Oh no. Oh no no no.

I can’t believe it.  Yah, the SNL video about Hillary having no ethical standards was amusing but I didn’t think it could be completely true…

Why is Hillary still in the race when its clear to everyone, even her own aides, that its over in all but name?

“Mrs Clinton is also facing a cash crisis: she has now loaned her campaign more than $11 million just to keep it afloat and it has further debts of at least $10 million.“

Wouldn’t prolonging the campaign just be a further waste of money?

And then I read this just a few minutes ago:

“A little-known provision of a 2002 campaign-finance law cosponsored by McCain prevents candidates who drop out of the race from raising money after the nominating conventions to repay themselves for personal loans. If Clinton fails to come up with the funds by the Democratic convention in August and she fails to gain the nomination, she will be out the $11 million. If she quits before then, she may find it hard to get people to keep giving cash so she can retire her debt.“

And it suddenly becomes clear; she’s staying in the race to get people to contribute to her so that she doesn’t lose her $11M…

[Update: Look at the maps from this post showing where Clinton got >65% of a given county's votes and note where the upcoming West Virginia and Kentucky primaries are; its not a stretch to think that Hillary will get a lot of support there.  She's going to try and parlay large victories there into campaign fundraising]

never mind that “Bill and Hillary Clinton earned a combined $109 million between 2000 and 2007“  its the principle of the thing: she wants others to pay for her mistake.  Others like this 11-year-old kid who sold his own stuff to raise money for her to be president even though that’s all but impossible now.  Others like the Obama campaign workers who have to endure hideous racism while Hillary stays in the race and tries to attract the support of “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans” who (won’t vote for a black man for president and) will contribute to her campaign; this is worse than plain demagogy, this is a giant scam.  She knows she can’t win, but she wants her money back and she’s willing to pander to the prejudices of others to fleece them out of their cash.  And its hurting Obama’s chances to become president, but she doesn’t care either…

Update:  I can’t think of any other reason unless she is in such an absolute denial of her own imminent failure that she can’t realize what’s going on and won’t until its finally over.  And either way, as unscrupulous crook or delusional thinker, this proves to me that she is not qualified to be president.

Here’s how we can test which it is. If she drops out of the race before the convention (with significant debt remaining to herself) then she’s just in denial right now.  But if she drags this on to the convention (or ends it only when she’s debt free), then its sadly true.

Update 2: Surprise, surprise:

“Hillary Clinton seized on the West Virginia results in an area where she needs particular help: fund-raising. Roughly $20 million in debt despite $11 million in personal loans from Clinton, her campaign sent a text message to supporters’ cellphones less than an hour after the polls closed hailing the victory and urging them to donate at her Web site. A similar pitch arrived by e-mail two minutes later.”

Though the article quotes her as saying in the e-mail:

“With your help, I’m going to carry the energy of tonight’s victory into the next contests in Kentucky and Oregon”

Kentucky sure (see map above; the voting will be very similar to W. Va.), but Oregon is a whole separate matter.  First, consider the racial breakdown:

West Virginia: ~95% white
Kentucky: ~90%
Oregon: ~80%
US as a whole: ~65%

Second, consider per capita income:

US avg ~$21.5K
Oregon (23rd) ~$21K
Kentucky (40th) ~$18K
W. Va. (49th) ~$16.5K

As a result it might not be too surprising to note that three separate polls in Oregon in the last week have shown Obama at ~55% to 35~45% for Clinton (the rest ‘unsure’).  HRC will lose Oregon and by double digits.  Hopefully then she’ll bow out gracefully, but I won’t hold my breath.

Note: as per Wikipedia, here are the number of pledged delegates from each state:

W. Va.: 28 (20 Clinton; 8 Obama)

Kentucky: 51 (guessing: 34~38 Clinton; 13~17 Obama)
Oregon: 52 (guessing: 22~25 Clinton; 27~30 Obama)

Based on my guesses, the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on the 20th will thus give:

56~63 pledged delegates for Clinton and 40~47 for Obama; at MOST, Hillary would have a net gain of 23 delegates that day.  Obama leads her by 154 pledged delegates right now (see small table near the top of the Daily Kos homepage).

Electoral Math

Now that Obama appears almost certain to be the democratic nominee [1, 2, 3] (even with Clinton on track to win West Virginia and Kentucky by ~2:1 margins it should be over by May 20, though she might not admit it to herself ;) the question becomes ‘How can Obama win the 2008 general election?’  And I have a nice map site to help me illustrate :)  The goal is the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

These are my basic assumptions:

1. The states that voted for both Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 will almost certainly vote for Obama in 2008; this gets Democrats 248 votes immediately.

2. I will give McCain the benefit of the doubt and give him each state where he’s currently polling favorably (>5% in his favor).  I will give Iowa to Obama as they voted for Gore in 2000 and currently are polling in Obama’s favor (NOTE: polls will change between now and November and thus recalculations will be needed! e.g. watch New Hampshire).

3. Of the remainder, states which Clinton neither won in 1992 nor 1996 and which Obama is not leading (curiously enough, they’re the same right now ;) go to McCain. (NOTE: as in #2 except this should be more stable; if any do get Obama leading I would switch them to undecided unless it was >10%)

The result of all this is that (currently) just four states are in play:

Nevada, Colorado, Ohio and Florida

Yes, again with Ohio and Florida; ugh.  Let’s hope that Obama picks up significant support in some of the other states (perhaps via a VP candidate? :)

Update: a very interesting article about how Obama could win simply by increasing voter turnout…

Update 2: linked from the above article is this very interesting set of maps.  Note the “best case” (for Obama) scenario at the bottom; of the sixteen states that Bill Clinton never won in ‘92 or ‘96 (AK, UT, ID, WY, ND, SD, NE, KS, OK, TX, IN, VA, NC, SC, MS, AL), Obama actually has a small chance in five of those: TX, IN, VA, NC, SC.  It would be an amazing coup if Obama could win Texas, though of those, it looks like his best chances are in Indiana and Virginia.

Also interesting is that if you take the 2004 results and do the following switches: NH -> Rep.; IA, NV, CO, NM -> Dem (see this page), Obama can win without West Virginia or the south…

Asus EeePC Pricing Shenanigans

(Another post via Ubuntu’s Bug #1)

Asus has had very good sales of their EeePC; they’re cute little devices, but while they run Linux, their distro is a Xandros derivative and I won’t support that (here’s why)

Now, with the latest version, the 900, they’re offering a choice of Windows or Linux… at the same price*

* except there’s a hardware difference:

—
S.S.D. Storage (Solid-State Disk)
12GB (4GB built-in + 8GB flash) SSD (Microsoft Windows OS Version)
20GB (4GB built-in +16GB flash) SSD (Linux OS Version)
—

So the ‘Microsoft tax’ is on the order of ~$50 US (roughly speaking, based on the difference in price of 8 and 16 GB USB thumb drives these days and assuming that what Asus pays Xandros per system is small) which is about standard for large OEMs iiRC. (e.g. Dell)

BUT…

A report from Australia:

—
Asus will sell the Windows XP model of its Eee PC 900 for a substantially cheaper price than its Linux counterpart, raising questions about the company’s long term commitment to the Linux marketplace.

At a Sydney launch event for the much-anticipated Eee PC 900 model, local product manager Albert Liang revealed that the XP model would sell for $599 in Australia, while the Linux model would be $649. To cover the licence cost associated with Windows XP Home and Microsoft Works — which replace a custom version of the Xandros Linux distribution and OpenOffice — the XP model has just 12GB of storage, while the Linux version has 20GB.

The machines, which sport a wider 8.9 inch screen and weigh in at just under a kilogram, will go on sale in Australia at the end of May. Adding to the impression that Linux is now the poor cousin, the XP version will be sold through “selected retailers” while the Linux machine will be available through “computer resellers”. (Translation: No more Linux machines in Myer.)

The original Eee PC, launched in Australia in November last year, has been a major success, selling one million units worldwide. “It has generated a tremendous amount of noise into the market,” Liang said.

While the presence of Linux clearly hasn’t been a barrier to consumers buying the notebook to date, Asus appears keener to promote the presence of XP on the new range than to expand the Linux market. “Microsoft has been a longstanding supporter of Asus,” Liang said.

“People are asking for the familiar and compatible Windows interface that they’ve used in the past,” said Keith Holtham, the account manager for Asus at Microsoft Australia. “The goal was to provide a platform that allows users to have access to their favourite applications.”

Holtham made much of the presence of Windows Live applications on the box, including Communicator, Photo Gallery and OneCare Family Safety. He then totally undermined the credibility of the latter by noting that his teenage children seemed able to find anything they wanted online regardless of such filtering software being present.

APC played briefly with the machines on show at the launch. The XP version of the Eee boots quite speedily for a Windows box, but is still notably slower than its Linux counterpart. Even Asus’ press release promoting the product acknowledges that the Linux machine is faster to get started. “It provides a fast boot-up time, ideal for quick internet access while waiting for public transport or taking notes on-the-go,” it breathlessly proclaims.

Apparently, “the Linux version is suited to users who desire an icon-driven and easy point-and-click interface – well suited for children or users with limited computer experience”. We’ll leave the reader to deduce what that implies about the XP interface.
—

(as per http://www.xe.com/ucc/ the $AU is ~ to the $US right now)

So it appears that the Microsoft tax there is ~$0.  Did Microsoft give them a special deal where they’re offering Windows for next to nothing in exchange for promoting the Windows machine over the Linux one?

Regardless, it shows how Linux (while a superior and less expensive OS, as the article notes) faces an uphill battle due to the OEM bottleneck.

Consider Ubuntu:

- free of cost
- basically free of malware/virus risk
- modest hardware requirements
- good hardware support
- quite usable
etc. etc. etc.

But consider the ‘average computer user’:

- will never install an OS… ever.

Wubi is a great leap that will probably get a lot of ACUs to try Ubuntu, but the machines they buy will still come with Windows unless something can be done to really breakthrough the Microsoft stranglehold on the OEMs.  I will suggest as a goal that for the Christmas season, another Major OEM besides Dell should be shipping Ubuntu systems (and hopefully not hide them on their site either ):  SABDFL can do the arm twisting in private ;)

The Microsoft Empire

A follow-up to my Microsoft Meltdown II post wherein I quoted a visitor to Redmond:

“[Microsoft] has degenerated into a series of disconnected fiefdoms that aren’t all moving in the same direction.”

Regarding user interface inconsistency in Windows:

—
The reason must be that no one in Microsoft actually gives a damn. Each group develops their own UI widgets in their own style and they simply don’t care that it’s a total mess. They don’t care that I have to learn new ways of doing the same task just because they couldn’t be bothered to do things the same way as other applications. I’m not saying, for example, that they shouldn’t have introduced the ribbon concept in Office 2007, because it seems to work pretty well, and I can believe that it really is a better UI model. But they should have taken stock of what they were doing and made it a system-wide UI device. New widgets and UI models do crop up from time to time, but they should be rare, and when they do appear, Microsoft should make them general so that everyone can use them.

Microsoft’s continuous and repetitive reinvention of the wheel again just makes the task for third-party developers that much more unpleasant. Because even when a developer does want to make something that “fits in,” and even when that developer has picked a specific application to fit in with, MS still offers inconsistent choices. Take the Office 2007 ribbon as an example. The ribbon is pretty cool, and it’s obvious that third parties will want to use the ribbon themselves (even if it might not be the best fit for their application, but sadly there’s not much that can be done about that). Unfortunately, the Office 2007 ribbon is part of Office 2007. It’s not a part of Windows, it’s instead built in to Office, and not usable for other software.

Recognizing the gap in functionality here, a third-party developer produced its own ribbon-like object that developers could embed into their programs to gain a ribbon user interface. Microsoft in turn bought the third-party object and is now distributing it to developers using the current version of Visual C++. Oh, yeah—it’s only for C++ developers. No ribbon for .NET developers. So now MS has two ribbons; the Office code and new one it bought in. That’s frustrating enough—it would be better to do the work to put the Office 2007 ribbon into a nice little library so the behavior would be identical—but it’s tolerable.

Here’s the bit that blows the mind: Microsoft is going to develop another ribbon, this time as part of Windows Seven. It won’t be the Office one, and it won’t be the Visual C++ one. It will be a new one. And, oh, this one won’t be .NET either. The confusion of UIs in Windows mirrors the confusion of development within Microsoft.
—

(bolded emphasis added)

Right now, MS stands on two main monopoly legs: Windows and Office; Server is profitable, but actually faces real competition and so doesn’t show the same extremely high profit margins.  An illustration from the excellent RoughlyDrafted Magazine:

If MS ever faced real desktop and office suite competition, especially in the form of free-cost (e.g. Google and/or software libre), the Microsoft’s Empire, already showing its late-Spanish Empire-like-cracks, would begin to rapidly crumble.

Update: An excerpt Wall Street Journal article (mirrored in full here) found via Groklaw’s News Picks:

there is a fear among shareholders that the Yahoo bid exposed weaknesses in Microsoft’s business model. Its operating margins on desktop software hover around 70%. Companies led by Google are now offering competing, ad-supported applications such as spreadsheets and word-processing — free. The worry is that Microsoft may need to combat these efforts. That’s where Yahoo, which excels in selling online advertising and subscription services, came in. Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo was seen by many as a signal the company recognized its grip on the desktop may be slipping.

(emphasis and link added)

Windows XP SP3

So…  you want SP3 for XP?  Sorry, MS screwed up by not properly testing against one of their enterprise apps and they had to halt the release.  What’s that you say?  You, as a home user, don’t run “Microsoft’s Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS), a software package for running retail stores”?  Oh.  Well then, just follow the direct download links on this page and get the copy you want! :) Advisory: its > 300 MB.

BTW, if you feel like virtualizing it, I’ve tested XP SP3 in VirtualBox in Ubuntu Hardy and it works quite nicely.  Also, if you have an actual XP SP1 or 2 install disk, you can make a SP3 disk quite easily with nLite (I actually did it in VirtualBox and it worked fine :)  I recommend also adding IE7 (the version for “SP2″ is the one you want).

Evil sorcerers did not steal my penis

An evil sorcerer.

Oh boy…  I had to add a new category for this post: “WTF”

This would be funny if people weren’t being *killed* as a result.

From Reuters:

Penis theft panic hits city..
Wed Apr 23, 2008 1:06pm EDT

By Joe Bavier
(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Mary Gabriel)

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

“You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings. … You see them covered in marks after being beaten,” Kinshasa’s police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

XiTiMonitor data for February and March now online!

French; Google tranlation (official English translation soon here)

Based on previous XiTiMonitor numbers, Firefox reached record high levels in 20 of the 32 countries surveyed in the last month!  Eyeballing the March data for discontinuities, I note that there are three main ranges:

18 countries 15% - 27% (these seem to be the low-to-mid adopters, which form a fairly continuous range)

9 countries 30% - 38% (the mid-to-high adopters)

5 countries 41% - 46% (the high adopters)

Curiously, the high adopters in east-central Europe follow an almost North-South line from the Baltic to the Adriatic Seas and the usage rates tend to drop as you go east or west from that Line.  Finland also appears to be a center, with the usage rates in Scandanavia and the Baltic states decreasing the further away you go.  Pretty much the only exception to this is Ireland, which spiked in July and has remained mid-to-high ever since.  That the high adopters continually flirt with the 50% mark is a tad frustrating; one wonders if FF3 will finally push one of the countries (Poland would be my best guess right now) over that.  I was wrong in guessing that FF would break the mark somewhere in Europe in 2007, but its time will come and I don’t think it’s going too much out on a limb to say that 2008 is very likely.

Ubuntu is THE ‘Linux Home Desktop’ distro; now onto the desktop wars

Just added another comment to Ubuntu Bug #1:

Two years ago Michael Dell said:

—
“People are always asking us to support Linux on the desktop, but the question is: ‘Which Linux are you talking about?’ If we say we like Ubuntu, then people will say we picked the wrong one. If we say we like and support Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat, and Xandros, then someone would ask us, ‘Why don’t you support Mandriva? The challenge we have with picking one is that we think we’d disenchant the other distributions’ supporters. It’s not that there are too many Linux desktop distributions, it’s that they’re all different, they all have supporters, and none of them can claim a majority of the market. If you look at DistroWatch, you’ll see zillions of these distributions. Which one should we do? And, everyone keeps telling us that they want different distributions. So, our conclusion is to do them all and let the customer decide.”
—

A year ago they started selling Ubuntu systems.

[Update: right now, "sales of Linux on Dell computers continue to grow"]

Today I read this:

“No Consumer Linux from Novell or Red Hat“

Basically, Novell and Red Hat won’t be trying to get consumer desktop market share, focusing instead only on the ‘enterprise’ desktop market; Fedora and openSUSE thus appear to be relegated to ‘hobbyist OS’ level.  Ubuntu is now THE distro of choice for home use, with no major competitors, but I think we’ve known that for some time:

fedora

debian

ubuntu

suse

mandriva

(note that we’re due for a big bump in the search results in about a week :)

So going forward with Hardy, its time to focus on a new trend graph:

xp

vista

ubuntu

apple

:-)

XP is on its way out; Vista is mediocre at best and an excellent example of bloatware, but still has inertia helping it along; OS X is tied to Apple’s hardware, so the mid-to-high end of the market.

There’s going to be a tipping point soon; the “race to the bottom” that Sony, et al are terrified of: $300 (or less) sub-notebooks and similar devices.

That’s not Apple’s market.  Vista won’t run on them.  XP, even discounted, would add a significant percentage cost.

Then there’s Ubuntu :)

I hope to see Hardy Heron really take flight and see some Ubuntu preloads from new sources this year.  On store shelves for Christmas would be nice :)

[Update April 25: Hardy was released yesterday; go grab your copy! :]

W3Schools: March Data

W3Schools posted their March data.  For whatever reason, I’ve noticed that their latest month data is subject to change; its happened several times in the last few months that they will post a set of numbers and the next month revise it.  But the trends are there to see; FF+IE keep a fairly stable market share ~90% (so no major third browser traction) with FF increasing quickly and IE7 increasing slowly, both at the expense of IE6.  I note via the browser OS stats page that the number of Vista users has increased by 0.8%, in the last month but the number of IE7 users has only gone up by 0.4%; this reinforces the implication that pretty much all of the IE7 growth can be attributed to sales of Vista machines (that likely are replacing old XP ones), yet also again that at least half of Vista adopters are using Firefox (a rate higher than the ~third for XP users) at least among those who visit W3Schools.com anyway.

Spiffy Application in Ubuntu Hardy: Prism

For certain websites that one uses almost like a separate program, e.g. Gmail, it would be handy to have them running as a separate instance, not linked to your other Firefox windows.  There is a Firefox extension that can supposedly do this, Prism for Firefox, but the other day I tried it and it didn’t work in Ubuntu Hardy (which is still pre-release FYI).  However, today I noticed that there is a prism package in the universe repository and several dependant packages:

prism-facebook
prism-twitter
prism-google-analytics
prism-google-calendar
prism-google-docs
prism-google-groups
prism-google-mail
prism-google-reader
prism-google-talk

Wow!  Very cool!  The Gmail one works beautifully BTW :)