Maszman Speaks!

Eric Ray­mond thinks that the fall in PC prices will even­tu­ally make Win­dows too expen­sive. But how can some­thing viewed as being essen­tial be too expensive?

Case in point: the Oil Cri­sis of the early 1970’s. Where once oil com­pa­nies might have com­peted on price, they now could basi­cally charge any­thing they wanted — and demand went up. Even if it becomes a sit­u­a­tion where every copy of Win­dows comes with a free PC to run it, price does not deter­mine demand.

From the Why the Blog World Seems So Inces­tu­ous Depart­ment: Dan Flut­terby Lyke blog­ging about blog­gers blog­ging about some­one who cri­tiqued bloggers.

And you’ll note that I blogged him, so the cycle con­tin­ues

I’ve hes­i­tated to blog this par­tic­u­lar issue for rea­sons those who know me per­son­ally would under­stand. But it’s all over the place and cov­ers issues I cover so here it goes. Xerox has obtained a rul­ing in the Graf­fitti case that forces Palm to post a $50 mil­lion bond.

This is how MS is work­ing slowly, but surely, to con­vert the Web from open stan­dards to their .Net “vision”. Appar­ently, HTTP needs to be replaced, at least accord­ing to a .Net team mem­ber. And it isn’t P2P, either (or from MS, but I digress).

He seems to con­fuse issues with some of the Internet’s infra­struc­ture with prob­lems in HTTP itself. But that’s assum­ing he doesn’t have an agenda (we know bet­ter). As inter­est­ing as Web Ser­vices are, they aren’t the only thing, despite MS’s recent con­cen­tra­tion on them. Unfor­tu­nately, they have the clout and mind­share to make peo­ple think them the be all and end all. And that’s prob­a­bly enough to doom HTTP.

Which is not to say HTTP is per­fect, it isn’t. But like much of the pro­to­cols that underly the Inter­net, it’s sim­ple and can be made to things it’s design­ers never intended. It should be replaced, but not by some­thing designed to facil­i­tate only some of the pos­si­ble traffic.

Tril­lian, the alter­na­tive IM client for AIM, ICQ, MSN, IRC and YIM, is now up to ver­sion 0.725 and has once again fixed the AIM block­age issue. It’s been an inter­est­ing cat and mouse game, and it’s likely to con­tinue. I’m using it for two rea­sons, first is the “one client for mul­ti­ple ser­vices” fac­tor, the other is the num­ber of secu­rity issues with the Win­dows AIM client. Iron­i­cally, secu­rity is the rea­son AOL claims as ratio­nale to block unau­tho­rized clients.

A pun-filled story on a move to make the pour­ing of a pint of Gui­ness take less time.