I read in El PaÃs that the next MS browser, IE7, will sport a couple of new features, namely tabbed browsing and RSS support.
I knew of the lack of tabbed browsing in that poor excuse of a browser that IE6 is, but… they didn’t have RSS?. What kind of sh*t is this? IE6 users have to open another program to read RSS feeds? That’s pathetic, man!
Firefox and all the Open Source browser lot surely have had them (both tabs and RSS) for a long time!
Go, MS “innovation”, go!!
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 TecnologÃa 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 extranjerÃa (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 compañÃa 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 deberÃan tener ningún problema en ser accesibles desde ningún sistema operativo ni con ningún navegador.
Sinceramente,
Iñaki Silanes
Today I came by train to Donostia, and when crossing the Maria Cristina bridge, out of the station, I met a woman giving away a free gazette called Metro Directo (which I believe is published in many places around the world).
Among the news I read while coming to the faculty by bus, one struck me (well, not really): a survey has been made among 1045 people in the USA (a fairly small sample, I’d say. Still meaningfull, however), to find out who people considered “most stupid person of the USA”.
The Top Five are:
1 – Michael Jackson
2 – Dick Cheney and Paris Hilton (ex aequo)
4 – George W. Bush
5 – Tom Cruise
Now, how sad is it that both the President and the Vice-President of a country are found by their fellow citizens to be second in stupidity only to Michael Jackson and Paris Hilton?
I read in Barrapunto (Spanish version of Slashdot) that a new supercomputer is going to be deployed at Santiago de Compostela, which will allegedly surpass MareNostrum as the fastest computer in Spain.
What I want to remark is that (of course, hardly surprisingly) it will run on Linux (as do over the 74% of the supercomputers in the World Top 500 list. The rest run on UNIX, BSD, and even MacOS. NONE runs, or better “crawls”, on Windows), and will use Free Software to operate.
UPDATE: I’ve had no less than two (yeah, 2!!) visits from non-Spanish speakers who had looked in Google for the correct pronunciation of Xabi Alonso’s name (he playing in the Liverpool), and how it differs from Catalan “Xavi” (Barcelona FC player) so here it goes:
Xabi (Basque): very close to shabby ()
Xavi (Catalan): very close to chubby ()
Original post:
Este post va en castellano, porque dudo que interese a ningún no-hispanoparlante.
Hoy en las noticias deportivas de T5 he oido, por enésima vez, referirse al jugador del Barça Xavi, llamándolo Chavi. Como buen Donostiarra, cuando Xabi Alonso jugaba en la Real y le llamaban CHabi Alonso me rechinaban los oidos. Yo pensaba “Joder, que este no es catalán, que se dice Xabi“.
Pero hete aquà que me he enterado (igual estoy en un error, y si es asÃ, corregidme) que TAMPOCO en catalán se dice Chavi. Sólo XE y XI se leen CHE y CHI. XA, XO y XU se leen como en castellano o euskera (aproximandamente). O sea, que el jugador del Barça se llama XAVI, no CHAVI.
CORRECCIÓN: Parece ser que XA, XO y XU también se pronuncian CH, al menos en algunos (¿todos?) de los diferentes dialectos del idioma catalán. Yo estaba, por tanto, equivocado.
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!
I am shocked to read this article in El Pais, regarding yet another bug in Internet Explorer, for which there is no official patch as of now.
What shocks me is that, in the same line, they go bash Firefox because “it also has its issues”. The example they give is the following: a guy browses to some date-finding web pages, instructing the browser not to save the passwords. Next, his girlfriend uses the same computer, but from her account, to surf the web (with Firefox), and apparently, when setting herself some password-related options, she comes across a list of sites that had the option “Do not save the password for this site”… the sites her boyfriend had visited. Result: a) they split up, and b) a bug gets reported (by the woman) to Firefox, regarding a user privacy breach.
Now, the reputed bug consists in the fact that the privacy settings (list of sites for which passwords are and are not saved) for a user (the guy), was supposedly accesible for another one (the gal). This would indeed be a security hole, and worth a big fat bug warning.
However, this was not the case. First, what seems to have happened is that the guy actually used her gf’s account to surf the web (when he set up her account), so there you are.
Second, they were running Firefox under Windows. If somehow the private settings of one account were accesible by the other one, it would be Windows’ fault, not Firefox’s. When running under, e.g., Linux, the privilege separation of users would not allow for that, no matter how wickedly wrong Firefox would have been made!
In short: the journalist reports a grave bug of Internet Explorer (product of Microsoft), and then tries to level the MS/Open Source battlefield by charging Firefox with another “bug” that is either due to user incompetence, or the OS’s fault (Windows, which is a product of… yes, Microsoft again). In my view, it’s a 2-0 victory for Firefox/Open Source movement, trying to pass as a 1-1 draw for IE/MS.
