If the draft of your vessel exceeds the depth of the water under your keel, then you are most certainly aground.

Smoke or Mirrors?

In early May, Microsoft announced changes to its Operating System Lifecycle and followed that with a Product Support Discontinuance notice. You'd have to work there to make sense of the graphs and tables but it kinda looks sorta like support for Win95 will cease this year and for Win98 a couple of years from now. This will hardly make a difference to the majority of their customers.

Then they dropped the hammer.

Corporate volume buyers were notified that if they failed to take advantage of new upgrade discounts for both WinXP (the upgrade for Win2K) and Office XP, they would lose them and incur substantial costs after October 1st. Since the business of Microsoft is Business, the reasons are obvious...and this too will hardly make a difference to the majority of their customers.

Some will find the new Software Subscription Model annoying but no more so than a price increase in their ISP, cable or newspaper bills, or registration nag screens for their printers, scanners, financial, and publishing software and games.

On May 3rd a Senior Vice President issued a calculated statement (there are no Loose Lips nor any Loose Cannons at Microsoft) attacking Open Source Software. The storm crows cawed, "War declared", and the creator of the operating system best known for being free and for not being Microsoft's responded: "He obviously doesn't "get" it."

Is it a smoke screen: dispersed widely and meant to conceal other activity, or hocus-pocus: a well executed and finely targeted distraction? You be the judge.

Two weeks later we were introduced to a new feature in WinXP called Smart Tags. Microsoft (and approved third party) programmers can place these on webpages and transport visitors to their desired destinations when clicked upon. You can evaluate an illustrative example at ZDNET; expect many more to follow. Smart Tags may violate copyright laws, but the question is: will they bother the majority of Microsoft's customers?

The Wall Street Journal called them "dangerous". The Register thought they were,"grotesquely tasteless." Some feel it's just another milestone on the road to being assimilated. I like Eric Norlin's brutally honest response: "those dirty fucks."

But suppose we're being led away from this?

Pehea 'Oe?

Nothing comes from nothing: the local term "howzit" originates in the traditional Hawaiian greeting, "Pehea 'oe?."
It means, in both cases, "How are you?"

I wouldn't ask you how you're doing
without giving you an easy way to tell me

  Whew....time to take a break. This page validates!

Realtime Chat

It was fun for a couple of days but this site is:

HumanClick wants $49 per month for the convenience. It's not worth that much to me - or too many others.

The next company to offer something similar will prosper at $5 per small-site/month or even better, charge by usage and I'll subscribe.

I'm evaluating other Instant Messaging services; one of them will be here sooner or later and in the mean time I'm open to suggestions.

 Light Reading 

If it doesn't start with: "#! /usr/bin/perl" it ain't heavy.

JWZ
EGR
JOHO
TDCRC
NextDraft
Request Line
f¡®sT-moñd@¥
* Tokyo Dreaming *
The Mighty Organ
SweetFancyMoses
FourStones
MoreStone
NEWSWire/400
(For "Out of Context")

 What'd I say? 

Look familiar?

Mahalo, Phillip Greenspun!

It's about the money. When Charles Barkley's grandmother asked him why he was joining the "party of the rich," Barkley replied, "Grandma, we are rich."

I always wish I could just scroll to the code for those customized scrollbars ------->

base-color:#EEE8CD;
face-color:#638CFF;
arrow-color:#EEE8CD;
shadow-color:#633;
dark-shadow-color:#638CFF;
highlight-color:#FFFFFF;
3d-light-color: #EEE8CD;

Carry On!