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Unfair to whom?

And so it begins again. With Microsoft getting in gear to ship Windows 7 to an anticipating public, the drums of war are once again beating to the tune of unfair advantages and anti-competitive practices. Of course the European Union is at the lead of the march with Opera and Mozilla in tow saying that Windows 7 will tie Internet Explorer to the operating system and give an unfair advantage the browser over it’s competition.

Before you get your flame comment half written, read this: I understand that at Microsoft we have some serious market share and including anything in the operating system get’s us a lot of users because most people aren’t that worried about using “the best” browser, they just use what’s there (which is not a concession that IE 8 isn’t the best browser, it’s pretty damned good )

Let’s look at an alternate scenario. Say for the sake of argument that Microsoft decided that it was going to get out of the browser business. It’s obvious that a PC is of very little good without a browser so we would be pretty silly to ship an operating system with no browser at all. Let’s see, the choices. Obviously we wouldn’t choose Safari, those snarky Apple folks have made way too much fun of us to do that, Opera is nice, but I am betting at the end of the day Microsoft would choose Firefox since it has a huge market share and is well known.

So bam, Windows 7 ships with Firefox, then what? I bet for one that Opera is pretty pissed off. Now we have just given our advantage to someone else.

Don’t forget the customer…

Let’s not forget a simple fact. A browser is a free product. Neither Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera “sell” their browsers. Of course Firefox piggy backs on Google for search and ad revenue. Microsoft, by default, uses Live Search or MSN. The browser has become a landscape to collect user data and advertise. That’s it’s primary function as a business. So what in effect is being asked of Microsoft is to place a mechanism in Windows to help Google make money.

UPDATE: Microsoft notifies the EU that this decision could further grow Google’s search dominance.

Think about that for one second, then try to find another case in history (besides Microsoft, you’ll find it more than once) where a government has stepped in and said “You have to change your product so that it directly drives profit for your competition.” Imagine the thought, I mean, this is still America right?

Let’s go tell Apple that they have to change their iPod so that it has to support ZunePass subscription music. I bet that gets very well received by Apple. But is it not the same situation? Apple has a massively dominant position with the iPod music player, yet nobody is complaining that it doesn’t support subscription music services. I want to be in the room when someone tells Steve Jobs that he not only has to support ZunePass, but provide the hooks in iTunes to allow users to subscribe to the service. Ha!

Who really Wins?

I may be the most capitalist person on earth but my gut is SO WHAT!? The EU is running around the world suing every successful American company it seems. Billions of dollars in fines are being accessed, which they are keeping to support completely un-related programs. Am I the only one that finds that odd? I mean, imagine that I smashed my car into yours. I take you to court over the damage and the government keeps the money I win in court. Hmmmm. Shouldn’t Mozilla and Opera be seeing some of this fine money if they are the ones that have been damaged by Microsoft’s actions? Sounds like Microsoft and Intel are just the first donors in what appears to be a license to print money.

Microsoft is in an interesting position. Slammed by every fan boy on earth for failing to be innovative, and sued into the ground if it tries to do something cool. The sad part is ultimately it’s the customer who loses. All of these supposed “coups” usually result in more free software for the customer.

If you are not following the current trends in Internet Service Providers (ISPs) closely, you might wake up surprised one day. On the tail end of an un-successful, but not over,  fight against net-neutrality, ISPs have decided to take another stab and killing the blistering growth of internet video to save the flailing cable industry.

This time it’s called Metered Bandwidth. With big hitters like Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner on-board and actively testing in markets, I find myself concerned and considering a pre-emptive change to how I get internet access currently.

The problem is simple. Cable companies exist to sell you TV. If you have internet and television through cable, simply examine your bill. If you have something similar to mine you will probably find something like this:

So basically if you count the cable boxes and cable service itself, it accounts for 82% of my already monstrous bill. It’s obvious that they have good reason to be shaking in their boots. With services like Hulu and Netflix providing compelling alternatives at free or close to it ($8.99 for Netflix to stream all you want) it’s a changing world. My father recently sent his cable box back to watch all his basic cable on a Windows Vista Media Center PC and all of his on-demand content on Netflix.

So how do they try to make it up? Let’s look at this AT&T alternative. Your internet fee provides 5GB of bandwidth per month. A single HD quality movie is 7GB. They charge you $1 per Gigabyte when you go over. Let’s look into my mom and dad in this future. They watch a lot of TV. Usually two are on in the house for I would guess 4 hours a day. If both were getting video content online at HD quality, this quickly becomes a problem. If you take the 7GB HD movie, assume it’s two hours long, you can come up to about 3.5GB per hour per TV. So in one evening they could consume 28GB of bandwidth. Extrapolate that for a month, and you come up with something shocking. Do the math, $835 in overage charges.

I may be a cynic, but it sounds like direct approach to try and kill internet delivered video in it’s tracks. The scary part is that the government does not declare internet a utility, so the regulations that were put in place against telephone and cable providers regarding television pricing, do not have any power to protect the consumer.

The end to this horrifying alternate reality is that cable companies protect their dying model, innovation gets crushed, and customers suffer a trifecta of Quality, Value and Choice.

I want to end saying I definitely understand that if they don’t make the money with Cable anymore, they have to come up with an alternate business model. I, for one, do not mind paying more than I pay now for pure internet access. (not more total, more than the internet service portion of my bill) If I was able to get all of my video entertainment online, I would gladly pay $100 a month for fast, reliable and un-metered bandwidth.

I love watching documentaries. I am a hopeless addict of them. Tonight I decided to watch “The History of the Internet” on the Science channel and I have to admit my Microsoft hairs on the back of my neck are raised and annoyed.

If I had to start with a history of the Internet it would begin with things like the beginnings of TCP/IP, goofy app names like Kermit and Archie and a bunch of geeks sitting in college computer labs around the world.

This show instead decided to start with dark red and black imposing images of Bill Gates. The use of words like Predatory, Monolithic and Miscreants just went further to point out what is in effect a total attack on Microsoft.

Crudely packaged as a battle royal between Netscape and Microsoft, it is beyond clearly biased, painting rosy tech bubble goodness and good vibes on Netscape and characterizing Microsoft as the monster who only wakes to swallow unwitting passers by.

Painting employees like me as ruthless. Painting Bill Gates as mean and hateful. It’s all pretty petty.

We have all heard this song and dance before, none of it is new territory, I just am trying to figure out how the Science Channel has the balls to call it, “The History of the Internet.”

John Heilemann continues in part two to point his rose colored glasses at Google nearly pretending that the likes of Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, Dogpile never existed and that before Google there was just no way in the world to find anything on the Internet.

Somehow the faux history of the Internet manages to begin with Netscape vs. Microsoft and skip ahead to Google and somehow skip over what I feel is pretty much the entire history of the Internet.

Where is the start of e-commerce? Where is the beginning of video online? What websites kicked off it’s popularity? What about the online music boom? Email anyone?

I am done ranting, it’s just really, really bad journalism.

After answering an email to a family member about a virus warning email she had received, and giving her pretty close to the same advice, I decided to dig up this treasure again for the world to see and love, because if anything is true, it’s this.

The Email Facts of Life

1. Big companies don’t do business via chain letter. Bill Gates is not giving you $1,000, and Disney is not giving you a free vacation. There is no baby food company issuing class-action checks. You can relax; there is no need to pass it on “just in case it’s true.” Furthermore, just because someone said in the message, four generations back, that “we checked it out and it’s legit,” that does not actually make it true.
2. There is no kidney theft ring in New Orleans. No one is waking up in a bathtub full of ice, even if a friend of a friend swears it happened to their cousin. If you are hell-bent on believing the kidney-theft ring stories, please see: urbanlegends.tqn.com/library/weekly/aa062997.htm. And I quote: “The National Kidney Foundation has repeatedly issued requests for actual victims of organ thieves to come forward and tell their stories. None have.” That’s “none” as in “zero.” Not even your friend’s cousin.
3. Neiman Marcus doesn’t really sell a $200 cookie recipe. And even if they do, we all have it. And even if you don’t, you can get a copy at www.bl.net/forwards/cookie.html. Then, if you make the recipe and decide that the cookies are that awesome, feel free to pass the recipe on.
4. We all know 500 ways to drive roommates crazy, irritate co-workers and creep out people on an elevator. We also know exactly how many engineers, college students, Usenet posters and people from each and every world ethnicity it takes to change a lightbulb.
5. EVEN IF THE latest NASA rocket disaster(s) DID contain plutonium that went particulate over the Eastern seaboard, do you REALLY think this information would reach the public via an AOL chain letter?
6. There is no “Good Times” virus. In fact, you should never, ever, ever forward any e-mail containing any virus warning unless you first confirm it at an actual site of an actual company that actually deals with virii. Try www.norton.com. And even then, don’t forward it. We don’t care.
7. If your CC: list is regularly longer than the actual content of your message, you’re probably going to hell.
8. If you’re using Outlook, IE or Netscape to write e-mail, turn off the “HTML encoding.” Those of us on UNIX shells can’t read it and don’t care enough to save the attachment and then view it with a Web browser, since you’re probably forwarding us a copy of the goddamned Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe anyway.
9. IF YOU STILL absolutely must forward that 10th-generation message from a friend, at least have the decency to trim the eight miles of headers showing everyone else who’s received it over the last six months. It sure wouldn’t hurt to get rid of all the “)” that begin each line. Besides, if it has gone around that many times — I’ve probably already seen it.
10. Craig Shergold in England is not dying of cancer or anything else at this time and would like everyone to stop sending him their business cards. He apparently is also no longer a “little boy” either.

My Thoughts on the Topic

These are unsubstantiated opinions, I’d love to get the research and have hard numbers behind them.

• Forwarded cats, puppies, religious themes, chain letters and jokes are second only to spam (and in my opinion they are spam) in what wastes Internet bandwidth.
• More viruses have been spread via email forwards than any other method.
• Forwards are exponential. Every forwarder you get added to, finds your name on their friends, and their friends……
• Forwards can get people fired (ask my Dad if you don’t believe me)
• I hate forwards
• I hate forwards more than I hate people who kill puppies
• I hate forwards more than I hate people who club baby seals
• I hate forwards more than I hate getting kicked in the nuts
• Did I mention I really really really hate forwards?

Have a nice day!

We had our cable connected at our new house Wednesday and dang…..that’s some fast stuff, here is a snap from the speed test.

This is a direct snap downloading a Ubuntu/KDE4 Image for VMWare.