That's one possibility. The other is that Shuttleworth knows that if he tries to explain, the process will follow the familiar routine that has been gone through whenever he has tried to explain things to the FOSS community.

It goes like this: Shuttleworth writes long, verbose piece explaining X or Y; people post comments, lots of them very snarky; Shuttleworth initially stays cool whil responding; after a while Shuttleworth loses it a bit and says "that's the way it's going to be"; people dump on him more and more and finally comments are closed.

That may be why the company's only official act, after the fund withdrawal was made public by Canonical employee Jonathan Riddell, was to send out its chief spinmeister Jono Bacon to throw a little water on any flames.

It is worth noting here that Shuttleworth has posted on his blog as recently as Friday (February 10) but made no mention of the Kubuntu funding cut.

Bacon turned up on the Linux Weekly News website, and posted a few comments, trying to create his own version of reality. For the most part, he was given a polite reception.

But there are others who have a harsher view of the events that have led up to the Kubuntu fund withdrawal. A SUSE Linux developer, whose views are probably influenced by the fact that he works for a competitor, sees it as one more step in a grand conspiracy by Shuttleworth.

According to this theory, Shuttleworth created the Kubuntu project to cheaply tie up competitors' resources. He had a five-stage plan that would "establish the Ubuntu brand amongst early adopters; expand it to the wider Linux user base; make Ubuntu the default Linux for non-technical users; tie up a paying market and profit".

Make of this theory what you will.

I prefer to think that this is part of the natural evolution of a project like Ubuntu which is backed by a company that has to, in the final analysis, think of the bottomline. People in the FOSS community are quite naive when it comes to evaluating exactly why companies set up community projects and in the case of Caonical the motives have been no less mercenary than those of Red Hat or Novell.

Both Red Hat's Fedora and Novell's openSUSE projects have provided good GNU/Linux distributions for free use; at the same time, the companies would not be spending money on running them unless it was getting more than it was giving. The only community GNU/Linux project with no strings attached is Debian.

Creating a community ties people in, makes them invest emotionally and otherwise, and makes it very difficult for them to quit. When a company makes changes in a community project, it does so much in the same way that one gradually increases the temperature of the water in a glass in which a frog sits. The frog stays there and gradually gets scalded to death.

It may sound cynical but that's the way the world functions. And if a businessman is doing at least an iota of good while making these little changes, he can always salve his conscience by thinking of that little smidgeon of positivity.

I don't think Shuttleworth ever seriously thought that he could bend either Debian or GNOME to his way of thinking. It is also unlikely that he ever thought that his idea of copyright assignment would wash with the more senior people in the community. But he had to make a visible effort so that, if asked later, he could point to his efforts and say, "see, I tried."

Ubuntu is a means to an end. Canonical intends to be around for the foreseeable future selling products based on GNU/Linux. It will go into the mobile and tablet markets as well; after all if a lone KDE developer like Aaron Seigo can bring a tablet to market with a few others, then Canonical can do it as well.

For those who moan that Apple has captured the tablet market, let's remember that there are now seven billion people on this planet. What has been captured is a very small fragment of the market in so-called developed countries. There is ample scope for those who are willing to depend on volume sales to succeed.

I’ve just spent some time at an IT Security conference put on by Kaspersky Lab in Cancun, and while some stories on the many and varied announcement that occurred during the conference are to come, I did learn a valuable lesson about recording video on your iPhone.

You see, if you use your iPhone to record video clips, there’s a very important piece of info that you need to know to avoid accidentally wiping your latest recording – and thankfully, it’s very simple – even though you’d have imagined it would have been simple for Apple to stop this rather serious problem from ever being an issue.  

Once your iPhone has finished recording a video clip, especially if it’s a longer clip that ends up being well over a gigabyte in size, you need to give your iPhone time to properly save all of that information to its internal storage.

I’ve learnt the hard way, now on two occasions (as it took more than once for the penny to drop), that if you’re recording video and you press the stop button to cease recording, you must leave your iPhone alone - until it’s clear from the on-screen display that it has stored the video clip to memory, and is ready to respond to your actions again.

Normally, if it’s a long video recording, you’ll need to wait a few seconds while the large, multi-gigabyte file saves itself to the internal flash memory.

If, however, you don’t wait, and start pressing the “video to photo” button so you can start taking photos, forgetting that you have to wait because it’s a long and very big video file, you’ll probably do what I did: press the damn “video to photo” button repeatedly in a vain attempt to get it to work before it’s ready.

If you do this, because you normally expect your iPhone to perform instantly, you’ll likely find (as I did) that the Camera application crashes – and you get booted back to the main screen… with your just-recorded video not being saved!!!

It might also be because other things are already open in your multitasking tray taking up memory, or maybe not, but if so, then repeatedly tapping buttons such as that “video to camera” button, is not only NOT going to help, it’s likely going to cause you to lose your video clip – as has now happened to me twice… which is VERY frustrating!

Thus, I’ve had to learn a bit of extra patience.

Indeed, this leads me quickly onto another topic – that of having too many things accumulated in a frozen state in the iPhone (or iPad’s) multitasking “tray”.

Please read on to page two!

I’ve read an article that swears black and blue that you can have as many things “open” as you like, and it will never make any difference whatsoever to the performance of your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, but personal experience tells me this assurance is pure baloney – despite some incredibly persuasive and strongly worded articles to the contrary.

The plain and simple facts are, despite any “frozen” state your background apps are in, if you have too many things sitting in the multitasking tray, there is one strange symptom I’ve seen occur time and again.

This is the problem of the keyboard popping up, as you’d expect, when you tap into an area that can take keyboard input – like a text box, subject field or URL address bar.

What happens next is that the keyboard then immediately disappears – even though you haven’t had the chance to type anything in yet. Thinking that it’s just some weird glitch, you try bringing up the keyboard again – only to find it disappearing immediately yet again!

In these cases, fixing the problem has always entailed closing some, most or even all of the “open” yet “frozen” apps in the multitasking tray, after which a popped-up keyboard STAYS popped up and ready for your input, rather than disappearing after barely a second on screen.

So… while the mightly Apple iDevice (in this case running on iOS 5.0.1) isn’t perfect, it’s still the platform to beat, and as with all platforms, has some idiosyncracies that you will inevitably need to work around – at least until they’re fixed in a future software update.

Seeing one of my just-recorded videos disappear because the Camera app crashed, because I was tapping the “video to camera” button is something I never want to see again, and it’s easily fixed by a few seconds of patience.

Likewise, making sure that you close open apps you’re not using minimises your chances of ever seeing the keyboard pop-up and immediate disappearing trick when enjoying your own iExperiences.

And… that’s that. I hope this seemingly obvious couple of tips genuinely help you in avoiding losing any “just recorded” videos and dealing with keyboards mysteriously disappearing.

If neither of these scenarios has ever happened to you – then both good for you and lucky you. But if it ever has happened, or ends up happening, now you know why either scenario has occurred (at least as I see it) – and how to avoid it in the future!

If you can’t go to China yourself to help the millions of workers abused by Chinese factory management, there’s an easier way to get your protest message across – and that’s by making an iScene at some of the world’s most important Apple Stores.

While the world is unaware as to whether or not the “ethical protesters” have eschewed all presumably unethically-made Chinese products, or whether they’re just joining an iFashionable protest is unknown, but the very visible action of iProtesting in front of some of Apple’s major iStores is an ethical blackmail tactic these protesters are 100% willing to undertake – even if they’ll iPresumably turn up in their Nikes or Chinese made clothes.  

Given that iRony is a concept probably alien to at least some of the protesters, just as it is for those iDedicated yet totally iWhacktoid “Occupy Wall Street” protesters who protest against “big corporations” by iRonically tweeting their iDisgust on their expensive corporate-created iDevices and laptop computers, I’d probably better leave iComedy to the two iRonnies.

Protest is, of course, a far easier course of action to take than going to China to try and actually do something on the ground for the reportedly mistreated iWorkers, and that’s what the protesters are doing – iEthically iProtesting in an act of “global action against worker abuse”.

This will see the iProtest group, claimed to be made up of Apple users, deliver a “quarter million petition signatures to Apple in Sydney, Washington DC, NYC, San Francisco, London and Bangalore”.

The iCampaign targets “concerned Apple customers” who have iRegistered themselves at “Change.org” and “Sum of Us” at each targeted Apple Store – with Sydney’s George St Store the prime Australian iTarget – and will iDemand that “the company respond to recent criticisms of worker abuse in their supplier factories and commit to creating an ethical iPhone 5.”

This naturally presumes that Apple will indeed release an iPhone 5, and not an iPhone 4G, 4GS or perhaps an iPhone 6 instead of the long-awaited and as yet undelivered iPhone 5 model.

Unlike Apple Store lines of many thousands when Apple launches any new iDevice, the iProtesters are expecting a group of but 20 iEthical iProtestors delivering those 250,000 iPetition iSignatures in an iWheelbarrow, which will iAsk the iCrunchy iComapny to “develop a worker protection strategy in response to reported abust in Chinese supplier factories” – even though Apple CEO Tim Cook has reportedly done something like that already.

Genuine Apple Store customers can expect the iHoopla to iOfficially iBegin on iFriday, the 10th of iFebruary, at the family-friendly time of 8.00am at Apple’s George St Sydney sotre.

One of the iProtesters will be wearing what we presume will be a 100% Ethically Made iPhone iProtest iSuit – presumably not using a skerrick of iChinese made iFabric – or at least, we iHope so.

Mark Shields, an Apple user from Washington DC who has probably not had to endure years of “raise the shields” jokes from rabid iStarTrek iFans, decided to do good by launching a campaign on “Change.org”.

Mr Shields, who may or may not be related to Brooke, says he “launched the campaign on Change.org after learning about poor working conditions in the Chinese factories where many popular Apple products are manufactured, including the iPhone.”

Presumably, all those other companies also using the same iFactories Apple is using won’t be seeing any iProtest actions, despite those same companies using the same iFactories as the supposedly iNasty and iEvil iApple.

The press release iCelebrating the iProtest says the “petition delivery is being coordinated globally by concerned consumers”, with these deliveries occurring at the iAforementioned iAppleStores, with all the protests “all asking Apple to improve its commitment to worker protection”.

Again, there appears to be no campaigns asking Apple’s competitors who use the exact same iFactories to do the exact same iThing, exposing a level of iRony that is presumably iNvisible and/or iRrelevant to the otherwise iErstwhile iProtesters.

“Major Media Outlets” such as the Boston Globe, CNN International, The Guardian and the BBC, among others, have already featured Mr Shields’ Change.org iCampain of iNtense iProtest.  

Should you wish to see live signature totals for this particular Change.org campaign, you can use your hopefully ethically made and non-hypocritical Chinese-made computer to visit Mark’s “Change.org” campaign.

Should you wish to see the other works of doing good that Change.org claims to iDo, this iWebsite will iProvide you with more iNformation.

Just remember - it's probably best to let he or she who has not iSinned by buying any number of other presumably unethically made Chinese iGoods cast the first iStone. Surely there must exist amongst the ranks of iChangers many who are devout followers of ethical iBuying?

Only thine own iConsciences can truly iAnswer this iQuestion - and I say it without a hint of either iRonnies.

Thus, it's iGoodnight from me, and iGoodnight from him, and hopefully, iGoodnight from Apple's suppliers ever acting in any way, shape or form iUnethically ever again.

After Challenger blew up in 1986, the space shuttle Columbia blew up in 2003. Both, in my opinion, were needless disasters that should not have happened.

Boisjoly states, "I don't care how many commissions you have. These guys have a way of numbing their brains. They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense."

He was talking about NASA management, along with NASA’s contractor Morton Thiokol, the maker of the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) that caused the Challenger disaster.

And, such nonsense is not isolated just in NASA, but many other organizations around the world. These companies want team players, those that do not question authority. Sit in your cubicle and do your job, and keep quiet. Don’t bring up problems, just leave things alone.

Such organizations do not want whistleblowers – the people who state what they belive regardless of what the company stance is at the time. They care about ethics, quality, and doing the right thing.

Boisjoly and many others around the world are made of the Right Stuff.

Unfortunately, these people are often not treated very well by the companies they are trying to help.

Page two continues with more the Mr. Roger Boisjoly.

The Los Angeles Times obituary “Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challenger launch” states, “Boisjoly was not the only engineer who attempted to stop the launch and suffered for blowing the whistle. Allan J. McDonald was Thiokol's program manager for the solid rocket booster and became the most important critic of the accident afterward.”

And, “When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed.”

Further, “The tragedy was particularly hard on Boisjoly, who would sometimes chop wood in the Utah winter to work out his anger. In a 2003 interview with The Times, he recalled that NASA tried to blackball him from the industry, leaving him to spend 17 years as a forensic engineer and a lecturer on engineering ethics.”

Boisjoly was correct in what he professionally thought, told his superiors (both NASA and Thiokol) his professional opinions, and he is blackballed by the very people who didn’t heed his advice. There is something strangely wrong with how things end up! The men who tried to stop a terrible disaster are punished, while the ones that decide to "take a chance" and launch even in the face of pending doom are not punished.

The New York Times article “Roger Boisjoly, 73, Dies; Warned of Shuttle Danger” states, “Mr. Boisjoly was awarded the Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and spoke to more than 300 universities and civic groups about corporate ethics. He became sought after as an expert in forensic engineering.”

“But before then he had paid the stiff price often exacted of whistle-blowers. Thiokol cut him off from space work, and he was shunned by colleagues and managers. A former friend warned him, ‘If you wreck this company, I’m going to put my kids on your doorstep,’ Mr. Boisjoly told The Los Angeles Times in 1987.”

Page three concludes with hope that whistleblowers will triumph over nonsense.

We need professionals like Mr. Boisloly to speak out honestly about the wrongdoings that go on in the world. Unfortunately, these people (these so-called whistleblowers) are often punished by the very people who really should be punished in the first place.

However, there is a small light that "good" still lives in the world. The New York Times article states: "He later said he was sustained by a single gesture of support. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, hugged him after his appearance before the commission.”

Dr. Ride was one of the members of the commission that investigated the Challenger disaster. She was also a member of the Columbia investigation.

Mr. Boisjoly said, “She was the only one. The only one.”

The NPR article “Remembering Roger Boisjoly: He Tried To Stop Shuttle Challenger Launch” quotes his wife, Roberta. She states, "He always stood by his work. He lived an honorable and ethical life. And he was at peace when he died."

As previously reported, Optus won the copyright case brought against it by Telstra, the AFL and the NRL concerning the TV Now service, which allows subscribers to record free-to-air broadcasts and then play them on a computer or mobile device.

This, in my opinion, was a completely correct decision. The Copyright Amendment Act 2006 gave us the right to time-shift TV programs, and for some years our Commonwealth and State governments have worked on the basis that legislation should be technologically neutral. So copyright law doesn't provide an exemption for the recording and playback of programs on a particular type of media, for the method used to transmit the recording from the recorder to the player, or where the recorder or player are located. It just provides an exemption for recording for personal or household use.

According to a report published in The Age last Friday, Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, is considering changes in the legislation in order to block Optus's TV Now or similar services. The danger for ordinary Australians is that any such changes could easily restrict the exemption provided under the Copyright Act that allows us to time-shift or time-slip broadcast content. This practice has become an entrenched part of everyday life for many of us.

Just because Optus or anyone else offers a PVR in the cloud I don't see why that should change anything, especially as a separate recording is made for every user, recordings are only made when the user 'presses the button', and the recordings are deleted after a fairly short time.

I know this is remarkably similar to Optus's position, but before anyone accuses me of being an Optus shill, I assure you that I arrived at it independently and that my only connection with the company is as a cable broadband and fixed-line telephony customer. 

Why did anyone expect a different decision? Please read on.

Frankly, I'm amazed that anyone (including the plaintiffs) expected the court to deliver a verdict other than the one it handed down, and I think some parts of the mainstream media are playing it up in a way that serves their own interests. The case was brought in part by the AFL and NRL, and Australians love their footy. The focus on a specific type of content rather than the principles has allowed the leagues and some commentators to suggest that the decision puts the sports at risk.

As Greg Baum pointed out in The Saturday Age last weekend, if the leagues are relying on revenue from streaming video to mobile devices, then they are living beyond their means. Don't be fooled by the argument that suggests that if the court decision is upheld and the law isn't changed, live sport will move almost exclusively to pay TV. That's already happening - look at English Premier League football in the UK, or A-League football in Australia.

Remember that the local leagues are already being paid handsomely for the content that TV Now is taking to additional screens. We're talking about free-to-air programs that are financed through taxation (in the case of the ABC and to some extent SBS) or by the revenue from the advertising that's embedded in the transmissions, and the TV stations are already paying the content owners/producers - whether they are production houses, studios or sporting bodies - for the broadcast rights. The AFL, for example, receives $1.3 billion under its current multi-year TV rights deal.

If the situation was reversed and the $1.3 billion was put at risk by the $153 million, you could see why they were worried. But the idea that the leagues should get more money just because matches are being recorded is blatant double-dipping. If anything, the extra screens and eyeballs makes free-to-air TV more valuable to advertisers, who presumably could therefore be persuaded to cough up more dollars to the TV stations, who would then be able to pay more for the content.

And if the issue for advertisers is that we're fast-forwarding over the ads, we've been doing that for about 30 years. (I don't know what happened in your house, but we bought our first VCR in 1984 in order to watch the Los Angeles Olympics.) But I think they've caught on, judging by the increasing display of during-play advertising and a massive increase in advertising at major sports grounds, including video technology that allows multiple ads to be shown in one location.

The danger is that any change to the law that would block TV Now is likely to impact the way we currently consume TV. If short-delay ('near-live') playback was prohibited, you'd no longer be able to press Pause on your PVR or iQ when the phone rings, or use products such as Elgato eyeTV to relay live TV from your computer to an iPhone or iPad.

What else could be prohibited? See page 3.

If wireless transmission of recordings was prohibited, you may no longer be allowed to stream recordings made on a tuner-equipped PC to your Wi-Fi equipped TV, to use one of the wireless HDMI products such as the Belkin ScreenCast AV4, or maybe even one of the many wireless AV senders that people use to connect a TV in the bedroom to the pay-TV set-top box in the loungeroom.

If consumption of recordings on a mobile device was prohibited, you'd no longer be able to use your tablet or smartphone to watch programs you'd recorded on your computer. There might even be questions about using a Wi-Fi TV tuner such as the Elgato Tivizen with an iPad.

Optus is charging for is 'rental' of the equipment used to make the recordings you requested (saving you having to purchase your own gear), and then for delivering the recording to you. This isn't a legal nicety, it's the heart of the matter. The Telstra/AFL/NRL position is a bit like saying that Australia Post should have to pay a fee to the studio for the right to deliver the DVD movie you purchased online, and that the manufacturer of your PVR should have to pay a fee to the 'rightsholder' every time you record something.

My belief is that we are best served by keeping the technology-neutral approach, but there are clearly forces working to reduce our existing rights. The underlying problem is that Telstra has paid for rights to certain sports content that aren't actually separable from the broadcast rights - but that's their problem, not ours. Yet money talks.

I know that things get tricky when we stay into the political arena, but if you are at all concerned about this, I suggest you write to your parliamentary representatives and express your views. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I believe there is a rule of thumb when dealing with politicians along the lines of one personal letter is worth 10 phone calls, 100 emails or form letters, or 1000 signatures on a petition.

You can bet your life that big business is lobbying hard.

Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in January and OpenOffice.org, the best office suite in the free software world, was part of the purchase. Oracle did not reveal any concrete plans for OpenOffice.org for a long time and an indication of the company's attitude to open source projects came when it killed off the OpenSolaris project. The OpenOffice.org code was then forked and LibreOffice was born.

Since, then there has been steady activity to stabilise and better the suite, with hackers aplenty joining up to contribute code and ideas.

The progress of LibreOffice indicates that the decision to set up a foundation to look after the project was indeed a wise one. Statistics released by the project indicate a very healthy level of hacking - and by that I do not mean breaking into and entering other people's systems - and a commendable amount of activity.

In a curious twist of fate the Foundation will be headquartered in Germany - that's where the original code that became StarOffice, and then OpenOffice.org, came from.

The code for the project these days comes from three distinct classes of hackers. Around 250 volunteers  contribute easy hacks and small patches; a regular batch of 100 volunteers  send in easy hacks, large patches and small features; and a core of 50 paid coders and volunteers handle the key patches, key features and draft the development strategy.

There was an initial burst in the number of code contributors in the early months of the Foundation's life; now things have b off and there is a steady level of contributors, both old and new.

Nearly 1500 bugs have been fixed out of the more than 5000 reported by volunteers. And one very important development has been the removal of code for features that are mostly unused. This is what makes LibreOffice run faster - a lot of the bloat has gone.

A number of companies are still involved in contributing code - Red Hat, SUSE, and former Sun/Oracle people as well - but volunteers rule, with more than two-thirds of the hackers making contributions belonging to this category.

Longtime readers know I am a strong advocate for DropBox, the cloud-based file-synchronisation service. For a limited time you can increase your free DropBox capacity by 5Gb following these simple steps.

I first encountered DropBox when searching for a solution to a problem, specifically, how to easily keep documents in sync between several computers so I could cease use of USB sticks, e-mailed attachments and other manual and fiddly mechanisms.

DropBox solves this problem admirably meaning it is entirely viable to work on a company laptop, save, go home, work on a home computer with a larger monitor, save, go to the office, and resume working.

More than this, DropBox clients for a raft of smartphones and tablets mean your files are readily available on the road too. Just left the office and got a call for a report while you’re driving? With DropBox it is a snap to open the document and mail a link to anyone.

Out of the box, so to speak, DropBox provides 2Gb of uncharged cloud storage. Paid accounts allow you to increase this quota.

Even so, shrewd DropBox users have noted clever ways to eke ever increasing amounts of free space from generous offerings the company makes available periodically.

One such increase is yesterday’s announcement of a new beta DropBox release which automates uploading of photographs and videos from removable storage into DropBox.

To avail yourself of this, first download and install the new DropBox beta (version 1.3.13) for Windows, Mac or Linux.

Next, plug in your removable media (including phones). As well as the usual options for what to do (browse, etc) you will find an option to import into DropBox. Choose this, and watch as DropBox brings over all the media it can find into a new “Camera Uploads” folder that it creates.

Imported media is renamed by date and time making it easy to sort.

For each block of 400 – 500Mb or so that you upload, DropBox will grant you an additional free storage space on your DropBox account to match, up to a limit of 5Gb.

When Apple first introduced the iPad, it had what looked like the exact same “white plug” charger that the iPhone comes with.

It was the same story with the iPad 2, and unless Apple does something unexpectedly radical, it should be the same story with the iPad 3, too.

The problem is that the iPhone charger and the iPad charger are two different chargers, even though they look virtually identical.

The difference is in the “fine print” on the bottom of the charger. If you look closely, an iPhone charger notes that it is an ‘iPod charger’, while an iPad charger notes that it is a ‘10w charger’.

This is a crucial difference, because the iPad draws more power to charge, and while an iPhone charger will indeed charge an iPad, it’s only a 5w charger and does it at very, very slow speeds – taking hours longer to charge than an iPad charger.

Thus, what I have been doing for friends who have been unaware of the difference between the two chargers is to closely investigate which charger is which, and once the charger with the ‘10w’ notification underneath is established, I either place a sticker or use a black permanent marker and write the word ‘iPad’ on all the sides of the iPad charger.

This way, it will be impossible to mistake chargers in the future, and fast charging of your iPad is restored once more.

But… what about using your Windows desktop or laptop to charge iPads?

We know that iPhones can easily be charged, but normally – unless you have a newer desktop or laptop that is compatible with iPad charging – you get a message on your iPad that it is ‘Not Charging’, which is a very frustrating message to be getting – especially if you’re running low on power.

Thankfully - there's an answer for most Windows PC users on how they can FINALLY charge their iPads on their PCs, using excellent FREE software, without getting that dreaded 'Not Charging' message - please read on to page two for the amazing details!

So, it was with great interest that I discovered the free “Asus Ai Charger” software, available for free download here.

Here’s how Asus describes its software: “With the exclusive ASUS Ai Charger, all of your motherboards, and desktops become universal chargers for your iPod, iPhone and now, the new iPad.

“Ai Charger turns any PC into a flexible power-up station for popular Apple devices through a simple USB connector, extending their usability and benefit in every lifestyle.

“Charging goes up to 50% faster and smoother while you do your work or have fun – whether at home or on the go. The Ai Charger software is available for a variety of chipsets and motherboards from ASUS as well as all desktops, so [download our free software and] prepare for even more enjoyment!”

Now, I’m using a MacBook Pro, which can charge iPads, so I don’t have this problem. However, my father, who inherited my iPad 1, has a Core i5 Samsung notebook, which always gave him the “Not Charging” message.

So, I downloaded this software (which works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and probably Windows 8 too), loaded it onto my Dad’s Samsung, and… lo and behold… his Samsung Windows 7 laptop can now charge his iPad!

Chances are this software will work for you too, and while there are no guarantees, it’s certainly worth trying out – well, if you have an iPad and a Windows PC that is, and are also sick of seeing that ‘Not Charging’ message. Here's that download link for the Asus Ai Charger again.

So… please don’t put up with slow iPad recharging by using the wrong white Apple charger, and if you’ve got a Windows PC, an iPad and are getting the ‘Not Charging’ message, please give Asus’ free Ai Charger a go – it just might charge up and change your iLife!

Outspoken NBN critic and Exetel CEO, John Linton, has sadly passed away due to a stroke.

Mr Linton’s blog delivered the sad news via his son, James Linton, as did a Tweet from the ExetelExec account.

According to James Linton, John was enjoying lunch at a restaurant while “talking about the state of the telecommunications market in Australia”.

Although John Linton was talking after the stroke, which initially appeared mild, things grew worse at St. Vincents Hospital where Mr Linton had to be placed onto a ventilator and under an induced coma.

Sadly, Mr Linton did not recover, with his family choosing to turn off the ventilator, and with Mr Linton passing away peacefully “a few hours later”, according to his son James.  

James Linton posted that: “This is the saddest day of my life, I have lost my dad, my mentor, my boss, and one of my best friends.

“However, Dad would not want us fussing over him, he would want to know what we have sold, which was actually one of the last things I said to him.

“He would also want Exetel to go on as he had planned for it to. He put in a place a strategic plan, so we need to move on as he had wanted us to, and remember him for the great man he was.”

Exetel executive Steve Waddington posted on his blog a heartfelt farewell.

He stated that: “I have worked with John for the last 16 years, at four different companies, and been his business partner for the last eight years.

“We started Exetel with the objective of creating a 'perfect company'. We faced many challenges, some that would have undoubtedly overwhelmed anyone with less indomitable determination than John.

“He was the toughest person I think I will ever meet. The most honest person I have ever met, and one of the kindest. But above all he was unique, with the clarity of vision and sharpness of mind that was simply awesome.

“He has been my manager, my mentor and my friend.

“Farewell John”, concluded Mr Waddington.

Fellow iTWire contributor, and IBM retiree, Tony Austin, well remembers working with Mr Linton in Melbourne during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

"John was a marketing manager in the IBM Metro Branch, responsible for a sales team selling IBM small systems and peripherals, such as the IBM System/32 which was essenatially a small one-person machine. At that time, I was a systems engineer supporting these products.

"His approach was always a fiercely pragmatic one, focussed intensely on selling the current product range against competition, with a 'take no prosoners' attitude.

"As an example of this pragmatism, Tony recalls one meeting where Mr Linton clearly extolled the selling point of the System/32 despite the fact that key competitors were outwardly superior offering multi-terminal computers against it.

"It was fascinating watching him at work, making point after point in gavour of the System/32 and rubbishing the failings and problems of multi-terminal systems. You ended up believing his sales pitch, despite as a technical person still thinking that the competitive systems were technologically superior!

"A few years later IBM introduced the System/34, and Linton's pitch changed 180 degrees almost overnight. He now persuaded one an all that you'd have to have rocks in your head to want to buy any technology but the multi-terminal S/34.

"I lost touch with John after that, but he certainly seems to have continued in the same winner takes all vein”, Tony concluded.

Farewell John Linton – may the force be with Exetel, may your hard work and strategy pay great dividends into the future, may the NBN’s proponents have learned something from your strident and, in this humble writer’s opinion – extremely valid and very telling NBN criticisms - and may you rest in peace.

Kuhn was reacting to the flame war that has grown out of Linux developer Matthew Garrett's criticism of efforts to develop a replacement for the popular BusyBox program that provides minimalist replacements for the most common utilities usually found on a UNIX or Linux system.

The SFC has been enforcing the GPL on software since around 2008 - it does so for BusyBox - and Kuhn said he had decided to write a post on th SFC blog, restating things he had already said many times, in order that people were clear about the organisation's role in GPL compliance. On his own, he has been doing enforcement since 1999.

Several of those who posted comments on the Linux Weekly News website about the BusyBox replacement issue had mentioned the SFC.

"After all these years of speaking about, writing about, and doing GPL enforcement, I'm occasionally surprised at how much confusion still exists about how and why it's done," Kuhn wrote. "I've focused solely on doing GPL enforcement via 501(c)(3) not-for-profit entities, which means I do it only in the public good."

The primary goal of any GPL enforcement - in this case of version 2 - was to ensure compliance: providing users with source code so that they could copy, share, modify and install improved versions.

"The GPL itself is a copyright license (sic) that does a weird hack on copyright: it uses the copyright rules to turn them around, and require people to share software freely (as in freedom) in exchange for permission to copy, modify and distribute the software," he wrote.

The GPL states that in the event of a violation, then one loses the rights to distribute the program in question for all time - this is known as the "death clause" and is present in version 2 without any further addenda - unless the copyright holder(s) grants it another licence .

The SFC has been granting new licences to violators only on condition that they release the source code to the program whose licence has been violated and, and also the source to all other programs on their device which require source distribution.

Kuhn wrote that the SFC's request for source for all other programs on a particular device being distributed by violators was being done "because violators express a concern that, if they come into compliance due to my efforts, what stops others from coming to complain, in sequence, and wasting their time?"

He had then suggested that if a violator came into compliance all at once, on all FLOSS licences involved, "it would be easy for me to be on their side, should someone else complain".

Apart from this, Kuhn wrote that the SFC, when it undertook cases of enforcing the GPL, generally appointed a compliance officer so that a company which had violated a licence and then been brought into compliance would have a person on staff who had some expertise to deal with any future issues if they did arise.

He wrote that he had been reluctant to charge a violator for the costs of enforcement.

"I struggled for years about whether it was the right thing to do. I avoided it until someone pointed out to me: 'If you're doing GPL enforcement for a non-profit, who should pay the cost of doing enforcement: the folks who send you charitable donations to support your other non-compliance work, or the violators who actually violated the license? Indeed, those who donate probably always comply with GPL themselves, so if violators aren't charged the cost of enforcement, compliant people end up subsidizing (sic) violations with their donations'."

Litigation was annoying, time-consuming and also took very long. "That's why litigation has always been a last resort, and that 99.999% of GPL enforcement matters get resolved without a lawsuit. Lawsuits are only an option, in my view, when a violation is egregious, and multiple attempts to begin a friendly conversation with the violator are consistently ignored," he wrote.

"I've no interest in making license enforcement the primary activity of Conservancy — indeed, it's but one item on Conservancy's extensive list of services, and Conservancy has 27 (and growing) projects to care for. Many of those projects are GPL'd and LGPL'd, and many of them want Conservancy to handle their enforcement, but that work is always balanced with all the other work going on at this thinly-staffed organization (sic)."

NASA, the U.S. space agency, is building its Space Launch System (SLS), a heavy-lift vehicle that will be able to lift at least 70 metric tons into space, and at least 130 metric tons for a mission to the planet Mars.

The announcement for the SLS was made by NASA back in September 4, 2011, in the NASA article “NASA Announces Design for New Deep Space Exploration System.”

The first paragraph of this announcement stated, “NASA is ready to move forward with the development of the Space Launch System -- an advanced heavy-lift launch vehicle that will provide an entirely new national capability for human exploration beyond Earth's orbit. The Space Launch System will give the nation a safe, affordable and sustainable means of reaching beyond our current limits and opening up new discoveries from the unique vantage point of space.”

However, critics have bombarded NASA with much negative criticism of the program – basically calling it a “rocket to nowhere.”

A January 31, 2012 Houston Chronicle article “Critics blast NASA’s 'rocket to nowhere. See the space agency response.”, talks in detail about what the critics say and what NASA has to say in response. Houston, Texas is the home of the NASA Johnson Space Center, where NASA directs mission to space through its Mission Control Center and trains its astronauts.

Please read this article for much more information on this topic of NASA’s future with the SLS outside of low-Earth orbit.

Page two continues.

When asked the question: “One of the things people are concerned about is they see a really long timeline here. What do you say to about NASA’s checkered history with new spacecraft programs, and the inability to carry those across different Presidential administrations?” Dan Dumbacher, who is the director of engineering at the NASA Washington D.C. Headquarters, responded with the following:

“My answer to that is that basically, we work for the administration, and we have to work within the confines of the administration. The real fact of the matter is, with additional funding we can get to missions beyond low-Earth orbit quicker. But it’s fundamentally a matter of money. We’re doing everything we can, making as much process as possible with the funding that’s being made available to us.”

This has been exactly my contention for a long time. NASA is confined by the current presidential administration. Every four or eight years the United States gets a new administration. Likely, things change for NASA every time one of these big administration changes occur in Washington D.C..

One administration wants to go to the Moon. The next administration wants to go to Mars. Maybe the next administration (or the one after that) wants to go to Jupiter. The main problem with these changes it NASA has to respond to each (drastic) change and, thus, make its own corresponding changes in direction.

NASA is rarely left alone to implement "one" program on a "long-term" basis.

If NASA could be left alone (obviously under strict inspections by the government that it is doing what it says it will do) to work out one plan for manned space exploration, it could (in my opinion) do a much better job.

Page three concludes.

So, again in my opinion, you can criticize NASA all you want, but much of the criticism should be levied against the organization that supplies the money – which is the U.S. Congress (and its members of the Senate and House). – and to the organization that sets the direction for NASA – the White House (aka, the president).

If President Obama is re-elected for a second term, I would foresee things progressing as they have been. If a Republican candidate is elected, we may (and I use that word “may” loosely) get more concrete direction for NASA in its quest to explore deep space.

In either case, what we really need is one plan that extends through multiple administrations, one that cannot be changed ad hoc at the whim of the next administration.

To go where no one has gone before takes a lot of money, but it also requires a good plan and a consistent one, too.

It seems ironic that Kevin Bermeister, who was involved in the paradise of file sharing that was Kazaa, only to later turn anti-pirate, is advocating for a “cleaner” Internet.

Mr Bermeister’s thoughts appear in a self-penned Huffington Post article, which talks about the fight against SOPA and the surprise takedown of the “alleged $175 million worldwide Internet piracy operation, Megaupload.”

Amongst a range of thoughts, Mr Bermeister says: “In 2012, the rapidly shifting technology at the forefront of the piracy battle now has the capacity to offer an automated global file registry filter -- which would reduce piracy to a very small problem using equipment that already exists from vendors like Cisco, Juniper, Hauwei and others -- and which enables ISPs to divert customers who are seeking to view or download illegal or pirated content to a legal source without breaching their privacy.”

Later, he notes that: “With a customer-sanctioned, ISP-based copyright filter that can also be used to stop child pornography, viruses and other criminal communications that warrant filtering, ISPs are fast approaching the ability to gain control over the Internet's traffic -- a real and valuable proposition.”

Naturally, it is worth reading the article in full for yourself.

However… the chance that these technologies could be used to filter out dissent, political protest or other law abiding views that ISPs or governments-gone-bad don’t like, and want to squash, are only all too real.

Mr Bermeister, of Kazaa fame… how did you make so much of your “brilliant digital” money, again? And how much of Kazaa's file-sharing technology made it into the now massively popular Skype?

Perhaps in a parallel universe, Mr Bermeister is under the same scrutiny that Megaload’s Kim Dotcom is under.

In this universe, however, Kevin Bermeister is advocating for a system that, on the surface, would “filter out” pirate content, porn and other “nasties”, but what protections are there that this system wouldn’t be used against the Internet citizens of the world?

We’d only have a “promise” the system wouldn’t be abused. After all, the right to free speech only exists in the United States of America – we certainly don’t have that specific right here in Australia, and neither is it available in many parts of the world.

From the stopping of SOPA to the delivery of content control directly via the world’s networking equipment – or at least, in the world that Mr Bermeister imagines.

Is this supposed to be a victory for freedom on the Internet, or yet another way for the Stephen Conroys of the world to extend censorship, embrace Orwellian boots to the face, and extinguish the hard-won freedoms of the last couple of centuries?

It’s one thing for a telco to deliver a new 4G network, but it’s another thing as to whether it actually delivers on its promises, or not.

Telstra’s 4G LTE network is the only true 4G game in town, at least when it comes to substantial ‘CBD’ coverage in capital cities and at least 80 regional areas around Australia, and had Telstra’s 4G speeds been little faster than its Next G speeds, it probably would have been false advertising.

However, every speed test conducted and reported on in the press using either Telstra’s 4G USB modem, or on its HTC Velocity smartphone, when in a 4G zone, has genuinely shown vastly faster speeds than are attainable using 3G modems or smartphones.

I’ve also been able to test Telstra’s 4G USB modem in both Sydney and Canberra, and in 4G zones, the results are smoking hot and superfast.

So, it was with some interest that I came upon Gizmodo’s article entitled “Telstra’s 4G vs 3G: is it worthwhile?” and while my initial instinct was to say “yes, without doubt, if you’re in a 4G zone”, it was worth reading the article to find out what it said - which you should do as well, especially if you want to see the raw data that was collected.

In short, the answer seems to be “yes, without doubt, if you’re in a 4G zone” - or at least, that's how I've interpreted it.  

Interestingly, a test was conducted in the outer Sydney suburb of Hornsby, which is not a 4G area, and here we could see that Telstra’s 4G USB modem, in DC-HSPA+ mode, delivered ping speeds and download speeds surprisingly close to 4G results, although with an upload speed of only around 2Mbps, rather than the 10Mbps+ upload speeds normally seen when connecting at 4G LTE speeds.

The HTC Velocity’s non-4G results in Hornsby weren’t at the same level as the 4G USB modem, so it may well be that the most worthwhile 4G device for the moment is that 4G USB modem.

So… it’s nice to see a report essentially “proving” that the claims of 4G speeds and performance are, at least for now, more than holding up, and, at least in Hornsby, on that particular test, a 4G modem in 3G DC-HSPA+ mode also did incredibly well, even though it -wasn’t- in a 4G zone.  

Still, it’s exactly what you would have expected from the service if you were a new customer, so if you feel the need for speed, and genuinely spend a lot of time in 4G-equipped areas… 4G delivers well above and beyond what 3G delivers, and for now, that means Telstra, with Optus and Vodafone still to make good on their 4G promises.

Such a state does not last for long, as there are loads of little points to nitpick over, especially when it comes to licensing, and there are lots of developers who love to argue about these differences.

And when Red Hat employee Matthew Garrett, a Linux kernel developer, gets involved, one is sure that the flames will be stoked. Garrett knows how to provoke people, even if his provocatory acts spring from the desire to do good.

One difference about this spat is that it has stayed civil in terms of language so far, though, judging from the contributions of many, emotions are riding high. It hasn't come to the stage where it can be classified as a flame war.

A couple of days ago, Garrett, who maintains a busy blog, ventilated his thoughts about enforcing the General Public Licence (GPL), mentioning the Software Freedom Conservancy and its actions on BusyBox as an example of a body that enforces this licence.

He pointed out that the actions of such organisations resulted in access to large bodies of source code that would otherwise have been kept under lock and key by the companies which indulged in the violations.

A few facts about BusyBox: it was originally started by well-known open source advocate Bruce Perens and combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. The Debian archive says: "It provides minimalist replacements for the most common utilities you would usually find on your desktop system (i.e., ls, cp, mv,  mount, tar, etc.). The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts."

From the project's own website: "BusyBox has been written with size-optimization (sic) and limited resources in mind. It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize (sic) your embedded systems. To create a working system, just add some device nodes in /dev, a few configuration files in /etc, and a Linux kernel."

Perens wanted to put a complete bootable system on a single floppy that would be both a rescue disk and an installer for the Debian distribution; that was his motivation for writing BusyBox. He is no longer part of the project which is now maintained by Denys Vlasenko.

BusyBox gained a measure of fame a few years ago when it became the subject of a lawsuit in the US, some say the first case in courts in that country to test the GPL. A number of similar suits followed, the contention always being the same: BusyBox was being used by some company or the other in violation of the terms of its licence, the GPL.

The suits were filed by the Software Freedom Law Centre; more recently, the Software Freedom Conservancy has taken over the role of enforcing the GPL on the program. So far, so good.

One must also mention here, for the uninitiated, that the GPL stipulates that any code added to a project that is already under this licence has to be under that very licence. Hence if I were to contribute some code to a GPL project, it would come under the same licence and be subject to the same terms of distribution as the original project.

Supporters of the GPL argue that this ensures that one man's greed is not allowed to get in the way of the community benefitting. For obvious reasons, companies do not like the GPL. There is a lot of very good code out there which is under this very licence and companies do whatever they can to use it without giving back the entire source.

In his blog post, Garrett made reference to a project recently begun to write a non-GPL replacement for BusyBox.

Garrett accused the person behind the project, an engineer from Sony named Tim Bird, of starting the project in order to enable people to "violate licences with impunity." Code licensed under more permissive licences like the BSD licence can be taken by a third party amd locked away if one is so inclined; companies love code that is issued under this licence.

If companies use BusyBox, then the SFC can go after them in the event that they violate the terms of the GPL. One of the conditions in the GPL is that if someone violates it, then one loses the rights to distribute the program in question for all time unless the copyright holder(s) grants it another licence. The SFC has been granting new licences to violators only on condition that they release the source code to BusyBox which they have used and also the source to all other programs on their device which require source distribution.

If something else were to be used instead of BusyBox, then the SFC would have no lever to ask for source release for any programs on a device. Garrett has thus urged those who have copyright to code in the Linux kernel to let the SFC enforce the GPL on their behalf; then the SFC could lay down the same conditions even if Tinybox were used.

Here is where Garrett has hit a sore spot. Bird has denied that his motivations for rewriting BusyBox had anything to do with enabling anyone to violate licences. The person contracted to the replacement project is Rob Landley who began a project named Toybox in 2006 "to create simple implementations of all the important Linux command line     utilities".

Landley has weighed in with some forceful replies of his own, and Perens, who is another interested party, has joined in with gusto. The comments, animated as they are. make for interesting reading; one lot is here, on Linux Weekly News, and the other is on Garrett's blog. Enjoy.

Whether you use McAfee, Norton, Kaspersky, BitDefender, AVG or some other brand of Internet Security software on your desktop or notebook computer, if you use an Android-powered smartphone, you really should run Internet/smartphone security software there, too.

Naturally, these big security companies, the McAfees, Nortons/Symantecs, Kasperskys, BitDefenders, AVGs and others have been offering Android security suites for some time now, too, and for good reason: Android smartphones are just like Windows PCs in being dangerously vulnerable to malware and viruses without protection.

The risks for iPhone and Windows Phone users are much lower due to a vastly stricter app authorisation regime in place by Apple and Microsoft, whereas Google pretty much lets anyone add any app they wish to the Android Market.

This includes a raft of so-called security products from companies you’ve never heard of, some of which may or may not be trustworthy… it’s certainly hard to tell, although sticking with the big, well known brands is clearly very easy to recommend.

While Google’s approach mimics the way software has been delivered to PCs and Macs for decades, and delivers an extremely open ecosystem, it means that Android smartphones, Android users and the data that is stored on those Androids are at risk from malware-infested apps hell-bent on screwing you and your digital identity over.

So, while I’m sure that the other Internet security players will seek to do similar deals with telecommunications companies (and may well be doing so overseas), it’s good to see that Vodafone is proactively working with McAfee to deliver its Android smartphone users an affordable.

After all, the besieged and beleaguered Vodafone Hutchison Australia needs some good news, as it had a truly annus horribilis in 2011 due to unbelievably bad network problems that appeared to emerge due to a chronic lack of infrastructure funding and investment, leading to massive churn away from Vodafone and a massive $1 billion investment in 2011 to fix network problems as quickly as possible.  

I’m not a Vodafone customer but I do have friends who are, and some report definitely noticing improvements while others still complain of call drop outs, so as always, YMMAV – your mileage will always vary – no matter which carrier you’re with.

So, what does McAfee’s software do? Well, it seems it does a similar job to other vendors’ suites, letting you locate your smartphone via GPS, remotely wipe lost of stolen devices, protect against viruses, surf safely and, a key difference, which is device data backup, especially handy to do if you need to perform an emergency wipe of a lost device and need a backup first. 

McAfee wants to charge $3 per month, which means $36 per year. Norton’s Mobile Security Lite is free, and appears to do a very similar set of tasks, although the “Lite” version does not offer backup, and as yet, neither does the paid version, which costs around AUD $30. AVG has its "Mobilation" product in free and paid versions (with the paid version costing AUD $25), working from Android OS 1.6 upwards, for smartphones and tablets, but also no backup option - or at least, not yet.

Kaspersky’s Mobile Security costs AUD $12.32, and also offers a range of anti-virus, anti-theft and privacy protections, but doesn’t appear to offer backup either, so McAfee software does seem to one-up its competitors on the backup front, while costing a little extra. What's the bet that McAfee's competitors all decide to offer backup too sometime this year? :-)

Continued on page two, please read on!

So, why has Vodafone partnered with McAfee on promoting the McAfee Mobile Security product?

Well, the obvious reason is to ensure customers using Androids have some form of protection and backup available to them, and equally obviously, there’s a revenue opportunity as well.

James Dampney, Vodafone’s “Head of Applications”, said that: “With the rise of the smartphone and all of the fantastic ways we use our mobile devices, protecting personal contacts, SMS messages and other sensitive information including photos is something everyone should consider”.

Vodafone and McAfee point to research they commissioned from Carnegie Mellon which also “revealed that 54 per cent of people store personal photos and 25 per cent keep confidential work-related information - such as emails - on their mobile phones”.

The research also stated that: “With Australians’ increasing reliance on their mobiles for organising their professional and personal lives, 46 per cent of Aussies are more worried about mobile device theft, 35 per cent are concerned about the loss of personal or work data if they accidentally lose their device and 31 per cent are concerned by the exposure of sensitive personal information to a possible cyber attack.”

The features of McAfee’s Mobile Security include anti-theft protection, device locking, remote data wiping that also “also back up data before the remote wipte to prevent the loss of data on the device”, a data restore feature, location and tracking feature, personalised message display on the screen on lost devices, anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-phishing protection, a web-protection module that even promises to protect you from malicious QR codes and an online portal that lets you manage all this from any web browser – once you’ve entered in your username and password, of course.

There’s also “uninstall protection” which “prevents a thief or another user from bypassing their McAfee mobile protection.”

Again, the key differentiator here appears to be the backup and restore feature, which for $3 per month seems a reasonable price.

Michael Sentonas, the VP and CTO of McAfee Asia Pacific says that: “Mobile devices are the record keepers of much of our personal and business lives, whether it is our emails, text messages or images. The anxiety we feel when we believe that we have lost our device is not only to do with the inconvenience of the loss; the next questions we ask are who has access to the information on the device and what will they do with it?”

Vodafone Android post-paid customers who take up the offer will get their first month free, and then will be charged $3 per month thereafter, with more information available here.

If your desktop environment is littered with unnecessary icons or apps then dig deeper. Apply the Van Halen M&M test.

Van Halen’s standard contract contained a provision the rockers were to be supplied a bowl of M&M’s but with the clause all brown M&M’s must be removed. While this has often been cited as an example of prima donna behaviour and largess David Lee Roth provides a logical explanation in his autobiography.

Van Halen had huge truckloads of equipment, he explains. The band found they would arrive at theatres to perform but girders would not support the weight of their equipment or other technical problems.

Van Halen’s contract rider was extremely complex because so many humans and equipment were involved. Articles would state precise voltage and ampere requirements and the like. Then, with seeming incongruity, article 126 stipulated there were to be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.

David Lee Roth states if he walked backstage and found a brown M&M then he knew instantly he had to line-check the entire production. To him, this was a fast visual check to show how well the contract had been read with its many complex requirements, some of which may potentially threaten life if not implemented correctly.

So, what’s your brown M&M test for systems administrators and the quality of your company’s desktop environment? Let me tell you one of mine.

Recently I consulted to a company whose Citrix environment was causing angst – frequent slowdowns, pauses, lock-ups – particularly as the sun travelled and western states began coming online.

Their systems integrator had recently rebuilt the whole Citrix platform but expected performance gains were not met.

I logged in to Citrix for myself and immediately two things caught my eye: an Adobe Acrobat Reader desktop icon and the Google Toolbar running in Internet Explorer.

Now, don’t get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with Adobe Reader or the Google Toolbar in general, but I am not talking about home use but a production environment in a business, servicing some 150 concurrent users.

How do these things get installed? The answer is one and the same. Install Adobe Reader from the Adobe web site and you are prompted to also install the Google Toolbar, with the checkbox enabled by default. After installation, Adobe Reader leaves a desktop icon for posterity.

I don’t believe I have obsessive compulsive disorder but I find it unusual when regular users – let alone systems admins – don’t notice these things.

Earlier this century I began working for a company and as I worked on laptops and desktops I mused how surprising it was that everyone was using eBay so much! Every machine had an eBay desktop icon and I could only imagine this was a deliberate action of the user.

Then a new computer arrived, using the standard operating environment, which included a Logitech mouse and keyboard set. Load the Logitech software and surprise, it prompts to install an eBay desktop shortcut with – yes – the default set to checked.

Previously, the people installing this paid no heed to this checkbox. Then no further heed to the desktop icon. Nor did the users.

That sort of thing bugs me. Moreso in a server environment.

I put to the systems integrator that the presence of the Google Toolbar could be only one of three causes. Either it was specified as part of the platform, or a user did it and users have the ability to install software on the server, or a systems administrator did it via a blind “next/next/next”-type software installation. Only the first option was acceptable to me, although it would be surprising.

I made the systems integrator explain why the Google Toolbar was present. (Additionally, why jusched.exe was running for every user). I’m sure they felt I was being petty and focusing on minutiae – after all, it was hardly likely the Google Toolbar was causing the environment to grind to a halt.

Yet, it wasn’t about the toolbar; it was about care, diligence and just general quality of work. If something so visible was sub-par then what else?

Ultimately, the SAN was the cause and the server environment had over-subscribed its number of virtual machines. Implementing a new SAN caused a massive breakthrough with huge performance gains.

Obviously, I did not get to this point from the Google Toolbar but the lesson is that I could not trust their previous investigations or set up due to something so simple as the presence of a desktop icon and web browser toolbar.