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Tuesday, March 30, 2004 |
Oooops! I haven't been able to convinced my company of the right strategy and technologies for the Intranet and now I'm paying for it. Boring tasks fall on me almost every week and the Intranet runs the risk of becoming a weekly news thing... Any suggestions? I'm still trying to convince the higher ups, but it's getting harder and harder and a final solution looks farther and farther away. I predict this will end up being a huge problem for me...
6:46:31 PM
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Costa Rica throws out Chavez foe. Costa Rica retracts an offer of asylum given to a Venezuelan union leader opposed to President Hugo Chavez. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]
It is a rare event when Chavez gets his way and I'm happy. I think this guy played with fire and got burned, but, unlike, must of us, had the option to leave and not get hurt. He wanted to continue to play with fire... If you don't like the heat get out of the kitchen they say, If you like the heat don't get out of the kitchen. Come to Venezuela and stand against your foes...
On other news, my brother commented the other day that I seem to like NPR and that I quote it quite a bit. So I thought, "Why don't I hear it all the time?". Got the feed (RealPlayer, yech!) and started listening, and I found out the reason I don't hear it all the time. Heard a report about venezuela, criticizing Kerry for his statement and saying the poor here are with Chavez... How clueless can you be? Unless you offer people money or threaten them, nobody in this country is with Chavez, that is why the chavistas are so afraid of the recall referendum... It would be a landslide... The good part, all this makes Kerry look good... at least he understand... Comes to think of it, it makes Bush look good also, he also understand, unfortunately it makes NPR look ridiculous and you start questioning their reports on other parts of the world. Mind you, I wouldn't like an anti-chavez report either, but some balance would imply getting at the truth, not the official story. Not mentioning the violation of human rights and the dead borders on the unethical...
5:00:28 PM
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I can't not say my opinion about the candidacy of Arias Cardenas for the Zulia governorship. There are a multitude of candidates for several posts and that reflects how lost the opposition is. That lack of unity is what, since 1998, has produced most of Chavez' victories. But the candidature of Arias Cardenas (both now and in 2000 for president), has a different tinge to it. He has all the legal right to be a candidate, but you can't help but suspect him as a Benedict Arnold. He does not do these things for his political aspirations, but because he is Chavez Fifth Columnist. A very ugly Mata Hari to confuse, an already troubled, Venezuelan opposition. The worst part is, he may win. Most Chavistas will vote for him and a lot of the opposition will also. I do hope Rosales kick Arias butt, come election time.
3:27:47 PM
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Gates's vision -- and failure thereof. Bill Gates just gave a talk at a Gartner symposium where he predicted that hardware would get so cheap as to be essentially free. This is a pretty visionary idea -- and, I think, plausible enough; you can buy a $0.99 singing greeting card today with more computing power than all the world's digital computers at the launch of Sputnik (multiple Soviet space-programs' worth of cycles for under a buck!), so the idea of powerful, useful hardware going ubiquitous and cheap is pretty nifty and pretty credible.
In the same breath, though, Gates predicts that software won't be free -- though he has no good explanation for this (presumably, it's because universal free software would be bad for his buiness, so he can't bring himself to contemplate the possibility). This kind of blinkered thinking does Microsoft -- which could be capable of pursuing lots of profitable strategies that don't involve fighting the future tooth and nail -- no credit. If the senior management at Microsoft is this head-in-sand over production trends in software, maybe it's time for the Board of Directors to think about hiring a new chief architect and CEO.
I suspect that it was this kind of thinking that led Microsoft superstar David Stutz to write his blazing resignation when he quit the company last year.
Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won't .
Link
(via /.) [Boing Boing]
2:30:51 PM
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© Copyleft 2005 Alfredo Octavio.
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