Hatred of the recording industry runs deep in America. Take me, for example. I right about the RIAA on a regular basis in this weblog and I never have anything nice to say and I'm in good company. From teenagers to Generation X, musicians to congressmen, nobody really likes the RIAA. So, how long can they hold out?

In the first six months of 2002, CD sales fell 11 percent - on top of a 3 percent decline the year before. Sales of blank CDs jumped 40 percent last year, while the users of Kazaa, the biggest online file-trading service, tripled in number. Meanwhile, the labels' new legitimate online music services attracted fewer paying customers than the McDonald's in Times Square [Wired].

As surprising as it may seem, it is eminently possible that the music industry as we know it could crumble within the next few years. The only people that wouldn't benefit from that would be the likes of Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. 5:01:37 PM      

I've been following progress in .Net at arms length since I first started hearing about it a couple of years ago. I am very intrigued by the whole concept of being able to write code in any language, compile it to an intermediate language (CLR), and then run it on a JIT compiler. Microsoft's rhetoric is that .Net will be cross-platform, but the reality is that it isn't yet and many detractors claim that Microsoft has not and will not put any investment into overcoming the hurdles to making it truly cross-platform. However, Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Ximian and the head of the Mono Project disagrees:

"There's a lot of crack being smoked...I'm going to tell you what it is -- there are very very very hard parts in .Net, extremely hard parts to do, and those are the things that got standardized. The binary file formats for .Net applications, that got standardized. Everything else that was easy didn't get standardized, but the important parts did" [Salon].

If anyone is in a position the slam Microsoft, it's de Icaza. Ximian is writing open-source software that is in direct competition with Microsoft. So, his words are a strong statement of support for .Net.

I think Java is a great framework, but .Net is superior. Microsoft has had the luxury of looking at Java, looking at other ideas that are out there and then crafting a solution that goes one step further. They have floated the cross-platform promise that Java tries to deliver on and it is a matter of time before we know if .Net will deliver on that promise.  In the mean time, it is exciting for me to think about the possibilities. 10:47:41 AM