handyfloss

I am currently reading Terry Pratchett‘s Equal Rites, and enjoying it quite a lot, at that. It’s not his best book, which is to say it’s only ten times funnier than your average comedian.

What drives me to write this post is a comment Mr. Pratchett makes in page 97 of this book. May the potential propaganda it brings him compensate for the copyright infringement it might ensue quoting it here:

One reason for the bustle was that over large part of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disk had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.

Self-explanatory, ain’t it? :^)

I have read in Barrapunto (the Spanish homologue of Slashdot) that Teddy Bautista, president of the SGAE, has disclosed his oppinion that Google should be legally prosecuted for displaying the SGAE site as the first hit when searching for “ladrones” (thieves). Go ahead and try it (in any search engine, not just Google).

Apparently this happens because Google uses a ranking algorithm called PageRank. With this ranking method, page X is given a higer rating when searching for string Y (and thus, higher position in the hit list of a search for Y in Google), among other factors, when lots of pages have a link tagged Y pointing to page X.

Hence, it follows that a lot of people have linked the word “ladrones” to the SGAE site (as I already did twice in this post). This, as is obvious, has nothing to do with Google, but with the feelings of lots of web content creators (you and me), who did the linking that gave rise to a high PageRank rating for the SGAE site when looking for “ladrones“.

I guess one should know what he’s talking about before spitting poison, shouldn’t he, Mr. Bautista?

Some days ago I was dismayed (although not really surprised) to come across some “Technical requirements” for accessing a service in the Spanish Ministerio de Administraciones Públicas, specifically the online service to track the state of the tramitation of permission of stay for a foreign colleage.

This “requirements” where the dreaded MS Windows/IE combo, and thus it prompted me to write the complaint e-mail quoted below.

To my surprise, they have answered, today. They just say that they sent my complaint to the Subdirección General de Tecnología de la Información y Comunicaciones, so they might or might not do something, but that’s a start!

My e-mail:

Estimados servidores del ciudadano,

Constato con asombro e indignación que en su página web, al menos en la sección de extranjería (link), mencionan como “Requisitos técnicos” para acceder a sus servicios, cito textualmente:

# Sistema operativo Windows 98 o superior
# Internet Explorer 5.5(SP2) o superior

¿Cómo puede aceptarse que un organismo público, pagado con nuestros impuestos, tenga como requisito para su acceso un sistema operativo de pago, propiedad de una compañía privada extranjera? ¿Acaso el Ministerio distribuye gratuitamente licencias de Windows, para hacerlo accesible a quien no lo tenga? ¿O acaso todo potencial usuario de su página web debe hacer frente al desembolso requerido para obtener una?

Les recuerdo que existen alternativas a Windows, algunas de ellas LIBRES, GRATUITAS y PÚBLICAS, como BSD o Linux. Yo soy un usuario de este último S.O., y creo que como ciudadano, votante y pagador de impuestos, me merezco que den soporte no sólo a dicha plataforma, sino a todas.

Si su página es conforme a los estándares de Internet, en cuanto a formato (HTML, CSS, Java etc.), no deberían tener ningún problema en ser accesibles desde ningún sistema operativo ni con ningún navegador.

Sinceramente,

Iñaki Silanes

Just as in the USA they have the RIAA, here we have the SGAE, which “takes care” of the artists , composers, writers and so on. In the suspicion that what they defend are the interests of discography lobbys, and fed up with the whole “music business”, I turned my eyes to the music released under a Creative Commons (CC) license.

So far I haven’t had time to dive too deep in this world, but I have come across a very interesting resource for such music, namely a French site called Jamendo. All the music there is free to download, hear, burn, share, and probably broadcast (there are different CC licenses, some more restricting than others). Go ahead and give it a try, folks!