Technophile Monkey

Over at Boycott Novell we have a few choice quotes by early users of Windows 7, both big and small names. It’s interesting that Harvard sees no rush migrating to Windows 7 and will instead increase their Ubuntu GNU/Linux deployment.

My Windows 7 review was mostly about gaming, and for that I see no real problem with Win 7. Windows is where the gaming market is, at least until PC gaming dies the horrible death that has been predicted for it since 1997. For serious work I’m sure that I get fantastic performance from the FOSS systems, but I’m not sure how Windows would fare because I haven’t risked doing any serious work on it.

Perhaps the seeds of a second review when the first service packs roll in?

In related news, if you haven’t yet, check out the new Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. Update: Reading some of the comments around those articles linked in the Boycott Novel one seems to indicate that 9.10 contains a fair bunch of regressions (problems that had been fixed in previous releases that reappear in the current one). That’s bad! More QA at Ubuntu HQ, please! Go and help Canonical with testing Ubuntu releases, post bugs etc. Also, consider contributing your time to Debian GNU/Linux. They only release once every aeon, but their releases usually have far less regressions, and this helps Canonical who are leeching know-how from Debian.

Regressions don’t have to be, and this throws a bad light on Shuttleworth’s plans of release-every-six-months-or-die. If the consequence is more regressions, either the community at large has to focus on synchronized releases together (which would throw more eyeballs at discovering and fixing regressions) or Canonical has to hire more developers and testers to do this themselves.

Another hint could of course be not to change half the system, eh? Audio subsystem here, system initialization scripts there, yeah, let’s wipe out 80% of the system architecture in six months and see if that improves anything.

Oh my, now this has turned into a rant against regressions. It started so innocently…

Jon “Mad Dog” Hall has a very nice article up about how he left his mark on a few people and how moving to Free Software has improved their lives. We don’t have that many long-term observations for Free Software yet, because it’s a young sector, but Jon has been with it from the start and has always showed a huge amount of foresight. The people he has convinced of Free Software a decade ago have been reaping the benefits ever since. The earlier you make the move, the earlier you can profit as well.

One commenter even reminds Jon that thanks to his vision and dedication to Free Software, the US Space Shuttle and other space gear now runs its software on Linux, and how that has saved them the trouble of porting to a zillion incompatible and closed platforms.

It’s beautiful when you see first-hand (well, read second-hand) what a positive influence freedom in software can have on a person’s life.

This weekend I joined the Pirate Party Switzerland. I feel that the pirate parties of the world best represent my political interests as a digital citizen. Some of the green or green-liberal parties in Switzerland also have a reasonable technical agenda, but I think what they lack a bit is know-how. The Pirate Party is full of geeks like you and I, we can do something about the short-sightedness of tech decisions by the other parties.

Some of the core ideas that I believe this party will add to the political playing field:

• Stop Big Content and the Copyright Mafia from taking away even more of people’s rights. Big Content has been crying like a sissy ever since digital copying became possible. Instead of realizing that their business model is outdated, they used their massive lobbying power to influence and bribe politicians into cutting further into people’s rights, all in the name of holy entertainment profit. Even though their claims of losses due to “piracy” are based on a calculation that doesn’t make sense (they assume that each copied work represents one lost sale, which is nonsense), they seem to receive more laws the louder they trumpet these numbers. This has to stop.

  The games industry is facing a similar transition (no more games sold in boxes in a store, things are moving all digital now), but the games industry has foreseen the trend and is adapting its business model. Why should the governments of the world change laws just because the content industry was too stupid to react in time?

• Support a totally transparent government. We need to know about politicians’ conflicts of interest, we need to know government people’s wages, we need to see exactly how a decision was ignited, how it was changed and by whom and how it is put into place. The Pirate Party can not only supply ideas and start motions in this direction, but its members can also serve as technology counsellors to make this possible.
• Fight the erosion of privacy. Governments and corporations are increasingly removing people’s privacy. CCTV/camera systems, biometric passports, easily trackable RFID tags, genetic fingerprint databases. Read a bunch of science-fiction books to see where this could be leading us. But governments aren’t the only ones to blame, with people cheerfully surrendering their most private details to companies like Facebook, Inc. Laws need to be in place to severely punish abuse of personal data. Any activities by the government that would lead to even further loss of privacy, without any clear benefit, need to be opposed. The terrorism craze has made people gullible and blindly accept giving up privacy in the name of “fighting terrorism”, but people don’t stop to think about whether the laws imposed on them actually work in this way.
• Oppose patents and monopolies. Microsoft’s OS dominance isn’t the only globally harmful monopoly that is in place right now. Software patents pose a threat that we can’t even estimate at this time. Monopolies must be reduced, patents must be reexamined.
• New copyright laws. The developments of the last ten years have shown that current copyright laws are completely inadequate to deal with humans’ ways of treating copyrighted works. Sharing (for non-commercial purposes) of copyrighted material must be as legal as it used to be, or even more. DRM systems and region coding, which gives content producers artificial muscle to discriminate against certain areas of the world, must be forbidden by law.
• Violence in media must be discussed, not forbidden in a blind panic. Violent video games are not satan. Violent films and books have been around for hundreds of years before these video games appeared, yet overall violence in society has decreased. The current witch hunt against “killer games” is nonsense. Instead, we need to sit down and talk about a reasonable approach and solutions to violence in media, and we need to work on systems to find out why people feel so mistreated by the current school system or by their work environments that the only solution they see is to kill others and end their own lives. We need to treat this problem at its root. Most politicians’ strategies around violence in media have all the grace of a panicked chicken.
• Open standards. Because closed ones are none.

If you’re curious about these and other issues on the Pirate Party’s agenda, please see our Parteiprogramm on the Pirate Party wiki. It’s also available in French, but not in English, unfortunately.

I believe the Pirate Party brings a perspective to politics that has been woefully underrepresented so far and that none of the other parties can cover adequately, because it’s outside of their focus.

Yaarrrrr!

Update: If you want to join a Pirate Party in your own country, see the list at Pirate Party International.

The Ubuntu-Stammtisch is a (roughly) monthly meeting where current and future Ubuntu users and other Ubunteros/Ubunteras get together. The goal is to hear about new stuff going on in Free Software, to give and receive Ubuntu tech support, perform or receive Ubuntu installations and troubleshooting or just have a beer and chat.

I will start organizing these events again this October (after a few months of hiatus). So I’m proud to present the 42nd Ubuntu-Stammtisch in Zürich:

http://gnupingu.ch/2009/09/der-ubuntu-stammtisch-kehrt-zuruck-am-22-10/

Feel free to show up and drink a beer if you’re nearby

Here’s news that the Canadian arm of the Copyright Mafia has opposed a law that would make it illegal for them to install spyware on people’s computers.

It gets really worrying when the content industry wants to prevent the government from passing a law that protects citizens. And just so that Big Content can keep spying on people using draconic DRM systems.

One of the provisions of the law would make it illegal for someone to install software on a person’s computer without asking them. The Copyright Mafia opposes this — they want to have a special exception so that they are allowed secretly install anything on your machine.

It’s good if you use an operating system that Big Content isn’t “supporting” with their generous good spying intentions, but that won’t allow you to hide forever. So the only way for you Canadians to protect yourselves from such nonsense is to become politically active and oppose these changes. It’s good if the government introduces laws that punish spyware makers and spammers. I see no point in saying “but spyware installed by Warner and Disney is okay”.

I’m using Windows 7 a bit more regularly for gaming purposes now, so I thought I’d start on a series of articles about Win 7 vs. KDE. I’ve given up on GNOME until 3.0 rolls around, but once that’s out, I can do three-way comparisons

Today I’d like to nitpick on something. Observe the following screenshot from the top right corner of a KDE 4.3 window using the default theme:

And here’s Windows 7 with one of the default themes in green:

What do you notice? The window controls on Windows 7 are much chunkier. You get a whopping 50 x 20 pixel close button and quite clearly outlined icons on the buttons themselves, KDE only gives you a measly 20 x 20 pixel target area. The three buttons in Windows 7 are beveled and have a gradient on them, which doesn’t give very good readability, but at least the purpose of the close button is pretty clear.

I think Windows 7 does a better job presenting the window manipulation controls to the user than KDE 4.3: The icons are larger on Windows and thus easier to hit, and their purpose seems clearer. Of course this is arguable: Nothing in UI design is truly intuitive, that’s a myth, so you can’t say for sure that a small bar, a small rectangle and an X are any more intuitive than an up triangle, a down triangle and an X.

KDE loses one more point because the window control’s hot area (the clickable area) doesn’t extend all the way to the border of the window, and on hovering over the close box, the hover effect is barely noticeable. The users, especially those with less-than-stellar eyesight, are left guessing whether their next click will truly “take” on the close box or whether they still need to move the pointer a bit.

Still, I know that the KDE theme engine can deal with buttons of various sizes, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen an Aero-like theme with a wide close button. I’ll have to investigate.

Personally, I think the default KDE theme is a step back with 4.3 and Windows 7 (if you compare default settings) would win. I will crawl around KDE Brainstorm and pimp the idea of larger default window controls a bit.

(This is another post about the decline of the Swiss-German language, so it won’t make much sense to translate this to English. But if you’re interested in what’s going on, drop a comment and I’ll give a summary )

Ich freue mich über Leser aus Deutschland, die scheinbar über die Suche nach “Schweizerdeutsche Sprache” und ähnliches auf die Deutschenschweiz-Kategorie stossen. Super

Deshalb hier ein kurzer Artikel über ein paar Helvetismen, also Schweizer Begriffe im Schriftdeutsch der Schweiz, und vielleicht ein paar Worte zur Unterscheidung der Sprachen. Einige Deutsche scheinen zu denken, Schweizerdeutsch ist Hochdeutsch mit einem seltsam betontem K und rollendem R. Den Eindruck könnte man gewinnen, wenn man Schweizern hauptsächlich über SF1 oder Wiederholungen in 3Sat begegnet ist. Wer denkt, alles andere seien urchige Dialekte vom Land, ist spätestens dann hoffnungslos verwirrt, wenn er in Bern aus dem Zug steigt und mit Bärndütsch und Französisch konfrontiert ist.

Es gibt zwei Varianten von Deutsch in der Schweiz: Das Schweizer Schriftdeutsch und das Schweizerdeutsch. Ersteres ähnelt dem Hochdeutschen. Es ist die Standardsprache in Schulen der Deutschschweiz und folgt der deutschen Grammatik, hat aber einige Eigenheiten und Wörter, die man in Hochdeutsch nicht findet. Das Esszett (ß) existiert zum Beispiel überhaupt nicht, es wird immer Doppel-S geschrieben (Grösse, schliessen, Füsse…). Helvetische Wörter findet man hier auch:

• Es heisst nicht Hähnchen sondern Poulet
• Fahrrad heisst Velo
• Gehsteig heisst Trottoir (Sprich: “Trottuahr”)
• Geldbeutel heisst Portemonnaie
• Man zieht nicht um, man zügelt
• Parken heisst parkieren
• Grillen heisst grillieren
• Vereinbaren heisst abmachen
• Der Fahrschein ist das Billet
• Ein Pfand ist ein Depot (Das Tram- oder Busdepot ist aber auch ein Depot)
• Der Reisebus heisst Car
• Hausschuhe sind Finken
• Die Autowerkstatt ist eine Garage, die Garage zuhaus aber auch
• Innerhalb ist innert (“zahlbar innert x Tagen”)
• Sahne ist Rahm
• Eine Ampel ist ein Lichtsignal
• Im Nüsslisalat hat es keine Nüsse (okay, manchmal schon), das ist ein Feldsalat
• Die rote Beete heisst hier Rande
• Etwas süsses (im Sinne von “oooh, wie süss!”) ist herzig

Man könnte die Liste noch beliebig ergänzen. Die meisten dieser Wörter sind in der Schriftsprache völlig legal, doch scheinbar haben die Schulen heutzutage seltsame Lehrmittel (oder die Jugend sieht zu viel deutsches Fernsehen), denn ich höre manchmal sogar im Schweizerdeutschen Wörter wie “Gehsteig” oder “Haltestell”, wo man eigentlich Trottoir und Station sagt. Dazu aber ein andermal mehr, heute geht es ja hauptsächlich um die Helvetismen.

Die Österreicher scheinen stolzer zu sein auf ihre Sprache. Wenn ich dort im Restaurant sitze, ist von Marillen die Rede, nicht von Aprikosen. Auch, wenn man explizit Hochdeutsch spricht (weil der blöde Ausländer den Dialekt nicht versteht), bleiben die österreichischen Begriffe meist unübersetzt. Bei weniger geübten Hochdeutsch-Sprechern in der Schweiz ist das zwar auch so (“Sehen sie das Velo dort auf dem Trottoir?”, dies zum deutschen Touristen…) aber in Städten wie Zürich scheint es Mode zu sein, on-the-fly von Trottoir auf Gehsteig und von Billet auf Fahrkarte umzusteigen, wenn man mit Deutschen spricht.

Vielleicht ist das auch alles subjektiv, ich war ja nicht lange in Österreich. Trotzdem wünsche ich mir mehr Stolz auf die Helvetismen, so wie die Österreicher stolz zu sein scheinen auf ihr eigenes Deutsch. Irgendwo sind die Lehnwörter ja hergekommen, hierzulande hauptsächlich aus dem Französischen und Italienischen. In Österreich haben wir noch ungarische, polnische und andere östliche Einflüsse. Das ist doch schön, abwechslungsreich und farbig, warum sollten wir unsere Schriftsprache auch noch opfern, wenn der Dialekt schon stirbt?

Das gilt übrigens gleichermassen für Schwaben, Fischköppe, Berliner und Leipziger. Auch die regionalen Ausdrücke innerhalb Deutschlands sollten bleiben dürfen. Nicht, dass man meint, ich mag keine Deutschen.