The Starrenburg’s Website

This is an example panoramic 360º photograph. The picture is created from a number of photographs taken with a normal camera (a digital SLR is best) using a ‘panoramic head’, and then processed in special software to ’stitch and blend’ the photographs. The pictures give an amazing immersive experience. Click on the picture below to view online (the picture will take a little while to load). I’m still trying out the software as you will see, the sample picture(s) are from one of the panoramic head companies. You can also download and view the picture full-screen in QuickTime on your computer. To move around you click and drag with the left mouse button, left-right & up-down. Shift key to zoom in and Ctrl key to zoom out.

And if you want to get an ideal of just how stunning 360º panoramic photography can be… have a look here. When the window opens make sure you select “high” up in the top right corner to get a high resolution image. Note this high resolution QuickTime source file is only 3.4 MB in size!

If you are a Windows user and don’t have QuickTime (Macs come with QuickTime automatically) then you can download the free QuickTime player here. If you are a Linux desktop user… why don’t you go all the way and get a Mac? After all, the Mac is Unix with a decent desktop - something most Unix/Linux distros have not come anywhere near achieving yet. Ooops - flame wars! Please guys… don’t hurt me, I’m one of you, my web server is running on Gentoo, a real geeks distro - if you’ve ever done “emerge -puv world” on an out of date Gentoo box you’ll know what I mean! Anyway… at least the Mac is not Windows!

Would you trust your mother with this man? Hmmm - I didn’t think so.

He looks like Steven Tyler from Kiss without the makeup, wait… perhaps he is Steven Tyler? Well one thing’s for sure, I’m not going to go up and take a tongue-print to confirm it!

No… it’s not Steven Tyler, but another Steve, Steve Ballmer CEO of Microsoft. You may have heard that Microsoft has come out of the patents closet and is now wielding a big stick stating that “Linux and others violate 235 of our patents“. Well sorry Stevie, looking at that photo of you (ugh) we’re the ones feeling ‘violated’. I mean, it’s bad enough that we have to look at photos of you like this, and watch videos like this of you going crazy. Now we are going to have to put up with you and Microsoft running scared resulting in a “sudden increase in posturing [..] to turn into a full blown series of lawsuits and countersuits sure to stifle innovation into the next decade.”

I’d put the disaster of sofware patents America has foisted onto the world on the same level as some of their other notable disasters like - their love affair with guns, resulting in ‘organisations’ like the NRA, and the war in Iraq (soon to spread to Iran no doubt). Huge mistakes with long-term results along the lines of that proverb “a moment of pleasure, a lifetime of regret”.

Naturally there has been the predictable response and backlash to Microsoft’s comments. Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux the open source operating system, has basically told Microsoft to put up or shut up. No doubt still annoyed by the recent case of the pathetic patents exercise of SCO, where that company said that large portions of Linux used code from Unix. SCO came, via a round-about way, to ‘own’ Unix - but they did not expend any effort to bring it to birth. See here for a website dedicated to reporting the disaster which has come down on SCO’s head through their own greed.

The whole situation of software patents, leading inevitably (in America naturally) to the phenomenon of patent trolls puts me in mind of a well known quotation spoken by the character Salvor Hardin in one of the Isaac Asimov ‘Foundation’ trilogy science fiction novels:

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Which could, in this situation, be rephrased as - exercising violence via software patents is the last refuge of the technically incompetent.

So, what does that say about where Microsoft is headed? SCO bedfellows… again?

p.s. How does someone get to have a tongue as big as this??