The Day I Moved the Market

Well...not quite. But thanks anyway to Blake "ever vigilant" Winton, for pointing out that the mildly amusing NASDAQ ad I linked to below has now been corrected at source, neatly erasing the point of my (admittedly rather cheap) gag.

It would be nice to think that the huge volumes of traffic flowing through this site directly to the ad in question led them to trace the links back to source. Oh yes. I'm sure that was it.

If you're wondering what the mildly amusing part was, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that there are still several hundred examples of the exact same typo in use on the websites and in the printed materials of quality financial services firms everywhere.

Told you it was only mildly amusing...

SNAFU



No new material here, just an explanation for the temporary, unscheduled interruption:

Official explanation

Normal service will be resumed as soon as we have arrived at a working definition of "normal".

Memo to NASDAQ

Please tattoo this daily mantra onto the inner surfaces of your web team’s eyelids:

“I still need to proofread. I still need to proofread”

If you’re not sure what I’m on about: read, carefully, the contents of this pop up ad window currently being served by nasdaq.com:



There’s any number of cheap snarky remarks I could make about this one, but the sound of your EVP Marketing slapping her forehead as someone recuts the page will be reward enough.

Thank you.

UPDATE: They fixed it and spoiled the fun. The original, unaltered version of the image linked to above had the sub-head "STEAMING REAL-TIME QUOTES". Something to do with the "market heat" thing, I guess...

Other people’s cleverness

Two quick snippets. First, via email from the noble and talented Jeff Roman:

"This poem is composed entirely of actual quotes from George W. Bush. The quotes have been arranged for aesthetic purposes by Washington Post writer Richard Thompson.”


MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
By George W. Bush


I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist. Families is
where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize Society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

Second, this letter in the June issue of Wired is worth repeating:

Ascent Technology founder Patrick Winston, referring to airport logistics management, notes that “maybe there are some gates or jobs that could be swapped to make things easier for everybody.”

Truer words have rarely been spoken; indeed, I’m sure many Wired readers can think of some Gates and Jobs they wouldn’t mind switching.

-- Adam Greenfield

The “new” Wired, btw, is equal but different and I like it.

I'm reassured to note that many of the people signing this "petition" clearly get the joke. If it is a joke. Who knows...?

Quasi-random example: "I think they should rename New York too, because every time I hear "New York" it makes me think of that day and it makes me cry. That and the words "world," "trade," and "center" should be removed from our language as well."

At the same time, it's pretty scary to see the number of dumbasses who are completely falling for it.

The good news is that this petition, at the same host site, is currently caning the "rename" one by 2149 votes to 1220.

Of course, it's depressing to realise that the majority of signatories to both petitions are probably coming from America. No disrespect to Americans at all, honest - my point is that unless Peter Jackson's brother happens to run the state of California, it's entirely possible the rednecks will win out in this case. Expect to see Dubya's name lining up in favour of the "Rename" list pretty soon.

When I pinged David Weinberger about this earlier today, his simple response was: "I apologize for my country."

In related news: survey results published in today's Globe & Mail indicate that 30% of Americans are quite convinced that Canada is indeed the 51st state.

For all I know, they could be right. I wouldn't be too surprised if this one slipped past Chrétien while he was nodding off listening to Stephen Harper's interminable drone...

More "free" email blackmail

There are a lot of perfectly good reasons for keeping an occasional use web-based mail account such as Hotmail. The increasingly despotic behaviour of Microsoft is not one of them.

Get this:

MSN Hotmail account expiration policy

Please be sure to sign in to your MSN® Hotmail account every 30 days. If you don’t, your account will become inactive, and:

• You will lose all e-mails and attachments in your Inbox and other folders
• All of your incoming e-mail will be rejected
• You will lose all contacts in your Address Book

Unfortunately, this information cannot be recovered.* As a valued Hotmail member, we want to make sure you know that subscribing to MSN Extra Storage exempts you from this account expiration policy. It's the smartest way to prevent the loss of all the important information in your MSN Hotmail account.

SECURE MY ACCOUNT

In addition to exemption from the 30-day sign-in policy, MSN Extra Storage also includes:

• 10MB of MSN Hotmail storage — five times the storage of a free Hotmail account
• Larger attachments — send and receive attachments of up to 1.5MB per message
• 30MB of MSN Communities storage — the perfect places for photos, music, and other large files

You get all this for only $29.95 per year, so get MSN Extra Storage now!

Harrumph.

I believe I said just about all I could possibly say about this kind of sleazy, underhanded extortion, when those filth at mail.com declared me legally dead a while back

“As a valued Hotmail member” me arse.

But here’s a question. Just whose email is it anyway? And whose address book?

I don’t think there’s anything of real value that I’d want to keep in my Hotmail inbox, and I’ve never used their address book widget – but that’s not the point.

Like most Hotmail users, I imagine, I’ve only the most superficial knowledge of their terms of use – but surely a smart lawyer could argue a case here that the contents of my personal email inbox, stored under an agreement that I originally accepted because it was free, should be mine to do with as I see fit?

So they want to start charging for bigger inboxes. Fine. Buggers. TANSTAAFL, I know – but they’re still buggers.

But is it even remotely fair to close down an account just because you don’t sign in every 30 days? Typically the times I most need access to a web-only account are few and far between. But when I need it, I really need it.

To force me to sign in every 30 days just to keep the sodder alive (and so that they can continue to force more MSN spam down my unwilling gullet) is just stoopid and annoying.

Oh – and unless you sign in every 30 days, you’d never know that they’re busy sending you “you are now legally dead” notices. Irony not their strong point, I guess.

The built in thesaurus in Microsoft Word lists no synonyms for “blackmail”. True. Go ahead and check.

BTW, there is an alternative, praise be: I’m in the process of switching anything useful that currently hits the Hotmail account over to my brand spanking new michaelo@oddpost.com account. A little early to know for certain, but so far Oddpost certainly appears to rock, IMHO.

OK, it’s $30/year, as opposed to “free” – but if they’ll promise faithfully not to behave like racketeering bumpipe autocrats, I’ll gladly shovel thirty bucks their way every year.

BTW #2 – I should probably point out my own terms of use at this point, to be safe. Read “A note on content”, at the foot of this page.

New Peru GNU - how about you?

This is just extraordinary.

Thanks to my good friend Philippe for pointing me to this remarkable dispute between the Borg and the government of Peru.

The scoop: The Peruvian government has introduced legislation requiring government offices to go the open source route wherever possible. Microsoft is naturally tweaked by this and has fired in a complaint, via their country manager, crying foul.

The lengthy, cogent and simply remarkable response from a member of the Peruvian Congress is up online for all to see. The fundamental tenet of his argument is that it is simply out of the question for the government of a democratic republic to be tied to the use of closed proprietary software.

It’s a long but very worthwhile read which will have any proponent of the open source movement thumping the air with excitement. It strongly encourage you to read the whole piece yourself, but to whet your appetite, here’s some choice quotes:

“The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:

- Free access to public information by the citizen.
- Permanence of public data.
- Security of the State and citizens.

To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indespensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.”

Microsoft’s letter to the Peruvian government apparently accuses the republic of anti-competitive behaviour (hah!), stating: “The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies...”

To which point the Congressman responds, with admirable restraint, that:

“the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement.”

And that:

“This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competitvity is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations.”

You can almost hear the grating of his clenched diplomatic teeth as he adds: “It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users: "update your software to the new version" (at the user's expense, naturally)”.

This delicious and insightful communication concludes with one of the highest level, almost libertarian arguments in favour of open source I have yet come across. The articulate and rational congressman, Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez, declares that the government’s bill is:

“...based on the republican principle of openness to the public.

In conformance with this universally accepted principle, the citizen has the right to know all information held by the State and not covered by well- founded declarations of secrecy based on law. Now, software deals with information and is itself information. Information in a special form, capable of being interpreted by a machine in order to execute actions, but crucial information all the same because the citizen has a legitimate right to know, for example, how his vote is computed or his taxes calculated. And for that he must have free access to the source code and be able to prove to his satisfaction the programs used for electoral computations or calculation of his taxes.”

This needs no further editorial from me. Go – read the piece. Tremendous stuff.