Hmm, I wonder how long it'll be before Microsoft makes me carry around one of Wozniak's new devices so they'll know where I am? Oh, wait, I already carry around RFID. Heh. Well, we can both play this game. I can see it now: the "where's Bill Gates' car?" Web service.

Hey, Steve, send me one of these, and I'll promise to carry it around everwhere so all my webloggers will be able to see where I am.

Chris Coulter debunks the 101 reasons not to buy a Tablet PC.

Hi to all the Platform Strategy and Partner Group employees who are rambling by here today. Turns out my boss's boss emailed everyone in that group and said "I love Scoble's weblog."

Oh, oh. I better start doing some real work now. :-)

Seriously, that's a quite heady, after only two months at Microsoft. I don't deserve those kinds of executive kudos. Maybe after Longhorn ships and we have a rocking great community and Dave Winer writes "I freaking LOVE this new trunk Gates and Co built for me" or Tim Bray writes "I'm a sharecropper and I'm getting rich writing all these cool .NET apps."

The truth is, there are 55,000 Microsoft employees who deserve more credit than me. They are the ones who've built a company that's fun to weblog about and work for.

Mark Fletcher has a blatant attempt to get me to look at his Bloglines service. Heh, it works. Nice service too!

John Robb: "link to my site, please."

Security Focus: "In six months we can sit back and say, "see, I told you so," while others put in 20-hour-a-day weekends cleaning up Mescaline. Or we can be proactive and get the word out as security evangelists: patch and protect your systems, practice least privilege and implement security in depth."

Kookaburra asks "will Longhorn eat RAM?"

My "official Microsoft approved answer": too early to talk about minimum or recommended requirements. We probably won't talk about minimum requirements until right before launch.

The answer I give my friends after they get me drunk: "yes."

Now, since I'm getting myself in trouble, let me explain how Microsoft develops software. We look forward. We ask ourselves "what are most people going to be using in 2005-2008?" Remember, most people won't upgrade right away to Longhorn (no matter how great a job I do and how awesome it is -- some big customers are still using Windows 95 or 98, for instance). So, most customers probably won't upgrade to Longhorn until 2006 or beyond. What will a machine in 2006 look like? Well, a lot less expensive and a lot more powerful than today's machines are.

It's a constant tradeoff. Do we put things in to take advantage of the new hardware, or do we try to run on all the old hardware? For instance, one of the trends we're seeing is that by 2005 almost every computer sold will have a decent 3D video card. Today those cards are almost totally unused by Windows XP (unless you're playing a game). That's HUGE amount of processing power we're not using for anything.

But, here's why Microsoft doesn't want me talking about requirements yet: we simply don't know until the coders get done and anything I say in public will affect your expectations.

If I say "oh, we'll make it work on a middle-of-the-road 2000 machine," you'll scream bloody murder if it ends up not running as well as you'd expect.

If I say "It'll take a gig of RAM" then you'll all start writing articles about how Longhorn is gonna be a bloated, crappy OS.

Anyway, it's too early to predict. See ya in 2005.

Debunking time: Dave Winer says that Longhorn has SmartTags (or, at least, that Jim Allchin promised him that they'd come back). Anyway, I've asked about SmartTags. So far the answer has been pretty consistent: no SmartTags in Longhorn (at least in pieces that browse Web sites).

How do you know you're in Redmond? You bump into .NET CLR architects in the grocery store. Tonight I bumped into Peter Drayton. He apologizes for not keeping his weblog up to date.

The past few days have been quite a whirl-wind. It started on Friday. Lunch with Don Box. He talked about putting a Tablet into his new VW. Wanted some ideas. He wants to have the coolest car stereo on campus. Well, at least the geekiest. I think he'll have to do something really wild. Maybe a SOAP interface so we can see what he's listening to? Don'd be the guy. He was one of the co-authors of SOAP.

For those who haven't been following my personal life, I travel to the San Francisco area twice a month to see my son. He's doing great and has settled into his new house in Petaluma. Nice town.

So, on Saturday I took him to a weblogger dinner I called for. I don't dare say I host these things. They are more like spontaneous events. Especially if Dave and Marc show up. This one was more interesting than usual. Dave and Marc debated on RSS vs. Atom (er, n-Echo). I learned a bit, especially about what namespaces are for.

I won't get in the middle of the debate. It's been discussed elsewhere ad nauseum.

Reports of the dinner are here: Don Park. Marc Canter. Steve Zellers. Bill Lazar. Micah Alpern. Phil Wolff. Scott Mace was there. I'm sure I'm missing someone. Who did I forget?

Anyway, today, Maryam and I signed our closing papers for a house. We are excited. We'd never be able to afford a house in Silicon Valley, but up here is a totally different story. But, that brings moving and unpacking. Not to mention painting and stuff like that. Anyone know a good fence builder?