I’m having real trouble getting a handle on what Microsoft is up to these days. Between .NET, Hailstorm, Windows XP, Office XP, and everything else, you have to devote real time to this stuff to sort it all out. I’ve read a lot of the articles in the trade rags about this stuff, but they’re no help. I guess I’m going to have to turn to the primary sources.
I’m not going to be able to listen to baseball games over the ’net for free this season. I doubt I’ll cough up $10 a month in order to listen to day games while I’m at work.
Scott Rosenberg’s take on Hailstorm seems to echo many others. He focuses on Microsoft’s offer to aggregate your personal data for a fee. Naturally, there are lots of downsides to entering into this sort of arrangement with a big company. It seems like if they really wanted to empower users, they’d provide an application that enables the user to store all of the data on their local system and an interface that enables the user to share only the data necessary with third parties in a way that the user controls. They could then provide some sort of net-based backup service for the data that stores an encrypted copy of the data in a central location so that the user doesn’t risk losing it, and also doesn’t have to worry about Microsoft abusing it in some way. Using some established, standard system of authentication, the encrypted copy of the data could also be shared among multiple computers used by the user.
Yesterday a reader sent a link to Apple’s own 300 page system overview for Mac OS X. Definitely worth a look if you’re into the details.
This week on “Sick, Sad World”: Web developers who buy Macs so that they can use Virtual PC to test their sites using multiple versions of Internet Explorer. How long has Microsoft known that it’s a huge pain for Web developers to test their sites under IE 4, IE 5, IE 5.5, etc, ad nauseum? I guess you just can’t do that when the browser is actually a deeply integrated part of the operating system. (Yes, I’m guffawing as I type that.)
The Merc has a story about Rob Neyer, a baseball columnest for ESPN.com who has built a significant following through his atypical writing about sports. Unlike most sportswriters, Neyer is very analytical and doesn’t give any weight to the stupid common sense crap that you hear spewed endlessly by TV “analysts.” Even better, Neyer delights in skewering the received wisdom handed down by such analysts (like the execrable Peter Gammons).