Blogging the day before a holiday..

A very tricky thing to do. I've been busy so I didn't update..
Yet here's an update. Tomorrow is the feast of St Peter and St Paul, Il-Luminarja or the feast of light. Not just that, but it's a public holiday so everyone gets a day off!

Linus, the man who invented Linux (or its kernel anyway) talks about the deterioration of Microsoft in an interview in the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog.

Basically he says that Microsoft will not be replaced by another monopoly. Companies like Microsoft (and we have the equivalent here like Maltacom etc) begin to take themselves for granted.

He says "companies just don't tend to stay on top forever -- they become irrelevant either because of their own missteps or because their market just isn't the "happening thing" any more. You can only skate the cutting edge for so long.

So the question is how the decline happens, and in what timeframe. Will open source be a factor? Almost certainly. Will it be the factor? I don't know."

The clock's ticking, I say. More and more are realising that Microsoft is not the only way. It's not the only OS and not the only provider of a word processor in the world. Those of us who refuse to keep feeding the beast can switch to OpenOffice, an open source office suite.
Hopefully the government in Malta will wake up and smell the coffee rather than keep promoting just Microsoft. Let's promote open source too. Let's give students FREE copies of Linux and OpenOffice (not just copies of Office XP and Windows XP for Lm 10) so they can learn how to use advanced operating systems, not just click here and there like idiots who can't understand a thing about what they are trying to do.

Why are Maltese shops so terrible?

Go to buy something, you'll find it's been lying there for ages. It's either something lying in a shop window, gaining dust and becoming yellow due to the sunshine (and we have a lot of that), or it's old technology still being sold at yesterday's prices. I mean you can shop online and get a cheaper deal within the EU... Even if you want to buy a DVD, it's often cheaper to get it from websites like Amazon.co.uk than to get it from D'Amato or Exotique.
The prices are often twice as expensive at the local shops I mentioned, and you can't find anything different from standard hollywood fare and little else. Try to get a tv show dvd box set. You will get strange looks. Once I saw a Smallville box set in a shop window in Sliema. But Amazon UK had a cheaper deal, so I got it from them instead and you order and pay everything online including VAT (no need to hassle at the customs or post office now we are EU members).
Sigh.

Try to get a good digital camera, you might find a shop which tells you 'sorry we don't stock that model'. It's cheaper if you get it from abroad too.
Try to get a digital projector of some famous brand, you might find a shop (the agent of that famous brand) that tells you 'we don't sell that anymore, buy some other brand instead'.

Why bother.. indeed. It seems that recently our shops have become hopeless. They aren't selling much stuff, so what they have becomes old (especially for technological products including cameras and computer stuff).
I haven't mentioned how some other shops foist bad quality merchandise on unsuspecting customers...

Forgot to say that I found also that D'Amato has some good prices on Cd's. In particular you can find italian cd's which are not that easy to buy online at the moment. And Malta cd's of course.

This is my first post in a blog.. I'm hoping that this will be an interesting read.

This blog will be about malta, that island in the mediterranean... anything interesting happening here, my thoughts, etc etc..

Malta has an impressive history. It joined the EU in May 2004.
Onto the present...