Older blog entries for tagishandy (starting at number 4)

Drugs house shut after complaints

Drug House

Blimey, the complaints must have been annoying if they had to resort to drugs.

Syndicated 2007-05-24 14:13:31 from Hexten

Bastard Linux Patent FUD

And then this:

“The point of the study was actually to eliminate the FUD about Linux’s alleged legal problems by attaching a quantifiable measure versus the speculation,” he said. “And the number we found, to anyone familiar with this issue, is so average as to be boring; almost any piece of software potentially infringes at least that many patents.”

Who said that? Dan Ravicher of OSRM - also known as the guy who wrote the report Balmer is quoting.

Via The Inquirer

Update: This dates from November 2004 (eWeek). As far as I know Ballmer’s still quoting the same report.

Syndicated 2007-05-16 16:48:44 from Hexten

Robber Barons

James Turner is pissed off about Microsoft’s patent sabre rattling - as we all should be.

At the end, there’s only one thing left to say. For shame Microsoft, for shame. You’ve twisted competition into a thuggish debacle that ranks right up there with the worst of the great robber barons. How ironic that Bill Gates is trying to reinvent himself as the great philanthropist. Andrew Carnegie took much the same route late in his life, as if it could wash away his sins. We can only hope that in a few years, Steve Ballmer will look as much a fool as Daryl McBride does today.

More here.

Syndicated 2007-05-14 17:56:08 from Hexten

I've been having trouble focussing my eyes for the past week. Turns out I have some kind of macular dystrophy. My right eye has a blurred and displaced area (about the size of my thumbnail at a range of 30cm) which makes bits of text bend and blur when I try to look directly at them. My left eye is fine but seems unwilling to help my right eye out - presumably after years of laziness.

Apparently I'm too young for it to be conventional macular degeneration. I think that's supposed to be a consolation of some sort. It's all a bit freaky given that I spend about 80% of my waking time staring at a screen. Can't do that right now for more than about half an hour without getting a headache.

The good news is that it happened once before about five years ago and either went away or my brain got used to processing the distorted image. This in spite of having been told it was both incurable and degenerative. Of course right now I'm using the eye-power I have reading whatever I can find about the condition.

So I guess I might be a little less always-on than usual. The effect is much less pronounced when I focus near infinity. That's an excuse to get out more if ever I heard one.

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