Chris Anderson discusses Avalon and what operating system it's designed on, deployed on, etc.

Everytime I read Chris' weblog I start getting visions of "Mr. Anderson" in the Matrix. Heh.

While the tech press is busy calling Morton Thiokol, you might also call Verizon and ask them what platform they choose to do all their cell phone bills on. About a week ago, I met a guy who works on the team that programmed that system.

Well, I wish they were a little less efficient about charging me for my cell phone use -- I sure wish that system would blue screen and stay down for a while. :-) (The developer says it stays up and does its job very well, thank you very much, although he asked me not to name him).

Yeah, he uses Visual Studio .NET to do his job. Might give you some idea as to what system they picked. :-)

Hmm, I'm in Silicon Valley and I missed the earthquake.

Wow, I'm getting a ton of referers from Salon. Oh, an article about weblogging and Longhorn that quotes me (I didn't know about this one).

The Boston Globe and Business 2.0 are also working on things webloggy too, from what I hear.

"Microsoft deserves credit for opening a dialogue between its developers and the public."

The computer press loves to write about it when Microsoft loses business to other computer companies and/or movements. On the other hand, ask yourself why no one has written about Morton Thiokol lately. They just changed computer systems for their engineers. They exhaustively compared systems. Their findings would make a good article in Business 2.0, or Baseline Magazine. But, you'll probably never read about them and their choices -- reporting on how political bodies, in say, Munich, are choosing our competitors makes for far more interesting copy.

Don't know who Morton Thiokol is? Why they build the Space Shuttle's engines, among other things. They are the world's leaders in solid rocket engine development and production. I love their Web site's title tag: "as a matter of fact, we are rocket scientists!"

Go ahead, call them up and ask them what computer systems they now use to design the Shuttle's engines. I'll wait. And, while you're at it, ask them how the performance is on their new systems. Ask them why one engineer refused to do any more work until he got one of the new workstations. And ask them how much money they saved (they were using boxes from a computer company headquartered in Silicon Valley).

Heh. I think I'll change my motto to "I only use stuff good enough for rocket scientists."