Slashdot | Gates' Replacement says Microsoft Must Simplify

"I am sure Microsoft did an unbiased evaluation of what mail server to run internally? Lol... yeah right.

Give me another company that uses it for 60,000 employees and you'd have a point (not saying there is no such company, I have no idea.)"

Here is my experience with a large (I think it was probably in the 60K range or better) company running Exchange/Outlook: Yes, they do it, but they don't do it well.

You have some company information stored on file servers, other information stored in Outlook folders (or maybe the proper terminology is Exchange folders). None of it is indexed in any way so that it can be found without a brute force search. Some of these folders are out of date and pretty much read-only because they don't want to hire a team of gatekeepers to ensure that it is otherwise. Other folders are more up to date by allowing just about anybody to update them, which occasionally leads to them being updated with bad info or being wiped out altogether: "Let's see, was the last backup done recently? Did any important changes happen after that? Oh well, maybe it wasn't that important. Just to be safe, I'll load a copy of everything I might ever want to use onto my company laptop and take it home, leaving it in plain view in the back seat of my car for a few weeks. Ooops, now where did that laptop get to? I wonder if it would be better to report it stolen or just forget about it. Those company inventories aren't very reliable anyway, after all, they keep the results in a public Exchange folder. HAHA!"

The inmates are running the asylum in many corporate DP shops these days, both large and small, and we have Microsoft (first among many) for providing idiotic tools for idiots to use to so efficiently mishandle important data. I don't see anything changing soon, with kids in grade-school now being required to turn their homework in as Powerpoint presentations.

The PC paradigm shift that allows us all to do things with computers at home has infected the thinking of most companies these days, simply because so many new employes of such companies got their computer education using home PCs for both personal and school work/play. They don't know any better, they don't know any different, and if you try and explain it to them you just get a blank stare, or worse, a "knowing" argument, that as long as we "encrypt some stuff" all will be OK.

I predict the inevitable collapse of much of this infrastructure. I'm not Ludite enough to avoid using computers, but I'm going to avoid being at the epicenter of it all by not using Windows and much Windows based software whenever I can avoid it. My exposure to Notes mostly second hand, observing a friend use it where he worked, was that it handles workflow issues a lot better than Exchange. If it works the way it appeared to work, then yes, it would be harder to administer, because it does more. There would be concurrency and validation issues that Exchange handles by ignoring them.

I bet what brings Microsoft to its senses more quickly than a change at the top will be a change in the way home users use their computers. Yes, today grade school kids may be submitting homework in Powerpoint on floppy disks, but tomorrow they may be using a web based tool and not know what a floppy disk is. Those web based tools will have to deal with validation, backup, encryption and a few other things in order to even be viable solutions. In the mean time, local PC oriented programs will not have changed in any fundamental way since the days of DOS.

Whether it takes a disastrous collapse of this bad infrastructure, or just a generational change, back really, to robust centralized server solutions, there will hopefully be a day when people look back at our day of data loss and corruption and laugh and ask themselves: "What WERE they thinking?"

The Canonization of St.Bill, and my comments

"The answer to either question is worse than the other. But when responsible media organizations who tonight are celebrating Gates achievements next turn to the thorny subject of business ethics, they may have a harder time convincing us that they're sincere about the subject. "

I think he meant to say "either answer to the question", nevertheless a good article.

As to how and why media so often gets it wrong (and my theory is that they get it wrong well over half the time) it probably has a lot to do with deadlines, and word counts, but most of all, it has to do with what got many of these people into media in the first place. The full answer may be the subject for a much longer article, but the short answer is that "to seek the truth" is not a part of the long answer. Most journalists have an agenda, and for most it is a hidden one. Discovering the agenda is quite literally an exercise left to the reader.

Generally I've found that when I read or listen to the news I can count on the first and sometimes the second sentence being a true fact (or at least true as far as the reporter is concerned). Go beyond that first sentence or two and you are on shaky ground, in fact by mid paragraph you may be irretrievably in 180-degree-off territory. Several examples are given in the linked article. No, Gates didn't invent the computer, or even the PC, and many would debate that he did anything to make them more useful or usable.

What Gates, in the form of Microsoft, did with a lot of help from Intel was trim our decision path too soon. Of course IBM had a lot to do with this, by anointing Intel and Microsoft as the primary subcontractors for the PC a lot of other microprocessors, motherboard designs, operating systems, compilers and so on were written off (by these same journalists for the most part) almost overnight.

At no point since has the media shown any interest in alternatives that might be or might have been. Until recently Apple has been relegated to niche status, and it has been taken for granted for a very long time that companies like SGI and SUN would eventually be ground to dust by the overwhelming power of Intel and Microsoft, and so it has been. Which hint at the answer to the question about why journalists become journalist, which is that they seek to make the truth rather than to find it.

Although journalists often state the facts exactly as they aren't they can only divert the course of future events in subtle ways and often, the big ocean liner of history doesn't arrive anywhere near the port that they were aiming for. Still, I think the satisfaction comes with moving the wheel at all, not with arriving at any particular place. So, when some event with a mass of its own arrives in our sights, it is often too late to have a debate about whether to veer left or right, and hitting it head on or scraping up along side it for a few hundred feet becomes the realm of "fate".

Maybe, just maybe, the selection of non-Intel hardware as the basis for the next generation game consoles will represent the sort of sea change over which the "conventional wisdom" of journalists has no control. With that change, there might come a convenient place to select a new, or at least different operating system to go with it. Microsoft is already hedging its bets, maybe some journalists will be too. Apple, inexplicably abandoned ship, and is swimming toward the iceberg...

Oh wait, now I'm reminded why I am not a journalist. I paint my way into lousy metaphors. Or something.

PS: In the above discussion I didn't mention headlines. Headlines as we mostly all know are created after the article is written, usually by someone other than the author. They often bear no relationship to anything in the article at all. What passes through the minds of those creating the headlines is a whole different topic.

Is Gates' Retirement Linux's Chance?

I don't think Gates had that much to do with day-to-day operations any more. It's taken him too long to figure out that the company runs just fine without him. Now there ARE problems, but I think he knows better than anyone else that he does not possess any magic solution to a set of products gone out of control.

Another thing to consider: by stepping down now, his legacy is intact. If the company goes on to do more great things, he will still be remembered as the guy who got it started (to the extent that that over-simplistic assessment makes any sense). But if things continue to go badly for Microsoft, some of that could rub off on him too. By getting out now, he keeps his legacy, and continues to milk the company for profits (with luck from well times stock market transactions) and at 50, he still can enjoy all that life has to offer the richest man in America. I really think this is a no-brainer for him and I only wonder why he didn't do it sooner.

As to Linux, I think the upcoming Vista fiasco (I'm pretty sure we haven't seen the worst yet) is a big chance for Linux. I've never been one to buy off on concepts like "The Year of the Linux Desktop" though. I think success will come in small increments, and there may be steps backwards as well. I have my doubts about Apples future in the computing business for example. Linux could still pick up some of that market share. I've heard Apple server support is awful and I have to wonder why anyone with a room full of those things wouldn't want to just run Linux. The transition to Intel is still muddled and could get worse. Moving to Linux simplifies things in a world of changing hardware. "It just works" can be said of Linux across a broad spectrum of hardware when you confine yourself to the basics of both servers and commodity desktops. The more big companies lock down their desktop systems so that they are not play-toys for desktop users, the more these systems look like Linux. Just the basics. Who cares if some oddball camera works with it?

I'm no Gates fan, but I bear him no ill-will either. He's doing the right thing for himself, and I really think it will have no impact on the company other than a short term psychological one, but then, they seem to be doing a fair amount of navel gazing anyway these days. If the company is going to fall flat on it's face, it will do so no matter what Gates does. Anyone with sense will just stand clear.

reprise: Nothing New Here, Move Along

"I think there are some good parts of Microsoft yearning to be free, so to speak. The company needs to get beyond being the creation of Bill Gates, and I dare to say, Bill Gates would be better off being a very wealthy stock holder, but being as much interested in his other stock holdings as he is in 'his baby'. As of now, I think MS has a far larger chance of following the flight path of DEC, who's founder stayed with it almost to the end than IBM, that managed to survive its founders and become true corporation rather than personal empire."

Obviously this has become an influential bog!... err blog!

The World As Best As I Remember It : Broken Windows Theory

"Micromanagement, though not pervasive, is nevertheless evident. Senior vice presidents sometimes review UI designs of individual features, a nod to Steve Jobs that would in better days have betokened a true honor but for its randomizing effects. Give me a cathedral, give me a bazaar – really, either would be great. Just not this middle world in which some decisions are made freely while others are made by edict, with no apparent logic separating each from the other but the seeming curiosity of someone in charge."

Chuckle.

IBM to Open Source More WSDM Code - CIO Tech Informer - Blog - CIO

"With more than 30 IBM products already incorporating WSDM, IBM thought the time was right to open source more of its code relating to the standard, according to Scott Handy, vice president, worldwide Linux and open source at IBM. The 30-plus IBM products include some of its Tivoli systems management software, its DB2 databases, its Rational development tools and its Virtualization Engine.

IBM’s hope is that open sourcing its framework will encourage other systems management software vendors like CA and Hewlett-Packard to stop duplicate development work and embrace the IBM approach for building WSDM interfaces, Handy said."

IBM... Still teaching the other companies how it is done. They continue to be a class act.

Switching Sandboxes

For anyone who is reading along, I've semi-retired the Sand-box blog that was this blogs predecessor. I had thought of just using it as a "scratchpad" for entries that might find their way here, but blogger seems to be getting slower, not faster and the "BlogThis" method that I use seems to work differently from week to week. I find the new Google Notebook plugin to be much easier and much much faster, so I made a public "Sandbox" folder for it that will serve that scratchpad purpose. It's linked in over there on the right. That way -->

ENOTSERIOUS 28 05 2006

So.... what happened after Oslo???!!!

Don't tell me you dropped your laptop!

I'm "planning" a much more modest driving trip into the midwest in about a week and I'm agonizing over which technology to take:

There is the "new" laptop that I'm using now and use most of the time, a two year old Powerbook running OS X (10.4 the last version I'll ever run I expect).

There is the several year older iBook running Linux, that in many ways is faster, and more flexible, I mean really, I can live without the bleedin' Aqua interface, and the lightweight Icewm has a theme that puts the red, yellow and green balls on the left side of every window so I don't get confused, and not only that, but they do what they are supposed to do... like close the application when you click the red one or use the ENTIRE screen when you click the green one.

And then there is the even older Compaq, also running Linux. Basically, all I use around the house are laptops. I have FOUR other computers (very old stuff that I mostly paid $99 each for) that I haven't turned on in many months, but the laptops are faster, quieter, cooler, et-cetera-er. I should really clean off the hard drives and give/throw the old desktop systems away.

Now the Compaq is bulky, huge, heavy, and creaks a lot when you pick it up. I'm always afraid when I move it from one place to another its going to fall apart. In fact pieces HAVE started falling off of it, but so far, nothing important (I don't think). It's running Debian unstable (fitting?), which is the other reason it is a bit risky for a trip, not to mention it has battery life of like 45 seconds. So it wouldn't be useful in the car without using an inverter thing. I have a wireless card for it and have used it in hotels before, some of which only have wireless connections (I'd always use a wired connection if available, as the hotel networks are insecure enough that there is a slight safety margin if you are plugging into a switch rather than a router, the wireless ones are sometimes totally wide open (even to non-guests in the parking lot!)

No problems with the "New " Powerboook, except they don't make them any more and I don't want to mess this one up if I can help it. It "just works" as they say and it is already set up for my camera, Palm Pilot, etc.

So I'm leaning toward the iBook. Wireless is broken on that. It worked once, but Apple repair broke wireless in the process of repairing everything else. Since I had once written the thing off as a lemon (pun) that it works so well now seems rather nifty somehow. I've got a Netgear wireless print server that will allow the iBook to talk to a wireless network, using a Cat5 cable, and that is probably what I'll do, but then that pretty much eliminates the possibility of popping into a Starbucks to read my mail. I'm not sure they have Starbucks where I'm going anyway, so, probably a non-issue. Furthermore, since I had already written it off once (the iBook that is) if I drop it into a canyon and it shatters into a million pieces, I won't shed too many tears. All data on it has been copied from somewhere else, so there is no need for frantic backing-up before the trip. I just have to make sure that any pictures I load onto it exist in at least one other place (either uploaded or copied too an external drive) until I get back.

I really don't make a good traveller. A shortcoming I've learned to live with.

Google's not-so-very-secret weapon

"'Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset,' said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and the cofounder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex."

What differentiates Google from Microsoft and Yahoo (among others) is that they are building huge computer networks with ease, using a system that is almost totally automated, while Microsoft, for one, spends countless man-hours tweaking their network for better load balancing, farming out some of the heavy lifting to other companies. Google seems to have figured this out back in the dissertation days and is still trying to come up with enough stuff to tax the system. Woe be to many of us if it ever collapses, but somehow I think Yahoo and Microsoft have more too worry about in that area too.

Robert Scoble: First Corporate Face Transplant?

"At the end of the day, who wants to work at the kind of company that is worried that it's employees will become too popular and may get stolen away? Microsoft isn't that kind of company and that's one of the reasons it is a great place to work. If a company is so worried about employees becoming too visible then it probably has deeper personnel problems than just worrying about losing a few bloggers."

Precisely.

Microsoft is a 1000 pound gorilla with a limp

"Seeing what is happening with Symantec, Adobe may feel that the time to act against Microsoft is sooner rather than later. By taking away a much sought after feature of Office 2007, it may hinder the new Microsoft product’s take-up. An antitrust suit in Europe where Microsoft is vulnerable may further weaken any pretensions that Microsoft harbours to move into Adobe’s Acrobat territory. Adobe’s silence has been astonishing and probably means a lawsuit is in the wind."

Dump Intel shares and run, says analyst

"One such analyst, RBC Capital Markets' Apjit Walia, described Intel stock as 'dead money,' in a report published on Monday."

Looks like they have company:

Web 2.0 worm downs MySpace

Is this too cooincidental or what?...

The cunning JavaScript exploit added a million users as "friends", forcing the site offline. Service was restored on Friday but two days later the site was still struggling with the consequences, serving pages at a glacial pace.

And then there is this:


JavaScript worm targets Yahoo!

Not to mention my superfast DSL service has been operating at 33kbps modem speed since Friday afternoon. No really!

Thank you Web 2.0. Can we go back to 1.0 now?

Microsoft's Calling Home Problem: It's a Matter of Informed Consent

We didn't do it!

But if we did, we had a perfect right to.

But if we didn't have a perfect right to, we'll change it.

And anyway, it's for your own good.

You agreed to it after all.

Maybe.

But now you know about it, so what's your beef?

Go away and stop bothering us.

Keep sending the money though.

Download Windows Vista

No, I'm not actually recommending anyone do this, just pointing too Scoble's blog. I was going to post my own snide comments over there, but 50 other people already beat me to it. Is it just my imagination or is Microsoft losing mind-share like air rushing out of the airlock on the space station?

Before visiting Scoble's I read where MS has taken some PC to PC synching feature out now. Absolutely the last feature they are going too remove... they PROMISE. Unless something changes of course.

Someone remarked that if they were going to remove anything why didn't they remove DRM. At least that would make them popular with music fans. But I have a more realistic idea.... remove everything EXCEPT DRM! Windows Vista could become a super desktop iPod. It would play encrypted music files. And that's IT! All other uses of your PC could use new AJAX web features from Google.

Someone sent me an invitation too use Writely today. Too early to evaluate it, but its nice to have the whole "suite" of new Google products to tinker with. I'm looking through my archives for old Excel (and now Word) files to test-load. I never used most of the fancy features of either product but I have a few challenging documents out there.

And speaking of PC to PC synching, last night I installed the new Google Synch plugin to my Apple machine and one of my Linux boxes and for the first time in a long time had perfectly matching bookmarks, history, the works on both machines, automagically. I guess the synching that Vista dropped got picked up by Google eh?

Can the malware industry be trusted?

"It may be that if you do business with Microsoft on a regular basis, you get used to working in an ethics-free environment, and you begin to practice the same black business arts as the master. Whatever the cause, what I see happening in the malware business today reflects Microsoft's own ethics-free practices. I'm not convinced there is an honest firm in the whole mess. So in my humble opinion, the answer to the question, 'can the malware industry be trusted?' is a resounding 'No!' What do you think?"

Microsoft plans better disclosures of (spying) tool

"'It's kind of a safety switch,' said David Lazar, who directs the Windows Genuine Advantage program."

No, it's kind of electrodes shoved up your customer's ass.

Too bad that some people will be "shocked" to find out about it, but fitting that it keeps your companies reputation in the toilet, where it has been for some time.

Microsoft Still Working on Tiny Haiku PC

"TAIPEI-- The launch of the ultra-mobile PC hasn't quenched Microsoft's thirst to find a blockbuster product in the portable PC space. In fact, the company has continued to work on another mini-Tablet PC concept, the Haiku, and expects it on the market within the next few years."

Oh please Microsoft, just call your next idea hari-kari and get it over with. We are no longer amused!

PC World's Techlog - Google Spreadsheets: Very Basic, Pretty Interesting

"Google Spreadsheets' most unexpected feature is a built-in chat feature: If you and one or more people you've shared a sheet with are in it st the same time, you can use a chat window to communicate. This won't change number-crunching forever--you can do something similar today with any IM client--but it's nicely implemented, and could certainly come in handy if you need to work on a spreadsheet with someone who's not in the same room at the same time. "

And I've used it already and find it about what I would expect, except the ability to print is flakey.

'Second Life': Don't worry, we can scale

"Castronova, who said he does have some worries about the 'Second Life' business model, said it's worth sticking around to find out what happens.

'Regarding (their) business model, I have the anxiety of someone who went out to explore a river,' he said, 'and I'm already 200 miles further than I ever thought I would get and there's still more river. Scary, but I have to keep going.'"

Hopefully the first 200 miles are upstream, unless someone is picking you up at the end!

An Avatar Is Born - Electronic House Magazine

"Unfortunately, there's also a debate about the avatar's good looks. 'Cleopatra reminds me of Angelina Jolie,' Patti says. 'I keep telling Brian that I would much rather have an avatar who brings Brad Pitt to mind. But he keeps telling me that is technically impossible.'"

And surely it must be.

Official Google Blog: It's nice to share

"Now when I say “share,” I don’t mean “send group email,” and I certainly don't mean 'time-share'. (That’s actually the root of the problem we are trying to solve: multiple out-of-sync versions that are email attachments.) I do mean “use and update the same spreadsheet.” When I use Google Spreadsheets to organize events with the other parents at my kids' school, we’ll be looking at the same details at the same time. If I change the agenda of next Friday’s teacher’s meeting, the other parents will see that change immediately. When my brother-in-law’s bike club uses Google Spreadsheets to track rides, they’ll be in sync -- and if I change the time of next week's ride, the other riders may actually show up."

WSJ.com - Google Plans to Release Spreadsheet Application

"Google said the new offering was a simple, early release that lacked some sophisticated features such as the ability to create charts or drag and drop data within a spreadsheet. The company will release the service to an unspecified number of users who add their names to a waiting list. Each user will be able to store up to 50 spreadsheets initially."

I think this could be a turning point (or maybe as people like to say these days a "tipping point"). Analysts have been predicting some form of "Google Office" but Google has been busy denying any attempt to compete with Microsoft (a wise thing to do). I'm sure this product won't go toe to toe with a full blown spreadsheet, but I bet it will be good enough for my use and the more things I have organized "online" the better as far as I'm concerned. I trust Google's backup strategy more than my own. I'm already using the google calendar, I have the beta for company-based e-mail going (although I really don't have much use for it) and I'm on the waiting list for "Writely" the web based word processor. In another years time there will be no reason for the average home user to have to acquire a copy of Office, and quite possibly in the years following, many businesses will find that a simple box sitting in the corner will handle most of their in-house web-based data processing needs too. It's taken a long long time, but finally, the "mainframe" is staging a comeback.

Maybe this will even result in fewer cases of sensitive data lost via laptop theft. With people using networks the way they were meant to be used there will be no reason to take such things as every veterans personal information home in the first place.

*ALSO*

NewsForge | Day 2 keynotes at the Red Hat Summit

"Professor Moglen is a lawyer, and he looks and talks like a lawyer. He wore a beige suit, light blue shirt, and a light beige tie. He is not overly tall, slightly rotund, and sports a full but neatly trimmed beard. He is soft spoken, and speaks easily and gracefully, as you might expect a professor at Columbia to do. His message was not soft, however, but urgent. He reminded the crowd about the why of free software, about why it is needed, about the freedom it gives us, and how we can keep it."

Taipei Times - Government Computers to be Linux Compatible

"The government-run Central Trust of China has mandated for the first time that all desktop computers purchased from now on must be Linux-compatible, demonstrating the government's desire to widen the nation's usage of open source software."

Now if only US governments would follow this example they would all see their bill from Microsoft go way down. Nothing is so embarrassing as to watch a government procurement agent report on his "successful negotiation" with Microsoft... where they end up paying retail prices per seat. It's your money and mine, and we should all be mad as hell about it.

Second Life Update

Well, I'm quite sure I haven't been writing enough about Second Life lately. So I thought I'd check in and see what was going on. First thing I got was a new release... a major release of sorts I guess, which incorporates bits of the Mozilla browser into its interface. I hope to find out more about that soon. Second Life runs admirably well on my two year old Powerbook and I think the company deserves much more credit in the press than they have gotten for running on just about anything (well, anything with a fancy video card in it anyway). It runs under Apples OS X and Linux as promised long ago that it would.

But it's no speed demon on my Powerbook, and is a good test of the ventilation/cooling system, so I'm not in-world as much as I might be. I'm shopping for a new computer though, which could finally change all that. I went so far as to put a Powermac G5 in my shopping cart at the Apple store (online) along with a second battery for both my Powerbook and iBook in preparation for a road trip. (Yes, I may take two notebooks as I much prefer the iBook as a laptop since it has Linux installed and runs rings around the newer and faster Powerbook running OS X... but the Powerbook has a working WiFi card, and the Apple repair service broke the WiFi capability on the iBook while replacing just about every other component during a product recall.) But finally, I removed the G5 and just purchased the batteries, thinking that for less than a third the price I could have a generic PowerPC desktop with Linux pre-installed. If I were salivating over Intel's latest accomplishments like Apple fanbois seem to be I'd probably get one of the new cheap Compaqs containing dual core goodness, although the bargain deal at Sams Club continues to be a 64-bit AMD laptop by Compaq that looks really nice, almost making the Powerbook look like a toy, and it even has a video card very much SL capable. (And for only $700+ !)

After much self-debate, as usual, I decide to do nothing. I have more computing power than anyone in America has the right to have as it is. NOTHING I do on my computers takes longer than half a second, that is of course, excluding things I do while in SL. For that I can wait... maybe wait for quad core AMD laptops circa late 2007, if the world doesn't end before then.

In the mean time I content myself to check out the SL forums, which used to be a seven times a day happening, now more like once a quarter.

The SL forums are slow. Nothing to do with my computer, just all that bandwidth being sucked into a black hole in that datacenter I suspect. (I wonder if the SL forums are even run in their own datacenter?) Ahhh many changes afoot...

There once was a girl who wanted to form an SL government. Only they had to promise to keep electing her to be in charge of it... or something:

Oh the drama (we are supposed to say drahma I think)...
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=111027&page=1&pp=30

Oh the suspense...
http://forums.neualtenburg.info/viewtopic.php?t=19

Oh the comedy...
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=110799

And in other political news:

New Mayor of Blumfield...
For information:
After a vote (using group proposal) Blumfield has elected its first mayor - Max Case.
In the first 10 minutes of being mayor Max declared martial law, demanded tributes and taxes, then wee'd on the assembled throng.
All in all, a strange start to a new era.

And... In answer to the question: Should Ostracism Be Used in SL?:

I believe what you're proposing is the political formalization of a social system more commonly known as "high school".

In spite of its Athenian, "cradle-of-not-so-democracy" roots, it's just a glorified social skills contest and ought not to be the basis of "governance" or consensus-building in Second Life.

If it comes to it, the first person I'll nominate for ostracization is you.

Earth shattering revelations: "The Bible is a book"

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=109926

OK, so maybe once a quarter is enough. Nobody ever claimed that SL would attract the next generation of politicos, philosiphers or non-couch potatoes for that matter.

I still think the system has great potential, if still unrealized, in the great tradition of Metaverse novels ("Snowcrash" being my favorite). When I can walk my avatar up to another avatar and hand them a PDF file as a book and say "Take a look at this, you might want to use it in your next class" or something like that, then I'll know it has arrived (oh, and either the hardware or software will have to improve so that my laptop doesn't start blowing dust-bunnies off the shelf it's on when I do this maneuver).

I'm waiting for the Linden Labs IPO, or the buyout by Google, whichever comes first. There's no way Microsoft would ever get it, or if they did they would ruin it.

Besides, they'd have to agree to always elect Ballmer President. I'd never stand for that!

Seven new laptops from PC-Koubou - Engadget

"Japanese manufacturer PC-Koubou has just released seven new laptops, including two featuring Core Duo processors. The 12-inch Lesance NB QU207IW-DUO laptop seen here comes loaded with a Core Duo T2300 1.66GHz processor, 512MB RAM, 60GB HD, and Intel 945G chipset in a 2 kg package (4.4 pounds) retailing for 139,980 Yen (or just over $1,240US)."

... and the MacbooKiller 5000 comes with water-cooled Quadruple Core Duo, a Gigabit bus, half a T of memory and will retail for 5 cents.

In other news the entire Apple engineering department have been found splattered in the parking lot in Cupertino.



Actually, the buildings aren't tall enough for that.

Writing from the road

The road trip, under less than ideal circumstances, seems to have done Scoble some good, he is no longer blatantly censoring his posts. Welcome back to the true meaning of "naked conversations".

Yahoo Boss Not Sure If He'd Collaborate With Nazis

Thank goodness for small favors from Yahoo. Of course, if the deal was the right one...

Someone has spiked the punchbowl that some of these corporate execs are drinking from. I can hardly wait for the next gems out of the mouths of Gates and Jobs. I'm still laughing over Ballmer's latest below, and judging from the comments at Mini-Microsoft I'm not the only one.

Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won't Like About Windows Vista

"So, why is the year-old Mac OS X Tiger so much better than Windows Vista, which Microsoft won't even ship before January 2007? It isn't that Apple has put more effort into its operating system; Microsoft has mounted a gargantuan effort on Windows Vista. It's that the two companies have very different goals. I've come to believe that Microsoft has lost touch with its user base."

Not to mention stockholders, internal bloggers, news analysts, external bloggers, partner comunity, cartoon artists, radio comentators, Walmart stock clerks, and the Ewok.