Monday, June 02, 2003

PeopleSoft to buy J.D. Edwards. The business software maker will acquire J.D. Edwards in a stock deal worth $1.7 billion, creating a company with 13,000 employees and 11,000 customers. [CNET News.com] 11:41:16 AM    comment []

June 01, 2003. Internet Explorer 7.0 Interesting things are going on in the browser front. Slashdot has discovered an off-the-cuff remark in a chatroom by a Microsoft employee claiming that “IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.” Little surprise; there has been virtually no work on the IE web browser for a couple of years now and it looks like Microsoft has no interest in spending resources on a battle they already feel they've won. Meanwhile the Mozilla and Opera teams were getting bogged down in ground-up rewrites, oops, so there was little or no serious competition and IE climbed in popularity until today we have more than 90% of the world using Windows IE 5 or 6. Where it gets interesting, is, approximately, today, because, for the first time, the Mozilla Firebird browser has finally caught up with Internet Explorer. After downloading virtually every Mozilla release over the last three years, this is the first browser I'm actually going to make my default web browser. All the little problems are fixed. It loads fast. It's not ugly and clunky. My beloved Alt+D/Ctrl+Enter work perfectly. NT challenge/response authentication is supported. And there are new features, too: tabbed browsing, which is better than it sounds. Incremental search, which is brilliant and I already can't live without. Text size adjustments that always work. A download manager. Excellent cookie management. Oh, and no more whack-a-mole, the reason I've been trying to switch for so long in the first place. Bravo! Now with a good code base to build upon, Firebird is likely to soar past IE in functionality and performance. With some real competition, perhaps Microsoft will again have an incentive to make improvements of their own. Maybe, after 5 years, Microsoft will care enough to make text scalable. Maybe they'll finally fix the bug that causes 99% of web site icons to be lost. But they probably won't wake up and notice that they have real competition for a long time, and in the meanwhile, we may once again have a two browser world. What about AOL? Meanwhile, Microsoft has settled the lawsuit with AOL, agreeing to pay AOL $750,000,000 in a complicated deal that allows AOL to continue to use Internet Explorer for several years. I'm not sure why the second part is interesting. Everybody in the world is allowed to use Internet Explorer; it's built into Windows and open to all developers as a component. I suppose one possibility is that Microsoft plans to not make IE available to all developers as a component in some future operating system, and AOL wants to make sure that won't affect them. Considering that AOL spent $4.2 billion to buy Netscape, you'd think somebody would have noticed that they already have a browser component. Aha, but they don't. The Internet Explorer component is so much easier to embed in applications than Gecko that it probably comes down to the programmers on the AOL client team who just don't want to undergo the pain to embed Gecko. Now, if you're a programmer at AOL working on Mozilla, and you like your job, you might want to think about what it's going to take to make your happy little division actually useful to AOL so you aren't jettisonned. My highest priority would be to implement Mozilla as a COM control that supports the same embedding interfaces as IE, so that the AOL programmers can switch to Gecko. Oh, look! There is one Netscape employee, Adam Lock, working on this! And he says, “be advised that these ActiveX related projects are my own personal efforts and have absolutely nothing to do with my employer. I work on them when and if I have the time.” Yo, Netscape employees! This poor sod Adam Lock is working in his spare time to save all your jobs. Wake up. [Joel on Software] 11:29:05 AM    comment []

Reloaded analogies: the Merovingian. As I mentioned in the last post Reloaded has a number of things that have counterparts in esoteric topics and mythology. One of the things that maps really well to real-life, or to real-life mythology in any case, is the whole Merovingian part. The Merovingian dynasty was a family of kings that ruled over parts of France in the years 447-751, hence the French accent of the Merovingian in the movie. According to research the Merovingian family is the same as the mythological Grail family, which lived in the mountainous Avalon, thought to be the Pyrénées, hence the location of the castle of the Merovingian in the movie. Synchronistically, as I mentioned in a previous entry the "Holy Grail", thought to be in the custody of the Grail family, is not really a "thing" but a bloodline ("sang raal"), and as it happens the Merovingians are that bloodline. As descendants of Jesus they are in exile from Israel, where they would be the legal rulers since they are descendants of David. Hence, the Merovingian is referred to as "The Exile" in the movie. As I also mentioned in the Grail blog entry the Merovingian family was guarded in medieval times by the Knights Templar. However, the Knights Templar was the military branch of the Prieury de Sion, which is an organization that is dedicated to the preservation of the Grail bloodline. I would guess that the "twins" in the movie represent these two organizations, especially considering their white garment, which is similar to that of the Knights Templars. Update: the twins are probably a lot more complicated than the above. They are most likely related to the Medusa/11 mythology (hence the "stone faces"), but expanding on that thought would require a minor essay, so I won't. Why the Merovingian uses vampires as helpers I don't know, although considering his real-life counterpart as "royal bloodline" it might just be the focus on "blood" and "live forever in secrecy" that are the reasons. Or, it maybe just seemed like a cool idea. Update: looking more into the Merovingian bloodline history I noticed that while they are descendants of Jesus (hence being "saviours" like Neo) at one point (Merovee) the bloodline were contaminated by outside forces. This is reflected in the movie, and is also a reason why the Merovingian is seen to be allied with Vlad the Impaler (see "Enter the Matrix" for details). For details about the Merovingian bloodline and this contamination read the book "Holy Blood Holy Grail". For those with eyes to see this part of the movie reveals a whole lot about the Wachowskis thoughts on the Merovingians, but it's hidden in plain sight so I doubt many will see it. Funny. [Random thoughts] 11:22:28 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Alberto Borbolla.