This is sad.  Such a senseless war. 

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Gone too soon. Bob Zangas killed in ambush in Iraq. Bob was a Public Affairs officer with the CPA in Iraq and a pretty good blogger. After spending 6 months in Iraq as a Marine he returned as a civilian to do what he could to help the Iraqi people rebuild their nation. His blog posts were sometimes funny, sometimes sad but always told from the point of view of someone who wanted nothing more than to help. Link goes to the last post before his death. [MetaFilter]

6:59:40 PM    

I know Tim as well.  He's cool.  My guess is he won't be drinking Kool-aid anytime soon.

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Tim  Bray goes to work at Sun.

Tim Bray gets hired at Sun Microsystems. Congrats!

I first met Tim at the CNET Builder.com Live! conference back in the boom times of the Internet (that conference is gone now). Great guy and glad to see he's happy in his new role.

I wish he didn't immediately fall into the Koolaid role (Sun version), though. I guess a lot of people said that about me when I started at Microsoft, though, too (and I've done enough slinging mud in all directions too, so my hands are not clean in this particular rant).

That said, the webloggers who are getting hired at various companies have a real chance to change this industry (there are bloggers now at Sun, at Google, at eBay, at Yahoo, at IBM, and other big companies). Do we do what big companies typically do (and politicians) which is to beat up on each other? Or, do we try to find ways to make technologies better for our customers? After all, my Target Visa card in my wallet has a Java runtime. There are quite a few Macs around here. The head of typography here works on an IBM monitor. Our recruiting department uses Google to vet new employees. My house has a Tivo running Linux. And I have a Tablet PC (hint Tim: ask for the biggest, baddest, hardware you can get now: the newest Toshiba Tablet PC is a sweet deal).

So, we can either call each other names, or we can figure out how to make all these technologies work better together.

Yeah, it's a big dream (I know a lot of people who work here at Microsoft who like the mud fights too: they are fun and do get a lot of attention since journalists love conflict).

Anyway, just a thought. I'm sure that tomorrow we'll be back slinging mud at each other, although I'm pretty sure that won't bring our customers any better technology.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
12:03:25 PM