Unbelievable how corporations are lobbying the European Union to death. After a lot of pressure by the people the European parliament said no to software patents last year. But the case is still hot. The European commission is preparing to force the Europeans to introduce patents on software.

Wouldn’t it feel good to escape the dictatorship of the lobbies and to show them that they cannot control everything like they want to?

Why don’t we show the lobby to go back to the place where they came from? I really do not want to wait until it is too late, to wait until the European commission just enforced the law. Let us show them that the people have a voice too. Let us organize ourselves now and demonstrate against this practice before bad things happened. Everyone who is interested but too lazy to follow the topic can drop me an email with his/her details wolfgang (@t) hafenscher (dot) net and I will inform him/her about the current situation and give him/her details about public demonstrations and other activities near his/her place.

I am not going to found any new organization but will rely solely on existing organizations. My goal is to be the interface to the existing organizations for those who are interested in the topic itself but do not have the time or the will to follow all the activities.

Get information about the whole case at http://swpat.ffii.org/
Some other background info at
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.truth50.com/

Today Mr. George W. Bush is visiting Vienna.
Not really anything to say about that…
…except maybe you want to see a contribution to this event of a friend of mine.

I think I already might have mentioned that my pre-installed Windows Home edition on my Sony Vaio notebook is packed with tons little bits of software of which you cannot get rid of. For e.g. one special feature is the bubble which constantly pops up to remind you to register at club Vaio.

Probably this and the rootkit dilemma was just the start. If you look at this nice high quality video over at Akihabara News – Sony Vaio UX50 vs. UX90 you will be surprised.

The screenplay goes like this: Daimaou takes the UX50 with plain Windows XP and its faster and more powerful brother the UX90 with special Sony style Windows XP and compares in realtime the boot time of both. Of course the UX90 must win one might think. But take your time to find out yourself.

My next Notebook definitely will be another brand. Some suggest Panasonic devices. So plain and without annoyance you might wonder what is wrong with the machine. My favourite choice most probably will be Toshiba. So many features out of the box. Devices where the extras don’t cost as much as the device itself (furthermore you don’t have to get them extra… they are just on board from the beginning).

Oh yeah. Not to forget. My dispute with Sony is settled. Online customer support told me that I am allowed to replace the harddisk myself. It does not break any warranty (as long as you don’t destroy anything in a blatant way). You just have to keep the original harddisk. In case of failure of another component you have to put in the original harddisk before sending the notebook in. I guess they just want to reinstall Windows themselves in order to repair any other hardware error.

It is incredible how good Sony is at making their customers look out for alternatives. To be honest I was quite a big fan of their products. I am taking pictures with their digital cameras, I am making phone calls with their mobiles and some months ago I decided to sell my desktop PC and switch to a Sony vaio notebook. Since that day my loyalty was fading.

First of all you don’t get any bundled driver/operating system CDs/DVDs anymore. They use a certain amount of your harddisk to store the Windows recovery there. So they take away some gigabytes from your harddisk in favour of some recovery files. Do you usually buy harddisks where the assembler decides to use a certain amount for his stuff?

Next surprise arrives right after booting the hilarious operating system (which is definitely not my preferable choice). Dozens of popups which tell you to register somewhere. Everytime I boot into Windows I get reminders of joining club Vaio. No option to deactivate this nonsense. It’s like telling Jehova’s witnesses to go away… every time you open the front door of your flat.

After installing GNU/Linux you will notice that Sony does everything to prevent the community to develop drivers. It is not like someone asking Sony to develop drivers for their hardware. It is more like the community asking “please let us develop drivers which work with your hardware for free” but they want to force us to use Windows. But hey… who needs the built in Modem and MemoryStick reader?

Today another bad thing happened. The harddrive decided to break. It is not fully broken yet and I was able to make a backup but I am sure those strange, loud noises it makes are some serious illness. I don’t blame Sony for the broken Harddisk. That happens a lot. But I blame their way of treating the customer. They disallow me (and the company where I bought the machine too) to remove the harddisk and send it in alone. Does anyone have any details on this? I am not allowed to replace the harddisk myself because the guarantee will be violated? What if I want to put in a faster harddisk with more memory?

I depend on my notebook and I cannot waste weeks waiting for replacement (as they don’t offer replacement notebooks during the repair process). It is OK for me to buy another (faster, bigger) harddisk and use that one. I don’t want to charge Sony any cent… they just shall return the old harddisk once it is fixed. Sadly the only way is to take away the whole notebook.

The helpdesk is no use either:

Helpdesk: Your harddisk is broken? Please do a system recovery.

Me: Ok. What for? I am not even using Windows.

Helpdesk: You have to do a full system recovery and see if the error occurs again then.

Me: Ok. After doing the recovery… how will this story go on?

Helpdesk: A man arrives at your place bringing a box. He will make another appointment with you to pick up the box another day with your notebook in it….

Arrrgh. How could setting up my Windows be the solution to my problem? The harddisk is physically broken and makes strange noises.

All this is enough for me. As soon as my Sony products need replacements I will switch to alternatives. There are many out there and I should have done more research before handing over my money to some weird corporation.