Spontaneous Monotony

I had messed up some of the Wordpress feed redirects last night, so some people (including an aggregator or two) might have been cut off. Sorted now (in theory).

You might remember the university lecturers’ strike last year. Not content with above-average salaries, which for the average member of staff already exceeded £35,000 before the strike¹ – compared to a UK average of around £22,500², unions used students’ futures as bargaining chips without their consent in a bid to squeeze more money out of the universities.

They eventually got the cash – a 13.1% pay rise over three years – but that has left already-cash-strapped universities with an additional £60m+ deficit. With student services already being cut significantly (e.g. Glasgow has cut the student unions’ block grant in half and is threatening to pull out of the Crichton Campus altogether, many other unis are cutting unprofitable unpopular courses), the only way for many universities to solve this latest financial crisis is to go to the source.

Strathclyde University is sacking 250 lecturers³, Dundee has already announced plans to sack an unconfirmed number⁴, and common sense suggests that other universities will have to follow suit.

While it is never a good thing for universities to have to cut services (I thought in this country we believed in adequately-funded state-provided education, apparently not), there is something pleasing about seeing the people who abused thousands of students for their own financial gain, finally getting their comeuppance.

References

¹ A. Smith Students condemn strike ‘disruption’ (Guardian Unlimited, March 7th 2006)

² R. Watts and D. Roberts FTSE pay spirals out of control (Telegraph, 25th September 2006)

³ K. Schofield Jobs cut as university finance crisis bites (The Scotsman, 30th January 2007)

⁴ K. Schofield University jobs threat as lecturers’ pay deal adds to £3m deficit (The Scotsman, 24th January 2007)

Well just after I posted about Vista, Wordpress managed to go totally toes-up. I did the usual fiddles (deleting htaccess and recreating permalinks, deleting all files and reinstalling wordpress, etc.) and they didn’t work, and to be honest I have little patience with malfunctioning software. Long story short, I’ve switched to Textpattern and I’ll be setting it up with tag plugins etc. over the next couple of days.

UPDATE: OK, I’ve got all necessary gubbins installed, I’ll migrate the Technorati tags from old posts tomorrow, and IIRC from last time, Textpattern turns comments off on imported posts by default. That will require more phpmyadmin fiddling to fix, but shouldn’t take long.

This may come as a shock to you, but (contrary to the blanket propaganda being pushed through the BBC at the moment) you do not need to downgrade to the new Windows Vista and Office 2007 offerings from Microsoft. If you already know what’s wrong with Vista, feel free to skip down a few sections

The 3d desktop is bloatware. That isn’t anything against Microsoft- most 3d desktops are bloatware. Think about it, the pixel shader technology that runs system-crunching games like Company of Heroes is now required for your operating system to display your desktop. Things get really nasty if you try to run a game on top of that desktop.

It isn’t even all that good. Of course, when you see it the automatic thought is ‘ooh, shiny’ but believe me when I tell you that it soon becomes tiresome. I have used various 3d desktops (and even a 3d tabs plugin for Firefox) and the extra animation gets in your way. At the moment, if you are in your web browser, and click on the taskbar (or whatever your OS calls it, Windows calls it the taskbar) icon for your word processor, your word processor will appear. With a 3d desktop, you click the icon for your word processor and you have to wait for a couple of seconds while the stupid switching animation plays. In most operating systems, taking 2 or 3 seconds to switch between already-open applications is (ironically) taken as a sign of spyware/virus infection.

Aside from the performance implications, there is the much more serious consequence of installing Vista on your PC – its so-called ‘content protection’ system ‘incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost’ ¹. Vista’s device driver system gives Microsoft the ability to disable your hardware over the internet ² if you do something with your computer that Microsoft does not approve of.

I could go on all day, but instead I will limit myself to one more flaw – price. Microsoft’s prices – including the hidden Microsoft tax all computer buyers pay through Microsoft coercing manufacturers into not offering OS-less systems³ – have always been excessive, but the treatment of those living outside the USA (just over 95% of the world) is just taking the proverbial piss. Example:

• Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition. US RRP: $149.95. UK RRP: £119.99, which is $235 ⁴

Now on to the suggestion – use OpenOffice. Now we can compare it with Microsoft Office on the basis of numbers – taking a quick example, one of my essays is saved in doc format and is 110kB. The exact same essay, when re-saved as the ISO standard⁵ OpenDocument format (which OpenOffice, Abiword and Writely all support, but Microsoft Office does not), is just 21kb in size. But enough with numbers, let’s get down to the basics. I have been using only OpenOffice for all my university work, for six months, and I have yet to come across something I can’t do. OpenOffice gives you every feature you need, and is more stable than Microsoft Office. Even if it wasn’t free, it would be a better bet than its Microsoft competitor. You even get database and flowcharting packages, which Microsoft Office only gives you with its higher-priced business versions.

If you want to find out more about OpenOffice, you can visit its website.

*PS:*This is the 500th post! Woohoo!

References

¹ P. Guttmann A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

² Microsoft Corporation Output Content Protection and Windows Vista

³ United States Department of Justice US v Microsoft: Court’s Findings

⁴ Google Currency Converter, as at 30th January 2007

⁵ International Organization for Standarization ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Information technology – Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0

It seems that children in England are to be taught ‘Britishness’ in school. Aside from the fact that political indoctrination of any kind has no place in the classroom, there simply is no such thing as Britishness. There is Scottishness, Englishness and Welshness (whether or not we should include Northern Ireland in the term ‘Britishness’, since it is on a separate island, is not something I have time to discuss here).

The idea that there is a single ‘British’ national identity just because we have a British government is as ludicrous as the suggestions that we have a ‘European’ national identity just because we have the European Union. The fact that different countries share a government does not mean that they share a national identity.