101 ways to save the Palm platform. (OK, that’s not really the title of the article, and indeed, it’s a much more well thought out article than the pithy list of ways to save Apple compiled by Wired, but I couldn’t resist the joke.) Marc Hedlund takes a look at the current Palm landscape and proposes some steps that Palm and its partners/competitors could take to save the platform. All of his ideas are very good.

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed or not, but Windows has gotten expensive. I always thought of it as being pretty cheap, but $200 for the full version of Windows XP is no bargain. Like all News.com stories, this one features a moronic quote from an analyst. The idiot du jour is Peter O’Kelly of the Patricia Seybold Group, who says that Windows XP will be cheaper than Windows Me in the sense that PCs are getting cheaper due to the reduction in cost of components other than the operating system.

Robert X. Cringely supposes that Microsoft might purchase a country like Belize if settlement negotiations with the government don’t go their way. Umm, OK.

Ximian has announced a new project to port .NET to Linux called Mono. It’s being discussed over at Advogato.

Over at Slate, David Plotz asks who’s really President?

Todd Gitlin savages Henry Kissinger, Henry Kissinger’s book, and the other people who reviewed Henry Kissinger’s book today at Salon. It does truly amaze me that people are so willing to give Kissinger a free pass for his horrific crimes against humanity in the United States’ dirty war against communism around the world. It doesn’t take more than a cursory examination of Kissinger’s record to discover that he makes Slobodan Milosevic, the war criminal du jour, look like a rank amateur.

Remember how Dubya promised that we’d see a different kind of Presidency, and the end of the so-called permanent campaign? Looks like he was lying. Not that this surprises me, or even that I think it’s wrong. I believe it’s a required feature of modern politics. I just find it a bit sad that people really believed him when he made that promise.

Here’s an interesting thread at Java Lobby: language constructs Java needs.

Today seems to be a slow news day. I will say that if you never have to learn the significance of the word polybutylene, you’re probably better off than I am.

Microsoft has always been a master of the “big lie” public relations technique. Their latest efforts have revolved around lying to the public about how open source software is bad for business, despite the fact that many businesses are built around open source software or rely on it for significant parts of their operations. Anyway, IBM, which is spending huge amounts of money in the open source software business, is doing its best to expose Microsoft’s lies for what they are.