It has been quite some time since I’ve written anything in this blog, primarily for two reasons:

• I’ve been too busy with everything else
• I really haven’t had that much on my mind that was worth writing about

But today I felt different, so here we go with my little rant, hopefully there will be some comments to it.

USD keeps depreciating against the Norwegian Krone (NOK). We have had a 2.26% depreciation the past two days and USDNOK is now trading at 5.1899. If we look at monthly data we see that NOK gradually has appreciated since 2002, when USDNOK was at levels above 9. It passed the 1992-high of 5.20 in august 2007 and is now trading around 5.19. This marks a 46% appreciation which, I believe, most will agree with is a massive movement.

I have no doubt that we will see USDNOK continuing to decline, and we’ll see the 4-number before or during 2009. I speculate that after this; presuming the US can get its act together, we’ll see normalization around 2013-2015 at a 6-7-range. But we’ll see if time proves me wrong or right on that one.

One thing is certain. with EURUSD at 1.5, with expectations to reach 2 by 2010-2011, USA loses international purchasing power. The upside obviously being gaining competitive strength again.

And being competitive internationally is something the US of A has neglected for quite some time. If we e.g. look at the the automaker industry and agriculture; the political reign has been dominated by protectionism and neglected modernization, supported by, to mention one factor, strong lobbying from worker’s unions.

If we look at the auto-industry, consider the gas-efficiency and some americans complaining about 2-3 USD / gallon gas prices. As a comparison, the after-tax-price on gasoline in Norway is about 13 NOK a liter, or 2.45 USD / liter, or about 9.26 USD / gallon. Then, if we look at the crude oil prices, which currently trades at or above 100 USD a barrel. Or, converted for american’s convenience (it is not like we can expect them to do arithmetic), 100 USD per 42 gallons of crude oil; 2.38 USD / gallon for the raw material.

I expect to see even higher oil prices in USD-terms over the next couple of years, as USD depreciates against the Euro. Taking into account an EURUSD of 2 (versus today’s 1.5) we have a 133 USD/bl oil price on just forex fluctuations. An oil price in the 150-200 USD range isn’t something I’d be surprised to see, and that would still be relatively stable in Euro-terms.

With an upcoming presidential elections we can only hope that Americans will take a stance for a sustainable long-term economy, rather than going for the easiest quick-fix and consequently the politician promising the most. Of course, such a hope is against my better judgement, but that is after all why it is called hope.

Until then; the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are what can help the global economy by supplying increased consumption. If we look at today’s situation; where USA has a net negative savings rate (being indebted on average), China has a savings rate above 50%. Politicians are already trying to bring the savings rate down and support consumption rather than savings, in order to offset negative consumption growth from the US. And we are indeed seeing a slightly higher effort in savings, if only it had happened 15 years ago.

As most of those who knows me knows, I’m a GNU/Linux advocate. The GNU/Linux operating system is running exclusively on all my computers, and that is the way it will continue to be for a long time. This is what I’m happy with, providing me both the flexibility and the stability I want from day to day.

Today I was presented with a blog post at ShelleyTheRepublican that was, uhm, interesting.

Fortunately Microsoft have prepared a great deal of information to help computer users get away from this menace

Interestingly enough I wrote an article commenting on Microsoft’s Get The Facts campaign not too long ago, which had 15,000 unique visitors in a day. Something tells me Tristan Shuddery, the original author of the article, was not one of them.

My favorite paragraph in the blog post is still

If you see a company using Linux, it may be that they have not paid for this software. Report them to the Business Software Alliance who have the legal authority to inspect any company’s computers for illegal programs like Linux.

The Business Software Alliance’s website states the following:

The Business Software Alliance is the foremost organization dedicated to promoting a safe and legal digital world. BSA is the voice of the world’s commercial software industry and its hardware partners before governments and in the international marketplace. Its members represent the fastest growing industry in the world. BSA educates consumers on software management and copyright protection, cyber security, trade, e-commerce and other Internet-related issues.

Now, first of all. Using a product that is offered for free is still legal, no matter what Shelley seems to believe. For some reason she seems to believe that nobody is making money off of GNU/Linux. But has she considered that most pay more for support than the actual product? And people want to customize their packages to fit their company, giving programmers work to do. Companies, like International Business Machines (IBM) is making money and providing jobs for employees all around the world, including America which she seems particulary centered around.

Finally, remember to include Linux users in your prayers tonight. As individuals we may not be able to change people’s minds, but the Bible teaches that God can make any sinner repent.

Well, its a good thing I’m non-religious then, and I have a hard time expressing how happy I am that this woman is unable to change my mind.

Tristan follows up on the story in a comment to the post stating

Thanks for posting my article Shelley; I submitted this to the mainstream IT press, but none of them wanted to know. It’s shocking to learn that the same liberal bias that infects mainstream news-sources also affects the technical press.

Yes, Linux is a primative European clone; It is much less capable than Windows. In fact it omits features that were standard in Windows back in 1998; For example Linux has no built-in anti-virus or anti-spyware software.

You cannot even buy popular utilities like Norton Security to compensate for this fact. There are no tools for common tasks like defragging a hard disk. God knows what you would use to send a fax or make a website. You cannot even get Front Page for Linux.

Linux is that bad; The only explaination I can think for people using it is that it by-passes the protection given by American companies and the Dept of Homeland Security. It should be considered a terrorist program.

Tristan

Interestingly enough, Tristan’s web log (blog) is hosted on blogger.com, a service provided by Google. as “rj” states in some comments:

rj said…

Shelley, you’d do better to go research the matter yourself.

There’s a good chance that blogger.com runs on Linux. Maybe you should ask them.

Shelley said…

No way. Blogger.com is hosting on Windows!!!
I would not host my website on Linux either. It’s disgusting.

rj said…

Blogger.com is run by Google.

“What operating system (OS) does the Google Search Appliance run on?

The Google Search Appliance is based on the same software that is used in Google’s datacenters. The operating system is a hardened version of Linux that is optimized for search, sometimes referred to as Google Linux.”

Google Enterprise Solutions

“Google quickly outgrew the confines of its Menlo Park home, and by February 1999 had moved to an office on University Avenue in Palo Alto. At eight employees, Google’s staff had nearly tripled, and the service was answering more than 500,000 queries per day. Interest in the company had grown as well. Red Hat signed on as its first commercial search customer, drawn in part by Google’s commitment to running its servers on the open source operating system Linux.”

Google Corporate Information

And to close up, the ShelleyTheRepublican website is itself hosted using the Open Source Apache running Linux.

Sorry, I think you are a liar.
Me and linux hosting? Never!

Ignorance is bliss.

I have never been a fan of tabloid newspapers. Virtually the only thing I dislike more than tabloid newspapers are readers believing in tabloid newspapers, and sadly there are too many of those.

Lately the Norwegian tabloid VG ( Verdens Gang, roughly translated world’s times) ran a story related to certain usage of the Firefox referral program offered by Google.

Well, to clear a few things up, despite VG trying to make this sound like a new thing, the Firefox referral program was offered to US publishers the 4th of November 2005. International publishers, of which I’m one of, living in Norway got access to the Firefox referral scheme the 28th of November 2005.

If they had done some more research they would have found out that Google has hired several known Firefox developers in the past. As firefox is an open source project, creating an extension for it (such as the google toolbar for firefox) is easy, and it can usually be more flexible than for proprietary systems. But I guess it isn’t of interest for VG that google might be have monetary interests to offer a referral program.

The article is focusing on Explorer Destroyer. A set of javascript code snippets used by a small group of individuals.

That someone took the referral program to the next level and requires people to use Firefox in order to visit their website, instead of just offering a suggestion, doesn’t really come as a surprise. And that is what ExplorerDestroyer does, at least in “Level 3: Dead serious”. It offers two other levels as well, level 2 offering a “splash page” that an IE user would have to continue from to see the rest of the page, and in level 1 showing a field recommending users to switch to Firefox.

Although any real web developer will frown down upon such actions, it is generally easier to develop a website with a spesific browser in mind, and chances are these sites have flaws when rendering in other browsers than Mozilla Firefox, and rather than fixing the site, they decide to use such as script.

The World Wide Web Consortium, in short W3C is responsible for maintaining amongst others the HyperText Markup Language(HTML) recommendations used to write the markup for websites. Internet Explorer (IE) has historically, and still is in voilation of many of the recommendations, and you often have to use different sorts of hacks to separate IE from other Web User Agents in order to serve a good looking website to it. Hopefully this is better in version 7 of the browser, although that won’t help for a number of years due to different update cycles.

I particulary dislike the ending of the article in VG: Roughly translated it says “Both Google and the company behind Firefox refuses to comment the case at this point. And with that the hate-campaign continues”.

I’m pretty sure that whomever received the request for comment is still laughing at VG. Neither Firefox nor Google is related to the “campaign” in the first place, and it annoys me that the wording might lead people to believe that VG is implying that Google is behind the “hate campaign”.