Priest

Ray Ozzie, [Bill Gates'] successor as chief software architect, doesn’t have anything close to the confrontational approach that the Microsoft co-founder used to shape the company.

“It’s as though you’ve been running Italy using the Mafia for the last 20 years and you bring in a priest,” said Mark Anderson, publisher of the Strategic News Service technology newsletter.

One year later, Microsoft feels subtle effects of Gates’ transition, Todd Bishop

Barzdukas

“We have made IE 8 the best browser for the way people really do use the web,” said Microsoft’s Amy Barzdukas. “We have long advocated providing choice to customers and respect peoples’ ability to choose.”

Of course, as long as they choose Microsoft.

Market Share

At the infamous Bug #1 discussion, someone compared Microsoft developers’ priorities to Linux developers’ priorities. Although this discussion is very boring lately, i felt compelled to reply and said that Microsoft’s only priority has always been getting Microsoft products to all computer users in the world.

And today i read an interview by the Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard, who says: “That might sound strange, but we are not that concerned about market share. [...] I’d like to make sure more fundamentally that the web is healthy.”

Free Software people are determined to make the world a better place and treat questions of market share in a “if you build it, they will come” manner.

On Microsoft Internet Explorer

There is no Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Silver

Microsoft want to compete with Adobe and make a product called Silverlight that seems to do quite the same thing that Flash does. I have not idea why would they want to do such a thing, but who am i to judge.

When they first announced it, they said that it would work on both Windows and Mac. Both.

Apparently they changed mind and announced intentions to support Linux, too. Are they finally doing the right thing or is another trick?

Dull

One of the things that i was happy to learn in my last round of job interviews is that although C# and the .NET environment may seem like the most important thing ever happened to the software development world, it is actually not the case.

Don’t get me wrong: C# and .NET are good technologies. They are well-designed, and ultimately they make it easier for the programmer to write good software for the benefit of the end user. I even respect Microsoft’s boldness to innovate instead of sticking to rusty technologies such as COM and Windows API. Going even further, Microsoft is working on some very interesting new technologies that combine functional programming paradigms with the very object-oriented .NET – Cω, F# and others; of course, i salute this. My only concern with .NET is portability – .NET development environment is good, and the software created with it may also be good, but they are all bricks from which a Microsoft-only world is built. (There are projects aimed at resolving this, such as Mono and DotGNU, but currently the solution they offer is very partial.)

But some – well, probably most people and companies don’t like to save time and money and to expand their user base by making their software portable and they think that working with Windows is just enough. Well, guess what – i am not going to work at such places. Some people are so deeply in love with .NET, that they won’t stand any criticism; if they see a job candidate that disrespects .NET, they will dismiss him immediately. “What?? You disrespect Microsoft, Windows and the Holy of Holies – .NET? Are you serious?!” Yes – it happens, not in these exact words, but it is implied. It happens, but not always. The good news are that there are people who don’t think that C# is the Holy Grail or even outright dislike it. At some interviews i was careful not to say anything bad about C#, not because i was scared, but because i just didn’t want to offend people. It’s a culture thing.

Again – i worked with C# a lot in the last year and i don’t think that it is an inherently bad language, and i even came to like it. But i am just glad to see that there are enough people in the industry, who exercise their right to think different.

The moral of the story: Diversity is not dead yet, and it is good that it is so.

The Future

Where does the computing world go? I’m not talking just about Free Software, but about the whole industry. Even Microsoft is in trouble here.

What more can we do with computers? What will computers do five years from now that they can’t do today?

Writing documents and university papers can’t get much better than MS-Office, OpenOffice, TeX and DocBook. Each of them caters rather well to their respective markets (except some interoperability issues, which are really rather minor if you put the bizness bullshit aside.)

Music, Movies, Animation? You can’t improve this field much more in the home market, and the high-end market of professional artists and studios is rather narrow. (Although ideas expressed in Lessig’s Free Culture can make it wider …)

Business v1.0 software – databases, billing, CRM, ERP? It is a market of reliability, not innovation.

Websites, communications and social networks? True innovation in that area hit a glass wall long ago, if you ask me. Some websites make up nicer AJAX tricks, but that’s about it.

So i thought that the really innovative thing that can useful on a major scale may lie in the field of Linguistics (disclaimer: I am studying for a B.A. in Linguistics). Speech recognition, text-to-speech and automated translation – all of them are related to Linguistics; none of them can be done right without proper scientific Linguistic preparation.

Microsoft puts “improved” speech recognition into every version of MS-Office, but it is very far from doing it right. Xerox and IBM tried something in their respective (and respected) research labs, but it didn’t see the light of day (at least yet). Google are rumored to be doing something with statistics-based automated translation.

But no-one has anything finalized.

The first one who does it right will rule the whole market for years to come. Of the current players, Google seems to have the best chances to succeed, but it can also be a startup company created by an anonymous undergraduate Liberal Arts student in India, Nigeria or Ukraine. Or Israel?

(Originally published in Bug #1.)

It’s decreed the people rule

What do you know – my little campaign for free-as-in-freedom hardware bears its first fruits.

I sent a few messages similar to the one that i posted here recently to forums concerning Linux, gNewSense, Ubuntu etc. I have also posted a few comments^* to the post on Mark Shuttleworth’s blog, where he announces the first developer release of Gobuntu, the “radically free” version of Ubuntu.

Surprisingly Mark himself replied to me in the comments of Bug #1. That’s nice, but not too notable on a global level.

But today something bigger happened: Mark announced that he sets up an initiative to pressure laptop manufacturers into building the perfect free-as-in-freedom GNU/Linux latpop – one that can be used with only purely Free Software drivers. He didn’t mention me by name, but i really don’t need this.

So there you go: One of the good things about Free Software projects is the openness of the development and the project management.

Most Free Software projects have open access to their mailing lists and bug tracking tools. Every user of the program can, nearly anonymously, enter a bug or a feature request into the database (Bugzilla, RT, Launchpad, SF.net etc.) and then track its investigation and fix.

It is not a requirement of any license; it just makes sense! For most users this is even more important than being able to read or modify the source code. Even a reply like “Duplicate bug” or “Works for me” is far better than nothing.

I’ve never seen anything like this in the proprietary software world.

Sure – you can send an email with a bug report to Microsoft, Oracle, CA, HP etc., but it is unlikely that you will know where did it go, unless you have a personal service agreement. It’s just “fire and forget”. And you surely won’t get a personal reply from Mr. Gates.

Yet in the Free Software community the user has the full power to influence the project planning of the core development team.

So – thank you, Mark, for this initiative.

---

^* Some people that read them badly misundestood what i was trying to say. I have made some mistakes too; i really should have known that being sarcastic in writing is much harder and more dangerous than when speaking in person. Joshua Gay, Andrew Fenn, if you are reading this – please accept my apologies again for any misunderstandings.

Live to tell

I don’t like Microsoft’s Live Search but for some reason it likes me.

Look what it finds if you search for coffee drinking.

If you don’t understand what am i talking about: One of the pics that it finds is this.

No Nukes, part 3

In a bold marketing move Microsoft announced that it will release a portable digital music player called “Fucking”.

That’s right – the meaning of the word “Zune” (זיון) in Hebrew is “fucking”. Imagine, if you will, this dialog:

— “Hello, i’d like to buy Microsoft Fucking for my grandson. How much is it?”

— “Let’s see … 689.95 NIS for the Fucking Device … 59.95 NIS for a monthly subscription to Microsoft® Fucking Music Service™ – it’s pretty good, you can listen to Weezer, Beck and David Byrne … and you also need to sign an agreement stating that you know that if your grandson tries to crack Microsoft® Fucking Crap™, you will be automatically fucked – i mean, sued.”

— “Fuck.”

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Oh (edit): Did anyone get the Weezer, Beck and David Byrne joke?

Vegan Spam

Here you go:

X-Gmail-Received: af5da61812e6f0b5e7f7133d607317213a97b783
Delivered-To: amir.aharoni@gmail.com
Received: by 10.65.248.15 with SMTP id a15cs102679qbs;
        Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:42:20 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.49.41.18 with SMTP id t18mr336896nfj;
        Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:42:20 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <?WORD??WORD?@?mail_domain?>
Received: from F246A7D4ECFC4A2 ([210.75.200.85])
        by mx.gmail.com with ESMTP id r33si415786nfc.2006.07.17.22.42.18;
        Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:42:20 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: fail
Message-ID: <36781866608732.A3D0FB1D07@5MVMO>
From: "{WORD)" <{_WORD){WORD)@{MAIL_DOMAIN}>
To: <amir.aharoni@gmail.com>
Subject: {}NEW} {STOCK_2}
Date: {DATE}
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106
Thread-Index: {ALNUM[36-36]}
Content-Type: text/plain;
        charset="Windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

{BODY}

It gives a peek into the spammers’ inner systems. {}NEW} {STOCK_2}, {BODY}, {_WORD){WORD)@{MAIL_DOMAIN} are probably templates, placeholders for actual values and something went wrong in their processing. The actual message that i received was blank.

Also, it was sent by Microsoft Office Outlook. Is Outlook efficient enough to process spam? Or is it fake?