Resignation letter from Microsoft regarding the inevitable fact that the hype will die and that the PC and the associated resident software are becoming more and more a commodity every day.

The author also adds to that the fact that Microsoft, as a major player in the PC software field, missed the boat by not adapting to networked environment sooner: He argues that open source software and open protocols eat Microsoft’s lunch in that area.
A few quotes:

Microsoft’s reluctance to adopt networked ways is understandable. Their advantaged position has been built over the years by adhering to the tenet that software running on a PC is the natural point at which to integrate hardware and applications. Unfortunately, network protocols have turned out to be a far better fit for this middleman role

Microsoft cannot prosper during the open source wave as an island, with a defenses built out of litigation and proprietary protocols.

The conclusion being:

Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come.

Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!

While I am known to occasionally enjoy a good MS bashing, I think that MS has adopted a very strong position in defending and extending their current business model and quite effectively holds a good part of their consumers hostage due to the lack of alternatives (with apologies to Apple and the open software crowd). I’m less worried for the future of Microsoft itself as I am for the future of computing as a versatile tool, as an agent of social and cultural empowerment.

Thanks Fizzz

Fizzz mentioned this paper that points out that the security through obscurity debate can be moved to the TCPA field.

The author argues that TCPA, and DRM enabled platform en general, will essentially squeeze open source initiatives out of the security equation.

At least that’s what I can get from a quick diagonal read. I’ll re-read during daytime.

Le journal de Montréal, tel que lu sur canoe.com, titre fièrement  » Explorer 8000: une façon révolutionnaire de regarder la télé ». Tous se rappelleront que j’ai déjà mentionné l’ENP de Vidéotron dans ces pages.

L’article est dithyrambique:

 » J’en veux un, point à la ligne. Oui, je veux un Explorer 8000, l’Enregistreur numérique personnel de Vidéotron, mieux connu sous le diminutif de ENP »

Et ça s’est seulement le premier paragraphe. Évidemment:

« …l’Explorer 8000 est beaucoup plus performant que l’enregistreur numérique de Bell. « 

C’est clair.

Heureusement que la Commission de la culture lançait une initiative en 2001 sur la concentration de la presse et que le petit train suit toujours son chemin.

La Gazette avait ce matin un article intéressant sur le sujet. On y note que

« the committee urged « watertight » separation between promotion and advertising, and information. »

et

« The committee called for an information law in which media owners should be obliged to:
State publicly their principles and commitments when it comes to the right to information;
Draft and publish ethics codes, which reflect principles in a proposed Information Charter.
Regularly publish a list of administrators, revenues and expenses, links with other business, the proportion of revenues devoted to editorial, and transactions involving other media. »

Hey, vous avez oublié de dire que quand un journaliste plogue un produit qui appartient a son patron, et de surcroit au détriment explicite de l’offre concurrente, il devrait le déclarer. Caveat lector.

Ahhhh! C’est ça la convergence? S’cusez, j’avais mal compris.

[via Pssst]

So there we go, a MLDN hack by VeriSign obviously every geek out there is outraged (experience showing that this keyword and the utterance of « don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity » go hand in hand).

But all this is just a pretext to me think about Brightblue. Good luck in dealing with that… ahem… situation!

Following last week’s announcement of a Datang, Philips, Samsung TD-SCDMA partnership, The Register has this scathing editorial.…

I love telecom gossips. Thanks for the heads up Cla.

[Via The Register]

« This is pretty cool–I’m surprised I didn’t see it earlier. James Spahr used OmniGraffle and AppleScript to generate a visual mapping/representation of his website’s traffic. The result is quite interesting… »[ Mr. Barrett]

I also like the system he apparently has to log all the websites he reads. I’d love a way to do this on a semi permanent basis, with an easy way to opt out of logging certain sites after you realize they’re not interesting after all. I have my browser history, but it’s really not too useful just sitting there as it is. Logging outgoing links from my news aggregator (or flagging stories for the feeds that have the entire content included) would be a good start though.

Microsoft declares their first dividend ever. Could this be related to a certain tax plan?

Thanks to Fizzz for the heads up.

I hate mod points on /.: I feel like I have a duty to give back and read the comments. Fortunately, sometimes there are little gems:

Poster 1: We’ve never truly seen Google behaving in an aggressive, competitive way

Poster 2: It’s ironic that creating a superior product at a low price (free, in this case) is no longer considered « competitive behaviour ». These days, you aren’t considered « competitive » unless you are engaging in anti-competitive behaviour (customer lock-in, standards pollution, collusion, etc).

Mark is angry. How angry?

I migrated to semantic markup that has been around for 10 fucking years and they go and drop it. Not deprecate it slowly over time, mind you, but just fucking drop it. Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I’m still stuck in a dead end.
[…]
Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.

I’m migrating to HTML 4.

Refreshingly sincere isn’t it? I can understand him: it seems the XHTML he lovingly crafted will be made obsolete. (or will it? I don’t know, I have issues with the basics of CSS that need to be resolved… Look at this site… so I’m not going to get into discussions on XHTML)

Standards evolve and conflict. Generally, I can understand the need to do tabula rasa once in a while. I cringe when it happens with laws though, because a well known evil is often easier to deal with than that weird new thing, no matter how much good will went into drafting it.Yet, for things as mark-up languages, maybe standardization bodies should be allowed to fumble and change their mind.

I’m saying that because it seems like a relatively new field and an absolutely rapidly evolving one too and I imagine it is harder to envision all the consequences of a single decision. I’d be curious to learn about the rationale of the changes Mark talks about though.

So Mark followed the book to the letter, pure code, and got burned. At least he proved it could be done. That’s an impressive feat in itself.

Will Mark be as passionate about HTML 4 as he was with the much richer (philosophically speaking) XHTML? And more importantly, what’s with the need to use the latest, highest numbered, standard? Early adoption is great, but his code is still valid as it is isn’t it? Is it about lost bragging rights? Frustration of misdirected efforts?

I remember that at the back of old 2600 magazines, they used to have pictures of phone booths from across the world. Maybe they still do I, I haven’t seen one of those in a while.

Well this idea definitely is worth noting: using humans with cell phones as phone boxes with legs. Imaginative solution for a common problem.

[Via Smart mobs]

update: My favorite LDC connectivity specialist informs me that Bangladesh saw people adopting a similar situation where individuals would start a business reselling cell phone time. The idea snowballed.

Réponse du député péruvien Villanueva Nuñez à Microsoft

Oulah, un échange soutenu qui vaut bien la peine d’être au moins survollé.

[via Remolino]

Sometimes around 6 or 7 AM a mail rule my computer makes a special sound. It’s the Cla morning (well, noon) news updates. Somewhere (ok, I know exactly where) someone had a small thought for an old sleeping friend. It does help me start my day better than Corn Flakes. Thanks Cla!

So today we have old news (which incidentally I had missed back then so it’s ok): Kazaa gets the green light

And we have new news: first a NYT article on DRM . good read. scary read. sad read. I never considered DRM bad per se, but like anything, abusing something is never good.

Then an article on Intellectual property: an interview with the EFF’s Fred Von Lohmann. He’s the EFF’s attorney and this is another valuable read, revolving around the idea that « It makes you wonder whether the fight is actually about piracy, or if it’s instead about asserting control over new technologies. « 

He also states the tragically obvious: « If the precedents being made today were on the books 20 years ago, we would never have seen the photocopier, the VCR, or the CD recorder . »

Oh, and I’ll try reading in Safari today. I used to read long texts in OmniWeb but Safari seems to have fairly good anti aliasing too.

Once upon a time, there was a Really Bad Attitude mailing list. It was supposed to be a private place to say bad things without consequences. Thanks to MS Lawyers, it is no more (don’t worry, the subponea game works both ways).

In hindsight, complying with the company’s Document Retention Policy (which at Netscape was basically, « shred anything within 90 days unless you can’t get your job done without it ») might have been a good idea. But in any event, I sure am glad that I keep my work mail and personal mail in separate folders. I’m going to increase that separation soon, and keep them on separate machines entirely. And I encourage you to do the same.

Amen. I really should do the same.

The problem is that I love to have a digital memory. Contrary to human memory, I find it actually takes more effort not to keep a trace of something I did on a computer. Double edged sword apparently.

[via Fizzz]

Time to watch the keynote. My mantra: don’t expect anything…