Fighting against the Microsoft Tax

"The goal of this blog is to publish news and links about the so called Microsoft Tax. The Microsoft Tax is the “tax” added to almost every computer sold in computer shops today. This tax represents the cost of the preinstalled Windows shipped with most computers, as it is forced upon buyers, which usually don’t have a say in which Operating System is preinstalled on their computers.

The End User License Agreement that comes with Microsoft Windows states that “By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, return it to the retailer for a refund or credit.”. So in theory buyers have the option of returning Windows and getting a refund. In reality, this turns out to be almost impossible."

Why oppose the standardization of OOXML

(Following text copied Verbatim from a Slashdot comment)

Many reasons:
1. There is already an ISO standard for this same purpose.
2. There are exclusions in Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, meaning Microsoft can sue over other parties writing implementations of some of the things that the OOXML standard references (ActiveX and VBA are examples).
3. OOXML is designed so that fully-compliant applications can only be written by Microsoft, and mostly-complaint applications can be written by other parties but only to run on a Windows platform. Therefore OOXML is not inter-operable with other applications and especially not with non-Windows platforms, and the whole purpose of making something a standard is to facilitate such inter-operation.
4. OOXML is technically very inferior to the existing standard, ISO 26300. For example, OOXML specifies three different implementations of "a table", instead of just one common to different Office applications. This means that you cannot write a "table handling class" as a library, but instead you have to duplicate equivalent functionality several times over.
5. OOXML includes deliberately mandating bugs (such as dates before 1900) just to pander to errors in Microsoft software.
6. OOXML is controlled by just one corporation

... ISO 26300 belongs to ISO.
7. ISO 26300 already has many implementations by many vendors on multiple platform. OTOH even Office 2007 running on Windows Vista does not implement OOXML ... there is not one compliant application for the OOXML that is being proposed as the standard.
8. ISO 26300 even works with Microsoft Office (up to Office 2003) using a free plugin written by Sun. Microsoft deliberately broke Office 2007 file filters so that this plugin (or any other plugin not written by Microsoft) would not work in Office 2007.
9. ISO 26300 has a compliance test suite. You can use this test suite to make sure a given application works properly with ISO 26300. No such thing exists with OOXML.
10. It makes no sense to have "choice in standards" ... that just costs everybody a lot of money. It is fine to have "choice in applications" ... but ideally they should all read and write to the same standard file format ... and ISO 26300 is by far the best choice for that.

Axel, a Download Accelerator similar to Prozilla

Both Axel and Prozilla let you download the same file using parallel connections, which usually leads to an overall increase in download speed.

As Prozilla is not maintained anymore, I searched for a replacement. I found Axel, which is available in the Ubuntu repositories.

apt-get install axel