Penguin adds new 64-bit BladeRunners

I was tempted by the AMD 64-bit workstations (with a gig of memory) that I saw when I visited that page. I wonder if the forthcoming Linux version of SL will support these. Say, when is that due anyway?

Second Life In Mono

The Creation Engine: Second Life In Mono

WOW!

I'm still a bit ambivalent about Mono. I don't know if anyone has ever won an "Embrace and extend" war with Microsoft. But It's probably a good idea that SL use SOME standard as opposed to its own home-grown scripting language.

One notion that I've dredged up from my mainframe background (and I've seen applied in the PC world too) is that of having an API that can be called by several scripting languages. Maybe it's too late in the case of LSL, but ideally it would continue to work (as a deprecated approach) while the new scripting language (or languages) are introduced. Just a thought.

Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web

IE 7.0 Technical Changes Leave Web Developers, Users in the Lurch: "My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. Because of their user bases, however, Web developers are hamstrung into developing for IE at the expense of established standards that work well in all other browsers. You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Macintosh only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well."

Scoble should get right on this and err... call him a liar or something. We need to keep this item on the top of the hit charts.

Linux in Government: Jordan - A Surprise in the Middle East

Linux in Government: Jordan - A Surprise in the Middle East | Linux Journal: "Why bring up a reference here to the English East India Company? Possibly because of the parallel to a remarkably politically involved company in the United States that seems content to use federal law enforcement agencies and foreign governments to enforce that company's policies. In fact, that company seems content to take from regions outside the US instead of helping them become more able."

PowerBuilder Is Dead @ POWERBUILDER DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

PowerBuilder Is Dead @ POWERBUILDER DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL: "What all of these self-proclaimed PowerBuilder 'replacements' have forgotten is that productivity is king. They and, to a large degree, the developer community have become more enamored with elegance and design than function and delivery. Businesses chose PowerBuilder to get stuff done and make their businesses more successful. That was the only metric that mattered then and that is the only metric that matters now. That's the metric by which any competing tool must be judged and, unfortunately for most available technologies today, that is where they fail."

The annual PB is dead article (funny there haven't been any other PB articles at SYS-Conman for a long time). The author misses the part where the rapidly developed PB applications scramble the database in ways that are not discovered for years. Missing and misplaced data, and point-and-click programmers who don't have the experience or inclination to find it. PowerBuilder absolves the programmer of the need to know what they are doing. Like so many tools of this kind you can slap together an interface that looks fairly good in short order, and blame all the odd things that happen afterward on "some weird computer glitch" AKA those underlying SQL statements that you never quite figured out.

Elegance and design have their place, fortunately, with applications that do important things.

Drinking the Kool-Aid: Apple to add Trusted Computing to the new kernel...

Boing Boing: Apple to add Trusted Computing to the new kernel? Cory Doctorow writes: "So that means that if Apple carries on down this path, I'm going to exercise my market power and switch away, and, for the first time since 1979, I won't use an Apple product as my main computer. I may even have my tattoo removed.

My data is my life, and I won't keep it in a strongbox that someone else has the keys for."

Well, I've only been an Apple customer for a few years, but the switch to Intel itself was enough to lose me as a customer. I drank the original Apple Kool-aid.

The note (or apparent note) from Scoble below, or more accurately my response to it, reminded me of how I drank the marketing Kool-Aid from Microsoft back when it pronounced OS/2 (yes, OS/2) as the next great Microsoft operating system. As soon as it hit the streets I got a copy and installed it on my original IBM AT computer that, at the time I think, had a whopping 8 meg of memory and a few hundred meg hard drive, not to mention a blazing 6Mhz 80286 processor.

Not only did the OS work on my minimalistic (at the time though it was an only slightly out of date system) PC, but it ran pretty well, never crashed, and allowed me to run old Windows programs as well as do some scripting that previously I could only do on a mainframe. It really WAS a better Windows. Much better in fact.

I'll skip the history over why IBM and Microsoft went their separate ways once and for all, other than to say that it was the first time I started thinking of Bill Gates as the spoiled rich kid down the street who takes his baseball equipment home after he is not elected captain of one of the teams. Everything Microsoft has done since can be explained by this metaphor, as well as the results, that, like children, people who should know better have caved in to his demands over the intervening years. I think this is a safe rule: It never pays to give in to extortion.

Well I was happy with OS/2 for a number of years. I upgraded my PC, and also upgraded to the newer version of OS/2 that had been "cleaned up" by IBM. The newer version did everything better than the old and continued to run OLD Windows programs just fine. Windows programs that would crash the whole OS in Windows only crashed the emulation box under OS/2, but it was a lot faster and easier to just restart that one application than to have to reboot your entire machine. What this experience proved was that the programmers at Microsoft were not such unique geniuses after all. Their code was sloppy, not well documented (some would say this was intentional) and not all that well designed. I remember IBM Redbook style papers coming out about the clean-up of the Windows APIs with cover functions that assigned them more meaningful names. There was no doubt in my mind that, absent new developments, OS/2 would remain the OS of choice. There were new developments however. Of the marketing kind.

A few years later when I worked at the Department of Energy I encountered like-minded technologists. They used OS/2 and loved it, and they were accomplishing goals of getting energy related data out to the public in a timely manner at lest in part due to OS/2 (they were still using DOS for much of this work too, and I have serious reservations about their competence in this regard). Without exception though, the user community was happy with OS/2.

What I subsequently learned was that this OS/2 community of which I was a part was a shrinking island within the DOE. We were being encouraged to switch to Windows, at the time the buggy and limited Windows for Workgroups which we all knew to be a tremendous step in the wrong direction from where we were. No effort was made to justify this change based on any technological advantage, because there simply was none. Instead we heard that somehow Microsoft would be GIVING us money, in the form of cheap PCs to make the switch. Put simply, if we ever wanted to upgrade our PCs we had to switch to Windows.

At the time I left DOE it was a done deal. I went to another government agency that was farther behind on the glide-path to selecting the wrong technology for the wrong reasons. I stayed there as long as I could stand it, or perhaps as long as they could stand me. I watched in dismay as they paid big bucks for a study that recommended they recode everything in Java only to have them hush-up the report so that they could stick with Windows and third-party development tools that are all-but unsupported now.

As an outsider I cringed when they formally placed their formerly isolated network on the Internet (something we always recommended they avoid doing at all cost) and not 6 months passed before the system had been compromised. Not only is Windows not fit for Internet use, but the typical practitioner of "network administration" in these organizations does not and will never have the experience needed to secure such "open by default" systems. That these systems survive at all is more a tribute to extensive firewalling than anything else. It only takes one careless user to open that door from the inside though, and eventually they will, if they haven't already.

So, that's my "drank the Kool-Aid" story. I drank the Kool-Aid of Microsoft marketing on OS/2 and was glad of it. They told the truth. It WAS a better Windows than Windows. It's only everything that they have said since then that has proven to be false, or at least misleading. I used Windows NT for a while too. NT 3.51 was almost as stable as OS/2. NT 4.0 was, I think, the most tested version of Windows ever released, with driver support being closely coordinated between Microsoft and many many hardware companies. It has been downhill since, although I haven't used any of it since 2000, and I haven't booted Windows at all for more than a year.

I also drank the Apple Kool-Aid regarding the superiority of the Power-PC processor. Not only that, but that notion is backed up by the convergence of PC and mainframe technologies at IBM, which, unlike Microsoft, actually engages in fundamental computing research. I can't speak to how much fundamental research Apple does, I've always seen them as an integrator, not an innovator. That need to integrate is now taking them in a direction I don't want to go, and 5 years from now I suspect many Apple users will agree. But they are too busy with applications, games, or iPods to see this now. They won't know what hit 'em. As was the case with Microsoft I think the marketing hype was valid at some point, when the focus really was on technology and not some hidden agenda. I won't be consuming any of the latest flavors.

I'll be looking carefully at the new 64-bit AMD chips for my next PC and I won't bother running whatever version of Windows it comes with. It will be re-formatted for Linux just as most of my recent PCs have. I only wish I had done so sooner on my new Powerbook, which now has a lot of data to be transfered and probably some driver issues too.

For Second-Life, I have to wonder what sort of pain-in-the-ass it will be to support two fundamentally different version of the Apple computer. At minimum a re-compile, but I also bet a fair amount of tweaking, and we don't REALLY expect those Windows hardware drivers to work do we? I also wonder how a true 64-bit version of SL might look on the AMD chips running in native Linux mode. Will people in hand cuffs and manacles ever be able to run as fast as those of us that choose to be unencumbered? I don't think so.

Why Bill Gates Wants 3,000 New Patents - New York Times

Why Bill Gates Wants 3,000 New Patents - New York Times: "I have not seen the software in use. But if I were in a position to make a ruling, and even if I accepted the originality claim on its face, I would process these swiftly: Rejected.

Microsoft's other pending applications - 3,368 at last count - should receive the same treatment. And while tidying up, let's also toss out the 3,955 patents that Microsoft has already been issued."

All I can add is: Amen.

Scoble vs.The Register

Microsoft blogger: 'My toolbar vanished too!' | The Register: "Bullying small web publications, while maintaining an elaborate fiction, is a new step for the blogger however, and in our experience Microsoft's PR professionals have never resorted to bullying."

Scoble denies the e-mail (Update: and it may well have been faked by The Register, or SOMEONE ELSE). But the point being made (I think) is that when corporations blog, or pay individuals to blog you have to take everything those individuals say with a huge grain of salt. Scoble's blog (among others) are very vocal and carelessly casual most of the time, but then he gets into trouble and sudenly his comment system goes down, he goes on vacation, has company, eats too much cheese, and goes silent for a few days. (Update: he has company and has gone silent for a few days.)

The question is: Is the ailing Microsoft reputation benefited in any way by this? The company is known for bad PR stunts already, paying companies to produce "research" promoting their products and so on. Doesn't this just look like more of the same extended into the blogosphere?

Could something Scoble says get the company sued? Or can his posting on a non-Microsoft website allow them to wash their hands of any controversy? While most people seem to like Scoble, and at first, he seemed like a nice down-to-earth nerdy type to me too, after a while I detect a less and less subtle manipulation going on.

Microsoft has always been a great demonstration of marketings triumph over engineering. We look back at the Beta/VHS wars and can all conclude now that Beta was better, but its too late to do anything about it. The same dynamic applies to Windows. It was never the best, but now we are stuck with it. Like the Beta/VHS wars, the operating system wars may soon be rendered moot by a greater and greater emphasis on newer technologies, in this case ability of online techniques to take back many of the activities that used to require local tools (like Office).

MS wants to be a player in this arena, if for no other reason than to thwart Google who many think will eventually provide word processing and spreadsheet capabilities. You can't hire commissioned sales reps to go door to door selling MSN services (for free) as an alternative to existing Google and Yahoo functions (also free, pre-existing, and generally better). So what is a cut-throat marketing company to do? Whether Scoble is for real, a shill, or a totally fabricated persona doesn't really matter. The fact is that he is paid, and probably paid pretty well to convey a positive message about Microsoft. It's called stealth marketing, and one of these days the term will be up there with "spam" as something you want to avoid at all costs. But for now, companies are using it to push their products, and those of us who would prefer to continue thinking for ourselves have to be on the lookout.

The Counterterrorism Blog

The Counterterrorism Blog "The first multi-expert blog dedicated solely to counterterrorism issues, serving as a gateway to the community for policymakers and serious researchers. Designed to provide realtime information about cases and policy developments."

Updated URL: http://counterterrorismblog.org/

USA PATRIOT Act (H.R. 3162)

USA PATRIOT Act (H.R. 3162)
Handy non-PDF version, although I don't know how up to date it is. I got a kick out of this:

"SEC. 418. PREVENTION OF CONSULATE SHOPPING.

(a) REVIEW- The Secretary of State shall review how consular officers issue visas to determine if consular shopping is a problem.

(b) ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN- If the Secretary of State determines under subsection (a) that consular shopping is a problem, the Secretary shall take steps to address the problem and shall submit a report to Congress describing what action was taken. "

How many of us know people who would be aghast at the thought that our country would ban SHOPPING! (**)

Looking for items that have the left all up in arms I find it difficult to find all that many. Which is not to say there are not some.

If anyone wants to seriously debate the act, who not start with some specifics. Once debated, why not end with an amended act?

Of course if your aim is to Bash Bush, you don't have time for all this work. Easier to equate the entire act to "digging though our panty drawers".

(**) NB: Consulate shopping (or consular shopping) is the practice of making multiple attempts to obtain a visa to enter the US in the hopes that you will stumble upon a consulate or consular officer who is not doing their job properly. Nothing about the act changes anything happening over at the Department of State. This represents no more than a "goosing" of the DoS to focus on one of their existing activities with renewed enthusiasm. Much of the act in fact is along this same line.

MS Windows what?

MS Windows what? | Computerworld Blogs: "Windows is the brand, not the 2006, that's just the version. What about Vista says 'for systems other than servers'? What about it says 'for consumers'? It evokes natural landscapes, mountain views, blue skies, etc. Hardly makes me think 'high quality operating system.'"

And why should ANYONE think of "high quality operating system" when they think of Windows? Vista suits it just fine. Shitza might have been a tad better.

Microsoft still losing money on Xbox

Microsoft still losing money on Xbox: "When I asked Stephen McGill, head of UK marketing for the console, if Microsoft was expecting to make money on the Xbox 360 he shrugged and told me: “We’re thinking long term.”"

Mathematically I think it can be proved that if "long term" is infinitely long that it is the equivalent of not thinking at all.

PHBs by any other name...

CEOs are faking it, Stanford professor says - Computerworld: "In the interview, Grove added that it is important not to be weighed down by the burden of making important decisions without a clear picture of things. 'Try not to get too depressed in the journey, because there's a professional responsibility. If you are depressed, you can't motivate your staff,' he said."

Researchers finaly confirm what we suspected all along.

Media Alert: (or marketing hype warning)

Media Alert: Microsoft Unveils Official Name for “Longhorn” and Sets Date for First Beta Targeted at Developers and IT Professionals: Company announces official name of its next-generation Windows client operating system.

Bloated product, bloated marketing droids:



How can anyone take this company seriously?

As The Resister put it:

"Perhaps calling the product Windows Vista means it will give users a commanding overview of their information world. Or perhaps the strategy boutique at Microsoft thought dropping the 95, 98, 2000, 2003 act means less chance of dumping an entire cache of time-linked marketing material when development schedules slip a year or two."

Mini-Microsoft: Microsoft Financials: "And then?"

Mini-Microsoft: Microsoft Financials: "And then?"

We feel your pain. Not.

The sooner Microsoft is just another software company, the better. Ditto for Intel/hardware.

Monopolies do not make capitalism work well, and also give it a bad name.