JDPFu.com 2025

Sometimes companies do slimy things. It is usually because they didn’t think through the decision and I suspect Canonical simply didn’t think thru this decision before doing it.

Think again, Canonical.

BTW, Canonical puts together and markets the Ubuntu distribution of the Linux operating system. I have 15+ Ubuntu systems running here – most are servers. Ubuntu is based on FLOSS superheros Debian and Gnome and thousands of other FLOSS project teams, like Banshee. I don’t want to downplay what Canonical has done for Linux and usability, but the Debian guys do a tremendous amount of completely free work that is the base of Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions.

Amazon Affiliate

Banshee is a popular audio player on Linux. Banshee has an Amazon MP3 Music affiliate key embedded in their program so MP3 purchases made by users through that interface give them a little finders’ fee. This is common practice in open source software. Firefox earned millions of dollars last year from Google doing this.

Think again, Canonical.

Big Money

Banshee earned less than $3100 last year from this affiliate program. Further, the Banshee developers give all that money to the Gnome foundation – another critical FLOSS software project that almost every Linux distribution makes use of. Canonical decided to change that affiliate code in the Banshee version released with Ubuntu so that Canonical keeps 75% of the money and passes on 25% to Banshee. Uh … sorry … Canonical. Didn’t your mother teach you that stealing is wrong?

Think again, Canonical.

Ask and Negotiate First

Canonical, if you had contacted the Banshee guys and worked out an agreement, I bet that some win-win solution could be found. Sure, your distribution of Banshee as the default music player will certainly increase the number of users and probably increase the amount of cash the affiliate program makes.

Canonical. You are acting like Facebook and Apple and Microsoft. Stop it.

With the new Debian Squeeze release and Mint-Linux, Ubuntu users have viable alternatives. I hope that Canonical/Ubuntu rethinks this stealing and comes up with a published revenue sharing model that works for all FLOSS projects they distribute. Hummmmm. That has me thinking …

This morning, I was going through the normal RSS feeds that I read daily. Slashdot.org is in the top 5 reads.

As I write this there is an article titled Dell Knew About Computer Failures in the RSS feed. Clicking on it initially took me to a page with that title, but no content.

CrossChris writes " Freedom of information’ has revealed details of a lawsuit against Dell where they admit that they knew about a high failure rate of their products, but hid it from their corporate customers! From the article: ‘…Dell apparently encouraged its salespeople and technicians to not let customers know about known defects, and said internally that most customers (those who had not bought more than 50 machines) would be subject to “fix on fail”—that is, the company would only help them when their machines broke down. An internal presentation on the Optiplex GX and SX270 acknowledges that the company had discovered “quality issues,” but that employees should not proactively bring them to customers’ attention.’"

I read about this story yesterday on anther web site, so seeing it removed from /. is concerning. OTOH, I bet Dell is a major advertiser on /. so having the story removed would be a smart moved to retain those revenues. I don’t know that the article was removed – it could just be a publishing glitch or some other technical issue.

There is a /. discussion page related to the article still with a few comments.

A quick search of Dell on slashdot shows they haven’t pulled too many negative stories previously.

Arstechnica didn’t pull their version of the story.

My interest is mainly from a laptop that died a few weeks after the warranty ended. Dell Support was completely useless.

Update 7/2015 Oracle isn’t screwing just F/LOSS projects, if appears. Is Oracle really forcing enterprise customers to use their cloud?

Seems that MSFT might be doing the same for Office 365 to get higher client counts. At least 1 major company who never intends to use Office 365 got a better license deal just by signing up. They never intend to use the service and are migrating to Postgres and LibreOffice as quickly as possible.

Original Text:
Oracle is effectively killing some of the most important, fantastic, open source and FLOSS tools that we’ve come to depend upon. This is really sad for the FOSS world. It will not be long before these currently open tools disappear because Oracle can’t directly make any money from supporting them. Let me explain.

Oracle is the New Evil Empire

Oracle has never been very friendly to FOSS or FLOSS, but since buying Sun Microsystems, they have effectively killed some of the most important projects.

The Almost Dead List – Some Already DEAD

• OpenSolaris
• ZFS
• MySQL
• InnoDB
• Java
• OpenJDK
• NetBeans
• VirtualBox
• Oracle VM
• GlassFish
• OpenOffice

Here’s a list of FOSS from Oracle that will probably be only useful for historical purposes soon. Most of the leaders for these projects that Oracle got with the Sun purchase have left Oracle after trying to fit into the new corporate culture. Full disclosure: I’ve owned Oracle AND Sun Microsystems stock over the years. Since the Sun purchase, I sold ORCL and haven’t owned any shares on over a year.

If you are currently using any of those tools, you need to make strategic plans for alternates. Oracle *will be killing them off. Some will be saved by creating new FLOSS projected based on the last open license version.

Alternatives for Some

• ZFS – BTRFS
• MySQL – Postgres
• Java – Ruby or C++ (or any number of lesser known languages like D for F#)
• VirtualBox – KVM or VMware Player
• OpenOffice – LibreOffice

Or you can just plan to purchase the right to use the tools at Enterprise Software Costs. Not cheap.

I’m not actively using most of the software listed above except VirtualBox, OpenOffice and MySQL. For those, I have alternatives, but like almost everyone else, change isn’t easy until it is forced on us.

I’m not anti-corporations, but Oracle has not been a good steward and I have no reason to believe they will change. Just look at the handling of the OpenSolaris shutdown. I was a member of a local OpenSolaris UG. The leader was a well known and respected former Sun Systems Engineer, currently working for Oracle. I miss the UG. Oracle has proven they cannot be completely trusted. They are willing to change the rules.

Without the GPL, BSD and similar FOSS licenses, we’d be completely screwed. Now is a good time to donate to the EFF or FSF. A $20 donation will go a long way.

A Newspaper with no Date

Crazy, right?

We’ve all come across web article pages that don’t have date on them. In the web-time, days or years can matter, yet when a website doesn’t tag every article with a date, you have no idea how current there information is. This is fine for a very small subset of articles, but when reading an article on Windows7 or Xen virtualization, certainly you can understand that the date of the article provides context for what the writer knew. If the Windows7 article was written in August 2009 or earlier, they were looking at an RC, Release Candidate, not the final publicly released version.

Reading a blog or article that isn’t a date tagged is like getting a newspaper without a date.

This applies to any document. Think of how much adding just a date to a page and document tell each reader. What happens when there are 2 or more versions of a document? Well, if every page has a date on it, there is not issue. The reader KNOWS which is the latest information.

Time matters, so please put a date on your articles, blogs, websites, AND paper documents.

I was listening to a podcast today where they discussed eBooks. That got me thinking about what I want in an eBook Reader ….
A Kindle ?

• Inexpensive – less than the cost of 10 paperback books and it needs to include 10 books with the device – less than $100
• Small – smaller than a paperback book with 100 pages – think of all those pads on StarTrek, yep that’s the size.
• Light weight – it should weigh about the same as a paperback scifi book
• Beautiful reading screen – I don’t know how to explain this – but I know it when I see it.
• Control of font sizes – 6pt.-32pt. At least 10 different sizes.
• Open platform – support both the proprietary and open document formats. HTML/CSS, TXT, common MS-Office files, Open Office files, PDF. Minimal graphics.
• MP3 player – I suppose a case could be made for AAC and WMA protected formats, but that has nothing to do with my personally ripped CDs. This should be an option based on the extra memory to hold 200, 500, 500,000 MP3s.
• Reasonable Battery life – rechargeable in under 3 hours and it should work 4 days for reading only; standard USB cable used as a charger, not some stupid proprietary cable.
• Enough memory to hold 5-10 books; I don’t need 200 books.
• Back light, but it will eat the battery, big time.
• Looks like a HD when connected to a PC, OS-X or Linux device – definitely not MTP.
• USB connect to full sized keyboard and mice
• Quiet; auto-off if the page isn’t turned within a timeout period.
• 1-handed use. Handy buttons and scrolling designed by a human factors engineer, not some other type of engineer or software developer. Customization of the button use would be nice, esp for left/right handed use.
• Quick startup and back-to-bookmark; pagination shouldn’t impact my reading. Do it in the background.
• Auto-sync documents with a folder on a computer
• Password protected.

Ok, those are the basics, but I’d like a little more …

• cell phone – GSM or CDMA; I should bring my own cell plan
• Email / Contact manager; think CrackBerry with all that it provides
• wifi for web browsing w/ WPA; minimal browsing
• EDGE, UMTA, EVDO, 3G or faster wireless data
• if the MP3 player is included, add a voice recorder (MP3/MP4, not WAV)
• GPS – well, why not?

Most importantly, I don’t want to pay for a book twice. No checking back to a central server for post-purchase validation. No expiration of the content, books don’t expire. Transfer of the ownership – or loaning it out must be allowed. No matter what, 70 years later or until the copyright expires, I should still be able to read the book. Tagging bought books with personal information embedded in the book DRM is fine – name, address, email, and credit card number. This will cause folks to be careful with each book.

Ok, so when we’re all done,

• you still pay for books
• you don’t need a different cell phone device
• you don’t need a different music device
• you don’t need a special charger, any USB charger will work

After writing all this down, it seems converting a BlackBerry into an eBook reader would be easier than adding email, calendar, and internet connectivity to an eBook.

Someone on /. recommended this @ $130.

Being elected President of the USA is serious, not a popularity contest like in High School. This seal reminds me of the honor required for this government office, in particular.

1. Taxation – [[Fair Tax]]
2. War on Terrorism – how do you negotiate with people that want you dead? You don’t.
3. [[Term Limits|TermLimits]]
4. Energy Policy – [[Thoughts On Energy]] Ethanol is a waste; Coal, Solar, Wind with government incentives; why isn’t drilling happening in ANWR, Alaska? Popular Mechanics Article
5. [[Campaign Contributions]] – if you can’t vote in an election, then you shouldn’t be allowed to give money
6. Health Care – More competition; posted costs for all work; less government interference; shopping across state lines and small biz/individuals placed into the same insurance "Group" so they don’t get screwed by insurance rates.
7. Immigration – Fair is fair; no reward for breaking laws
   [[Thoughts on Immigration]]
   *[[Shortage of HiTech Workers in USA?]]
   **[[Saxby Update on Immigration August 2007]]
8. [[Education]] – School Choice
9. Abortion – ProLife/ProChoice
10. Tort Reform – loser pays to prevent lawsuit abuse

Ok, one of my Senators responded to my Thoughts On Immigration that I forwarded to his office. The response follows:

Dear Mr. P :

Thank you for contacting me regarding the Senate debate on comprehensive immigration reform. I appreciate hearing from you and appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Many have asked why I became involved in a process to work towards a comprehensive reform bill in the Senate. I did it for two reasons. First, in my travels throughout the State of Georgia in the past three years, I had heard loudly and clearly from Georgians that they wanted us to end illegal immigration in America right now, plain and simple. We cannot leave it for future generations to solve. And second, quite frankly, the 2006 elections changed the landscape in Washington and put Democrats in charge of the legislative process. Had I not sat at the table and fought for conservative principles, Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi would have had the votes to pass last year’s horrendous Senate bill and send it on to the President. I could not let that happen. Therefore, I stood strong with other conservative colleagues in the Senate and worked towards a process by which we could to start the immigration debate in the Congress.

I started this process seeking to accomplish three main goals in this debate – to truly secure our borders, to prohibit a new pathway to citizenship and to stop the current climate of amnesty whereby millions of illegal immigrants are breaking our laws and facing no punishment for doing so. As a result of a severely flawed immigration law passed in 1986, some 12 million to 20 million immigrants have been allowed to enter this country illegally and remain indefinitely. They work tax-free, get free health care in our emergency rooms and educate their children for free in our schools. Our nation’s policy today is amnesty, and it must end.

The immigration bill we debated for the past two weeks differed dramatically from the one signed into law in 1986 and it is also very different from last year’s Senate bill. The 1986 law granted amnesty but failed to secure the border, and our country has been paying the price ever since. Last year, the Republican-led Senate repeated the same mistake of 1986 by passing a bill to grant legal status to illegal immigrants without securing our nation’s borders and without imposing any punishment for those here illegally. I voted against that bill last year because it was amnesty and because it failed to secure the border.

This year, I led an effort to ensure that any proposal contain the essential foundation for successfully reforming our immigration system – a requirement to truly secure our borders first before any reform of our temporary worker system takes place. This became known as the "Isakson trigger," and it mandated that Congress must fund, put in place and make operational true border security before any temporary work program could begin. As it currently stands, the bill states that border security must include at least 20,000 border agents, 31,000 detention beds, four unmanned aerial vehicles, 105 radar towers, and 300 miles of vehicles barriers. In addition, a minimum of 370 miles of the fencing mandated in last year’s Secure Fence Act must be constructed. I firmly believe that these security measures would finally provide comprehensive border security and would ensure that we have operational control of our southern border.

The final, key piece of my trigger was a biometrically secure identification card that will allow employers for the first time to instantly verify whether an immigrant is legal. Employers today must guess whether documentation provided by immigrants is fraudulent or not. A biometrically secure ID would replace this guessing game with certainty and would hold employers accountable with much stricter fines for hiring illegal workers.

Although opponents of the bill have suggested that there was nothing worthwhile in this bill, I would suggest that it contained several critical and necessary changes to fix our broken immigration system. It would have secured our borders first. It would have ended our current system of amnesty. It contained no new pathway to citizenship and would have forced illegal immigrants to go home before they could be eligible for a green card or for citizenship. It would have ended chain migration. It would have given employers a fraud-proof system to verify whether workers are legal. It would have forced immigrants to learn English. These are the kind of conservative Georgia principles that I brought to the table and fought for and was able to include. Even though these principles were included, I recognized it was still an imperfect product and that is why I worked through the amendment process to make it even stronger.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Bingaman to limit the temporary worker visa quota for the proposed Y-1 visa to a "hard cap" of 200,000 per year. The bill as originally drafted provided for 400,000 Y-1 visas for the first year, and that number could have risen to 600,000 in following years. This amendment passed and that number was instead capped at 200,000.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Graham to impose mandatory jail sentences for those who crossed the border illegally after being deported – at least 60 days in jail for the first offense and no less than two years for the second offense. Everyone needs to know that America is changing its immigration laws, and that if you break our laws, you will lose your freedom. This amendment passed.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. McCain to require illegal immigrants to pay back taxes on their earnings for the time they had been in the United States . This amendment passed.

I cosponsored and voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Coleman to close a loophole in existing immigration law to allow local law enforcement to acquire information about the immigration status of a person they have probable cause to believe is not lawfully in the U.S. There are several "sanctuary cities" around the United States that have prohibited their law enforcement to inquire about a person’s immigration status. In certain cities, a person can be charged and even tried without the local authorities ever inquiring about whether the person is in the United States legally. The amendment would make it clear that state and local governments may not prohibit their law enforcement from checking a person’s immigration status when they have probable cause to believe that the person is in the United States illegally. Unfortunately, this amendment failed.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Hutchison to prohibit anyone who worked here illegally from obtaining social security benefits based on earnings obtained while here illegally. This amendment passed.

I cosponsored and voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Inhofe to require that English be declared the national language of the United States . It also provided that the English language is the default language for government communication, and that no person has a right to have the government communicate in any language other than English, unless "specifically stated in applicable law." If an exception is made, then only the English language version of any government form can have legal weight.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Demint to require that temporary workers maintain a minimum level of private health insurance to keep them off public assistance such as Medicare and Medicaid. Unfortunately, this amendment failed.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Sessions to prohibit anyone who is not a green card holder in the United States from being able to take advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit. This amendment passed.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Cornyn to permanently bar about 635,000 "alien absconders," or immigrants who have received deportation notices, from obtaining visas. Unfortunately, this amendment failed.

I also voted to defeat all cloture motions designed to cut off debate on the immigration bill. The Democratic leadership in the Senate refused to allow up or down votes on additional Republican amendments that would further strengthen this bill. Among these critical initiatives that I supported but was not allowed an up or down vote on was an amendment mandating spending for border security as well as an amendment to require illegal immigrants to return home in order to participate in the Z visa program. The Democratic leader’s refusal to allow votes on these additional amendments was unacceptable.

As I have said throughout the debate, I would reserve judgment on the final bill until deliberations were complete on the bill. At the time the Democratic leadership moved to end debate on the bill, it was my view that this bill was not good enough yet for the people of Georgia .

I recognize the lack of trust that a majority of Georgians have in the federal government’s ability to follow through on its promise to secure the border. For that reason, I recently sent a letter to the President calling on him to use his emergency funding powers to fully fund the border security measures in this legislation as well as all outstanding border security measures that have previously been passed but not yet funded .

I have been working hard to address the number one domestic issue in the United States . I will continue my efforts because I believe it is absolutely critical to our state and to this nation that we secure the borders and restore credibility to our immigration system.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please visit my webpage for more information on the issues important to you and to sign up for my e-newsletter.

Sincerely,
Johnny Isakson
United States Senator

Ok, everyone seems to be really confused about Mars and how close it is to earth this year, 2006. In 2003, Mars came as close to earth as it will be almost 60,000 years. For some reason, it has been making the internet spam rounds this year. Heck, even my Mother forwarded it to me.

See this article for info on the 2003 viewing. Mars to Get Closer than Ever in Recorded History in 2003

Interested in privacy rights?

• http://epic.org/
• http://www.eff.org/
• http://privacy.org/

If you already read my Rants on Campaign Contributions, then you have an idea of my belief in fair competition and a lasifair government. That wraps up my feelings about most things, including education.
If public education were excellent, why are all the public schools not creating college prepared students? What is it that private schools have over public schools? Can public schools copy the success of private schools? Is there a good way to help competition? The keys are:

• Gradual change is needed; nothing quick
• The government shouldn’t show any preference except towards the outcome.
• Income of the parents shouldn’t prevent students from going to another school, provided a commitment from the parents for the education exists. That commitment includes the parents providing transportation.
• Parents should be able to choose what is studied. Recommendations provided, but the parents get the final say. That doesn’t alter which standardized tests are given to the students, however.
• Competition is needed – the money follows the student. If a student leaves, then so does their money. Competition is good.
• Parents should be able to select the school – within seating limits – that their children attend. How would you feel if the government told you which grocery store you were allowed to shop at? Why do they get to tell you were you must send your child?
• Failure (low scores) should force a school out of business, not have more money thrown at it.
• Learning is the primary purpose for a school, not playing sports. Being on a sports team is a privilege once acceptable grades have been achieved. Teamwork can be learned by group exercises in all subjects, including PE.