Vista launched in Brussels Atomium to a VIP-only crowd

Microsoft Windows Vista made its Belgian launch in the Brussels Atomium tonight, a 334 feet metal structure representing a crystallised molecule of iron by the scale of its atoms, magnified 150 thousand million times. One guest called the Belgian launch “boring hype”.

Unfortunately, only VIPs and a limited number of invited guest were welcome at the Vista Belgian launch party, which featured interactive shows in six huge spheres of the Brussels Atomium. In contrast, the New York launch was visible for a more general public .

I’m currently trying to get in touch with an invited guest in order to get some inside-shots online, but I do notice a declining online interest in the Vista hype. At twice the US retail price, Vista’s pricing in Europe is absurd.

If you’re also fed up with Vista marketing, you may want to read Software Freedom Activists Stand Up To Vista Launch, or That $200 Windows XP service pack called Vista

Related video: Vista Launch in Tokio

40% of Belgians are clueless about “Windows Vista”

This is most unusual: when VTM-TV, Belgium’s largest commercial TV station last night aired an item about Microsoft’s abundantly publicized new operating system that launches today, 40% had no clue what on earth Vista actually was, “Vista, say what?”

Imagine: even Bill Gates came to Belgium last fall, along with a huge Vista media circus in Brussels. [My Image: question:"are you willing to try out Windows Vista": top 40% are clueless about Vista, 32% wouldn't touch it]

Prostitutes, police and lots of rain

You know the feeling when city living just gets too much? Well, it was one of those days: poring rain, bumper-to-bumper traffic, the works. Realizing that I could just as easily walk to my destination, I took a short cut through Antwerp’s legalized prostitution district.

Passing Villa Tinto, which is no more than an upscale high-tech assembly line for legal sex where prostitutes pay taxes and have an in-house police station, I really couldn’t care less about its workers or clients: I was getting soaking wet.

From within their 51 suites for window prostitution, featuring ensuite bathrooms, incorporating biometric technology and a general hyper sanitized look, the predominantly African “sex-workers” at Villa Tinto looked blasé at their passing potential customers. In this town, there’s nothing dishonorable or sleazy about prostitution anymore - locals even take their children along when they pass through the area.

The biggest surprise? The steady increase in empty windows, as legal prostitution cannot compete with the flood of moonlighting “home workers”, advertising their services in almost every local paper. My photo: an empty window prostitution booth with a rather unexpected decoration: a SPA bottle (Belgian bottled spring water) along with an American flag, apparently being used as a bath towel.

I wonder, would you feel safe with a high-tech, super-sanitized window prostitution area near your home?

Late Night with, eh, two transvestites

If you are still laughing at the cardboard jokes read from a tele-prompter by Conan O’Brien or any other regular US late night show host, you might be pleasantly surprised by Debby and Nancy, two Belgian actors whose late-night TV talkshow in drag has long caught the attention of the nation (at least, the Dutch speaking majority in Belgium).

I know, it has all been done before, but their sheer enthusiasm and extremely provocative yet intelligent approach is way off the beaten track. Currently, they’re on VRT-tv (still trying to find a YouTube link), but their previous “Laid Knight” on VTM was a must-see. Not included: a basic Dutch crash course

ECIS Media Release: “With Vista Microsoft continues its illegal practices”

I know, you read it probably last Friday, but here is once again the next chapter in the neverending story EU/ECIS (=IBM, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Oracle and Red Hat) vs Microsoft: [image: Gates promoting Vista in Brussels]

(Quote

“The very same practices the European Commission found to be illegal almost three years ago have now been implemented in Vista, Microsoft‘s new PC operating system. This will stifle competition on the PC and server markets, and extend its closed standards into the open standards based internet environment, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) warned today in a statement.
Microsoft still has not fulfilled its interoperability disclosure obligations under the European Commission‘s March 2004 Decision, which applies not only to existing but also to forthcoming Microsoft products, such as Vista, Office 2007 and Longhorn.”

If you really feel up to it, you can read the complete press release. And if you couldn’t care less, enjoy the marketing hype when MSFT releases Vista in the shops Jan 30.
Or just buy the “law-breaking” OS as an upgrade, and find out for yourself what is does to your 2 yo XP laptop

The devil wears Prada, accessorized with an LG phone

On sale in Europe February 2007: the ultimate LG touchscreen phone,
at least, for all fashion victims out there. Priced at € 599 ($ 720),
but then again, if you wear Prada, who cares about the price?

A novel approach to fight crime in Antwerp: build a library

When Antwerp city council decided to build their new futuristic central public library (”Permeke”) they chose to locate it right in the middle of an impoverished crime-ridden area near Central Station. A bold move.

The library, along with successfully chasing away the local prostitutes, was intended to dramatically upgrade the area. For a limited period of time, there was even a mobile Police station right in front of the “Permeke” central library.

Years later the project partly turned out to be a failure: most of my friends and acquaintances hardly ever visit this library anymore when it became ever so clear that a high-tech new library does not solve intricate crime problems.
At night the area is basically still not safe enough. A close friend was recently attacked a few steps away with a knife - local police officers confirmed that safety in the area is still ‘problematic’ at night.

Great library, but shame on how Antwerp city council is still ignoring the basic fact that building one prestigious project is definitely not going to solve street crime problems in an impoverished area

The visitor from Microsoft Corporation

My five seconds worth of attention from Redmond

Belgian Royal scandals, part 3: Crown Prince Philip attacks the press

Belgium is outraged once again after Prince Philip, son of king Albert and future heir to the Belgian throne, verbally attacked a national TV executive and a leading newspaper editor last night during the annual Royal New Years reception, threatening to deny them “access to the palace unless they dropped their recent (unbiased) exposure of visible royal ‘incidents’ “.

When both editors tried to explain the concept of a free press, a basic part of democracy, Prince Philip lost his temper and had to be physically restrained by his wife (…).

Prime minister Verhofstadt expressed “grave concern” about this incident, both to the press and to the Royal Palace. Several observers believe Philip is not suited to become the next reigning monarch. Questioned by a leading newspaper, 77% of all Belgians feel the behavior of some members of the royal family is no longer acceptable. There is currently a political majority in favor of curtailing the constitutional position of the Belgian monarchy.

On a personal note: it’s freezing in Antwerp, causing all the classic minor inconveniences. I recently had to quit my diving training, making me wonder how to find an alternative in order to fill all those free hours. All suggestions appreciated

Hillary Clinton.com: “We’re sorry, there was an error”

If there is one thing a presidential candidate doesn’t need, it must be a malfunctioning website.

Error produced by simply clicking any “Featured clips” link at HillaryClinton.com (20.00 GMT/UTC+1, Antwerp, Belgium). Try clicking: “UPDATED: Hillary Is the Democrats’ Best Shot”, then wearily smile reading “We’re sorry. There was an error with your request”. [Update: 48h later: still down...]

Even if the error gets corrected asap, Hillary will soon learn that “saying sorry” is a way of life for US presidents, or even presidential candidates. But then again, she’s no naive intern

And although she’s become quite a middle of the road candidate, Hillary will never make it: conservative America anno 2007/2008 is just not ready for a female president

An interesting offer: get paid by Microsoft to contribute to Wikipedia

Rest assured: it did not happen to me. But Rick Jelliffe, a www/ISO standards activist just mentioned yesterday getting such an offer on his www.oreillynet.com blog. Quote:

“An interesting offer: get paid to contribute to Wikipedia” [published Jan 22, 2007]
“As a regular participant at ISO standards, on and off for more than a decade at my own expense, it has always frustrated me that the big companies would not come to the table and make use of ISO’s facilities. So I am a big fan of the Mass. governments push that governments should use standard formats only. I know some of the ODF people, I had some nice emails with the ODF editor over Christmas for example, and Jon Bosak asked me to join the original ODF initiative at OASIS (I couldn’t due to time, unfortunately.)

So I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML [two document format standards, important for MSFT Office/Word users]. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they are frustrated at the amount of spin from some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs. I think I’ll accept it: FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see.“

Although I support all efforts to correct errors in Wikipedia, one wonders if actually paying a well known expert to clean up certain Wikipedia articles is the way to go. The White House employs staff to “clarify” some Wikipedia content, Microsoft is paying experts to “weed out the errors”, who will be next to ‘collaborate’?

Bottom line: is it acceptable to get paid by third parties for contributing to Wikipedia?

Belgian Federal police to use blind civilians to transcribe wiretaps

In an unexpected move the Belgian Federal police today acquired legal authorization to use ordinary (but blind) civilians to transcribe its current wiretaps, clearing a major roadblock to increase the number of federal officers/resources available for “real police work”.

Although currently only 30 positions are vacant, the Federal police already received a large number of applications. Belgium, like several other EU countries, has been stepping up phone monitoring to combat the increasing number of extremist/criminal organizations. However, transcribing these countless hours of tape proved to be an excessive burden on the system, as it had to be handled by federal officers. The Belgian Braille foundation applauded the effort.

Reaching the limits of cyberspace: is the Internet approaching gridlock?

According to a recent report by www.deloitte.com the enormous growth in video traffic on the “superhighway” means the Internet will be approaching gridlock in some areas.

The full report can be read in their Telecom 2007 predictions pdf file. In spite of caching content locally (eg Akamai) the increasing individual consumption of peer-to-peer video traffic will induce capacity problems in several areas. If the price paid for bandwidth continues to fall, there may be little incentive for some players to invest in new fiber.

The entire article is available on page 6 of the pdf file, while page 7 discusses net-neutrality

Video report: Porn industry embraces HD-DVD adult video, drops Blu-ray

IDG Holland reports from the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas ( video report - Windows Media Player: direct link), where all major adult movie producers made abundantly clear that high-definition porn DVDs were available only on HD-DVD discs, forgoing the lucrative installed Blu-ray user base market (eg Sony’s PlayStation 3 owners)

Their decision was entirely due to Sony’s strict content restrictions imposed on its replicating contractors for its Blue-ray DVD format: no porn, period.

By imposing these restrictions, Sony may well be losing the early lead in the upcoming High Definition DVD battle, as adult content has always been a crucial factor during previous competing format wars.

But then again, although it does represent a 4 Billion US $ market, you obviously don’t want to watch all this ‘filth” on your shiny brand-new HD player Btw: Microsoft is backing HD-DVD in its upcoming Windows Vista OS

[Update 2008: after the sudden demise of HD-DVD, the porn industry seems to have embraced the wrong partner ]

Blog comment spam: how do you cope with the tidal wave?

Let’s face it, we are all victims of comment spam. Without protection, even a 10-vistors-a-day blog will sooner or later fall victim to a tidal wave of commercial junk comments [94% of all comments are spam]

However, WordPress is blessed with a most efficient robust distributed approach to comment spam: Akismet, which uses API keys to assign trust to nodes and has wide distribution as a result of being bundled with the 2.0 release of WordPress. Combined with manual comment approval, not one single spam comment has gotten through.

Unfortunately, building high walls also keeps the ‘good guys’ out: many people just don’t feel like commenting anymore. Ever since I enabled “approve first” the number of legitimate comments has dropped dramatically. And although Akismet is the best comment spam filtering tool around, some legitimate comments must have been erased. I’m not about to read all daily 300 spam comments to make sure not to miss that potential false-positive.

Anyway, would you like to do me a favor? Just leave 1 single legitimate comment, it will make my day

The glass ceiling: why Caucasian heterosexual males still call the shots

“For the times they are a-changin” Bob Dylan sang way back in 1964, but when reviewing upwards corporate mobility in 2007, the Belgian minister of “equal opportunity” found out that the ‘glass ceiling’ showed no signs of cracking.

Middle-management has slowly become a more heterogeneous crowd, but the top of most Belgian companies (in this particular article: the public-TV management) remains the exclusive playground for predominantly rich, Caucasian heterosexual males.

Most white male CEOs and their board members have no problem sustaining this “concrete ceiling”: they just hire and instate other socially equal white males, as not one single law can influence their personal decisions. “Because we can” is the only reason for explaining the status quo. For middle-management, times definitely have changed. For those on top of the pyramid, don’t expect any change in the near future.

Details: Belgian public VRT-TV: top management: 8 white males

Belgian Royal scandals: You never touch royalty, ever

Belgian weekly Humo (www.humo.be) today published a shocking behind the Royal curtains report after the recent financial fraud involving Prince Laurent. The report evokes a multitude of scandals, alleged abuse of power and generally distasteful personal misbehavior by several members of the Belgian royal family.

According to Humo, the Belgian Royal “incidents” involve alleged Billion Franc (currently Euro) banking accounts-without-a-name for most of the Royals in the 70’s, prostitution during foreign royal missions, shady relations with Russian criminals and countless ongoing cover-ups including numerous accidents at high speed (Ferrari appears to be the most popular royal vehicle).

One fatal accident apparently involved a Royal in yet again a speeding Ferrari - allegedly Prince Alexander, half-brother of ruling king Albert, whose lawyers even tried to sue an injured crash victim for ‘damages to the royal BMW’s” in Oct of 1990 when the royal motorcade ignored a red traffic light, speeding at 140 km/h on route to an Alzheimers congress…

Prince Laurent has been “caught” speeding at 190 km/h in 2002, while his Ferrari passed through the narrow city streets of Ukkel (Brussels) at an insane 146 km/h (90 mph) on a peaceful day in 1999. He’s well known for insulting police officers who try to stop him. King Albert contributed to a major accident in the southern town of Bouillon, when someone apparently played ‘try to catch me’ with the security escorts.

Belgian royals enjoy a far reaching degree of immunity when they “misbehave”.

If a non-royal Belgian were to behave like some members of the descendants of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty, he would spend the rest of his life in jail.

If you realize that Belgium’s King Albert II (an apparent devout conservative Catholic) also has a 36-year-old illegitimate daughter, Delphine Boel, an artist living in London, and a half-sister (Princess Marie-Christine of Belgium), living “exiled” in the USA after a never ending stream of scandals, one wonders how much of this “we do as we please and get paid for it” royal misbehavior this country really is willing to put up with in the future.

To quote BBC-world: “this nation asks again: do we really need ‘these’ royals?”

[Images: Belgian king Albert II, exiled Princess Marie-Christine of Belgium back in 2000, living "in poverty" in Vegas after "having spent" her 40 million inheritance]

Defaced Belgian Military websites still off-line two days after being hacked

Last weekend the public Belgian military portal website www.mil.be was defaced by Turkish nationalists.

Two days later, there’s still only a short “temporarily unavailable” notice online, written in Microsoft Word (from the page html: “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word”). Apparently the Belgian military is finally strengthening security after its portal has been the repeated target of multiple attacks.

[Image: courtesy www.standaard.be]

Gates: battle between HD-DVD and Blue Ray is “irrelevant”

In an article published by computable-VNU publications, Bill Gates is reportedly having said during the CES in the US that the current battle between the emerging Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats is “irrelevant”. VNU quotes Gates as saying that both these formats will soon be “replaced by Flash memory”. “Soon”, as in 5 years in the future (…) Makes me recall his long forgotten book “The road ahead”, best known for flashing “visionary” one-liners that never came through. In the mean time, LG will probably be unable to market its current Blu-ray + HD-DVD player, as it infringes on interactive HD-DVD specifications. Most remastered older movies in HD format I recently watched on a demo Blu-ray player (+ € 1,000) hooked up to a full-HD 1080 LCD screen with an HDMI connection looked hardly any better than €5 DVDs on a regular €50 DVD player…

I’m amazed, Microsoft is firmly backing HD-DVD in Vista, can someone confirm the Gates “irrelevant” quote?

Belgian government sued by migrant for obstructing anti-discrimination law

The Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt (conservative VLD) this morning was served with a subpoena after a 27 yo Belgian citizen from Moroccan descent filed a civil complaint for violating art 108 of the constitution, when it became clear that members of the ruling conservative VLD party had been blocking certain actual checks of the 2003 anti-discrimination law.

The victim had twice been refused entry into a local disco in 2003, while his Caucasian wife had no problem getting inside. The victim had to wait 3 years to be informed that the Belgian Government had never instigated needed action for a legal framework that would have enabled him to take legal action against this form of blatant race discrimination.

Apparently Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt has even personally casted doubts on the need for on-site discrimination checks, although the spirit of the law was abundantly clear. So much for equality in Belgium, anno 2007..

[image: the Belgian Prime Minister, having a "bad hair day" - courtesy De Standaard]

Breathing without air: test-driving Navy Seal technology

I wasn’t really surprised noticing that many people assume divers breath “compressed oxygen”, which is obviously a dangerous oversimplification: breathing pure oxygen at -30m would simply kill you.

To set the record straight: divers breath compressed air, although the army does use exclusive rebreather equipment for its elite Navy Seals that does the trick: breathing pure oxygen in shallow water, without getting killed.

As you may or may not know, oxygen is corrosive, explosive and easily becomes lethally toxic at depth, so a test-drive in our divingschool pool with these military ‘re-breathers’ (self-contained pure-02 equipment that does not leave the typical bubble-trail) was a real thrill.

[image: rebreather (left) supervised by Belgian Navy Seal]

Neptune welcomes 2007

My diving school decided to open the 2007 diving season with a classic touch: we invited Neptune, the Roman God of water

Gay couples responsible for +50% of all Belgian adoptions in 2006

According to GayBelgium gay Belgian married couples adopted 294 native Belgian children in 2006, out of a grand total of 575 nationwide applications.

These disproportional figures can easily be explained though: apparently most of the gay or lesbian parents were the biological father/mother of the child, adopted by their new partner.

On a personal note: none of my relationships inspired me to get married, so the position is still vacant

First pictures of Belgian Prince Laurent submitting testimony in navy fraud scandal

Belgian Prince Laurent today made a turbulent entry when he came to court to testify in the ongoing Belgian navy financial fraud trial. Pictures posted at 14.00 CET , courtesy of all Belgian news feeds:

Belgian daily The Standaard (www.standaard.be) reported that Prince Laurent surprisingly “arrived at 2 pm in a tiny Smart car”, allegedly poking fun at the fact that no royal had ever been allowed (well, almost “forced”) to testify in a Belgian court during the past 175 years.

16 minutes later he left, only having referred to his previous statement, implying that he assumed following the advice of Royal Navy officer Vaesen was legitimate. Vaesen was instated by Belgian king Albert to ‘assist’ his financially troubled son.

For Belgian Prince Laurent, this is probably the end of an ongoing scandal he couldn’t care about less: being a senator by law he is protected from judicial pursuit. For the Dutch majority in Belgium, this “legal episode” is yet another one in a long line of incidents affecting the credibility of the ruling French speaking royal House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. All the rather boring details can be found at Wikinews

Saying goodbye to Christmas

All good things must come to an end: Antwerp closed down the City Hall ice-skating village tonight,
officially ending the holiday season. Welcome back to the real world.