The French are a strange lot, sometimes I think they are like us, and other times I’ve no idea how to define them. Today however, I’m liking the way they think. Microsoft is under fire in French courts for not keeping their end of the bargain with regards to OEM license agreements.

When buying a new PC, you are probably going to get forced to get a copy of Windows with it, and in the license agreement they say that if you don’t want the copy of Windows, you should return it for a refund (or words to that affect). Well several people have tried to get this “refund” with varying levels of success. In particular the amount of the refund should they decide to give you one may or may not match what you actually paid for it. In short, some French groups are saying “selling Windows OS with hardware violates a minimum of three laws intended to provide consumer protection.”

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While doing my daily rounds of all the tech news sites to look for anything new and interesting, I found a guy with several thousand Christmas lights all over his house that people can control via the Internet. What does he use to provide such a service? I hear you ask, Why Perl of course. (Mod_perl to be exact.) The site has a control panel during certain time periods (when his neighbours will let him no doubt) where you can take control over his Xmas lights and fiddle to your hearts content.

Over the last few years, languages like PHP and .Net languages have been growing very popular with the unwashed masses, but whenever I find something really cool, it seems to be written in Perl. Wise folks these guys. 🙂

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In an effort to block automated spam comments from our articles, we have adopted an image auth system. In short when commenting you will be presented with an image containing some random “case sensitive” text. In order to submit your comment, you must first type the text contained in the image into the text box below it.

We’ve been meaning to do this for about six months now as the amount of comment spam we were having to delete each week was getting ridiculous. We hope it doesn’t inconvenience anyone too much.

Franki

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to tweak CSS for design purposes. The more you can rely on CSS to drive layout, versus images, tables, etc. the faster your site is going to load and the more you’ll distinguish your site from others.

Mandarin Design is one such site that is pushing the CSS envelope. An exploration of their site reveals a whole shebang of excellent tips, tricks, design ideas and style guidelines. I haven’t come close to checking everything out, but here are a couple of notable articles:

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In what tentatively appears to be a win for the good guys, the European Union has delayed voting on software patents until sometime in 2005. The reasons for the delay are many and varied, but the most significant reason is that they no longer have the majority, and a vote could well kill off the proposal. So they probably put it off until such time as they can work out a way to push it though without opposition. My guess is that there is a good many dollars behind this proposal, big software companies desperately want software patents in place as it’s a very effective weapon to use against your competition. (Look at the situation in the US if you don’t believe me.)

With many European countries eager to distance themselves from reliance on US big business, they are not too keen to vote in laws that are likely to cement their reliance on Microsoft for desktop and server software. Countries in which OSS (Open Source Software) is growing in popularity are showing a growing desire to remove software patents from the table, and rightly so because software patents are just an excuse for frivolous litigation used by big guys to kill off little guys. Software is copyright, you don’t patent a book, you copyright it, software is exactly the same. We don’t need to hand big monopolies any more tools with which they can oppress the competition.

Franki

For the millions of people changing to the Firefox web browser, today marks the day that the E-mail component has reached a stable 1.0 release.

Thunderbird looks much like Outlook Express, but has been designed with Security, Spam filtering and advanced features in mind. I’ve been using pre-release versions for over a year now and I’ve been very impressed. It’s small, fast and feature filled, just like Firefox. Some advanced features are E-mail cleaning, where spam E-mails are stripped of web bugs and remote images, so the spammers can’t use them to validate your E-mail address, virtual folders for search terms, a learning spam filter, an RSS reader and a heap of other stuff. You don’t see that complexity unless you want to though, so it’s a very easy program to get along with. Thunderbird will also import your Outlook Express mail, address book and settings, so you won’t even have to manually configure it.

Get your free copy of Thunderbird 1.0 today and experience the difference a secure E-mail client can make.

Franki

There is great pressure from local governments to tax internet connection services. Several states already tax broadband and/or DSL connection services. A prior ban on such taxes lapsed at the end of November, but President Bush last Friday signed a bill to extent that exemption from local taxation. They allowed states already charging a broadband tax to continue that for two more years however.