That the Windows 7 phone could be worse is little consolation

I played with a Windows 7 phone at the Bell store (the LG Optimus Quantum). Although I wasn't repelled, I was puzzled. Things that should be fast were deliberately slow; navigation included pointless transitions that looked pretty the first time, but that I would soon get sick and tired of waiting to complete.

The device was so warm and heavy you could use it to give a hot stone massage. It is unsurprising that sales have been lukewarm. I was really hoping to see better from Microsoft, if only so that my mutual fund that depends on its performance would perk up a bit.

The cross-species dinosaur team meets to discuss the ideal design for a mammal

Greenspan gets a clue after the damage is done

From Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation in today's New York Times:

Facing a firing line of questions from Washington lawmakers, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman once considered the infallible maestro of the financial system, admitted on Thursday that he “made a mistake” in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves without government oversight.

Whoopsie!

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact."

Oh no, he's *distressed*. Well, fuck me with a chainsaw, it sounds like the poor man is suffering! Everybody should be so concerned about Alan Greenspan's legacy while we pick up the ruins of our financial system and economy. I am not sad to see that irrational cult of personality come to such an ignominious end.

Not one god-damned red cent for Wall Street

I'm just as deep in the stock market as anyone else is these days. After all, government policy has been urging employers to gut pension plans (remember guaranteed retirement benefits?) in favour of investment plans (with only a set contribution, but no guaranteed returns). So most of my retirement savings is tied up in the stock market, which is a risky gamble. I could lose it, but I wanted the big payoffs that stocks might provide, so I took a chance.

That's how the free market is supposed to work, right? Isn't that what Nobel-prize winner Milton Friedman said? Isn't that the ideology which has been ascendant in the US for the past twenty-eight years? If the banking industry isn't working miracles with all of those fantastic new financial instruments they've cooked up, and are in fact just building an elaborate confection that is collapsing on itself, why should we prop it up? It sounds like a huge proportion of the finance industry is doing things of no real economic value. They need a huge handout (plenty of which they'll pass back as "campaign contributions"), and if we give it they'll demand another huge handout in a year after they waste this one.

So fine, let my portfolio lose seventy-five percent of its value. Even ninety-five percent – we'll work it out. I'd rather spend a trillion dollars helping people in need than wasting it on more empty suits. Recessions are necessary: endlessly trying to apply the juice to extend a boom just makes the crash that much harder, and that's what we're seeing now. So let it go, and then we'll work out a more relevant (and possibly even less corrupt) financial system.

Bush said today the sky is falling so we've got to unlock the US Treasury with no questions asked and no accountability. He's the same guy that wanted to gut Social Security and put it all in the stock market! (Wow, too bad we didn't get to experience all of that great growth, huh?) First, we had to surrender all of our civil liberties because the terrorists were going to kill us all with box cutters. Second, we had to invade another country because they were going to nuke our balls. Now we're supposed to give an enormous birthday present to Wall Street because they blew our money on bear whores and cocaine. The man has no credibility. Fool me thrice: go fuck yourself.

Giving a huge payoff to this gang of crooks won't do a damned bit of good; it just encourages them to do it again. Write your senators and representative and tell them no. Maybe some regulation is in order. Maybe the banks need to be nationalized. Maybe mortgages need to be refinanced en masse. Maybe some depositors are going to lose their money (me included). So be it: when there is hell to pay, I'll pay it, but I won't pay one god-damned red cent in protection money.

Tools by tools no longer cool

For a while there I thought that Microsoft was going to take everybody down with Visual Studio Team System. They'd take their superior IDE and debugging environment, add testing and fix their crappy version control system, and they'd own the world. "Nobody else will be able to deliver everything in one package," I thought. "They'll undercut everybody else until they own the landscape, and then they'll milk us like the clueless cows we are."

I even chose Perforce for a version control system. I looked at CVS and decided it was crap; Subversion was still not there, and everything else was just not good enough. "Microsoft uses Perforce," I thought, "and how wrong could they be?" (At that point I was still in fear and awe of Microsoft. Hell, I even thought Longhorn was going to rule the world.)

How different the world is suddenly. Yes, Microsoft has a beautiful IDE that permits you to smoothly debug Windows software. But who can afford to run web software on Windows? It is simply murder on a business model. And desktop software on Vista? Yeah, right. As a result, Team System is terribly quaint all of the sudden. Trac, Subversion (or Git if you're really cool), and BaseCamp are really all you need for web development, so why would you bother administering a SQL server database and a domain controller and an exchange server and a project server and a team system server and buying CALs for all of the above and along with the hardware to run it -- all for tens of thousands of dollars? And if you want to do truly distributed development between a core team, external contractors, or even (gasp) a wide community, Team System won't even do it. And there's the rub: that's the way software is built today.

Yesterday I saw an ad for Perforce: they're giving away a 2-user version, "No questions asked." Whoop-tee-doo, who cares. They can't even give that away. Microsoft versus Borland versus IBM was like a tyrannosaurus fighting a triceratops and a pterodactyl. It just doesn't matter.

Yahoo! Microsoft is dead.

It is with a six-pack of schadenfreude that I consider the collapse of Microsoft's attempt to eat Yahoo. Particularly hilarious is this zinger from Steve Ballmer:

At the heart of our strategy is a commitment to bring the benefits of competition, choice, and innovation to everyone who uses the Internet.

Competition? from a convicted monopolist? Hollow laugh. Choice? Only until they use cross-subsidy to wipe out their competitors. Innovation? Microsoft has never had an original idea other than Microsoft Bob.

The yellow press is full of speculation that Ballmer's job is on the line. As a replacement, let me be the first to recommend former SCO head Daryl McBride. He has lots of experience that will help in Microsoft's probable new line of business: threatening people with lawsuits. The RIAA route is the last avenue of the irrelevant.

Asimov really is dead

I've been a subscriber to Asimov's Science Fiction magazine since I was a teenager. I have always loved scifi, from the juvenile wonders of Heinlein to the half-bug orgies of China Miéville. Short stories are the core of scifi, where the new ideas get kicked around, and sometimes they're good reading. Usually I could get at least one good story out of each issue.

Lately my enjoyment of this magazine has ebbed. The quality of the stories seems to be going downhill, and the circulation seems to be pacing that trend. Having subscribed for many years, there are many older stories I've read that I'd like to revisit, but I don't keep stacks of rotting acid pulp around the house anymore. You'd think that these stories would be available on the website, but you'd be wrong – the magazine remains steadfastly rooted in the past century: although they do sell a crappy DRM version through another publisher, the back catalog isn't available to current subscribers.

I really want to encourage people to write this stuff, but this medium's flaws are no longer tolerable. It's not that I'm cheap: I don't even mind the (stupid) surcharge for living outside the USA, and I'll pay for quality. But better stuff is now being published online, both in text and audio, which I really enjoy and which doesn't have embarrassing cover art. It is sad that a vehicle for a genre about the future stays so firmly wedded to the past, but there's a lot of that going around.

SF belongs to the boomers

The SFWA kopyright kops kerfuffle is back in the bloglines again. The details are engrossing and terribly boring, combining the contemporary debate on free speech and free society and the desire to maintain outmoded business models: whether the SFWA should be forward-looking or repeat the mistakes of the RIAA and MPAA. Copyright vs communism. Intellectual property vs creativity. The past vs the future. Yes, all of that. But really, it just illustrates the divide between people who still actually write stuff, and those who are living off work they (or somebody they used to fuck) did thirty years ago.

See, Science Fiction^® belongs to the boomers. They grew up with it first, and by sheer weight of numbers, they own it. They control the meaning of the words, which they have cemented in a museummausoleum where the corpse of the genre rots behind glass. SF is dead, and although some new work exists which might seem to carry on its tradition, it really doesn't matter because if it wasn't written by a baby boomer, it is most unlikely to be blessed by the anointed ones. [For some reason they like Neal Stephenson. And some nanotech. But that's it: it's like nothing has happened since 1985 otherwise.]

The new generation would like to make science fiction be about the future, or at least be an engaging commentary about the present, but the boomers haven't wanted anything at all to change since the early nineteen-eighties, and they're not about to let go now. They hold title to the trademark "SF" and they're not giving it up without being lowered into the crypt (and probably not even then).

Steampunk has escaped the deadly SF label; the rest of the genre's refugees need to build their own brand beyond the reach of the zombie corpse of SF, and abandon the corrupt institutions which shamble on, destroying any chance of a future. The boomers are never gonna let it go. It's dead, Jim.

Sayōnarā, WebEx

I have cursed WebEx for years:

• every time I waited ten minutes for the crappy ActiveX control or equally crappy Java applet to (fail to) load


• every time desktop sharing loaded but showed nothing


• every time I struggled to export a powerpoint document into its proprietary Universal (?!?) Communications Format with its Powerpoint plugin that never worked

why all that frustration? Just to control what page people look at during a powerpoint presentation, for the most part. Sometimes, rarely, for showing them an actual live application.

As with anything that truly pisses me off, I was once a fan. For one incandescent second in 1999 Webex was cool. But they never improved a damned thing. And fickle me, I've found a new shiny thing: Google Docs Presentations. For creating presentations it isn't much – you'd better not want more than bullet points – but for showing slides to others? Oh, bliss... just fire up the presentation and send the link to the attendees. So create your presentation in KeyNote, PowerPoint, or OpenOffice Presentation, save it in PowerPoint format, then upload it to Google Docs, and you're set. It is a beautiful thing. Bye-bye, WebEx, it was fun for a while.

Developers vote with their feet

Market share of developers working on Microsoft Windows is down twelve percent since last year, from 74% in a 2006 survey to 64.8% in a 2007 survey. Linux jumped 30% from 8.8% to 11.8%. That's a scary trendline for Microsoft and everyone who has their trailer hitched to their semi.

Use of the Ruby language is expected to grow 50% over the next year. Note that almost all Ruby on Rails development will target Linux (as per manufacturer recommendation), and there's no economic reason to run it on Windows. There is virtually no desktop software written in Ruby.

The shift to web-based application development is picking up serious steam. A tiny minority of Windows defectors might target Linux desktop software, but most of them are targeting Linux as a web hosting platform. For example, most people who work at Google target Linux servers and generic browser clients, although the Picasa and Google Earth teams include Windows alongside Mac and Linux in their target platforms.

These developers that are abandoning Microsoft are not switching teams: they're switching games.

Nortel's continued sad decline

Once-proud Nortel is back in the news, this time with a funny story about how they have a hard time keeping their former subsidiaries as customers. This is especially funny since Nortel's big successes in the go-go 90s were selling switches to Baby Bells who defected from Western Electric when they needed more switches.

For a while there it seemed like half the people I knew went to work at BNR/Northern Telecom/Nortel, and then just as quickly, none of them worked there anymore. The telecom boom died, and everybody had more than enough expensive circuit-switched almost-obsolete equipment depreciating noisily in their expensively airconditioned telecom equipment rooms – around the same time that people really started using blackberry and VOIP in a serious way. The Bay Networks acquisition never fared well against Cisco. Nortel never managed to come out with anything that resonated in the marketplace again, and their financials reflect that.

The telecom industry has become very rapidly commodified, and Nortel's half-cousin and arch-enemy Avaya has become the standard for awful, expensive local PBX solutions, while Asterisk-based solutions are ruining the party for all of the lumbering giants. Nortel could have ridden the wave of open source to become a new low-price leader, but instead seems intent on circling the wagons and riding its customer base down the drain.

And back to the earliest item: they apparently don't have any competent public relations staff. That's pathetic.

Ouch... breaking backwards compatibility

Joel Spolsky on Microsoft's latest versions:

I tried to open some of my notes which were written in an old version of Word for Windows. Word 2007 refused to open them for "security" reasons and pointed me on a wild-goose chase of knowledge base articles describing obscure registry settings I would have to set to open old files. It is extremely frustrating how much you have to run in place just to keep where you were before with Microsoft's products, where every recent release requires hacks, workarounds, and patches just to get to where you were before. I have started recommending to my friends that they stick with Windows XP, even on new computers, because the few new features on Vista just don't justify the compatibility problems.

Time for a reboot, folks: your old documents are better supported in OpenOffice.org than they are in the newest version of Microsoft Office. Furthermore, when this many important thought leaders are abandoning the Windows platform it is in serious trouble.

A friend went to the MySQL conference last week. He said it was like waking up one day and finding that the world had changed fundamentally: everybody was doing web development; practically nobody was doing desktop, and those few were doing Linux. He said 25-30% of the attendees were using Macs. When I went to the MySQL inner circle meeting last year roughly 1/3 of the PC laptops were Linux-based. Granted, MySQL developers aren't the entire developer population. They're just the part of the developer population that is growing.

Adolfo clued me in that there's a Microsoft advertisement here on my blog. It made me uncomfortable for a moment, but then it made me laugh to see Microsoft paying Google to counter my statements with their tired, expired FUD. Since Microsoft can't even provide backwards compatibility anymore, what possible reason is there for giving them money for an upgrade?

DoubleClick on Google

Old news already, but Google's purchase of DoubleClick is a pretty big deal. Google already owned most of the online ad revenue, and now they own the rest of it. Granted, their evil quotient just went up again, but I guess everybody cashes in sometime. I can understand how Yahoo! was outbid, but Microsoft still has $29 billion in the bank. Ballmer says advertising is important, but he seems incapable of doing anything about it. I suppose he's counting on his geniuses to invent something new. So far, they sell ads on MSN &ndash like, wow. Good luck with that, chump.

But honestly, what is the deal with Ballmer? Last time it was YouTube:

I am surprised that Google would pay $1.6 billion for it.
No. I'm not saying it is overvalued. I'm not trying to say that. It depends on a set of factors. I'm not saying I wouldn't write a check for that amount of money. I might.

Oh yeah? Well, buddy, if you can't innovate within your company, then you'd better stop dithering and buy something.

Switched to Skype

We've ditched our $30/month Vonage-clone VOIP service (Primus TalkBroadband) for Skype for $58/year -- with unlimited North American calling. The call quality is better, too. So they're going to help put Vonage out of business. Good thing, too, as the only thing I ever liked about Vonage is that they threatened the phone companies: beyond disrupting them, they never worked at innovating their service. I figure Skype has a couple of years to make some money before they're put out of business by P2P VOIP and nobody has to deal with landlines at all. They do at least have a nice (if nonstandard) codec going for them.

ASP.Net considered wasteful?

So, is ASP.Net really a pig? Is that why none of the big web apps use it? Is this correlation without causation? Let's explore some of the possible reasons.

It may be about cost. Start adding up how many processors it takes to serve those pages, how much the windows server licenses cost, divide by the number of users and revenue per customer, and in the end you'll keep a lot more money if you're running on an all-free LAMP stack.

Or it might be a more generational thing. The older generation of developers who cut their teeth on Windows naturally like the tools they're using and focus on them. They also live in fear and admiration of fearsome Uncle Bill, he who gives with one hand, takes with the other and makes the mountains tremble. So they listen to his oracular rumblings and lap 'em up. 80% of victims of family violence never escape their abusive situation.

The younger developers with the ostrich bone stuck through their eyebrow started out on web services and never considered Microsoft's opinion relevant. They never liked Windows anyhow, so why listen to that old fossil? Besides, this LAMP (or Ruby on Rails) stuff is new and shiny, and look, I can download it for free right now and use it immediately and write a promotional site for the keg party at Spencer's house on Saturday.

Or it might just be that ASP.Net is a windsucking pig that devours costly resources like 1980s metal bands consumed Bolivian marching powder, but without any speedy results. However, were this the case, I suspect that endless benchmarks would have shown this, which they did not. But are the benchmarks measuring the sort of applications that Windows developers of a certain age really write in ASP.Net (huge object-oriented confections with elaborately orchestrated design patterns swapping objects promiscuously like a 1978 key party) or a dumb Hello Web page hammered like mad (line-for-line translated simple I/O)? I don't know for sure. I have certain suspicions and recollections. LAMP applications are written very differently from ASP.Net applications, and it may not be the framework but instead the way the culture uses it.

Likely it is a combination of the three factors: price, performance, and fashion. One thing's for sure: of big web apps, there's nothing out there written in .Net. Unless somebody cares to enlighten me.