Bill Gates, OLPC Project, Educational Content

 Computing, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 292007
 

Just seen part of an interview with Bill Gates on News24 where Microsoft’s educational projects were being discussed, and the One Laptop Per Child project was brought up. Bill sort of avoided trying to talk about it by claiming that hardware costs will continue to come down and the real problem is about educational content.

It is true that hardware costs tend to come down … to a point where prices stay fairly static but specifications increase. He has also glossed over the fact that the OLPC laptop is semi-ruggedised with features specifically intended to help with its use as a learning tool rather than a working tool; including the special display which has a special low-power black and white mode intended for reading eBooks. Not something found in a typical laptop!

The other thing that was totally ignored is that the Sugar user interface (running on a stripped down RedHat) is designed to be easy to use for children rather than rely on some conventional approach to desktop computing. For instance there is an easy way to see your local “neighbourhood” (press F1) … the local mesh of internetworked OLPCs.

However Bill hit the nail on the head by bringing up the content issue. It is the real problem and in fact the OLPC project highlights this and has a prominent area on their Wiki to deal with content. Perhaps Bill should put his money where his mouth is and help fund the content projects … it may not help Microsoft directly (although given that the content is intended to be “open-source” there is no reason why a Microsoft operating system could not use it as well as the OLPC laptops) but it would help education.

IT: Software Patents and Microsoft Bullying Open Source Developers

 Computing  No Responses »
May 192007
 

Microsoft has recently claimed that open source software breaches exactly 235 software patents. Apparently open source developers “burn down the patents system”. Well my response to that is “well done open source developers”. Software patents are the biggest scam out there … bigger by far that all those scams we receive in our inbox every day. I quite happily say that companies trading on their portfolio of software patents are amongst the slimiest examples of capitalism and that even Microsoft were not that bad. Of course now they seem determined to join them.

A bit of tedious history … patents were first introduced as a mechanism to protect individual inventors from being ripped off by large companies. The 19th century is full of examples of individual inventors being ripped off by large companies. So patents for “hardware” inventions are not necessarily bad things.

Software is somewhat different. Software developers utilise software libraries written by others without inspecting the libraries for ‘patent violations’. When writing new code, they will come up with solutions to problems without realising that the solution they come up with has been used before. For instance one of the many algorithms for sorting is the insertion sort; it is not the most efficient sort, but is efficient enough (and probably more importantly is a stable algorithm) and is so simple that it has probably been re-invented many times. Certainly I thought of it back when I wrote a database engine for the BBC micro. There are many examples of software patents that are this simple.

For example, Microsoft holds a patent on a mechanism for navigating a web page in a graphical browser using the keyboard which requires that the ‘current link’ is highlighted in some way. Not only is there an example of a web browser using this mechanism before Microsoft’s patent (Lynx … a text browser that does exactly what is described in Microsoft’s patent), but it is a mechanism that is so obvious that it has been invented many times independently. Text editors on text terminals in the 1970s (and earlier!) used some sort of highlighting to indicate the current ‘active point’ on the screen and many of these editors were developed independently. So Microsoft’s patent here is a development of prior art (the only new thing is the graphical interface), and the basic concept of pointing where the ‘active point’ is, is one of those things that is obvious.

Back to Microsoft’s claim that open-source software is in breach of its patents … what exactly are these patents ? Well Microsoft doesn’t appear to be letting anyone know, which is kind of underhand as it stops open source developers from attempting to remove the problematic code. Linux Torvalds also points out that Microsoft hasn’t released their own source code to see how many patents they might be in breach of. Who knows ? Perhaps Microsoft has taken open source code and then patented concepts developed by open source developers … certainly it is known that Microsoft’s TCP/IP software is based on the BSD TCP/IP network software. Linux also points out that Microsoft has probably used many technologies developed by IBM such as demand paging and the like.

Most sensible people seem to believe that Microsoft’s tactic here is to spread FUD over the use of open source software to encourage people to use their own software. Perhaps they should spend more time on making their software better rather than indulge in dubious legal practices.

The Vista Ripoff

 Computing, General  No Responses »
Feb 162007
 

So I was reading a review of Vista on The Register and was hardly surprised to see that the consumers are being ripped off again. It seems that they think that Microsoft can’t do currency conversions without making mistakes … I guess this is not too surprising given this is the company that gave us a calculator that made basic arithmetic mistakes.

However I decided to do a little checking myself and decided to use Amazon as the benchmark on differing costs on “Vista Ultimate Full” :-

Amazon.co.uk

£327
Amazon.com

$379

Next I converted the Amazon.com cost into pounds using £1 = $1.95 which is close enough for the purposes of this little rant :-

Amazon.com in pounds

£194

But wait! I forgot to add UK’s VAT rate of 17.5% :-

Amazon.com in pounds + VAT

£228

Now it is pretty obvious to me that £228 is considerably less than £327. Enough that I should do the calculation the other way around :-

Amazon.co.uk – VAT

£278

And to convert it into dollars :-

Amazon.co.uk – VAT in dollars

$543

So instead of $379, we in the UK pay $542 for our copies of Vista. That’s an increase of 43%! Now I could forgive a little bit of flab in the cost, but 43% is a little much to swallow. Apparently when The Register contacted Microsoft about this puzzling price discrepancy, Microsoft claimed they adjusted their prices to suit the market … or to put it another way, they gouge as much out of the consumer as they think they can get away with. Obviously they think that the average UK consumer is a bit of a numbskull.

It would be nice to prove them wrong. And ask the EU to take a little look into this matter.

Of course Microsoft is not the only company that tries to rip us off with the excuse of ‘tax variations’ and other bullshit reasons. Apple sells the Mac OSX operating system at widely varying prices :-

Apple.com US Price for OSX

$129
Apple.com UK price for OSX

£89

Hmm. Doesn’t seem like a ripoff compared with Vista does it ? Take a closer look :-

Apple.com UK price without VAT

£76
Apple.com UK price without VAT in dollars

$147

Hey that’s only 14% more expensive in the UK than the US. All worship Apple! No wait … that’s still a huge ripoff, but just not quite as excessive as Microsoft.

Of course this gives the Linux, Solairs and *BSD marketing types a good slogan :-

£0 or $0 – No ripoff there!

It is interesting to see that Microsoft could not give The Register reviewer a free review copy … you might understand it if it were a small company with a valuable product, but Microsoft and Vista hardly fit in there. Microsoft are probably wondering why they didn’t get a positive review 🙂

 Newer Entries