrug off the last vestiges of his roller-coaster charm and portray a less sympathetic character; and good to see Toni Collette keeping her Aussie accent and capturing the barmy hippy spirit so well. It all holds out promise for the inevitable film of How to Be Good.
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[madagascar] On the east coast, a tropical storm leaves thirteen dead, no power or running water in Toamasina/Tamatave, and problems getting aid through because of Ratsiraka's roadblocks. On the west coast, fights among supporters of the rival presidents leave six dead and add to fears that old ethnic rivalries are intensifying.
Barijoana has sent me further links regarding his analysis of the election recount: the main story, and a summary in table form. He says he "also tried to compare HCC's verdict with the data collected by the most important group of independent poll observers. (Full disclosure: my mother is the president of the 'Consortium des Observateurs', and I was their webmaster)". The Consortium figures give the election to Ravalomanana, but more narrowly than the HCC recount (50.59% compared to the HCC's 51.47%).
Unfortunately, it increasingly appears that the election's potential to legitimise either candidate's claim to the presidency in the eyes of his opponents has been spent.
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Monday, 13 May 2002
[weblog] Boy, I'd love to see NASA's car boot sale [via MetastasizingFilibusterism]:
NASA needs parts no one makes anymore. So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet [to find] electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive... [and] hoarding 8086's so that a failed one does not ground the nation's fleet of aging spaceships.
That's nothing compared to finding the right windscreen wiper blades.
Mind you, making the Mars Orbiter out of old Texas Instruments calculators was a trifle rash.
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Feeling Comfortable and Relaxed Yet?
[politics] Typical crowd of I'm-not-a-racists pull off remarkably life-like impression of same [via Matt]:
Ten months ago a group of 89 Afghan boat people, who had fled racial persecution and death in their homeland, found sanctuary in the heart of rural NSW.... Now, a movement has started to hound the men out of town.
"The men are all gentle and polite who fit in well with our workforce," [their employer] said. "They certainly aren't taking away any jobs from locals. We couldn't find enough people to work here."
Course not. They're clearly far too busy signing petitions, hurling paint, and not being racists.
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Sunday, 12 May 2002
Romantic Melodies
[music] Röyksopp's Melody A.M. and Luna's Romantica get the once-over from me at Records Ad Nauseam. [Mirrors? But of course: Röyksopp; Luna.]
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[site news] Two old papers on Papua New Guinea politics, freshly liberated from the bottom drawer.
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[net culture] Dead search engines [via laze.net—also home to this superior blog comment].
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Pralines
Brussels, Leuven and Bruges, April 2002.
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Saturday, 11 May 2002
[weblog] Two years and counting.
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Friday, 10 May 2002
The White Album
[journal] Our living room was turquoise a week ago. Now it's white, or just slightly off-white, turning it from aquarium into art gallery. The whole space feels light, open, clean; I keep expecting to see an ancient Dave Bowman lying on a bed in the corner. It's enough to make a week of hole-filling, newspaper-laying, paint-splattering, brush-cleaning, stretching to reach the ceiling, and a hundred and twenty-five metres of masking tape seem worthwhile.
But now the bedroom feels like the black hole of Calcutta.
Curse you, Endless Treadmill of Redecoration.
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Engagement
[politics] Had a telling exchange the other night with an academic from China, who was trying to remember the name of the Australian prime minister. 'John Howard,' I said, only to be met with a blank look. 'Paul Keating?' I tried again. 'Ah, yes,' came the response, 'Paul Keating!'
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[madagascar] The U.S. is pushing for new talks in Senegal to break the impasse that is strangling Madagascar:
[At] Brickaville ... the blockade has created an unusual demand for transhipment of goods. "The workers earn four to five times more there than normal wage," a local businessman said. "Twelve million Malagasy francs (US$1900) to transport 25000 tons to Antananarivo," offered a young transporter. "It's a racket," said an operator. "And it's all being done with the backing of Ratsiraka."
Here, the country's main commercial highway is reduced to a narrow concrete path. Men totter over it in single file under sacks of cement, crates of tinned food and baskets of chickens. Others wade across the river, pushing barrels of smuggled petrol. Huddled out of the rain, traders sell rice, beer and tea. A militiaman threatens to shoot anyone too inquisitive about the crossing. Brickaville is becoming a border town, and a rough one at that.
Life in the capital is slowly breaking down. "We can't buy petrol, you can hardly find sugar, many people are out of work," said Noro Adrianjafy, beside her shoe stall in the city's red-tiled market place. "We feel ourselves being suffocated."
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Wednesday, 8 May 2002
[memory] I always mean to post more to the Fray, but you know how it is: you start your own blog, drone on endlessly until you're sick of the sound of your own voice, and before you know it you don't feel like posting shamelessly autobiographical pieces anywhere.
But for whatever reason, today I felt like it. [Now mirrored at this very site.]
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[infotech] Following up earlier posts on Microsoft's strange legal claims, the offending text in the Q&A section has finally been changed—to "The legal transfer of the operating system can go a long way to help an organization get that computer into use with minimal expended resources."
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Monday, 6 May 2002
The Man from Uncool
[music] I was a Rolling Stone reader (of the Australian version) for ten years, lured in by their '100 Greatest Albums of All Time' list of 1987—although I missed the first instalment, so only ever knew the 67 almost-greatest. Over the years their lists came and went—Greatest Albums of the 1980s, Greatest Singles, Greatest Stuff We Had Lying Around in the Glovebox—and I eagerly read them all, appreciating their pointers to new sounds even when disagreeing with their rankings.
They're still doing it, with recent lists of the 50 Coolest and now the 50 Uncoolest Records of All Time (as it Always Is—so musicians, you're in luck: nothing you record from now until the heat death of the universe will be uncool).
The 'coolest' list is as maybe. I've got a few of 'em, and am tempted to hunt down a couple more—Jorge Ben's Africa Brasil and Serge Gainsbourg's Comic Strip, for a start. But these days, the whole idea of 'coolness' leaves me cool.
Give me the uncoolest, baby. Show me where to find Perrey and Kingsley's The In Sound From Way Out, The Moog Cookbook's Ye Olde Space Band, and The Amazing World of Joe Meek. Is This It is it-ish, if not quite this (or is it?), but these days it seems like the weirdest, most unconventional and most interesting sounds are being made—were always being made—by musicians who eschew the black leather jacket for a stylish tweed or a natty blue skivvy.
So call one of my favourite albums of the 1980s uncool, Rolling Stone, and see if I care. When I wake up, yeah I know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the man who wakes up all uncool. And that's cool with me.
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[madagascar] Ravalomanana has been sworn in as president of Madagascar for a second time, in a ceremony drawing 100,000 spectators. While there is some measure of international recognition for his presidency this time around, disaffected provincial governors are pushing ahead with plans to break away from central rule. Meanwhile, yet another bridge near Antananarivo has been destroyed by saboteurs—this one, the fifth, on the main road south to Fianarantsoa and beyond.
Malagasy weblogger Barijaona has identified at least one significant data-entry error in the recent recount.
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[journal] As if one weblog wasn't enough, I'm now posting to another, although less frequently than here. Don't get too excited, though—it's the day job.
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Friday, 3 May 2002
[infotech] Adobe has won a patent suit against Macromedia. Macromedia has filed a countersuit charging that Photoshop and GoLive infringe two patents of its own. So should we grab that Photoshop 7.0 upgrade while we still can, or spurn it as the work of patent-enforcing killjoys? Oh, the dilemma.
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[infotech] If your email account is filling up with ghosts of mailing lists past, here's why [via WombatFile].
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Thursday, 2 May 2002
Microsoft Undo 1.0
[infotech] Thankfully, the Microsoft page mentioned yesterday has been amended. What before read:
If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated PCs, make sure that the hardware donation includes the original operating system software. Keeping the operating system with the PC is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement.
now reads:
If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated PCs, make sure you know the licensing guidelines. For instance, if the hardware donation is an original equipment manufacture machine, the pre-installed operating system license is only valid when used on the original machine for which it was first installed, so it's beneficial to leave it intact.
Lucky thing that keeping the original text with the webpage isn't a legal requirement.
But the 'Questions and Answers' table immediately below persists in its risible claim that "It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine." Does this mean that we can sue Microsoft if a spectacular system crash nukes our hard disk?
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[madagascar] The governors of five of Madagascar's six provinces are preparing to make an 'important and solemn' declaration of independence in response to the imminent declaration of Marc Ravalomanana as president, while one governor has already declared his province a "sovereign state, independent within the confederation of Madagascar." Saboteurs have blown up another key bridge near the capital. There are claims that the declaration of Ravalomanana's outright victory in the poll recount contravened an unofficial agreement behind the Dakar accord, which was expected to lead to new polls. The Organisation of African Unity has called for a referendum to resolve the dispute.
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Wednesday, 1 May 2002
[journal] Amazing. I've lasted well over three months with this same design and am still happy with it. A far cry from before.
Behind the scenes, though, it's been the usual bout of semi-annual blogging ennui. The day before the anniversary of uncertainty, I finally have some certainty about where I'll physically be in a year's time, but find that the uncertainty has migrated inwards and etherwards: Where will my mind be? Where will this site be? Perhaps I've lived with uncertainty for so long that it's woven itself into the fabric of my being.
The trouble is that I can no longer kid myself that this site and/or blog will lead to much: it is what it is, a personal site of modest readership and minimal impact, appreciated by a handful of readers and otherwise widely ignored. Back when I started blogging—nearly two years ago—it was still possible to imagine that putting in a little effort would 'lead somewhere'—you know, like writing a novel 'leads somewhere'; you eventually finish it, mail it out to dozens of publishers and agents, it miraculously leaps out of the slush pile and into print, and ta-dahh! A print-run of a few thousand and enough royalties to keep you in beans for six months await.
But blogging doesn't 'lead' anywhere. And even if it did—would you want to be there? Would you rather be Kottke or Kottke? I stumbled on Leo's site the other day, and had flashbacks to happy childhood hours of listening to The Best (an album my father loved); and even though it's years since I've heard them, every song came tumbling back into my head. Can any website hope to match that?
Similarly, after reading Philip Pullman's masterpiece I'm left wondering why I'm not writing something big, that says something significant about the world, and... I have no answer, except that I'm writing this—and that's the wrong answer.
And yet I can't stop. When I stopped before, I had nowhere to write about the deaths of George Harrison and Stuart Adamson; or before that, nowhere to write about packing up and leaving Oz, or taking that last long drive down the Hume Highway; and those moments have passed, never to be written about in quite the same way I would have. (But once I would have written about these things in a diary, or a letter; why does that no longer feel like an option?)
Worse, stopping would mean pulling out of a circle of friends, new and old, who read this blog in the same way I read theirs—to keep a conversation going, an ongoing buzz of chatter with occasional direct comments back-and-forth. Switching off the comments (which I've also considered—all of those zeroes were looking embarrassing) would be a step backwards for the same reason. But maybe I need to step back...
Erm.
Quick! Look over there!
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Bloody Donors
[infotech] Ed points out the worst case of Microsoft FUD we've seen since, ohhhh, last Tuesday, probably (that's 'fear, uncertainty and doubt', for those who don't follow MS shenanigans—spread to scare people away from the opposition). The company is suggesting, against all common-sense, that it's a legal requirement that "pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine."
The wording of the Win2K licence agreement shows that the legal position is nothing like Microsoft is suggesting: "The SOFTWARE PRODUCT may only be used with the HARDWARE as set forth in this EULA" limits subsequent reuse of the software, not the hardware; 'may only' does not mean 'must always', and they couldn't say 'must' without undermining the entire foundation of international capitalism. A company can't restrict anyone's use of an item that the company itself did not manufacture or sell—otherwise what's to stop Microsoft concocting ridiculous claims that every object with a chip installed has to run its software on pain of torture?
What's next?
If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated battery rechargers, make sure that the donation includes the original batteries. Keeping the batteries with the recharger is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement.
If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated car, make sure that the car includes the original gasoline. Keeping the gasoline with the car is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement.
If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated money, make sure that the donation includes the original owner. Keeping the money with the original owner is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement.
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