Blue Sky On Mars

C|Net reports on a proposed Microsoft civil suit settlement that involves giving a bunch of free software to schools. You’ve gotta be kidding. I think the Red Hat CEO summed it up well:

“While we applaud Microsoft for raising the idea of helping poorer schools as part of the penalty phase of their conviction for monopolistic practices, we do not think that the remedy should be a mechanism by which Microsoft can further extend its monopoly,” Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said in a statement.

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Dare Obasanjo wrote a comparison of C# and Java with many good examples and lots of detail. As a Java programmer, this makes for pretty interesting reading to see some of the design choices made in C#.

Unison is like a bidirectional rsync. Just what I need!

I haven’t had a chance to put much up here the past few days, because I was finishing up the process of negotiating for a new job and my wife and I have been helping some friends. It’ll probably still be busy the week after Thanksgiving, but more writing will come.

From the famous FoRK list comes a link to the Self-Referential Aptitude Test. Gadzooks.

Some sad news this morning: “Pakistani police killed three people Friday when they opened fire on pro-Taliban protesters in a nationwide crackdown on a general strike called by Islamic parties against government support for the war on Afghanistan.” I wonder if people in Pakistan are allowed to protest peacefully? Theoretically, that is one thing we are guaranteed in this country.

The Seattle Times has an article with highlights from Microsoft’s shareholders meeting. “Changes were prompted largely because Ballmer and the company were taken aback by the reaction of the industry and even Microsoft employees to the [anti-trust] lawsuit, in which courts found the company to be a manipulative bully with computer makers and competitors.” Taken aback? Once you start competing with contracts instead of products, you’re no longer in the software business…
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The Recording Industry’s (RIAA) Hillary Rosen spoke at O’Reilly’s P2P Conference in Washington. One interesting comment she made was that “This is an industry of advances, not royalties.” Perhaps that’s part of the problem… I certainly agree that artists need some money up front in order to be able to record, but giving out large advances is part of what makes albums so expensive. (Did they really spend $30 million on Michael Jackson’s new album? Is MJ’s contract with Sony really worth $1 billion? How much of Whitney Houston’s $100 million does she see up front?) I think royalties make a lot of sense and provide incentives for an artist to be creative in promoting their work.
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Dave Bau has created a fabulous search toolbar. This thing sits on your taskbar and gives you the quickest way possible to do Google searches, phone book lookups, stock quotes. And it’s a calculator tool. All they need to add now is email

My favorite search engine (and yours, probably) has translated their interface into just about every language. This includes hacker, Swedish Chef, and Elmer Fudd. Go Google!