Since I’m now starting to write and market some fiction, I pay more attention now to the ramblings of the so called “publishing industry experts”. They are all quick to point out that the vast majority of “consumers” buy about 1 book per year, counting the ones they give as gifts. Many will point to excerpts from campaign speeches stating that the average American can read only at a fourth grade level. Some are even saying that the government should go further into debt with a publishing industry bail out.

I’ve read quite a bit from these supposed beings of great importance. I’ve analyzed what they all say with the skill that only an IT veteran with years of requirements gathering possesses. Here is a quote I found in “Writer’s Digest” from Mike Farris, Farris Literary Agency:

Strong Beginnings start in the middle of the story. You can fill in backstory later. I like to see the protagonist in action at the start so that I get a feel for who the character is right off the bat. We often get submissions with cover letters that begin: “I know you asked for the first 50 pages, but the story doesn’t really get going until Page 57 so I included more.” If the story doesn’t really get going until Page 57, you probably need to cut the first 56 pages.

He is not alone in spouting this ka-ka. The vast majority of literary agents and publisher acquisitions staff seem to be feeding from the same septic tank. They point to the literacy rate and the education system, but never back at themselves. This is like listening to the heads of GM and the UAW talk about how everything wrong with the auto industry is outside of their control. They never point back at themselves and say “Two decades of absolute shit management guided solely by short term greed is really what got us here!”

At a young and impressionable age, I checked out the first volume of “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” from the high school library. The librarian actually allowed me to check out one of the trilogy (it was only a trilogy then) over the summer, a kindness I probably didn’t deserve, but greatly appreciated. (I guess the fact I’m mentioning it nearly 30 years later should speak volumes.) Here is a book which really helped define an entire niche of Science Fantasy and almost the entire first volume was background story. You knew by the heft of the book that it would be a journey and you went along for the ride. I learned more about leprosy than I ever cared to know from that book.

I quit reading the series after the third book. That is the point where the original author co-authored and really handed the reigns over to a different writer. It’s no longer a trilogy, and I’m no longer reading. I hate a book series which doesn’t have a predefined limit. Most book buyers feel the same way. If you don’t believe that statement, simply read some of the “ positive” reviews on “The Wheel of Time” series. Here is a combination of publisher and author who milked it for far more than it was worth. The first three books were stunning, the nine in the middle were oatmeal of the blandest variety. The writing didn’t return until the “actual” last book of the series when the fan base was outside of the publisher’s office carrying pitchforks and torches demanding the series be ended. Both the author and the publisher promised to end the series two books after this one…then the author died…but not before they squeezed out a prequel.

Why do we have prequels in the publishing and movie industry? Quite simply because of the absolute shit management we have running both industries. Those feces spewers who claim a strong beginning is in the middle of a story so they can get right to the action and hook the reader/viewer. You see, all of those flash-backs, dream sequences, and other contrived methods of “ bleeding in the back story” don’t (^)(*&)ing work. The movie viewer and the book reader both get lost or simply pissed off and they don’t stick around for the end.

Admit it now, you’ve all read reviews like this: “The action and imagery were great, but the story was lacking…” We get reviews like this because management was busy forcing “ strong opening” down the throats of everyone involved in production.

Quite simply, starting in the middle of the story doesn’t work. After hearing the above review a million plus times (and still managing to turn a profit), the industry scrapes up all of those discarded pages and slams out a prequel. How can you tell they scraped up discarded pages rather than writing it new? That’s easy. If reading/watching the prequel first doesn’t trash the series, they picked up all of the original discarded pages. When it is written after the fact, it busts things bad. Nobody involved in the process actually goes back and re-reads the entire series after reading the prequel to see what got walked on, they are too busy trying to make a fast buck. Skipping this last little step means your prequel blows things up later on. If all you did was put all those pages they told you to discard in a binder and resubmit them, your prequel doesn’t trash your story line.

How many of you reading this actually read the Hobbit stories? Watching the cartoons or the movies doesn’t count, how many of you actually read them? Okay, for those of you who actually read these stories, where was that first chapter action hook?

You see, just like the automotive industry, the publishing industry did it to themselves. They focused on today’s profit margin and didn’t look down the road. Quite deservedly, both industries are dying. When you take out “books bought to learn something for work or career change” the number of books purchased each year by the average consumer drops down into tiny fractions. We are all willing to plunk down a few dollars for something that makes us richer, especially if we can expense it back to the company or the IRS, but very few people bother reading a book anymore, mainly because the books today are all flavor and no food.

Make a list of all the non-technical/non-educational books you have read in the past 20 years. (For most of you this will be a list having five or fewer titles on it.) Of those titles, how many have the staying power to still be in print and read by people 20 years from now? Don’t know how to choose? That’s easy. How many were as well written as The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (first chronicles)? How many embrace the wonder of the Harry Potter series? (Btw, Kudos to that author for ending the series rather than milking it to the coffin. You have far more ethics than the vast majority of the publishing industry.)

People aren’t reading books anymore, and only the publishing industry is to blame.

The amount of criminal fraud which becomes institutionalized never ceases to amaze me. To fully understand how much it takes to amaze me you would have to understand what it is to be a citizen in Illinois where the statewide pass-time is sending politicians (in particular governors and anyone associated with the Mayor of Chicago office) to prison. I firmly believe we hold the international patent on fraud and corruption, only leasing it to wanna-be criminal countries like Nigeria.

I have long said you cannot teach or instill ethics into an MBA. They attend a specialized college curriculum to have morals, ethics, and dignity purged from their beings. While labor parties and backers were outraged at the recent attempt by one corporation to get stimulus dollars even-though they have been leading the charge off-shore and are now down to fewer than 30% U.S. Citizens as employees, I considered it just another day at the office. This is the mentality which has been rampant in the industry since the Gartner Group was paid to market “Right Sizing” and never faced criminal charges over the labor shortage when Y2K hit. Had all of those programmers been working on Y2K issues when Gartner was telling the industry to fire them, the entire Y2K debacle would have been dealt with for less than 1/10 ^th the cost, yet no criminal charges were ever filed against Gartner or the executives who cashed huge bonus checks/stock options from all the money they “saved” by “right sizing”.

We, as a country, can fix this, but it has to come from a grass roots effort. You will not get politicians cashing lobbyist checks to vote for it. Basically the SEC needs to be able to declare an enforce Non-National Corporation status. Any company with a U.S. Citizen employment rate of less than 51% would be classified as a Non-National Corporation. The stock symbols would get a special letter added to them, much like we add the Q for companies about to be de-listed. Further, the SEC must reach out and force both the S&P 500 and the DOW to not include Non-National Corporations in their compositions.

The only way to solve this problem is to hit the MBAs where they live, stock options and bonus checks. By forcing them out of the S&P and the DOW, we will force a liquidation of their shares. A lot of mutual funds track those indices as well as some exchange traded funds that hold shares of them. Forcing the dump from all of these will cut their share price 20-40% nearly over night. Next you have the “moral agenda” mutual funds which may not yet be aware of just how few American citizens these companies employ. They will also be dumping shares. Finally, the addition of the letter will force mom & dad to pay attention to the issues. Many times they purchase stocks on a “tip from a friend” or based upon a “chart” without every knowing what the company is really doing.

Probably the largest piece of this fraud is the very real likelihood that these companies are counting the output of non-nationals and foreign operations when the government is calculating the GDP. The secondary effect is that ALL output from these newly declared Non-National Corporations must be removed from the GDP calculation. We need a real picture when it comes to the state of the country, not continued fraud. The GDP needs to measure American citizen output, not Indian/Brazillian/Korean/Chinese/etc. output. What will really be interesting to see is if Toyota ends up getting classified as a National corporation when these new rules go into affect. They already build more vehicles in this country than Ford. It may very well turn out that 51% or more of their employees are U.S. Citizens.

Yeah Right.

Some of you have probably already found this link: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/making-microsoft-nicer-through-patents.ars. I had to laugh my ass off when I read it. Can you say “Scared shitless about a new Justice Department Probe?” Knew you could.

Microsoft has always operated like the right hand of the Antichrist. Many even believe Bill Gates is the embodiment of the Antichrist himself. You will hear them quote things like “His deeds and doctrine will eventually expose him to the world.” Well, it appears that Microsoft itself has recognized the merit of that quote. They are now on a massive PR campaign with a book, interviews, and Bill Gates giving away tons of cash to try and divert attention from themselves. I’m just waiting to hear either Bill Gates or Microsoft is “giving the land to Isreal” followed by 3.5 years of peace.

Let’s be real here. Microsoft has been Patient Zero when it comes to Corporate AIDS. Every company which gets in bed with them eventually contracts a “Wasting Disease” which rots it away. Just look at that poor bastard who developed the Mosaic browser! MS shafted him with a “percent of sales” deal, then bundled the browser into the OS (which still wasn’t an OS at the time) for free.

How about Lattice? Remember MS selling private labeled Lattice C compilers and their agreement not to develop their own? Remember when MS suddenly launched their own C compiler and it was incompatible with all previous object libraries? Is Lattice even in business anymore?

Then there is Novel. Remember when Novel was the king of PC network file servers and purchased DR DOS? MS used every underhanded and blatantly illegal trick it knew to make it almost impossible to get a reliable Netware connection. Then corporate America emptied its colon on MS for such underhanded tactics. Novel purchased DR DOS, which was far more robust than any release of MS DOS, and suddenly the Antichrist found itself burning on the corporate cross. It entered into a “negotiation” period with Novel to “improve cross networking functionality”, but mandated they stop all development on DR DOS while the negotiations were occurring. Next thing you know, MS comes out with a new release of DOS, breaks off negotiations, and starts shipping its own, far more buggy, networking products. Novel, for all intents and purposes, went out of business. Now, almost an actual company again with SuSE, it gets into bed with MS one more time. The Linux community has re-written most of the OpenSource licenses to basically remove Novel’s ability to ship much, if anything, with SuSE.

Now we have MS doing pratfalls, chuckling about how much it had in common with Spain during the days of the Conquistadors, and basically promising to “wear a condom this time, honest injun!”

Of course, when they find out three little things, it will probably all backfire. One, like every expression on the face of the planet, some find it offensive. Two, there’s actually a film company called Honest Injun Films Ltd. Three, the massively religious group most likely to recognize the antichrist find condoms offensive.

Once again, MS could get it right even when they try to steal it.

Logikal Solutions is proud to announce that “The Minimum You Need to Know About Service Oriented Architecture” ISBN-13 978-0-9770866-6-5 has been declared a finalist in the 2009 Eric Hoffer Awards. This award competition is much more general that there is no category for computer related books, they must compete with all other business and reference books.

Many of you reading this may also be aware that “The Minimum You Need to Know About Service Oriented Architecture” also won a Best Book Award from USA Book News, which does have a category for computer books.

Some of you might have guessed this post was coming given my prior post about needing a floppy to install some DOS software. When I installed my 64-bit version of OpenSuSE 11.1, I did not have a floppy drive installed on my machine. Indeed, it was even disabled in the BIOS. (Some of you might even remember from a prior post that the BIOS only supports a 3.5” floppy, not 5.25”.)

It ought to be a simple thing. Once I found a 3.5” floppy and a cable long enough to reach the bottom of my machine from the next to top drive bay things were looking up. You can forget about getting your LS-120 drive recognized as a floppy drive. I tried everything. Yes, you can stick a floppy in it and if there is anything on the floppy Dolphin will show the icon, but you couldn’t format an empty floppy there on a bet. You also cannot get either DOSbox or dosemu to recognize the thing as a floppy, which is the ultimate goal.

There are a lot of instructions on line when it comes to adding a floppy drive after the fact. Most of them only worked for one person at one time. All of them “assumed” the reader would do certain things automatically, thus left out critical pieces of information.

After you’ve done the hardware part, you need to open a terminal window and change to root. Once you’ve done that, you need to edit a file named fstab. I humbly suggest you make a safety copy before editing. Please note that you have to be careful about what editor you try to launch. Most of the on-line places will tell you to use vi. I don’t live in a cave, eat my own young, or foul my nest, so I don’t use vi.

roland@linux-uz4n:~> su

Password:

cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.save

linux-uz4n:/home/roland # madedit /etc/fstab

You need to add the following line to the end of the file. Make certain you leave a line with only a carriage return on it at the end of the file.

/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,exec,rw,sync 0 0

Once you do this, you need to create a directory so there is a mount point. I know, the installation should have created this for you, but it didn’t. I think a large reason behind that is the move to Dolphin and changing how storage devices are handled. Many will now automatically mount when connected if you have Dolphin installed. The downside is floppies don’t get recognized.

mkdir /media/floppy

ls -al /media

total 12

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-05-08 09:58 .

drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 2009-05-08 09:58 ..

drwxr-xr-x 2 root users 4096 2009-05-08 09:52 floppy

chown root:users /media/floppy

chmod a+rw /media/floppy

ls -al /media

total 12

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-05-08 09:58 .

drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 2009-05-08 09:58 ..

drwxrwxrwx 2 root users 4096 2009-05-08 09:52 floppy

I’m not certain you have to change the protection on the directory, but I did. I had still had issues. Finally, I went into YAST User management and check the “floppy” checkbox for my user ID. I still had no real success. Then I did the one thing nobody mentioned. I rebooted.

Now I can type dosemu in a terminal window. A DOS window opens and I can do things like this:

Since I’ve had some down time, I decided to work on an annoying matter. I have probably blogged before that I have some older expense files written with a C/Pascal code generator called DataBoss which had its own proprietary file system. These files are well past the window for IRS audit as I converted to another expense tracking application more than a decade ago. Still, the geek in me wanted that data in my new database because I had it. I wasn’t going to get rid of my last Windows partition until I got that data imported into my new PostgreSQL database.

Naturally, I tossed out the floppies which had DataBoss on them long ago. I think they might have been 5.25 anyway, so I was probably screwed no matter what. I poked around on-line and found some interesting sites.

http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/

Believe it or not, this site has a lot of old software. Original disks and manuals for sale. They even claim to buy/trade it.

http://vetusware.com/

Quite possibly one of the best ideas to ever hit the Web. Oddly enough, if the stuff was still being sold by the original vendor, this might be considered a piracy site. Today, it’s a Godsend. There is now a place where all of this great old software can be stored and retrieved for those times when it becomes relevant again. This is especially important in situations where the vendor has gone out of business. If you are as long in the tooth as I am, it is a trip down memory lane. Oh how I wished I still had some of that old DOS software I used to use to send to them.

Remember the Pro-C code generator? (not the Pro*C tool put out by Oracle) I wrote a lot of stuff with that under DOS…tossed it out long ago. The company dropped off the face of the earth. Sadly, now that we have Qt and Gtk on Linux, an OpenSource version of it using both of these underlying libs for the interface and PostgreSQL or another OpenSource database for file storage would probably get a large following. It was a 60-80% solution product like most code generators. I don’t even remember who made the product. I do remember the manual actually came in a binder and without that manual you couldn’t do much. Sigh…

Why would I be interested in such a piece of software now? OpenSuSE has two DOS emulators now. One is DOSbox, which once installed, appears on the KDE menu. It is set up mostly for running games. You cannot access anything which isn’t mounted out in your Linux environment. Another is dosemu. This seems pretty cool. It is an implementation of freeDOS which seems quite robust. There are some adjustments, such as you have to use xcopy instead of copy *.* if you want to copy more than one file. If I have free time over the next few months, I think I will try getting the old versions of “Lords of the Realm” and “Warcraft” running. I actually liked the older versions of these games. Don’t really care for the last version of Warcraft I bought. The old DOS version with cheesy graphics I really liked though.

Of course, once I managed to re-obtain a copy of DataBoss, I found out the utility programs weren’t all ready to run executables. That meant I needed to find a compiler. You guessed it. I tossed out Borland C 3.1 a long time ago. Other than DataBoss and one client, I never used it. I used Zortech for a lot of years, MS when I was forced to, and Watcom when I started my cross platform days. Love of Watcom lasted over a decade. There is even an OpenWatcom project now:

http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Main_Page

Sadly, DataBoss didn’t live long enough to support Watcom. I did force Pro-C to support it at one point.

Not a problem though. I found another beautiful site.

http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/21751

A link on this page takes you to the place where Borland is handing out Turbo C and Turbo Pascal gratis.

Once you get a floppy drive functioning, you can see things like this:

Of course, getting a floppy drive working is another blog entirely.

You know…I might even dig through my old floppies and install Vedit again. I used to like the DOS version of that editor…it really blew after it went to Windows.

It’s been a long time coming, but the first major step towards the elimination of off-shoring has finally been launched by the White House. Before the end of the year we should also see the elimination of the H1-B Visa program. I rather liked this quote:

The current law, Obama said, “says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York. “

Under the plan, companies would not be able to write off domestic expenses for generating profits abroad. The goal is to reduce the incentive for U.S. companies to base all or part of their operations in other countries.

Just how may clients do you guys have with a plethora of Caymen Islands divisions/joint ventures/subsidiaries? I’ve got some. Oddly enough these clients are the same ones who have been listening to the inexcusably bad advice of the Gartner Group and riding the off-shoring bandwagon. Given the speed with which the credit card laws got slammed through the first round of voting and their immanent passage in the next round, this shouldn’t take more than a month or two to get slammed through. It’s a win-win for the elected officials doing the voting. They are pulling back in money that had been funnelled out fo the country for years by the same individuals who brought us the global recession all wrapped up with a bow and using it to pay down the debt incurred by the government while sweeping that disaster up.

Talking heads and media pundits are all talking about how we are nearing a bottom or “leveling off” of the current recession. Personally, I don’t think we’ve found the bottom yet. I think once we find the bottom, the world is going to stay there for a long time. The “turn around” everyone talks about will simply get us back to the condition we were in several weeks prior to the bottom, then we will stay there a long time.

I’m not basing this line of thought on doctored up accounting data or other reports seer sizzled up by the same accounting firms who participated in the stock market and mortgage fraud cases we’ve been hearing about. I’m basing this on current trends and human nature. I think it will be at least a 30% contraction and it will last for 3-8 years.

Prior to our finding out just how void of ethics the mortgage/housing industry was (we always knew about the Realtors), the credit card companies were held out as the bowels of the Antichrist. They would issue credit cards to people’s dogs if an application had been filled out. (That’s not an exaggeration, I know someone that actually got a credit card for their dog.) Credit card companies had a seemingly endless list of tricks to jack up interest rates or charge excessive fees. Consumers got used to being rectally violated by these practices and started playing the “ 0% Interest Balance Transfer” game as a way of getting even. Of course, that game would only yield victory to those who stopped using their credit card for anything until the entire balance was paid off. You see, you had to pay the 0% balance off before any payments were applied to your new charges.

Eight years ago, it was nothing to run into someone with five credit cards in their wallet. Nearly everyone of these cards would have some kind of balance that was older than one month. There was a large group of people who thought it was OK to buy $140 pair of sun glasses, then make minimum monthly payments to their credit cards. Of course, the credit card companies encouraged this behavior. They even paid Congress to change the bankruptcy laws without lowering the maximum allowable interest rate. Retailers flocked to accept credit cards and also encouraged consumers to pay it off over time. If it wasn’t for consumers living well beyond their means, CEOs couldn’t possibly get those multi-million dollar bonuses.

Today, we see that the White House is about to spank the major credit card companies like they’ve never been spanked before. When they left the meeting in Washington almost none stopped to talk with reporters. They knew it was coming. There has been a mad rush to jack up interest rates on every card out there. Granted, a lot of that money grubbing is because the credit card issuers had a lot of exposure to the mortgage crisis. They think if they squeeze unemployed people who are behind on their mortgages harder from the credit card side, those people will suddenly pay things off. Make no mistake, it is usually “mortgages” for these people. They bought a house, went hog wild with the Martha Stewart decorating thing, ended up with massive balances on their credit cards, took out a home equity loan to pay off the credit cards, then ran balances up again. Now they are upside down on a mortgage and have just had their credit card limit slashed below their outstanding balance to generate more fees for the issuer.

Being a consultant, I try to never carry balances on my cards. I also try to never finance a car. I’ve seen too many consultants rack up large debt while on a long term contract only to have that contract suddenly end due to some funding/policy issue at the client site. Those are the consultants you find slithering into those absolute shit contracts offered up by EDS or the worse ones offered up by Verizon through the illegal alien vendor management system. The billing rate doesn’t even begin to touch a living wage, but it generates cash flow to keep gas in the tank and food on the table. It won’t begin to pay off a single debt. Those consultants will spend each day on the phone continuing to look for a new contract which actually pays a living wage. It doesn’t take long before they are fired, not because they couldn’t do the work, but because they put forth the level of effort such a wage deserved.

Enough consumers have either now been thrust into this undesirable situation or know people in such a situation, that credit card practices are going to change. The credit card companies have already started one massive push to bleed people while they can. I just got rid of my Bank of America card because they sent a letter stating the new interest rate minimum would be 8.65%+ the highest prime rate published in the Wall Street Journal for the prior two weeks. Talk about assholes! Since I don’t carry a balance, I called to cancel the card. My final bill arrived today. I also ordered them to remove me from their contact list. Most people forget that step. They have to actually remove you if you request it at the time of card cancellation. This stops all of those annoying “We Want You Back” letters.

I don’t think I’m alone in my actions. While I don’t consider myself the cream of the crop for credit card companies, (and since I locked down all of my credit to avoid identity theft, they can’t tell what I am), I can’t imagine people who don’t have a balance on a card getting a letter like the one I received and not cancelling the card. There was a time I was one of those people with five credit cards in my wallet (though I usually didn’t carry a balance on any), now I’m a person with exactly one credit card. From what I hear a lot of people are getting down to one or fewer credit cards. Now that most banks pass out debit cards for free and you can even use them to buy on-line through any vendor that accepts the credit cards of the same label, I don’t see a lot of overspending happening in the future.

How does this equate to a 30% or better global economy reduction? Many economies relied on Americans living well beyond their means. Some countries had even banked their entire economic and infrastructure growth on being able to sell as much as they wanted to American consumers. China is feeling our downturn even more than we are feeling it. The world economy isn’t ready to face American consumers having fewer than two credit cards in their wallet and never carrying a balance, but that day is quickly approaching. Once we hit bottom, that’s as high as we are going for a long time. It took over 50 years after the Great Depression hit before Americans started to live beyond their means in any serious way. It’ll take twice that long now. This time we don’t have to carry cash and checks.

Over the past few weeks we have been hearing stories about how every government in the Union is trying to increase revenue since the corrupt bastards that run the banking system were deregulated during the Clinton administration and allowed to continue running unchecked through the Bush administration flattened the economy. Since all of the elected criminals…errr…I mean officials view themselves as holier than thou (at least trying to portray such an image until we find out about cigar use in the oral office), the first thing they reach for is a new “sin” tax. Here in IL, that tax increase, plus mild price hikes by the manufacturer nearly doubled the cost of tobacco products a couple of weeks ago.

You know, this holier than thou sh*t has really gotta stop. They have already fraudulently lowered the blood alcohol level so far that you cannot walk through a room and smell an open can of beer with any hope of passing. Before they did that they taxed alcohol nearly out of existence, then they wondered why all of their tax revenue vanish. Gee, Einstein, what do you think happened?

Here in IL, and pretty much every other state that I have been to, the police departments have been horribly corrupted by both the legislature and the people who run them. Now; every raise, bonus, promotion, equipment upgrade, set of brakes for the squad car you’re driving, etc. all hinges on how many DUIs you issue. Law enforcement officers aren’t allowed to be law enforcement officers anymore. The system has forced them into becoming revenue generation machines simply to draw a paycheck.

Recently there was a big round up of police officers in Harvey IL on corruption charges of renting out their badges to provide security for drug dealers. The TV news had all kinds of officials putting their face in front of the camera saying how shocked they were that law enforcement officers would so quickly rent out their badge and the public trust. Yeah right! You manufactured them! You, the same person they are interviewing and a member of that same holier-than-thou cult which give us Al Capone, Murder Incorporated, and the first Heroin pipeline into America. You couldn’t remove all sin and form your religious Utopia with Prohibition, so now you are trying to get all sins taxed out of existence. I mean why wouldn’t you? Just look at the rousing success you had with Prohibition! That raid in Harvey was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your current round of success. In less than two years people will look back on the historic reports about corruption in the New Orleans police departments as the Norman Rockwell era.

I have finally figured out how to put this highly detrimental movement in check and help balance the budgets. The Holier Than Thou Tax. A $3 tax on every bible printed or imported into the United States. Doesn’t matter if they give them away, if it is created, it is taxed at the time of creation. Tax must be paid prior to the units leaving the printer. Same tax on every Tanakh and Quran and any other bible type book I’ve forgotten about. A $10 meeting tax will be levied for every service or other religious event occuring in a place of worship with the tax to be paid within 7 days of the event or service. Furthermore, the tax exempt status of all religious groups will be null and void, they will pay the same tax all other businesses pay.

Taxation has been favoring a religious agenda for far too long. It is time to enforce the separation of church and state by implementing the Holier Than Thou Tax. Uncle Sam will start looking forward to Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. They might even find the funds to help the Post Office stay open 7 days per week to keep the stream of revenue coming in.

It was a rather odd turn of events when Oracle jumped to purchase SUN. While they have been looking to have their own OpenSource Linux distro, most thought they were simply going to crush RedHat and take that distro over. Nobody really though them stupid enough to attempt going toe-to-toe with both IBM and what’s left of Microsoft while still trying to crush RedHat. Guess we all should have been warned about thinking.

This may very well be Oracle’s swan song. Yes, SUN is the originator of Java and Java is quite the rage. Yes, SUN is the originator of the codebase which hath become OpenOffice. Yes, Oracle got themselves an OpenSource Unix distro…well free anyway…that comes with an installed base, but to those of us who’ve been around a while, it sounds like the Quaker Oats buys Snapple deal all over again. Paid too much for a product that’s only going down.

Yes, most corporations are now standardizing on the Open Document Format. Decades of excessive fees and proprietary restrictions from Microsoft have finally taken their toll. MS Word is no longer the corporate document standard. There are, however, quite a few word processors implementing the Open Document Specification. IBM recently released the best implementation out there as far as completeness, Lotus Symphony. It has some missing features and some bugs, but hands down is without equal as far as implementing the complete specification goes. OpenOffice has way more in the way of recognition, features, and plug-ins, but it has some severe gaps when it comes to the implementation of the specification. Will OpenOffice ever manage to implement the complete specification? I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t look like they are heading in that direction right now.

OpenOffice has another severe flaw, it was written by Java developers not software developers and data architects. If you’ve been in the software industry for any length of time, you can spot applications with this fault just like you can spot applications that were written by Visual Basic programmers instead of software developers and data architects.

The easiest way to spot this problem is to create a large document with many screen shots, open the document in OpenOffice, then in a terminal window use the “free” command to check free memory. Kill off OpenOffice and open the same document in Lotus Symphony and try the “free” command again. I got forced into this little experiment when I was trying to port “The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer” from a WordPerfect format to OpenDocument. At the time my machine hand only 2 Gig of RAM and I needed to keep both a 900+ page converter generated file open along with the new file I was pasting into. I started crashing badly when I got to around 300-350 pages in the destination document. That’s when I noticed that I was out of RAM and using swap.

Boosting RAM didn’t help. Started having the same crashing problem when I got to 400 pages. That’s when I pulled down Lotus Symphony and tried the experiment above. Symphony functioned well within the 2Gig limitation even with both documents open. Why? Symphony was written by software developers and data architects who happened to use Java rather than Java developers. They knew that throughout history we have had to restrict word processor type applications to only loading a few pages at a time. Java developers don’t understand such things. They want everything loaded live in the VM and that is how they design applications. Memory issues are someone else’s problem.

It is true that IBM has a large investment in Java, but it is also true Oracle won’t get away with trying to force commercial licenses down the throats of those currently using the language. No, it seems Oracle has stripped to the waist and decided it’s time for Microsoft to die.