Geek Wednesday: Attack of the Borg

Microsoft: hegemony, arrogance, brutishness, surreality. Their latest imperial movement is all over the geek news: they are proposing to attack Linux, Open Office, and various other open source products and providers for violating some 250 MS patents. For some perspective on this, we call on our resident IT guru, Nearly Redmond Nick.

Here's an interesting article:

"Microsoft could have several motives for rattling its patent saber: slowing down open-source rivals, raising fears of open-source legal risks among customers, and winning payment for technology the company believes it deserves from a group that's generally been unwilling to pony up."

Given the company behind all this noise, I am leaning towards the last of the three. Just as Microsoft forced Novell into their deal, I think they're trying to do more of the same here. If this was legitimate and MS wanted a different result, they would be releasing many more details about each and every infringement. The reason they are bundling all of these up instead of fighting each one individually is because of their desired outcome. It's traditional conflict resolution - don't fight about every little thing, find the underlying theme or overall relationship and focus on that. I guess it's almost a compliment to MS that they are doing something well. They are definitely living up to all their nasty stereotypes.

Some good news is coming out of this, at least. The Free Software Foundation is promising to include language in the next version of the GPL that prohibits deals like the MS-Novell pact. That should be a fairly large step forward, given the popularity of the GPL. And, as with any MS announcement, the Open Source troops are riled up. Opponents of Redmond are calling the software giant's bluff. It's not just a legion of intelligent developers you're dealing with, Bill - it's fans of OSS from all professions, including lawyers who are calling "bullshit". You got away with one with Novell. Let's not get too excited now and think this will go much further. Remember, Novell is a corporation with a vulnerable head - the OSS community has many leaders. There is no single weakness, and their low-tech "weaponry" just may be a bigger asset than their high-tech software.

—N.R. Nick

The only point I'd add to that is the potential for a collision with Sun: after all, how different from Open Office is Sun's Star Office? If MS wants to shoot the goose, they'll have to go after the gander, and they might find both more than they bargained for. And they'll have more stuff like this shaken in their face by the geek press. Bottom line here is that David's finally gotten big enough to bother Goliath, and the monster is reacting as all trolls will. In fact, as this writer points out, the goon is getting scared.

Science Watch: Great piece in the Times yesterday on the CERN Hadron Collider, with a slide show and movie.

So what's that fruit vendor from Cupertino up to this week? Ah, romancing Paul McCartney, of course, even as they release a modest upgrade of their MacBook laptops. Very cool, Steve, and good timing on the heels of those questions you had to face at the stockholders' get-together.

I was thinking about doing a review of .mac, Apple's country-club style networking, email, backup, and family website creation offering ($99 a year). But a recent tip I've gotten from one of our regular readers at Geek Wednesday, Mr. D. Vrai, has basically closed the contest on .mac. He told me about Mozy, an online backup solution that comes free with 2GB of storage capacity, with unlimited storage available for a mere $5 a month. So when you put that together with Gmail (free with 2.8GB of storage) and the ability to make your own websites in Google Pages (100MB of content free), along with Picasa Web's photo upload application (1GB free), it would seem that .mac is toast. Here's an idea, Steve: use those fat iPod profits to Google-ize your servers and then just give away a basic .mac subscription, with a charge for a premium edition. You'll soon be watching those new MacBooks jumping off the shelves. Yeah, I know, it's a great idea, and I don't know why you didn't think of it first. You can hire me if you want: just give me a call.

But there are things you can do on a Mac that are just too hard or too clumsy to do on anything else. Next week, we'll show off a few of those. Until then, here's a brief excerpt from my new book, The Open Source Society, and our fractal of the week from Ben Haller's Fracture product.

Technology is supposed to be about innovation, and indeed, it often is. But true innovation happens over time and by degrees. As we will see in Chapter 5, the software development model provides a map of how real innovation occurs. Briefly, it follows these high-level stages:


Ø Vision (the idea, its purpose, potential benefits, and general structure)

Ø Scope (how far a reach this innovation will have; its overall compass of influence)

Ø Requirements (what will be needed, structurally and functionally, for this innovation to fulfill the vision without exceeding its proper scope)

Ø Development (the physical creation of the elements required to make the innovation work; usually this is the writing of computer code and the preparation of systems and physical machines on which the code is to perform)

Ø Testing (trying out the innovation in a controlled, limited environment and under carefully planned test conditions)

Ø Implementation (the delivery of the finished product, after multiple rounds of testing, development, and demonstration of working models to the users or audience for whom the innovation has been made)

You have an idea; you write a proposal; then you create a design and write some code. Finally, you hoist it onto a sandbox or development machine to try it out, take a walk around it. By the time anyone sees a test version of your innovation (for example, an alpha, beta, or release candidate), it has probably changed considerably from its early form and substance. Most live releases of a new product only barely resemble the original concept.

But the corporate advertising/media spin on innovation is different from this reality: it feeds us images of overnight transformation, of revolutions conceived in a boardroom and born the next day, with scarcely a moment's effort or reflection in between.

Such distortions of reality are dangerous, in that they create a false perception of how challenges are most effectively met. When this fantasy-based spin on solving problems is granted broad acceptance within a culture, the results can be positively disastrous. In its sale of the Iraq War, for example, our corporate government followed the same advertising model in its manipulation of the news media: it gave us "shock and awe," a dramatic and patently irrational response to a challenge that was nevertheless uncritically lapped up by the mass media. If we are to hope to prevent the recurrence of such tragic failures as the Iraq War became, we must see to it that we transform our thinking about facing challenges within our businesses, our technologies, and even in our personal lives. It is one goal of this book to contribute toward that transformation of consciousness.

Geek Wednesday: Enabling the Open Source Society

Protesters walk past Bryant Park in New York in Sunday's UFPJ Peace March (click to enlarge)

Before we get to Geek Wednesday and our feature piece on open source software, another word about this past weekend's protest marches and the organization behind them, because it represents what we here call "The Open Source Society."

United for Peace and Justice is a loosely-organized body of dissenters drawn from every point on the political continuum. If you're a Harry Potter fan like me, just think of "Dumbledore's Army" or "The Order of the Phoenix" and you'll have an idea of what UFPJ is all about.

But for those of you who don't read stories about boy wizards, allow me to clarify: UFPJ is an organization that furthers the kind of natural social order that is rarely seen in our rigid, lockstep corporate society. UFPJ doesn't ask how famous or wealthy you are; they don't want to know your sexual orientation, political party, or personal background. They simply offer themselves as an orienting force to support anyone who feels that peace is a more practical way of living than war; who sees that occupation and plunder have failed throughout history, as they are failing now (as the historians themselves now acknowledge); who knows that peace makes better policy than destruction.

From that grounding point, UFPJ marshals its considerable organizational resources and talents, and brings diverse individuals and groups together in the sort of events we witnessed and participated in this weekend past. The effort, vision, and sweating of the details involved to make these things come off as successfully as they do can scarcely be overestimated. UFPJ is, in short, an inspiration to every freethinking person who understands that dissent is both our national history and our personal birthright; that no person, group, or nation can truly evolve without an active spirit of dissent and a commitment to peace. If I were forced into a corner and commanded to offer a model for government, business, and social organization in general; I would say, "do it like UFPJ, and you won't easily go wrong."

You can donate to UFPJ here.
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Geek Wednesday

Strange doings at MS: The self-implosion in Redmond continues apace. Steve Ballmer, heir apparent to Uncle Bill himself, and a multi-billionaire like his boss, shoved his foot as far down his throat as it could reach in this rant (video) last week, in which he proclaimed Google's business model "insane," and a one-trick pony with no staying power. No wonder the students at Stanford Business School were laughing at him.

It all makes me wonder why I spill ink and waste time bashing MS in this space: they do it so well themselves.

In any event, Robert Scoble, MS's appointed blogger, has summed it all up for us in an expression long familiar to us Mac users: Microsoft sucks.

Stephen Manes of Forbes adds his two cents in a column titled "Dim Vista":

Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out. Vista is a fading theme park with a few new rides, lots of patched-up old ones and bored kids in desperate need of adult supervision running things. If I can find plenty of problems in a matter of hours, why can't Microsoft? Most likely answer: It did--and it doesn't care.

Ouch...and that's the fairly polite part of the piece: read the rest of it for all the gory details.



All the more reason why we as tech consumers need to pay more attention to the open source model—both for its potential in making computers more useful (and less expensive) and for its application to the realms of government and business. But first, a few links of the week:

Firefox speed tricks: I found a nice advice page here that has four fairly simple and well-explained tweaks involving the Firefox about:config page that will help speed up page downloads and general browser behavior in FF. You can't do this kind of stuff in IE.

Networking for Non-Geeks: I like offering options for technophiles who don't have time to learn the intricacies of the more technical aspects of geekery but would like to have the freedom they often bring. Networking is one big topic in this area: to create even a simple home network of two or three PCs requires some technical know-how and a fair degree of patience. Enter the geeks at Network Magic. They have a proven winner for ease of use, simplicity of setup, and reliability of results, in their Windows networking product, and now they've added a Mac version (still in beta). I've tested both, and made a mini-network between my Wintel box and the MacBook, and found that, by and large, it all works. File sharing and movement from one machine to the other went flawlessly, and there was only a scarcely noticeable performance dip while I had the network actively working. Printing is still a little buggy on the Mac side: I had to keep the printer plugged into the Mac's USB port for printing to be possible from both machines; it didn't work the other way. But if you've got PCs to network and would like ease, reliability, and security in the experience, NM is a good buy. I'm carrying their ad in the sidebar and below, so if you're interested, click it and see how it works for you; there's a 30 day free trial before you have to pay them anything.

Making Apple Mail fly: If you have a Mac and use OS X's proprietary email client, you'll be interested in these two pages: Macworld's Apple Mail tips page and Hawk Wings, a very nice blog that collects tips, news, and add-ons for Mail. I use Mail as my client here, and it's fast, versatile, and simple, with a nice, clean UI and a really solid junk filter. You can set up Gmail and even AOL accounts very easily in Apple Mail, so you can benefit from OS X's Spotlight feature for finding that needle in your Gmail haystack, and you'll never have to look again at AOL's truly horrible interface, or use its mangy browser.

Speaking of Apple, one reminder for computer shoppers out there: we're probably about a month away from OS X 10.5 Leopard, so if you're thinking about a new Mac, it may be best to wait until the new OS is out. The rumor mill's also hot with talk of new iMacs and Mac Pros around the corner, so all the more reason to hold on a bit. Next week marks the 6th anniversary of the initial release of OS X, and Cupertino may celebrate with some fresh hardware and software releases. As critical as we are here of Apple, there can be no question that OS X deserves every honor it has gotten from the geek press: best commercial OS on the planet, hands down. Lot of experts agree, and the compatibility issues are all dissolving in the Intel-powered mist of the new Mac era. Google's got a Mac blog, now that Eric Schmidt is on the Apple board; and the latest word on the last major software updates needed for the new Macs is that MS Office for Mac should be universal binary this year, and Adobe Photoshop's UB is already in beta.
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The Open Source Vision



So if Macs are the best thing since sliced bread in geekland for now, why would we consider anything else? I asked myself the same thing last week, as I was installing Ubuntu Linux onto a couple of old P2 Dell laptops; and the main reason has to do with choice and with sustainability. We need choices in geekdom, because computers are so central to ordinary living now; we also need to know that the geek tools we use reflect our values, just as the foods we choose to eat (and avoid) reflect them.

The term "open source" is a reference to the source code in a piece of software. Source code is what makes the product do what it does—browse the web, play games or songs, create spreadsheets or documents, or even serve as the operating system for a computer or a network of them.

Typically with commercial software, all or part of the source code is closed, or as they say, "proprietary." For example, the Darwin kernel that is the core of the Apple Mac OS X system is freely available; but the code for Apple's overlay to Darwin—the part that enables all the cool graphics, great features, and marvelous applications bundled with the OS—that is owned and protected by Apple.

Same goes for MS Windows: you can't even get the source code for MS-DOS, though there are "Free-DOS" alternatives out there. Corporations like Apple and MS spend millions to encrypt and protect their source code because it's their intellectual property—the stuff that makes their products unique and generates their profits.

But open source software such as the Firefox browser, the Open Office productivity suite, or Ubuntu Linux, is freely available as complete source code, which can be obtained and modified by anyone with the training and geek skill to understand it and alter it to some useful purpose.

Open source software is not the product of corporations, but of communities that are usually funded by grants, endowments, and both public and private funding. This means that both professional and amateur developers can connect to the development community during an open source product's life cycle (which is ongoing, since there is always a need for enhancements, new features, and bug fixes even to a finished product).

Open source communities do have a management structure, especially in the cases of large-scale projects like the examples given above. But there the similarity with the corporate model ends, for management in the open source realm is more like the kind of leadership I mentioned earlier in the discussion of United for Peace and Justice. These guys are typically development professionals who have been involved in the project from the beginning and act as guides and organizers for the community that is creating or expanding the product. You rarely hear their names, and they don't make loads of cash for their efforts, because in open source, the emphasis is on the interactive, synergistic whole rather than on an oligarchical hierarchy whose topmost layers make all the decisions and derive nearly all of the profit.

Ubuntu, for example, is an African word meaning (roughly) "I am because you are". It is an inclusive and receptive model that works to make geekery fits the needs of all people, regardless of socio-economic or national characteristics. Thus, MIT's $100 Laptop project uses Linux, and I am able to install Ubuntu on a pair of 10 year old machines that might otherwise be put in the garbage to wind up being taken apart by little Asian kids who are oblivious to the carcinogens and environmental toxins that are hidden in the guts of a PC.

Next month, the third major consumer release of Ubuntu will appear ("Feisty Fawn"). Dell Computer has already committed itself to providing Linux-based PCs, and the Open Office organization has contacted them about the prospect of providing the OO suite on their machines as well. The open source world is about offering alternatives to a short-life, expensive, and fad-driven consumer culture; and it is taking hold enough that even massive corporations like Dell, Oracle, and Microsoft are taking notice.

For now, we can no more kill corporate culture than we can completely eliminate corruption in government. But we can constantly question both, and share among ourselves the alternatives to Big Brother government and myopic, greedy corporatism, until they begin to look at themselves and see the decadence there. This will be the beginning of a change that could lead to a total transformation of society, but we have to demand it, to make it happen, through our choices and by our refusal to be fooled by appearances. We have to tell Coke and Pepsi that putting vitamins into their poisons will not make them any the less toxic, and choose safer and cleaner alternatives. We have to let Microsoft know that we won't pay hundreds of dollars for a poorly tested product with a bright new skin slapped over it, just because their marketing machinery proclaims that it is revolutionary or "new". We need to get the message to the meat-producing corporations and the burger joints that we can't live on food that is made from tortured animals on factory farms that are a major source of environmental destruction. We must show Apple that we can't listen to iPods when they are produced through an alliance with a sneaker company that is a global slave-labor machine.

In short, we as individuals can't make corporations go away; but we can force them to change.
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And now, for the three of you who have read this far, a Geek Wednesday reward: the 1984 Macintosh ad, with a slight political twist.

Geek Wednesday: Coming this Fall—Google Legal

Here's some advice for any young law students who may happen to pass by the blog: Web 2.0 Law is your ticket to prosperity and popularity. Just learn a little of the tech and most of the terminology: wikis, blogs, social networking, vlogs, podcasts, discussion forums, auction/shopping sites, IM, online video and TV. As of today, there's $1B at stake in the Google vs. Viacom faceoff—think those lawyers on either side aren't making a few bucks?

Meanwhile, Wikipedia's in trouble again, this time over a lying "professor" who falsified his credentials (now that guy's got a future in the Bush administration). And guess who else is getting into the Web 2.0 legal game? None other than our favorite literary witch, J.K. Rowling. She's after eBay for allowing crooks to hawk bogus Harry Potter merch over their site. eBay says it has no control over what people do on a free site, and it's impossible to monitor the legality of every sale. Sounds to me like the classic old alibi, viz. "I couldn't have known my cat would eat your parrot." Or more recently, the Gonzales defense: "Don't look at me, I'm just the boss—how am I supposed to know what my people are doing?"

We've been saying for a long time that fresh trends in geekery are going to help transform societies all over the world, and that's likely to come with some growing pains. The Web 2.0 legal storms are showing us some of the pain; the steady burgeoning of Linux also brings both excitement and challenge. This week, the French Parliament has joined a growing number of governments and organizations that are moving to Ubuntu Linux as their computing platform of choice. I hear Bill Gates will be countering with his own "Freedom OS" movement, with the endorsement of Bill O'Reilly. Poor old Bill and his $56B net worth: the man has never known competition, and now he's getting it up the ass and down the throat. We feel your pain, Bill.

From MS-bashing to Apple-mashing: if you were checking our links on Monday, you noticed a story about Nike continuing its decadent labor practices. This is why we have been critical of the iPod-Nike alliance from day one, and why you won't find any iPod ads in the sidebar. They're overpriced drives with a rather spotty record for endurance*; they're sold and marketed to promote a monopoly in their niche; and they are stained with the sweat of thousands of oppressed and underpaid workers from around the world. The Macintosh computer is a marvelous machine, and OS X is the most intuitive and reliable commercial OS in existence**; but Apple has gone down a corrupt path with the iPod.



While I've got my lather up, perhaps I should mention that I've been checking out some of the big social networking sites. You have to begin with MySpace, and wow, was I surprised to find out that the likes of Amber, Jessica, Stephanie, and Emma all wanted to be my friend! They all linked me to an amateur porn site, though the models in there looked pretty professional to me.

Porn—and porn is what you get at MySpace—is really fascinating for its history on the web. Porn sites have been the source of some of the truly pioneering developments in web tech and server-side sophistication. Online porn videos were a reality years before YouTube or Google Video were a twinkle in their creators' eyes; porn brought us many of the techniques now used by email marketers, spammers, and corporate advertisers; and porn was doing online fiction, proto-blogs, and discussion forums way before anyone was talking about Web 2.0. Meanwhile, their use of robust, high-capacity bandwidth servers and their optimization of complex code has always pushed the envelope of web innovation; so it's no surprise that many of the MySpace-type portals and online dating services have followed porn's lead, adopted many of its technical practices, and like MySpace, even joined forces with its leading edges.

Yep: I agree—it's offensive, often repulsive, demeaning (and dangerous) to women, and frankly, it's not much of a turn-on, really. But porn, like online gambling, is a driving force in technology, as well as being a powerful lobbying force in Washington. If you're a Congressman or a member of the press corps at the White House or Capitol Hill, and you're looking for a good time, the porn industry is there to help. And if you're a really good javascript/HTML/CSS developer looking for work, the porn sites and online casinos can pay you top dollar—even in excess of what the big corporations could pay you.

Anyway, MySpace is at the top of my list of prohibited sites as far as my daughter's concerned. Fortunately, I don't have to sweat this point too heavily: she's seen it, and says it's "really lame." And I agree. So far, once you discount the porn links, Tom's still my only friend at myspace.

Are there any good social networking sites out there? Sure there are: Friendster, where I also have an account, is still very good; though it too is opening the door a crack to the money and allure of the cultish fetishes that pervade our culture. Today on my F-ster home page, I found a Flash ad for "Brittney at Her Worst".

And if you're not looking to get laid but would rather make professional connections and form some more substantive online relationships, go over to LinkedIn, and you'll be glad you did.



One other social networking site that you might not think of as one for starters is Amazon. Shop around, post some reviews, make some connections with like-minded people, and you'll see the networking potential at amazon.

Another terrific social networking site is the Firefox extension we've highlighted here at the blog, StumbleUpon. This is a simple idea of providing users highly-rated sites within certain self-selected categories, which developed into a thriving worldwide community. This is the open source society at its online best, in my opinion: there are discussion forums that contain some lively and actually meaningful discussion; groups that bring people of common interests together; and some outstanding favorites pages, put together by ordinary web users like me and you. When I go to SU, I sometime spend an hour or more there; it's just that good. It's why we have an SU link in the footer to every post here: if you like what you've found at Daily rEv, you can click the SU link, rate the site, and let others benefit from what you've found here.

Finally today, a request to our loyal readers: if you're a technophile who's looking for some cool new gear, try shopping at some of the links we have in the sidebar. Toshiba's got some kickass Wintel laptops; Apple still makes the best computers out there; Wolfgang's Vault is a marvelous site for music lovers; and Network Magic really works (I've tried it—more on that next week). Just go through the sidebar, click some links, and shop—you'll get some great stuff, and you'll be helping our blog pay its bills and pour out new content and fresh geekery.
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*Data on iPod failures are not very scientific; the survey results cited are from a popular Mac news blog that surveyed iPod users rather than examining actual products. Other reports are generally anecdotal. So the principal focus of my objection to the iPod is the Nike/abusive labor practices alliance that Apple formed with the sneaker/iPod product, and Apple's MS-like aggression in pursuing a near-monopoly.

**That said, Apple's Mac OS X is amazingly efficient. Today, the latest and probably the last update of 10.4 Tiger, 10.4.9 was released to users, and I upgraded in minutes without a hitch. The update, over 160MB, includes security fixes based mostly on the MOAB findings from January, along with performance enhancements and an upgrade to iPhoto.

Skewering History (and Geek Wednesday)

Before we get to Geek Wednesday, click the graphic to hear Keith Olbermann delivering a history lesson for Condi. Of course, he could have applied this remedial pegagogy to nearly anyone in the Bush administration; they have all twisted facts, distorted history, and served us word salad with half-truth dressing and a garnish of lies. It is almost beyond imagination to think how these people can look themselves in the mirror every day. But that is the power of conditioned deceit: it becomes your identity. When that happens, then what everyone else around you may realize as the most blatant, moon-is-made-of-green-cheese delusion, is to you the most crystalline of truths. Many a grave has been packed with the mud of this simple habit of belief.

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Geek Wednesday


And speaking of cheats, liars, and thieves, here's something from my inbox (click the graphic for a larger view). Now the look and feel of that html is perhaps enough to fool some people into thinking that it's genuine; but read it, and then you'll immediately understand that it has to be a scam. That Borat-style English is the giveaway; and indeed, I got confirmation from someone in Monster's security unit that this message is in fact a phishing scam. The moral: learn and practice your English grammar and spelling, kids—it will protect you and your PC from harm.

More to the point, you can't be a writer without understanding such things as grammar, spelling, and usage (nor should you be President, for that matter). Now since many of our readers are themselves writers (and there are several very good ones among you—I've seen your work), it may interest you to know that there is another player in the field of online word processing. If, like me, you used to write (and even do DTP) in WordPerfect 5.1 back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and WP 5.1 for DOS was the best software of its kind, you may want to check this one out: it's the Corel WordPerfect Lightning Beta. I just found out about it a half hour ago, but I'll be checking it out and updating this page with a review next week.

What else is happening in geekdom? Dell is listening to its customers and will be offering Linux packages on its desktops. So far, it appears Novell's SuSE Linux will be the OS of choice in this vein, since they have concluded their uneasy truce with the Redmond Leviathan. But look at this as a forward step along the path toward a truly open marketplace in tech. Granted, there are already excellent choices available in affordable computer hardware bundled with Linux (System76 offers great machines with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed); but the fact that the hardware megalith of IT is now smelling the grassroots must be considered a sign of progress.

Your Microsoft-Bashing Moment

Meanwhile, over in Redmond, the gang that can't boot straight is getting tangled in its own shoelaces again. They've added a "maybe pirate" classification to their paranoid screening system for unpaid copies of Windows. Remember when these people used to make software that strove for uniqueness and user-friendliness (I'm thinking mainly of Word and Excel)? Now they just slap new skins onto old products (IE, Office, and XP/Vista) and leave it to the marketers to convince us that it's new and revolutionary. Meanwhile, they piss away good resources on defending their monopoly and making Uncle Bill worth $60 billion rather than a mere $50B.

I was reminded of this recently when I thought I'd try out their 64-bit version of XP, which is available for download as a 120-day trial. I have a MacBook here which can run a 64-bit OS and Windows XP, so I thought it would be worth a try. I downloaded and burned the ISO file successfully, but Apple's Boot Camp didn't recognize it. Thinking that this was simply a problem with Apple's utility, I used the VM-Ware Fusion for Intel Mac, now in beta, to install XP. The VM-Ware utility did a nice job with the installation, though it was rather slower than an install of XP Home that I tried last month with Parallels. But it worked out fine, except for one thing: XP wouldn't recognize any of either VM-Ware's or Apple's XP drivers. So I couldn't even get online with it, even though I had both an Ethernet/cable hookup and an 802.11n wifi card on the machine. I puzzled over this for a while until I checked the Start menu to see what version of XP Pro had been installed. The puzzle was instantly solved: "Service Pack 1", it said—in spite of Microsoft's claim at the download site that it comes "complete with Service Pack 2."

Now you may ask, as I did, (a) why is MS lying? and (b) what are they doing offering an OS in a two-year old versioning format? But that's life with the big Redmond devil, I suppose. And get this: the first message on screen was a talk bubble telling me that "there are only 14 days left in your trial period—click here to register your copy of XP." What happened to my four month trial that was advertised on the website? I'll be damned if I know, but what that message told me is that it was time to wipe that installation off the MacBook right away.

Under the Apple Tree

I wish I could tell you how excited I was to see the iPhone ad at the Oscars show (it was nice to see Al Gore's movie win an award, though). And perhaps I should be concerned or upset about the shipping delay on iTV or Apple TV or whatever they call it. It's just two over-hyped products that aren't available and will be too expensive for what they deliver, anyway, once they're finally on the market.

But while we await the arrival of something from Apple that is worth the anticipation (OS X 10.5 Leopard may be out in March); I do have one positive note on an Apple software product. I downloaded the 802.11n driver upgrade last week (it cost me $2.16, and is available only for Intel Macs that have the n-card version of Airport in the hardware), and I found that it was well worth the two bucks. I used it for a few days and even tested it beside my daughter's iBook with its 802.11g Airport card. What a difference: the n's signal strength was uniformly solid, even where the g-level card faded; and the n-card delivered DSL-level connectivity nearly anyplace I took it. If you've recently bought an Intel Mac that is n-ready, you can't go wrong with this upgrade. Give Steve his two bucks and you'll be glad you did.

Inside the Web

As I finished my Webby Award reviewing for this year (the presentation show is in June), I realized that some of my favorite sites don't seem to make it into the light of nomination (sites are self-nominated for the Webby's, meaning you have to fork over a couple hundrerd bucks to be considered for an award—not that I'm complaining about that, it's what helps to pay me for reviewing them!).

So I thought I'd help fill in that gap by offering a site of the week mention here at Geek Wednesday. Our first choice is an excellent learning site for anyone, beginner, intermediate, or advanced, who wishes to become a better web geek. It's so good I've put a link to Patrick Griffiths' outstanding HTML Dog site onto my sidebar. This is a site you'll want to bookmark and spend some time with; you may also wish to pick up his book, which is widely available (I saw it in Barnes & Noble here in Brooklyn yesterday). I've been helped by Griffiths' smooth, thorough, and intelligent teachings on HTML and CSS, and I'm betting that you will too, if you have any interest in learning something new, improving your skills, or just getting occasional help with a thorny piece of online geekery.


So HTML Dog is our site of the week at Geek Wednesday. If you have any nominations to offer, just post them to the comments—no application fee will be necessary.

When Pigs Fly (and Geek Wednesday)

Click the graphic to hear Roger Waters on Trump and Storm Thorgerson on flying pigs

Before we get to Geek Wednesday and another contribution from Nearly Redmond Nick, here's another slice of Floyd memorabilia for our Animals 30th Anniversary observance. This is an excerpt from drummer Nick Mason's book, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd:

Much of the material for Animals already existed in the form of songs that Roger had previously written. "Dogs" had been performed even before the Wish You Were Here album, on the Autumn 1974 tour of the UK, as a song called Gotta Be Crazy, and elements of Sheep had appeared on the same tour as Raving and Drooling. The music had thus been in gestation for well over a year and had benefited from some toughening up in front of the audiences on the tour.

Towards the end of recording, Roger created two pieces called Pigs On The Wing to open and close the album, designed to give the overall shape of the album a better dynamic and enhance the animal aspect of it.

My memory of this period is that I enjoyed making this album more than Wish You Were Here. There was some return to a group commitment, possibly because we felt that Britannia Row was our responsibility, and so we were more involved in making the studio and the recording a success. Given that it belonged to us, we really could spend as long as we wanted in the studio, and there was no extra cost involved in unlimited frames of snooker or billiards.

Some critics felt that the music on Animals was harder and tougher than anything else we had done. There were various reasons why that might have been so. There was certainly a workmanlike mood in the studio. We had never encouraged a stream of visitors to our previous recording sessions, but at Britannia Row, the lack of space meant there was really only room for the crew in the cockpit.

Any harder edge might also have been a subconscious reaction to accusations of "dinosaur rock" that were being thrown at bands like Led Zeppelin, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and ourselves. We were all aware of the arrival of punk -- even anyone who didn't listen to the music could not have failed to notice the Sex Pistols explosion in the media spotlight. Just in case we had missed this, locked in our Britannia Row bunker, Johnny Rotten kindly sported a particularly fetching "I Hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt.

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Geek Wednesday

Geek Quote of the Week: Think those suits at Microsoft have a firm grip on reality? Well, check out what this guy has to say:

"We're really recognizing the fact that homes now (have) four or five PCs, an Xbox, music player, a Zune," Microsoft entertainment unit president Robbie Bach said...

When you come back from your home planet, Robbie, maybe you should check out what's happening down here.

This, of course, comes from the company that slaps a new skin onto an old warhorse like Office or IE and then pronounces it a revolutionary new product. Believe me, folks, I turn on IE 7 just about every evening, with the popup blocker at full bore; and I still get multiple adware popups within seconds of starting the miserable thing.

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...and when you lose control / you'll reap the harvest you have sown...

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Now just so you don't think I'm some sort of Mac drone who has nothing critical to say of Apple, check out their home page now: there are no computers there anymore. There's a phone that won't be sold until June, a TV box that won't be sold until next month, movies, and more TV commercials. In fact, they took the word "computer" out of their official company name!

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...and as the fear grows / the bad blood slows and turns to stone...

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I also have this story from NR Nick: Apple intends to charge folks who purchased their new computers a fee for 802.11n access! All right, Steve will need the money to pay those fines to the SEC (and maybe he'll need some bail cash too). But shit, I've already spent $1300 for my MacBook and the 802.11n card inside it—how much more will it cost me, Steve?

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...and it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around...

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So there you have it: wealth makes you both delusional (MS) and arrogant (Apple). Now do you wonder why we're spending this week talking about a record from a psychedelic rock band that sings of the brutal realities of a world filled with pigs and dogs and sheep?

Now finally, for what we had meant to feature on Geek Wednesday this week, until other things distracted us. Here's Nick on the future of IT in the enterprise:

DailyrEvolution 2.0

As we begin the new year, I want to know what my job is going to bring me. It's not that I don't care about anything else, but I need to see if I'm wandering down the right path. Wishing one day to be a CTO or CIO, I need to put on my Future Vision goggles every once in a while and evaluate the up and coming technologies. Here's NC Nick's take on IT in the Enterprise.

As you pore over all the industry rags, you see this 2.0 and that 2.0 and hear all the usual buzzwords, like SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, etc. I think it's unfortunate when really cool buzzwords get lumped in with buzzwords that mean crap. This whole everything-2.0 drives me nuts. Especially when it hides the real importance of the original version 2 - Web 2.0. This whole AJAX thing has some legs. I know you're saying to yourself, "Sure, it's cool stuff, but it'll never fly in the enterprise".

Well, that's where you'd be wrong. Try to name an enterprise app that doesn't have a Web 2.0 product (and a damn good one in most cases). Just take a look at Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 blog for a ton of companies delivering wonderful apps, and for prices that make most vendors look like crooks.

"Hey Nick, I'm hearing a lot about SOA? Should I jump on board?" Well, unless you're working at Ginormous Megacorp, Inc. I say "no". "But Nick! All the trade magazines think it's the best thing since sliced bread!" And my answer to that is, "Of course they do!" Have you seen the companies advertising in those rags? Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Sun. It reads like a who's who of the software world. Let's hypothetically say Microsoft was giving me a free laptop to write nice things about a certain delayed operating system. Most likely, I would play nice and hope that MS came knocking when they were about to release another piece of crap software package. Of course, that would never happen.

When you have a company that can gain efficiencies by reusing tons of their software, adopt an SOA. If you have an army of programmers and need a library of services for business users to consume, adopt an SOA. Otherwise, stay nimble and just write decent code. You'll get your products out the door faster because you won't be developing all the overhead. This also means less money spent on development. Plus, you won't need all the expensive applications offered by Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Sun - have I completed the circle yet?

So this whole cost-savings/efficiencies thing brings me to SaaS - Software as a Service. We are definitely seeing a major shift towards this purchasing paradigm. No longer do we want to buy the next release of Office, with its 1.3GB footprint, and all its security holes, and its required $399 upgrades, and dependence on SharePoint Server in my infrastructure... I want to pay $9.99 a month and get just the functionality I want. And I want to stop paying when I stop using it. Oh, and it should fix itself so I don't have to do it. And I don't want to buy a server to host it on. And, umm, can it have a really cool interface? And is it OK if I never have to pay for an upgrade? OK, cool. It's pretty easy to see why everyone and their mother is looking at this pricing model as a viable alternative to traditional upfront purchase + maintenance fees as a way of life.

Take a look at Salesforce.com. They got it long before anyone else did, and it shows. It will continue to show, as they build out their infrastructure, and acquire more clients. Not to say things are perfect over there - they definitely need to tighten things on the security end, and work on their uptime - but they are the closest to an ideal SaaS company.

Lastly, lets not forget to mention the Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year - you! Congratulations! All those defamatory posts to MySpace, uploads of blackmail videos to YouTube and submissions of bookmarks to del.icio.us (not to mention your personal blog) make you incredibly important! Yes, yes, I know - we need to focus on the Enterprise, and the last time you checked, your company wasn't too happy with you browsing MySpace at work.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum (the user forum, that is) - what used to be called Knowledge Management has slowly transformed into Collaborative Computing. And because of it, all these neat social applications have been given a shave and a haircut and sent off to work. Wikis are replacing corporate intranets. RSS feeds are replacing paid news feed services. Blogs disseminate information instead of company newsletters. User forums are replacing town hall meetings. All of a sudden, "you" are in charge of content development. You, you, and yes, even you. All of you!

So what does this all mean? It means things are getting smaller and faster. Overhead will not be tolerated. And neither will slow reaction times. Customers continue to demand faster updates to their software - as things are fixed, not when a huge release is ready. They want capacity when they need it - and only when they need it. They don't want to do things unnecessarily - just enough to get a working product out the door. Vendors that can move with their customers will survive. Others, will not. Join me next week for a vendor shakedown!

—Nearly Redmond Nick