DoctorMo's Blog

Tomorrow will see the increase of the Value Added Tax (VAT) similar to the sales tax in the USA, it will go back up to 17.5% from a year low of 15%.

This low VAT rate was introduced in order to increase the amount of spending going on in the UK.

This would make sense, if the problem in the UK economy was that money was being hoarded by common folk with large fat savings accounts. The problem is that money is not being hoarded by the middle or lower classes, most of it has moved either to the ultra rich or overseas as the products consumed in the UK are predominantly made overseas.

So lets see, the logic of this is that most of the money of increased spending will remain in the country… cycling around. Don’t forget money is a reflection of work/value added, so it’s not like you can just print more money, that doesn’t do anything over than devalue existing currency. A bit like diluting juice more and more, you technically get more drink, but you don’t get the same strong taste.

If value is leaking away into Chine and other producing countries, what you don’t focus on is getting people service jobs. That’s about as short sighted and dumb as one could be. Sure it’ll solve a short term problem, but it will increase fragility of the whole system and ultimately lead to cardiac arrest in the economy.

It’s similar to the Halton Council, who persist in attracting even more super market chains to set up shop in Widnes. As if having 400 supermarket jobs will somehow solve job problems and generate wealth, when in fact it’s likely to just drain away the market in massive dilution of a single industry sector.

My economic New Year’s wish is that local and national government see sense and set up more funds, grands and subsidies for creative people who can prove that they spend their free time working on business plans, art, software, music, what ever takes your fancy. Cultivating a sense that the community will support you as you find your feet with your work is surely more useful than giving grants and tax breaks to the likes of Tesco or Wallmart/Asda.

Thoughts?

Ken Hess of Daniweb posting an amusing article about marketing, his personal feelings of frustration at the inability of a group of random plebs to marshal enough resources for a prime time advertising budget.

Ken, you are a card. I know you want to make your entries interesting, but look at this:

Microsoft has that marketing engine behind it. Linux has Linus and a band of merry followers who attempt to “convert by the sword” and to convince the infidels that there’s a better way.

Does it? What is this “Linux” thing of which you speak? a kernel project? Why does a kernel project need marketing on TV? And besides, when was the last time you ever saw Linus Torvalds doing anything as brash as advertising or marketing? Linus and his merry followers have no need of adverts, they’re doing quite well, thank you very much.

Microsoft isn’t fighting Torvalds or any of the kernel programmers, not really. Why should they care if there is technical excellence over there in obscurity? No, what they are fighting with marketing is the use to which this technology is put and as Torvalds so wonderfully put:

If you’re a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2′d software for your evil plans to take over the world (“Sharks with lasers on their heads!!”), and the GPLv2 just says that you have to give source code back. And that’s OK by me. I like sharks with lasers. I just want the mad scientists of the world to pay me back in kind. I made source code available to them, they have to make their changes to it available to me. After that, they can fry me with their shark-mounted lasers all they want.

Does that sounds like someone who cares about marketing their work for business use? or any use at all?

Yes, we have The Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation and a few others out there displaying the white teeth and freshly scrubbed faces but have you seen a Linux commercial lately?

Ah, so now we expect the Linux Foundation (a group of business interests that surround the kernel project) and the Free Software Foundation (a group of ideal interests surrounding the Gnu project) to produce and pay for the airing of major television advertisements? Somehow I think Ken has suffered a bit of amnesia, it’s not the LF or FSF that has historically been pushing “Linux” (whatever that is) at the business world, it’s people like Red Hat and IBM.

You remember all those adverts they made?

Well my take on the reason why those adverts are not being run is simply that both companies have enough business to be getting on with. If they need to increase public awareness of their products in certain sectors, I’m sure they will invest into advertising that best targets them.

So who is Ken’s article aimed at? I don’t think it’s aimed at FOSS businesses, because they’re doing rather well out of the economic crisis. I think instead the article is aimed at the fears in the hearts of enthusiasts. People who care deeply about the spread and uptake of Free Software and with that the fair treatment by third parties. It’s a cruel way of pulling on the dark heart strings that drive advocates and I think it probably just a crass way of getting hits.

Which unfortunately this entry doesn’t help. But articles like Ken’s do help in rubbing people up the wrong way, making them angry and in some way motivated. Perhaps that’s a goal too?

In conclusion, is the Free Desktop going to suffer in economic trouble? No. Is enterprise core business process software going to die during a meltdown? No, quite the reverse it seems.

I was reading this interesting article by someone on buntfu called “Ubuntu and Mozilla: The inevitable alliance“. There isn’t a way to comment on the actual article, there is no author links/names and it is in a sense simply idle speculation.

But right down there are the bottom of the page is some interesting misconceptions about the nature of Google, Canonical and Mozilla. The old chesnut that confuses Ubuntu with Canonical, the former is a foundation which was never used and the later is a privately held business in the Isle of Man (UK) which controls the entire business and community. Mozilla is a Corporation and a Foundation (in multiple parts) and Google is a share held corporation with a responsibility to it’s share holders only.

It’s possible that Canonical could be sold to Google, but Mark would either want serious control or some sort of section that allows design and implementation of features to roll through. I think the job of Ubuntu isn’t finished yet and I don’t think Mark is ready to simply sell for cash (more? what ever for?) or give up control.

The combination of Mozilla and Ubuntu? Well both have really weird trademark policies that cause grief, which plenty of delicate discussion was needed to resolve. So I suppose they’re common in that sense, but otherwise? Mozilla focuses so much of it’s efforts on the Windows platform that their Linux releases seem more like the personal project of a handful of people, or at least that’s my perception given how much faster Windows Firefox via wine is compared to native Ubuntu Firefox.

I can see the commonality, I just think it’d take a bit of shifting in the industry to end up with the two in a closer relationship. People are already mooting moving to Chromium as the default web browser in Ubuntu and there are plenty of other web browsers in the repository that are moving to webkit and away from gekko.

To sum, I think all these organisations are very different beasts with different primary goals, I can see closer relationships, but merging or buying would seem unlikely at this time.

I’ve joined my wife’s facebook group to support more Quorn products being imported or created for the US market.

Join if you like meat free, but meat tasting scotch eggs.

Dor Dankner complained that the Learnid project by Jono bacon was still using the Ubuntu icon, firstly I think it’s only using this icon because that’s what Quickly uses by default… perhaps something we should change as an upstream bug.

Secondly, this is my quick submission:

I might end up modifying it later, not sure what kind of logo is wanted by Jono yet.

I wanted to have a crack at developing a customised version of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix launcher screen (the netbook-launcher package in the repositories), these modifications would have been simple additions which take the new message system notifications currently in the system tray and would have displayed them as large icons in a similar style as the netbook launcher.

If you remember I was talking about easy to use interfaces with which I could give to my nan and my dad who both have bad eyes and could do with a computer that’s even simpler to use than the normal Ubuntu interface.

The problem is that when I started to hack on the ubuntu netbook-launcher code base, I couldn’t compile it. The apt-get build-dep command installed all the dependencies, but it still wanted a gnome SVN autogen file. Making it officially the hardest project to hack into as a new comer since I joined into the Ubuntu/launchpad/bzr easy to develop mantra.

So I gave up, since there weren’t any instructions on how to do it in the README or any logical reason why it should need some random development file from gnome that isn’t available in a devel package.

Instead I did a ui mock-up in inkscape, it’s not as useful as doing the devel work myself, but at least it gets my ideas on paper for you guys to see.

Oh and Happy Yule!

Update:Neil J. Patel has kindly given instructions on Christmas day explaining how to compile the netbook-launcher, so I’ve submitted two bug reports to add the missing packages to the build-deps. #500335 and #500334

As good capitalists will know, the best way to pure profit (defined as gaining money without work) is to have properties which you can effect rents from. These properties can be anything from home and office physical space properties and shares in companies to copyright and patent properties.

All of these things outside of their utility value are properties that can be rented out to others and thus someone else must work in order to utilise them. (If you think your buying copyrighted materials such software, music or movies is what you do at HMV, your wrong).

So what is the second way of earning money while being bloody bone idle¹?

Well it’s very simple, own a company that is involved in an industry, especially a monopoly, and in an ideal capitalist system it will have profits that are equal to or lower than the cost of entry by the competition.

So your first goal is to deliberately increase the cost of entering a market. This can be anything from making sure it costs a lot of money to bribe the right people in government or channel partners, to buying up the supply of manufacturing material increasing it’s price. You can also roll one industry into a second one, once you have control over your second industry sector, you can ratchet up the prices.

It should be the goal of the working class there for to make sure that when capitalists stomp their feet in political circles for regulation, we’re keeping an eye out for what these regulations will do to the price of entry and the way it effects the costs of the products.

¹ Yes, yes, I’m a socialist libertarian. I do believe that earning money without working is wrong on economic and social levels. There is a kind of abuse by proxy, a way of making people work for their betters through situation and not having the “betters” simply work for their wages like everyone else.

I might as well come right out and say it, all these financial problems, all these banking scandals and all these job losses, they’re all down to one simple fact.

We don’t like to serve our masters.

If we, the common people, weren’t so hung up on fairness and “everyone is equal” cultures, we’d find it easier to adequately bow and scrape at the feet of those with the money, there by effecting the great trickle down effect which would transfer some portion of the wealth back to the people who create it in the first place.

Think about this mess from a rich banker’s point of view. Here we have a my massive pile of cash in some foreign, tax protected bank, and what do I find when I try and spend it? Why I find good for nothing, cheeky beggars telling me that I can’t hire out the salvation army to whip people in the street. What a nanny state we’ve got ourselves into.

This must be the truth of course, otherwise how could you explain the failure of the financial system to effectively transfer and balance wealth before the failure of the production and workers for which the money’s value is based on?

Some people claim it’s because when you borrow out at 400:1 leverage your effectively printing money and that effectively causes massive inflation in what ever products those who got all the money want to buy: Houses, student loans, yachts, laws, etc.

Some say we need regulation to better protect people from unfair lending practices or unfair rents for essential properties.

The real solution of course is to grind people’s spirits down until they can not stand up to their betters. So that they know their place and their place is at the feet of the wealthy earning minimum wage (should be scrapped to!). Only when people who work are in the correct mindset that they have nothing to live for but to be slaves to the rich in our economy, those who have rightly not worked for the hoards of money which so effectively represents the work the working class have done.

Only then will we have an economy that doesn’t fall down every five years.

* Warning: This is satire, you may experience some emotion.

Email organisation is a pain in the neck, my messages are never in any logical category unless I manually put them into folders or create manually search filters or search folders.

What I could do with is a more organic system of organising my messages, something that can pull together information about who in my contacts are relevant to each other and who is separate conversations.

The first layer of distinction I make when I receive a message is what classification it is. This first level is not based on who it’s from, but who the message is to. If the message was sent directly to me and only me, then it’s top priority personal correspondence, if on the other hand it’s to me and a group of others then it’s a collaborative message and there will probably be a multi person thread needed to handle it.

Then you have messages to mailing lists, messages in which I was CC’d or BBC’d, each with their own priority for my attention and each format gives clues as to the kind of communication.

Once we’ve sorted all my mail out by who it’s to and we’ve put all the mailing list emails to one side. We can put emails that were sent directly to/from me to one person and in which that person has never been known to communicate with anyone else I know into a direct correspondence (Generic Inbox) until I can tell the computer more information about what it’s about.

I take all the other email and I want to create loose tribes around the people I’m communicating with, the computer should be able to pick out fairly easily who in my Inbox knows each other just from what email addresses tend to appear together. More usefully would be to back the data analysis up with friend data from places like Facebook, but it’s not a requirement.

I should end up with groups of messages like “Inner Circle”, “Ubuntu Community”, “Ubunchu Project”, “Various/Other”.

I could go further and do some clever filtering based on what emails contain key words like ‘account’, ‘password’ and ‘welcome to’ and filter those out into their own special category of message.

There is so much I want my email messages to do for me, that perhaps I want it to tell me about my communication patterns and sort stuff out into loose organic bundles of messages. More messages means more intrays.

All I know is, I dislike the very idea of the one single inbox.