A nice article in Business Week Online talking about Apple’s strategy.

Interesting comments on iPod, ITunes, Music Store and other product marketing.

Makes you feel good if you are an Apple owner.

I just called the Australian Competition & Consumers Commission (they administer our Trade Practices Act) and talked to them about SCO’s license claims.

They were interested to hear from me, and told me they were still deciding whether to launch an official investigation. Be good if they did decide to have a look at it.

If you are in Australia, you can contact them and have your say: see here for contact details.

Here’s my open letter to SCO asking them about their proposal that I buy licenses for my linux systems at a special priceof US$699.00.

Dear SCO,

So you claim I have to buy a license for something running on my 2.4 kernel linux machine. Ok. you can claim that.

Now, I need to know some things. I’ve forgotten just what it was that you want me to pay for. Something the kernel, you say. Can you be more specific? I’m director of a company here and by law I have to make sure I’m not wasting the company’s money. So, how about:

1. Give me a list of kernel files that I’m licensing from you.
2. Better still, send me those files so i can compare with my kernel and see what i’ve got.
3. Send me a whole new kernel with your stuff clearly marked in it, and then I’ll have a look. Oh, but if you do that you’ll probably violate the GPL. Hmm. Tricky.

Otherwise, you are just like the window cleaner that sent me an invoice last week for cleaning the windows in November 2000. Hell, I have no recollection of cleaning the windows, so forget it.

So, SCO, prove it, send me an invoice and we’ll look into it.

Best Regards,

Graeme Sutherland
Director
Barking Owl Pty Ltd

Our esteemed federal government is trying to pass legislation to remove the non-profit donation status from charitable groups that speak up against government policy.

This will effectively make free speech at least 30% more expensive.

The sort of organisations that will be impacted are people like Amnesty International, who speak out on lots of human rights issues in Australia, including detention of asylum seekers.

As Greens senator Bob Brown says, in a media release:

“It is a formula for removing tax-deductibility for environment groups, arts organisations and indigenous, education or health groups which lobby the body politic. It would threaten loss of vital tax-deductible status of The Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace because all lobby and try to influence party policies to protect crown lands, wildlife species or forests.”

Is there some way we could donate to an international organisation and still get the deduction? Then an international organisation could criticise our government from outside….

Anybody have any ideas on this?

It is official. Global Warming kills more people than terrorism.

C’mon, John Howard. Sign Kyoto and get on with it!

This article in MIT’s Technology Review suggests that Video Games train us to be able to multitask better, supposedly an essential requirement in the modern world where we are all going so fast, doing so many things at once.

I’m not so sure this is a good thing. Sounds to me like a recipe for disaster in the future. If we train ourselves away from being able to concentrate on one thing, and have to do multiple things, fast, at once, I’m thinking that we have then lost the ability to make detailed progress in one area.

I see this focus as being a key part of thoughtfully developing our potential — being able to focus on one thing, to occupy the whole mind on one problem.

See this amusing article about a team of British journalist trying an experiment: Spending a day trying to do their work from Brighton beach, testing a new free public WiFi network.

I’ve just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Quite a novel. Mid-way through, I was nearly ready to give up on it. I was finding it a bit too much.

Why? I tend to like depictions of the future that have some redeeming features, even if they are dark in places. I like them to have something fun or cool happening. Not so in Oryx and Crake. The dystopian vision is nasty and sad. And perhaps a bit close to home, a bit close to my deepest fears about the future.

It reminds me of Bill Joy’s Why the future doesn’t need us article that he penned in 2000. He named the big threats facing us humans as nanotechnology, genetic engineering and robotics.

I’ve been on a Blogger’s holiday for a week or so.

I’ve been back in my own head thinking about things, and out in the real world dealing with some things that matter. I guess that happens sometimes.

Oh, and I read that new Harry Potter book.

The latest issue of Bruce Scheier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter has a interesting article on a range of stupid security measures and how to fight them.

“Australia must stand on its own two feet and not unconditionally support America“, writes Malcolm Fraser in the Sydney Morning Herald. This is eloquent reasoning from one of our few statesmen.

This ABC Sci-Tech article quotes a study that claims that marriage may tame genius.

Ha.

I’ll show them.

I wonder if one’s genius gets tamed even more if one is married more than once :-)

I get a bit disheartened about how my home country is going.

Sometimes it feels like we Australians have lost our souls or sold them to the highest bidder in the quest for stuff and a governement-induced xenophobic need for ‘security’. We’ve destroyed our good human rights record, we’ve pandered to and joined the global bullies, we’ve subjugated ourselves to (in my opinion) a sneaky prime minister and a lying government. As a nation we are inward looking, paranoid, short on compassion and long on blame.

Now, this country is full of beautiful, wise, compassionate, caring people. Time to come alive folks. Time to stop hiding and feeling sad. Time to re-appear in the country, be a bit more vocal, nurture the compassion at the core of the Australian heart.

By nature I’m an optimist. I’ve been telling my friends for ages that the worst is over, the nation will regain its soul and soon. The bad people will fall from power when the heart of Australia comes back to life.

So, let’s get on with it. I saw a guy cycling through Fremantle yesterday with a Compassion sticker on his bike helmet. I’ve got one on the car. More please.

A few inspiring links:

Margot Kingston’s Webdiary

Amnesty International Australia

Australian Greens Online I don’t agree with all the Green’s say, but I have a lot of respect for Senator Bob Brown — he says and does a lot of sensible, compassionate things.

The folk at climateprediction.net have sent out an email announcing that they have beta code for their distributed climate prediction calculations. Like SETI@Home’sHunt for extra-terrestrial intelligence or distributed.net’s decryption attempts, this is another thing to do with the spare cycles on your computer — calculate how fast global warming is approaching.

But beware the irony here… Make sure you use a sustainable power source for your computer. Otherwise, you may be releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere worsening global warming as you are tying to calculate the impact of it…

I’m in Adelaide for a few days this week visiting clients. Unfortunately, I’m going to miss the Adelaide Festival of Ideas.

Kim Murray sent me over this link. This is an interesting article in the Toronto Star that talks about the initial responses of the presenters on major TV networks to the unfolding horror of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Note: the referenced links to the TV footage archive seems to be broken :-(

Time magazine has a new piece on finger pointing in the Bush administration over questionable intelligence about Weapons of Mass Destruction.

We’ve just got past the 30th of June, which is the end of the tax year here in Australia. There is a flurry of preparation as the final transactions of the year come through and we start to prepare tax returns and make final tax payments.

Word has it that our current government has doubled the number of pages of tax law (going the wrong direction, folks) in the last few years, and those of us in small business spend increasing time on compliance paperwork for our ‘new tax system’.

Now, I don’t mind paying taxes at a reasonable level, but I am rapidly getting sick of the paperwork. I do like running my own accounts, so I know what is going on, so I’m not really prepared to hand my receipts to somebody else and lose the ability to track day-to-day how the business is doing.

After doing all the paperwork and knowing there is more to come, what I want this week is automatic taxation. I want the portion to be remitted to the government to be automatically removed at transaction time. There would be different flavours of transaction with associated tax rates. Given that every time we use a credit card or bank account, there is all the back-end there anyway, why don’t they just sort out the tax then?

Using cash makes this difficult, of course, and there are many technical problems to solve. It would all be much easier if we all carried with us something that could act for us in every transaction, a portable PDA/phone/wallet with strong open-source crypto we could trust that handled the transactions for us.

The portable PDA/phone/wallet is getting close to reality. Much more work is needed on the infrastructure, and a hugely simplified tax law to support it all.

Last Friday, I sold my turntables and mixer. They hadn’t been upacked since we moved in January, and we don’t have a house set up for parties anymore. A sad moment, in a lot of ways, but also a reflection of the move to digital music.

And to cement the trend to digital, we now own a brand new iPod and I’m looking at getting hold of Native Instruments’ Traktor DJ Studio for the G4 Powerbook, to at least give me something to DJ with.

Wired talk about a club called Apt in New York City that has a pair of iPods set up with a mixer, and patrons get to DJ

Two iPods and a mixer. I’d like to get to be able to cue and fade with one iPod.

Wishlist: Perhaps Apple can make us a professional one that has a headphone output and can play two track simultaneously, can fade and mix and change speed of the tracks?