This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 22 March 2006.

Once again, Microsoft have drastically changed their Office interface.

While the new interface is very nice eye-candy and probably has some new features that could help (arguably), it represents yet another need to re-train.

The old argument that OpenOffice is too different from MS-Office to be quickly useable has just vanished. OpenOffice is more like MS-Office 97 than MS-Office 2007 will be, and really, who has needed any of the features in Office XP or Office 2003? What were they, again…? Oh yeah, anoying interface changes, and removal of the stupid Paperclip.

I think I'll be distributing my work documents in PDF, created by OOo now, except where I must absolutely use MSO documents for work. Everthing else will be OOo. Now I just need to convince my wife that it's not worth continually purchasing MSO, or even having it on our home PC.

This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 1 November 2005

In reference to this Slashdot article about the Internet killing newspapers

Why does "mainstream media" think blogging is such a huge hit? It's not that Internet is immediate, or that anyone can do it (which has big down-sides as well as it's egalitarian advantages). It is simply that people everywhere are fed-up with WWII-era propagandists telling us what to believe and have started researching it for themselves.

This is the Information Revolution: the Revolution is greatly improved access to the information. People are more educated now than they were 50 or even 20 years ago and can make informed judgements. They don't need some "journalist" to do it for them. This is quite appart form the fact that today's journalism is extremely poor compared to yester-year's.

I don't buy papers because I know that I can't trust them to bring me news in an unbiased, non-politically or commercially influenced fashion, or full of Tabloid rubbish like British newspapers. I accept the risk that the news I learn via the Net can be from the "uninformed" masses and mitigate this by using many sources so I can judge for myself where the "truth" lies.

I won't even read over people's shoulders anymore.

For at least the last 10 years, newspapers have been good for only one thing: the ink used in newspaper presses is fantastic for removing streaks and smudges from my computer monitor!

This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 10 October 2005

In reference to this Slashdot article about U.S. Cybersecurity being about as effectual as FEMA's handling of hurricane Katrina

I wish USA would stop calling it “cyber security”. It's just stupid. The word “cyber” was coined by AI researchers for the ability of computers to interact with humans, either via a human interface, or by acting human. Later, it turned more towards embedding computers into humans as a form of prosthetic (a la “$6 millon man”) or to build composite computer-humans (cyborg).

Lately I think the US “cyber security” push has one of these aims:

• To control cyborg's access to the net?
• To curb “cyberterrorism” — the attack on America by those cyborgs?
• To promote safe use of teledildonics within federal agencies, a sort of “Monica Lewinsky” protocol aimed at avoiding future political embarrasments.

Obviously, the most likely of these is the third aim… ;-)

This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 31 August 2005

In reference to this Slashdot article about RIAA lawsuits

Seems that RIAA are intent on sueing more 12-year old girls for sharing music... it sickens me.

I am not sure what to do to protest (beyond what seems to be happening already — consumers aren't buying today's crap, and RIAA/ARIA/MPAA etc are just blaming it on the Net anyway). I am considering what would happen if lots of fans started writing directly to their favourite artists and asking them these questions:

• why do you have this deal with your distributor EMI? I can't play your
• why don't you consider putting sample tracks on your web site? For that matter, why don't you deal directly with Apple, or start your own pay-per-download site for your songs? I'm sure heaps of fans like me will buy them, and you could get a much larger cut per track than Warner Bros is giving you

Of course, there are costs to running a web site also. But I wonder if what may happen eventually is a return to music guilds, where a guild runs the site, member groups contribute content and all proffit goes to the members. It would probably be a good business to start, atracting new groups like the “Idol” TV shows do now. Shame I have hopeless business sense though.