GoonanismA Sporadic mix of the personal, political and programming

Sorry about the lack of post – no time of apologies though, not when it’s the Australian Taxation Office that is about to feel my wrath.

You see, I hate Microsoft and pretty much everything they have ever done ever. They have made the world dependent on their poor performing software that was forced into our living rooms through breaches of anti-trust laws. I hate them because building a website means building one for the lowest common denominator because of Internet Explorer, because of the way they have successfully lobbied for an expansion of copyright and intellectual property law, because they are a huge multinational corporation and so on and so forth.

What has this got to do with those bean-counters at the ATO? Well a few years ago, the ATO realised that, you know, technology had happened since rum was the Australian currency *gasp* and they created E-Tax so you could do your tax online, at home, quickly and easily meaning less work for everyone (including the ATO).

However, that was before I discovered just how spectacularly amazing and easy to use Linux is. I made the switch and have never looked back, easily managing all my media – usually better than Microsoft does (every tried playing an OGG file on Media Player? It’s the standard media format for both Wikipedia and HTML5). So I happily potter along without the compatibility issues that everyone assumes I’d be having. Until I come across what you would expect to be a piece of software that was interoperable: E-Tax. But no, it’s built on the .net framework which, you guessed it, only works on Windows.

Now I understand that the majority of people use Windows and that’s why they have done this. But why use a Microsoft proprietary language/framework? Java works on ALL operating systems, why not use that.

So I started a facebook group. It’s about the level of protest that I feel it deserves – it doesn’t mean I’m not pissed off though.

And for that you, ATO are: Jerk of the Week.

# please note that I may be wrong about a few of the technical things in here, don’t hate me but feel free to set the record straight in the comments field.