Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

< 8:27:16 PM        >

Paul Thurrott says that MVPs won't help Microsoft beat Linux. Heh. Is that a job of MVPs? I'm an MVP cause I help people (by the way, the award isn't just for helping in the newsgroups anymore. I know quite a few MVPs who got their award and don't help in a single newsgroup). Sounds like a case of sour grapes. By the way, I'd do what I do with or without the reward. Funny, though, that I agree with his basic thesis. MVPs can't beat Linux unless Microsoft steps up to the plate with a kick ass product.

Lately Microsoft is moving so slow it makes a banana slug look fast.

Tell me again why companies with one, two, or maybe a handful of employees can come out with products like Blogger, Radio UserLand, Moveable Type, TopStyle but the 45,000 employees of Microsoft can't figure out how to upgrade Office or Windows or many of its other products with many new features that anyone is willing to pay money for?

I think Microsoft has a leadership problem. What's the problem? They've forgotten to ship new things once in a while. Tell me again, what's the thing that Microsoft has shipped in the past year that's really new and has radical new features?

Windows XP? It's more than a year old now and it really didn't have a radical new feature set over Windows 2000. Xbox? Oh yeah. Anything else? PocketPC? Come on.

The problem isn't with the evangelists. We're out here. The problem is we don't have anything new to talk about. So, we're going elsewhere. RedHat is shipping a new version. Mozilla is shipping a new browser. Macromedia is shipping a FrontPage-killer. ActiveWords has a better way to interface with your computer. Radio and MoveableType and all the other blog tools are giving us a better way to build a Web site.

Anyway, that's enough to chew on for the weekend. Have a good one while I pack and move.

comments < 8:26:17 PM        >

Here is everything you need to become a wireless ISP for your neighborhood.
[John Robb's Radio Weblog]
comments < 8:24:47 PM        >

What about patents?.

However, at lunch today with an old friend, we talked about new ideas for spreadsheets, and I said if I worked on that, I definitely would file for patents. After watching so many pigs feed at the trough, I realized that being the only honorable person is totally unfair to me. Further, to other anti-patent people, generosity seems to buy no consideration. If I have some patents, they'll have to negotiate. So if I invested the time to create a better spreadsheet (just an example), I would patent it, and make my competitors pay for the right to use my ideas. Maybe I'll change my mind again, it's quite possible; and it's also possible that I'll never have a unique software idea again, so this might be moot. If you're anti-software-patents, give it some thought. You might be being a chump too.

[Scripting News]
comments < 8:23:53 PM        >

Did Microsoft patent SOAP?.

This newly issued patent (9/24/02) makes it appear that they did. However this is not the SOAP that's in use today. One clue is the date it was filed, 11/10/97. Work on XML-based SOAP didn't begin until March 1998. Further, the description is of something quite different from what we call SOAP today. People at Microsoft liked the name SOAP, and when the binary transport for COM was stillborn, they wanted to re-use it for the XML-based SOAP. I confirmed with Microsoft that they had not patented XML-based SOAP, and they said they hadn't. Another large software company told me at the time that they were sure that they had. No matter, had Microsoft wanted to patent XML-based SOAP they would have needed to get me on board, and I never gave permission to do that.

[Scripting News]
comments < 8:19:44 PM        >

Friday: O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference. I'm off on Sunday to four days and four nights in Santa Clara, for the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference , an interesting grab-bag of technology and system admin detail for programmers, network workers, advanced users, and anyone with a yen for knowing how to put lots of kinds of things together in interesting ways. I deliver a 3 1/2 hour tutorial first thing Monday morning, and then am at liberty to attend a couple dozen sessions the rest of the week, which I'm very much looking forward to. If you're there, please say hi! A number of favorite people will be there, including Adam Engst, Dori Smith, Rich Siegel, J.D. Lasica, Randal Schwartz...I'd better stop or I'll offend someone by not including them. Too many cool people to mention, plus a number I've been looking forward to meeting for months or years. As a technology guy who runs in some different circles, it's fascinating to see how many people from different milieus are collected as speakers; it'll be even more interesting to see who comes ... [GlennLog]
comments < 8:04:39 PM        >

Apple to release SuperDrive firmware update
[The Macintosh News Network]
comments < 7:57:20 PM        >