I came to Wisconsin to escape the annoyances of daily life and enjoy an actual Christmas break, something that the Federal government robbed me of last year. I’ve been having a great time. But today, some of the old humdrum kicked me in the teeth.
One of my aunts (in-law) gave me a DVD of pictures from her trips to Ireland and Little Rock, Arkansas. I was excited, because some of the pictures are of a saw mill build in 1933 (and never meant for actual sawing) and is the last building used in “Gone with the Wind” that still stands. Not a fan of movie, but it was a pretty histroric and epic film. More important, the saw mill landscaping was done with a secret concrete recipe known only to one of the builders, who according to my aunt took the secret to his grave.
Earlier this year, Jodi and I bought an Ubuntu PC from Dell for her parents. It’s working great, and seems to suit all their needs – Skype for seeing their grandkids, printing, e-mail, web browsing, photos. I popped the DVD into the drive only to be greeted with, “Cannot mount volume. Invalid mount option when attempting to mount the volume . . . ” I did some digging around, and learned that Vista produces data DVDs in the UDF format, which is supposed to be a universal standard format – but they adjusted it so it’s unreadable by anything BUT XP and Vista [1]. This means a lot of angry people in the linux community who have purchased Vista machines for work compatibility, but now cannot make compatible standard media between the two systems. All because of a greedy, greedy company.
Screw them. Go ahead and try to separate me from my media with your non-standard little proprietary scams. I’ll just give a memory stick to my aunt and try to get the photos that way. How dare they further wall a small part of the world that can afford Windows from a larger part of the world that can only afford the free and thoroughly excellent linux OS. How dare they try to lock me into their elitist software formats with the shiny “free” photo apps and “free” file formats. “Free” isn’t really free if you can only use that freedom within a well-defined narrow box called a “Windows PC”.
Microsoft, you make Scrooge look like St. Peter and the Grinch look like Mother Teresa.
[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4021352&postcount=11
