Those grammar-checking tools…

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… are, well, useless. Sandeep Krishnamurthy of the University of Washington has been doing some testing of Microsoft Word’s grammar checking abilities. He ran this text past it…

Marketing Bad

Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. Updating of brand image is bad for processes in one company and many companies.

McDonalds is good brand. McDonald’s is good brand. McDonald’s are good brand. McDonalds’ are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola is good brand. MCDONALD’S AND COCA COLA IS GOOD BRAND.

Finance good for marketing. Show me money!

4P’s are marketing mix. Four P’s is marketing mix. 4Ps is marketing mix. Manager use marketing mixes for good marketing. You Know What I Mean? Internets do good job in company name Amazon. Internets help marketing big company like Boeing. Internets make good brand best like Coca Cola.

Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft. Gates do good marketing jobs out Microsoft. Gates build the big brand in Microsoft. The Gates is leader of big company in Washington. Warren buffet do awesome job in marketing. Buffets eat buffets in city and town in country.

… and found that Word passed it without comment. To be fair, other programs fare little better. Still, Krishnamurthy’s verdict is harsh:

My conclusion is that the “Spelling and Grammar Check” feature on Microsoft Word is extraordinarily bad (especially the Grammar check part).  It is so bad that I am surprised that it is even being offered and I question the ethics of including a feature that is this bad on a product that is so widely used.

I ran the text past MS Word for Mac. The only thing it objected to was the sentence “4P’s are marketing mix”.

Iraq: status report

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Very good Open Democracy piece by Tim Garden, who was formerly Assistant Chief of the Uk Defence Staff. Sample:

Four distinct groups now threaten Iraq. First, former regime elements, who are largely drawn from the Sunni population, and number somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 fighters. There are then two different groups of Islamic extremists who can field suicide attacks. The foreign fighters, including those led by Musab al-Zarqawi, number about 1,000. A new development is the emergence of home-grown Islamist insurgents. They are still fewer than 500, but their numbers are increasing and they can deliver great destruction. Fourth, the biggest security problem of all comes from organised crime. At least twelve of Iraq’s eighteen governorates have a major crime problem, particularly when the criminals work with the insurgents.

Garden sees two possible outcomes:

1. A fragile, but improving, situation in Iraq with the hope that coalition forces might leave by the end of 2006.

2. A country which begins to look more like Afghanistan than Vietnam, with increasingly lawless regions. The prospect for coalition forces is then without limit, as the worst route of all would be to abandon Iraq and allow it to become a force for instability in the region.

Quote of the day

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We’re not going to spend taxpayers’ money on a program so that Microsoft can further consolidate its monopoly. It’s the government’s responsibility to ensure that there is competition, and that means giving alternative software platforms a chance to prosper.

Sérgio Amadeu, president of Brazil’s National Institute of Information Technology, the agency that oversees the Brazilian government’s technology initiatives.

From a New York Times article on the Brazilian government’s resolute stand on Open Source software.

‘N’ for neutered?

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According to an Associated Press report, Microsoft will use a the letter “N” to designate Windows XP versions stripped of the company’s media player to comply with an antitrust judgment from the European Union.

The agreement with the EU came after antitrust regulators rejected Microsoft’s first choice, “Windows XP Reduced Media Edition,” on grounds it would discourage sales and mislead customers.

The player-free operating system will simply go by “Windows XP Home Edition N” and “Windows XP Professional Edition N” – the “N” standing for “not with media player.”

Microsoft’s subliminal message: an exegesis

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Such a helpful page from Redmond giving “Six Tips for Buying an MP3 Player with Flash Memory”. In the interests of objectivity, the Apple Turns Blog has provided an even more helpful crib, to which I am happy to add. Let’s take the six ‘tips’ in turn, shall we?

1. Understand the basics.

For the active person, a player that uses flash memory to store music has distinct advantages over a player that uses a hard disk. Simply put, flash memory players have no moving parts, meaning that you can take them jogging and your music won’t skip.

Translation: Don’t buy an iPod, which has a nasty hard drive for storing thousands of songs, compared with the measly hundreds you can fit on a flash player.

2. Make sure you’re getting all the goodies.

Many portable music players can do more than just play music. Some players have a built-in voice recorder, FM recorder, or stopwatch. And some come with extra accessories like high-quality headphones, a belt clip, or an armband. Because most of these features are included at no additional cost, make sure the device you choose is filled with these fun extras.

Translation: you just won’t be happy unless your player can record FM radio and includes, for some reason, a stopwatch. And it just so happens that iPods don’t do any of these things.

3. You’ll want a display.

When you have hundreds of songs on your player, you really need an easy way to select your music by artist, album, or genre. This is critical if you want to find that one song or artist you really want to hear. A display also comes in handy when you’re looking for your favorite radio station.

Translation: don’t buy a nasty iPod shuffle, even if it doesn’t have a hard drive (see 1 above) because it doesn’t have a display.

4. Let a professional make your next playlist.

Having an FM radio lets you put your player on autopilot as you mountain bike, cycle, or rollerblade. And when you’re sweating it out on the stationary bike at your health club, you can listen to the program airing on the club’s TV. You want to have something that is fun, lightweight, and flexible. And FM radio is a key feature that many players offer at no extra cost, even for less than $100.

Translation: why listen to your own music when you can listen to nonstop commercials and obnoxious local DJs on FM radio? And record them digitally, so you can share that great beer jingle with your friends and loved ones?

5. Pick the right size for you.

The price of a player will depend on its storage capacity—the more megabytes (MB) of storage it has, the more music it can hold and the more it will cost. If you’re ripping your own CDs, using a player with Windows Media Audio (WMA) support as well as MP3 support gives you the most music per megabyte.

Translation: Windows Media is great, and we just wanted to harp on that for a minute. Have we mentioned that Windows Media is great? And it’s much better than that nasty compression stuff used by Apple.

6. Don’t get locked into one online store.

Have you ever been on the hunt for a particular song? Some obscure indie rock tune or rare jazz performance you heard on the radio? You might have to shop at more than one store before you find the song you’re looking for. Having the flexibility to choose from over 1 million tracks of music from multiple online music stores such as MSN Music, Napster, MusicMatch, and Wal-Mart can be the key to getting the music you want. Several stores even offer subscription services so you can download all the songs you want for about the cost of a CD each month. If you buy a device that has the PlaysForSure logo, you’ll know that you can use it with your choice of PlaysForSure music stores.

Translation: it is, however, just fine to get locked into one proprietary data format and DRM scheme– as long as it’s ours. And be sure to avoid that nasty iTunes store.

Summary:

1. Don’t buy an iPod, iPod mini, or iPod photo.

2. Don’t buy an iPod shuffle.

3. Don’t buy an iPod shuffle.

4. Don’t buy an iPod shuffle.

5. Pick the right size for you (as long as you don’t buy an iPod shuffle).

6. Don’t buy an iPod of any kind whatsoever. And don’t buy songs from Apple.

Big Pharma: the reality

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Those of us who campaign about the way our current Intellectual Property regimes are stifling innovation always hear one reflex response from politicians: “strong IP regimes are necessary because without them we would not have the miracle drugs on which modern medicine depends.” As with virtually everything else one hears from politicians on the subject of IP, this is an evidence-free proposition. Now an illuminating new book by the former Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine tells a different story. Here’s an excerpt from Aaron Schwartz’s succinct summary:

Our utopia of miracle pills is now beginning to look a bit like a nightmare. Drug companies use our tax money to pay for their research, turn around and sell the results to us at high prices, spend the resulting profits on massive campaigns to mislead us about their effects, which then encourage doctors to prescribe an expensive pill which may not help much and might even make things worse. Year after year, drug companies are by far the most successful industry. They use their stunning profits to buy off politicians and propagandize the public into maintaining this state of affairs. Only by learning the true state of affairs can we begin to fight back.

Australian school bans iPod

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Entertaining rant by Andrew Orlowski spurred by the news that a private school in Australia has banned its pupils from listening to their iPods. The yuppie consumer gadget will not be permitted in class, because it encourages kids to be selfish and lonely, according to the school principal. I wrote a column about the ‘iPod effect’ a while back.

How much does email cost?

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The thing about email — and the reason it has become a pest as well as a boon, is that it makes it easy to c.c. messages to many people, thereby transferring cost to the reader. How much cost? Well, suppose you get 50 non-spam messages a day, and you spend an average of three minutes reading and considering each. What’s that in real money?

This very useful piece, “Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload” by Stever Robbins, suggests dividing your annual salary by 120,000 to get the per-minute cost of your time. But this reflects the longer working hours of Americans. For denizens of “old Europe” the rule is: divide by 110,400 (46 weeks, 5-day week, 8-hour day) to find out how much your email costs. The article has lots of really sensible tips — mostly aimed at authors — for making email more efficient. Thanks to Quentin for the link.