Nosce te ipsum

Misc Daily Tidbits

• Flash Developers Fear Spectre of Spyware
  Macromedia is receiving (and answering) a a lot of flack from several blogs over its decision to package Yahoo! Toolbar with its Flash player. Will your company develop Flash content knowing Macromedia is using its runtime as its own marketing piece?
  
• Microsoft Loses Key Engineer to Google
  Microsoft Watch reports Marc Lucovsky, one of Microsoft's key Windows architects has defected to Google.
  
• Google's Technology Explored
  Internetnews offers a moderately detailed peek at Google's technology. For example, they use stripped-down Red Hat on a massively redundant network, and they're starting to have success with automatic clustering of concepts, so that pages can match even if none of the words in your query actually appear on the page.

Great Minds Think Alike?

Queen Elizabeth II met four of Britain's most famous guitarists Tuesday, asking them: "And what do you do?" Queen's Brian May, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were all guests at a Buckingham Palace party to honor the British music industry. -- This is the same Queen who recently knighted one Bill Gates.

To my friend Rob in the U.K. - It looks as though both of our leaders are equally as clueless about the world around them. What's that you say? Oh yea, I guess your Queen is a senior citizen of advancing age from the Royal family who's been in power (and by default out of touch with the common person) for what, decades now? And our guy.. I guess we the people did re-elect him (I hasten to add that just slightly more than half of us voted that way.)

And no, I don't seriously expect heads of state to bother knowing of such things as Rock Legends but I would like to think that (at least in America) our elected leader would know the most basic fundamental fact about the Internet, that it's singular, NOT plural! We now return you to your regularly scheduled round of surfing the Internets.

Intel shows off Mac Mini-like concept PC

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel on Wednesday showed off its living room PC of the future--and it looks a lot like the Mac Mini.

As part of a speech at the Intel Developer Forum here, Vice President Don MacDonald demonstrated several concept PCs, including the Sleek Concept Entertainment PC--a square, metallic-colored device that was immediately reminiscent of the desktop computer Apple Computer introduced earlier this year.

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A very interesting read from a long time Microsoft coder discussing the current state of software distribution.

...I would argue that Microsoft used to know how to ship software, but the world has changed... The companies that "know how to ship software" are the ones to watch. They have embraced the network, deeply understand the concept of "software as a service", and know how to deliver incredible value to their customers efficiently and quickly.

Read more. | As always, Thanks to Dave Winer for the heads up