Entropic Cogitations

I know that there are probably many honest hard working 9 to 5 shlubs at SCO, but when I hear news like this,

I can’t help but think it couldn’t happen to anyone more deserving.

“The net loss for the first quarter of fiscal year 2006 was almost $4.6 million …

SCO Chief Financial Officer Bert Young blamed the decrease in revenue on the continued competitive pressures on its Unix products and services from Linux during a press conference.”

Hitched your wagon to the wrong horse eh Darl ? How’s that Linux licensing scam coming along?

Maybe Darl can get Mike Anderer to call Steve Ballmer. Microsoft may want to buy some more Unix licenses for tens of millions of dollars. Or Ballmer could convince Baystar into another PIPE deal.
:-p

Florida 79 Kentucky 64

Florida has now beaten KY four times in a row!. And this is basketball we are talking about, NOT football. For all those who were hoping for a “recovery” based on the LSU and Tennessee games, welcome back to Tubby Ball. I maintain what I had said in my post after the Vandy sweep. Tubbys era has been a journey downhill. From excellence to mediocrity.

People say the expectations of KY fans are too high. But I think they should be. This is KY basketball. And YES, anything short of a championship is a disappointment. So a 19-11 season and the middle rung of the SEC is definitely NOT acceptable to me, nor should it be for any KY fan.

I have never understood this concept, and I hear it all the time now. It seems like everyday you read / hear in the media about someone “demanding” an apology for being wronged. People do it, groups do it, and even nations do it.

What good does it do to DEMAND an apology? And if you demand one and get one – say at gunpoint, does it actually mean anything? Are they really sorry for what they did or are they only saying “Im’ sorry” to avoid the consequences?. I have never demanded an apology from anyone. That does not mean I endorse being a doormat by any means. When I am wronged, I make it abundantly clear to the person who wronged me about what they had done. If they then feel sorry for what they have done and apologize, I can then choose to accept their apology or not. If they don’t, then I am clear as to where they stand.

Demanding an apology is a sort of macho streak, like twisting someone’s arm in the schoolyard till they tell you they are sorry. In a mature adult world it is completely meaningless. In fact even if the person that wronged you felt sorry for what they had done, how would you know if you demanded an apology and got one?

Just a thought …

I just wanted to say … BOOOYAAAHH.

LINKY

Not that I expect anything miraculous to come out of this. But cockroaches HATE sunshine and I can just see the likes of Anderer, McBride and Ballmer scurrying about while the Nazgul lawyers from IBM shine the spotlight on them. And I am DYING to know who at Microsoft suggested Baystar to invest in SCO. I would especially like to see them get cross examined by IBM’s lawyers to find out under who’s orders were they acting. This goes directly to the heart of Microsoft interfering in IBM’s business. Hey DOJ, are you taking notes ? After all Microsoft’s self proclaimed evangelist Scoble thinks transparency is good thing, right?

Meanwhile, it appears that Judge Wells is catching on to SCO’s perpetual discovery games. I love hearing the word DENIED when it comes to SCO. As everyone other than Microsoft and SCO in this case feels. Enough is Enough.

As always, follow Groklaw for the latest in this insane lawsuit.

Vanderbilt!, not Florida or Tennessee. We got swept by Vanderbilt!.

And there’s more misery yet to come. Sheesh. I don’t care how many people say Tubby Smith is a nice guy. So what? My uncle Billy is a nice guy. That doesn’t mean he can coach KY. And as far as defending Tubby’s record, I think this season speaks for itself. It is very telling when a coach’s best year is his first. KY has been on a steady sure decline ever since.

We have blamed the players enough. It is one thing to rebuild a program from the ground up. It is quite another to be handed a prestigious program that was at the top of the heap and run it into the ground. What has happened to KY basketball over the past 8 years of “Tubby Ball” is nothing short of shameful. KY is not even going to MAKE the NCAA. The last time we heard that was when we were on probation.

I’m sorry, but TUBBY HAS GOT TO GO!

Google has an informal Corporate Motto – “Don’t be Evil”

Microsoft today finally came out and announced that they will be selling an antivirus / antispyware product for $49.99 per year. You can find the ZDNet report here. If this doesn’t meet the definition of PURE EVIL in the IT world, I don’t think anything will.

This just makes my Blood Boil. I cannot believe that people are going to let Microsoft get away with this! Am I living in some Twilight Zone? Can’t people see the how WRONG this is? Microsoft is going to charge you for a product that protects you against viruses, worms and spyware that ONLY exist BECAUSE of the vulnerabilities in their lousy operating system. And of course they will pre-install this as a “trial” on every new PC and I am sure as soon as it reaches expiration, the Nag popups will begin. Grandmas all over the world and Joe six pack will pony up their “protection money” because GASP they got a “Windows Warning” that told them they were unprotected. Despite all the evangelism of the Robert Scobles of this world, this company has proven time and again that it has zero ethics. This is the last straw for me. This once and for all proves to me that this company has NO redeeming qualities whatsoever. And I don’t care how many zillions Bill Gates gives to charity.

A while back, when I saw this move coming (when Microsoft bought Giant antispyware and GeCAD antivirus), I sent an email to my friend Matt. He told me that after reading that article he was genuinely angry, and would swear off Microsoft if this ever became a reality. I guess he got to keep his word as he recently acquired an iMac.

I am so ANGRY today that I can’t even come up with proper analogies. Imagine if your doctor tomorrow was sloppy in your treatment and caused you to have multiple ailments. And this happened over and over again. And the doctor absolved himself of ALL responsibility and blamed you and the big bad world for all your problems. Now imagine the same doctor wants to charge you for additional medicine to treat the very ailments he was responsible for! And you have to pay this protection racket money year after year. In the real world, you would sue this doctor out of existence and the AMA would revoke his license. But in the twilight zone I seem to be living in, we reward this kind of behavior by making Microsoft the richest company in the world.

Can’t anyone see that the only way for the Windows one care business to be successful is for Microsoft to continue to have vulnerabilities and for there to be a million viruses and worms that plague it? If the new Windows Vista is the ultimate Secure OS, would there be any need for Windows One Care? When the Windows security team discovers a new vulnerability do you think they will share that info with Kaspersky or AVG ?

I am genuinely angry and depressed today. The lack of moral outrage on the part of the tech media has made me lose all faith in them. I am reminded of a Simpsons episode, when Burns takes a recycling factory and makes animal paste by sweeping the ocean clean. Lisa tells him “You haven’t changed at all. You’re still evil. And when you’re trying to be good, you’re even more evil!” That to me, is Microsoft in a nutshell.

Yes, as the URL of this website states I truly DESPISE this company. And with good reason.

The president in the latest State of the Union Address spoke about America’s addiction to oil. I couldn’t agree more. A shift to an ethanol economy would drastically shift the energy balance in our favor.

I have heard the various arguments against ethanol. Most of them revolve around the net energy balance of manufacturing ethanol versus the amount of energy one gets from burning it. However, even the authors of some of these studies admit that if the same stipulations were applied to petroleum, it too would turn up as a loser on the energy balance. In fact even using such stringent guidelines, ethanol is a lot more energy efficient compared to petroleum. Yes it takes energy to make ethanol, but how far do you take the life cycle analysis? From the tractors used to plough the field, to the steel used to build the Walmart stores in the town the farmer lives in, everything contributes to the net energy balance.

The people arguing against ethanol on the energy balance basis, often forget one important point. It is important for a fuel to be energy efficient, but it must also be in a usable form. I can hand you a lump of coal and technically it has say, 5000 BTUs. But that is completely useless to you till I burn it in a power plant and give it to you in the form of electricity that you can use. Even if I lose 50% in the conversion, it is still worth it! That is the other side of the equation people often ignore.

Hydrogen as a fuel does have its obvious advantages, especially on the pollution front, but Hydrogen use today still is a distant dream. Compared to that, there are cars on the road today made by GM and Ford that will run any fuel from 85% Ethanol to 100% Gasoline. All Brazil had to do was mandate it. And even the cost of a retrofit is less than $150 per car. The oil companies have an excellent distribution system in place that can easily be converted to delivering ethanol to gas pumps. And once market forces take hold, competition will drive prices down.

Ethanol technology is not super high tech by any means. Investment dollars into the technology will skyrocket once ethanol becomes the established fuel, and the side benefits can be immense. Why couldn’t the tractors that plough the fields to grow the corn run on ethanol? Why couldn’t the trucks that deliver the grains to the fermentation plants run on it too? One can ferment almost any cellulose material to ethanol. And the material left after fermentation can be burned and used as fuel to power the plants that manufacture ethanol. In fact, this process has proven so efficient in Brazil that the plants burning the dregs produce enough steam and electricity that they sell to the national grid.

Ethanol can be used not just for automobiles but can also be used to fuel power plants which are currently dependent on natural gas and fuel oil. Imagine if we could free up all the gasoline we use for cars and the US Govt. no longer had to maintain a SPR. The psychological impact of that would be huge!.

Not only would this be good for America, but the developing countries too would benefit from this. Sure we will always have the need for petroleum, and not everything can use ethanol for fuel. Cold climate environments may dictate some mixture of gas + ethanol for cars. But the relative percentage of that would be small. To use something like that as an argument against ethanol is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. If we are no longer dependent on petroleum for fuel, supply vs demand equations would drive prices down for all items from Jet fuel to Petrochemicals and Pharmaceuticals. I work in the Chemical Industry and our #1 cost today is energy. We cannot but help transfer those costs to you, the customer. An ethanol economy would have a disruptive influence, but as we have often seen in stagnant markets, disruption is good.

The oil companies themselves are slowly but surely molding themselves into energy companies. They will adapt and survive. Like I said before, someone has to make the ethanol and deliver it to your doorstep. And I see no reason why the Exxon-Mobils of this world can’t be the people that do that. The only losers in this ethanol economy I see are the OPEC oil barons. But I am not going to shed any tears for them. They have had their run and made more than enough money. If ethanol takes off, hopefully we wont get into a price war and revert back to petroleum – just because OPEC decides to cut prices by 10 cents a gallon. If we push for an Ethanol economy, we can take control of our own destiny. The time for us to act is NOW.

I hope we get to see this dream fulfilled and soon.

In a recent interview with CNET news, Jim Allchin, group VP of Microsoft stated “Safety and security is the overriding feature that most people will want to have Windows Vista for”. I can’t help but to roll my eyes skyward. Here we go again. How many times have we heard that before? With EVERY new release of Windows?

Wasn’t Windows XP the “most secure operating system” MS had made? Oh how things change in 5 years. Here’s a direct quote from Allchin – “A standard Windows XP computer can get hacked the moment it is connected to the Internet”. He got that right at least. Does that sound like the most secure OS on the planet to you?

So now the push to Vista is ON. Microsoft is the only company in the world that can trash its own products to sell its new products. “Buy Windows 2000 and avoid blue screens of death”. “Buy Vista because XP is insecure”. I can’t imagine the GM of Ford or Chevy going out to the world and saying “Our 2000 Cavalier / Taurus is a death trap – you need the latest 06′ model”. That’s what you get when you have an illegal monopoly controlling your computing environment.

It amazes me that people still believe the pile of poop from Microsoft every time a so called new release comes out from Redmond. There have been many references on the web about Windows apologists acting like abused spouses. And in saying that I am in no way making light of a serious social issue. And NO I am not calling anyone at Microsoft a wife beater. But when I hear the people defend Microsoft, the parallels are uncanny.

The people who use Windows claim they are dependent on MS. They are reluctant to leave because MS and the Tech media have filled them with the FUD that life will be miserable if you leave them. They have all this “software” that will only run on Windows – the “hanging on for the sake of the children” excuse. They get spanked every time the latest worm / virus / spyware infestation hits their computer, but it is always someone else’s fault. Or it is their own fault for not protecting their computer. They tout the redeeming features of MS and Gates – “He is such a wonderful guy, he gives billions to charity”. And with every new service pack / bug fix / new release, you get the “things will be different from now on” excuse. Sounds exactly like a battered wife to me and for someone who has been in EMS for years, they sound like the same excuses. And if someone gets in their face about the truth, they will lash out at Apple or Linux. They will point out all the vulnerabilities in the other OS’s. Never mind that there are over a 100,000 viruses/worms for Windows and zero for OSX so far. I call that the “my man may be a wife beater, but your mans farts smell” excuse. In fact, I have never met a Windows defender in this world – only apologists.

I used to spend my spare time fixing the malware infested machines of friends and co-workers. I find it hard to sympathize anymore with people that are deliberately willing to let themselves get abused over and over again. I find myself thinking that I am an “enabler” when I do that.

I am paraphrasing a quote on a website I read, but there comes a time when a certain company has crossed that psychological “screw you” line just so many times that you don’t give a crap about “the next best thing” that comes out of their door.

I got myself out of this abusive relationship 5 years ago after having gone through all the iterations from DOS to XP/SP2. One fine day I decided I just had “had enough” and walked out of the MS world. And I have never once looked back. You can do it too.

Recently, Microsoft announced that they are going “above and beyond” the call of duty by offering to license parts of the the Windows Server Source code. The press release can be found HERE.

In Europe, the EU Commission had ordered Microsoft to license its protocols to help servers interact with Windows Servers. This was to prevent a repeat of the way Microsoft had competed unfairly in the 90’s. You know … the Monopoly thing. The EU commission had to ORDER Microsoft to hand over CLEAR documentation regarding Server protocols. So, Microsoft hands over documents – 12,000 pages worth. But it is incomprehensible. So the commission threatens to fine Microsoft $2.4 Million per day unless Microsoft complies. So what does Microsoft do ? Instead of providing the documentation that they have been repeatedly ORDERED to provide, they throw a bunch of server source code on the table. Their way of saying – “Here, you figure it out!”.

And they have the gall to say in their press release that – “Microsoft is going far beyond the European Commission’s March 2004 decision and its legal obligations to provide companies with the technical specifications of its proprietary communications protocols.”

What a Crock !

I know some of you are thinking – “Hey, they offered the Source Code”. Isn’t that the “ultimate documentation” as Microsoft themselves describe it ? No it’s NOT. It’s a cute way of Microsoft circumventing the legal order. And no one is laughing.

Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say I have a new car and you want to supply the fuel for the car. But you have no idea what kind of fuel is supposed to go in the car. For years, I kept this information secret and that’s how I illegally maintained my monopoly. By making sure only my fuel would work with my car. But now I tell you I have reformed my ways. So once again, you ask me for documentation about the type of fuel, – and I supply you with reams of pages about the history and mechanics of the internal combustion engine. Doesn’t help you one bit. So you threaten me with fines and I hand you the keys to the car. My way of saying – “Here you go, you figure it out!” Now tell me, how does that help you ? And to add insult to injury I will charge you rental fees for the car. Oh, and I will provide you 500 hours of free tech support. And all you wanted was for me to say “87 Octane”.

These are the kind of games Microsoft plays over and over again. And the Tech media just eat up every word that comes out of the Microsoft PR department. It took Andrew Tridgell years of painstaking analysis of Windows Server packet transmissions to come up with SAMBA. Without SAMBA only Windows machines would be able to talk to Windows Servers.

This kind of crap from Redmond makes a mockery of the efforts of people like the SAMBA team and anti trust settlements around the world. But then again, I never did believe that Microsoft had ever reformed their ways.

So, I finally broke down and decided to join the millions of other bloggers around the world, and THIS is my first post.

I just watched KY eke out a 2 point victory against Arkansas after being down 18. We got hot with the 3’s this game. But this team has NO offensive scheme, and all I hear from Tubby is about “taking people off the dribble”. I think that is a recipe for disaster.

UK has gone steadily down over the years since Tubby took the helm. The time for excuses has passed. Rupp used to be a place people feared and KY used to win half their games just based on the intimidation factor. I don’t think there is a team out there now that is scared to play KY at home anymore.

Only time will tell. But the 1996 – 1998 teams seem like a distant memory now. Will we have to go through another 18 year drought before we win a Championship? For a program the caliber of KY that was handed on a silver platter to Tubby, to be where we are now – not even nationally ranked – is a crying shame. And I have but one man to blame.