I just read this article on Slashdot, Game Developers should ignore software pirates, and my first thought was “They finally get it!”

This quote sums it up fir me “they weren’t customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose”.

I think a lot of software companies and the music industry spend too much money on fighting small-time piracy, the average user at home who downloads a song or movie or piece of software to play with it. I definitely have a problem with “professional” pirates who make copies and sell it. That is taking away sales from the owner of the software.

It looks like the music industry is slowly starting to realise that making music freely available for download is actually marketing as it exposes your music to more people and most of the people that really like your music will still buy it.

With software it is a different situation though, as people normally don’t buy software because they are a fan of a vendor. I think what would work there is to make watered-down versions of the software available for free download and if the user wants more functions, they buy it. Or the general open source method of selling services, extensions, customisations or integration to your product.

But, let’s look at the pure proprietary model. If Microsoft would make a basic version of Word and Excell available for free for example, I don’t think they will loose a cent as the users that will use it will mostly be the people that are currently using a version of Office ‘borrowed’ from their employer or somewhere else. How many home users do buy MS Office? My theory is that the home users that buy MS Office is mostly people that really need to use it and will still buy the version with the more features. Most home users just need a word processor to write the odd document or do a task or a spreadsheet to do the budget.

I know that OpenOffice is the real solution for this situation, but I am now just theorising on the issue if Microsoft will really loose any money if they make a basic version of Word and Excell available for free and stop treating their customers like criminals.

Let’s take the Windows XP licensing model. To implement that, Microsoft had to spend millions to set up the callcentres to handle license validation and to set up the infrastructure to manage this whole process (the online validations, etc). What is the value of this? From my point of view it looks like they only managed to alienate their customers as a customer now feels like a criminal. The people they really want to tie down with this system is still not affected as they just use cracked versions of XP or download a cracked key. I have heard many times that frustrated Windows XP users said that it is actually easier to download a cracked key for their legal version of Windows. So what is the point? Would Microsoft not be better off if they made a Home edition of XP or Vista available for free or at least very cheap and not impose a licensing model that makes the user feel like a criminal?

I am sure that this point about Windows licensing have been discussed many times, but I just could not help myself.

I try to keep a digital copy of all paperwork for the business. This then gets backed up. I used to scan it all in with an Epson flatbed scanner. In the beginning it was fine, as it was a few papers a month so scanning one sheet at a time was not a problem.
But the business grew and with it the amount of paperwork per month also grew. By last year the process of scanning all documents for the month took up quite some time, even if I scanned it as soon as I got it. The process was becoming cumbersome and time consuming.
I was starting to think of getting a scanner with a multi-document feeder. Problem was that they were expensive and incompatible with Linux (We don’t have any Windows machines at the office). I tried to find one for a client and could not find one.
So my options was to buy one and buy a PC as well as Windows and anti-virus. Which makes it an expensive project and I will have to deal with a Windows machine, which I do not like too much. The alternative would be to buy an Apple Mac Mini to act as scanner server, which still makes the project expensive.
Then, one day, while visiting Autumn Leaf, Franco showed me the new multi-function printer they bought and he mentioned that you can set it up to save a scanned document to a Windows shared drive. It was also not very expensive. It was the HP Officejet Pro L7680 All-in-One.
Now this got my interest. I knew that there were scanners available that can email a scanned job to you, but the ones I saw was very expensive. So I started to shop around for this printer and I managed to buy one from eShopper for under R3000, which was acceptable as it also replaced our aging Epson Stylus C86 ink jet printer. It also have fax capabilities, so we can directly fax paper documents without first scanning them.
We received the unit 2 days after ordering and I started to assemble it. Quite a process. I had to actually look at the documentation to get all the bits and pieces together in the correct order.
Then the initial startup and configuration came. It takes a while to boot up, but the configuration was easy. It basically does everything itself. Then it was ready to play with. It connects to your network via ethernet, so you don’t need to attach it to a PC and set up drivers and all that. You access it via a web interface to do configuration and check status. You can even do a scan via the web interface and download the image. Now that is a very nice function if you have visitors to the office that quickly needs something scanned. No need to get access to somebody’s PC and all that kind of disruption.
The main function that I was interested in was the Direct Digital Filing function. You can configure up to 10 pre-configured scanning profiles, or speed-dials as they refer to it in the web interface. Each speed-dial consists of the remote share (a SAMBA share in our case) where the document will be stored, the document type (PDF or JPG), paper size, quality of scan, darkness setting, single or double sided and a prefix for the file name. You can also enter a username and password for the share if required.
Then, to scan a document, you press the ‘Digital Filing’ button, then select a speed dial option from the list it gives you and press the ‘Start Scan’ button. When the scan is done, you go and look on your PC and it is there. Very nice. You can also override any of the pre-set settings before you scan,
The only problem we had so far is that every now and again it fails to connect to the SAMBA server, but when you try again, it works. This also only happens with the first scan after the unit has been in stand-by mode.
Printing to it from Linux turns out to be very easy. Configuring it in CUPS was quick and easy. Cups have the model in the list and within a minute we could print some very good quality colour documents. It also prints much faster than the little Epson C86.
Other handy functions include: double-sided printing, double-sided scanning (The doc feeder does it automatically if you tell it to scan both sides), colour copies, double-sided copies, double-sided faxing, photo printing and manipulation directly from all kinds of memory devices (I have not played with this yet, but there are many slots and some buttons under a PHOTO section on the front panel.
It features a colour LCD screen that makes selections, etc easy.
Scanning quality is quite good and it seems that it automatically adjusts the quality to match the type of document it scans. I installed the Mac client software on my old TiBook just to see what it includes and I did a manual scan, where I selected my own resolution and quality, as I am used to with previous scanners and the result was still not as good as when I let the unit do it’s own optimisations. I am quite impressed.
The ink system also impressed me. I am a fan of Epson because the heads are not part of the ink cartridge, as most standard HP ink jet printers are. The L7680 also feature separate heads, although the heads still have a small reservoir on them and you still change them from time to time, but not as often as the actual ink cartridges. The ink cartridges are situated behind an access panel on the front of the unit, so it is easy to replace the cartridge. The ink is fed through tubes to the heads.
We actually got more than we bargained for and scanning all the business paperwork is now actually a pleasure. I can definitely recommend this printer/scanner to any business.

I downloaded the latest openSUSE DVD and upgraded my openSUSE 10.2 on my HP nx6125 laptop today. I expected a few things to go wrong as the poor laptop have been upgraded all the way from SUSE 9.3 right through to 10.2.
Well, nothing went wrong. In fact, the upgrade went better than expected! For the first time since I have the laptop, the wirless network card works with Network Manager. Now I too, can change wireless network with the click of a button!. The laptop sports the Broadcom BCM4318 wireless card and up to now, I had to compile ndiswrapper and load the windows driver each time I upgraded my kernel. Due to ndiswrapper, I could not use Network manager.
Well, openSUSEW 10.3 comes with a driver for the card. All I had to do, was extract the firmware from the Windows driver with the bcm43xx-fwcutter and save the files in/lib/firmware. Now the wireless works like any other supported card with Network manager.
The SUSE guys also made huge improvements with YaST. It is much more user friendly and the package manager is much better.
You can now add your community repositories by selecting them from a list from within YaST. No more manual configuration of the additional sources.
Another nice improvement is the one-click installation of certain things, like the ATI graphics drivers or the additional codecs for video playback.
You go the the openSUSE web site and click on a link. That pops up the software manager, asks your root password and then adds any repositories that it needs, and then install and configure the required software. Through the process, message boxes explain to you what it is doing and ask you permission to carry on. It is kind of like having a techie right there helping you to install software while explaining what he/she is doing.

I use the GNOME and XFCE desktop environements and both have some nice improvements. Attional tools in XFCE, like Thunar file manager that was not avaialble for 10.2.
Evolution now have a plugin that display an icon in the notification area if new mail arrived. Only downside is that it is not configurable and due to my plethora of rules in Evolution, most of the new mail is not seen by the plugin. Maybe the plugin is not working properly, or it is a design flaw. I still need to find out. I suppose I need to compile mail-notification again until the plugin works properly.
But I have only been using it for a few hours, so maybe I am just missing something.
Well, this was just a quick overview of my experience so far. I will form a better idea of how much really improved and how many problems arise over the next week or so.
I am still impressed though. I think this is something that the average computer user can use.
PS: GNOME now also includes a lockdown utility, so I can set up a safe environment for my users.

In light of the recent CLUG flame war about mailing list netiquette and Jonathan’s announcement about the changes to CLUG list rules, I have decided to dust off my netiquette-enforcing gear and take old High Horse for a practise run around the block.

I found my imaginary baton of netiquette enlightenment, donned my imaginary mailing list police jacket (with the badge) and saddled up my imaginary High Horse.

The early morning air was crisp with promise and carried a delicate aroma of pewter. (I have no idea why the air would smell of pewter, I don’t even know what pewter smells like, but it is an interesting word to say and it sounds like computer)

I mounted High Horse, shoved the baton upwards and forwards and shouted “Hi-ho Slivar!!”
High Horse responded immediately and jumped forward with enthusiasm and flaring nostrils. We were out of the stable like an unlit rocket, wind blowing the three hairs left on my bald spot into disarray.
We hit the ground with a thud and we bounced a few meters forward, stopping right on the edge of the driveway. High Horse has collapsed again.
At least this time we managed to get to the end of the driveway, much further than normal.
After catching my breath I hobbled back to the imaginary stables and grabbed a few imaginary carrots and started to lure High Horse back into his stable.
That dammed Imaginary Horse Spa that I sent him to did not help a bit!
Well, that was enough exercise and excitement for the both of us for one day, maybe we will try again tomorrow.
Today the driveway, tomorrow the world!

PS: To understand the above, search the CLUG mailing lists for High Horse

I just realized that my GNOME blog applet has been posting my blogs to /dev/null (or some alternative reality) instead of my Wordpress.
Gmff!
So, now I am giving the Mac a go with the WordPressDash widget.
Let’s see where it ends up…

Update (8 Jun 2007):  I finally found my posts!  It went to my old blog site.  It turned out that I had the GNOME blog applet set up incorrectly…  Damn human fallibility!

This is my first post to my new blog.

I decided to add a blog to my business web site, where I can blog about more technical and OSS related things.