UnixPoet

If you think that most of postmodernism is a load of obscurantist bull then you’d be right. A blog where the posts are in the typical postmodern vein - and all generated by a computer program. All posts are fully referenced and in gramatically correct English. Whats depressing is that the articles read just like the real thing.

WTF?! The blogosphere is always having “conversations” about the demise of the MSM and newspapers and yet all the RSS readers feature a newspaper-like mode. WTF?! I like to receive my feeds as email in Entourage or good old Outlook via FeedWinder.

If Apple were to release OSX for Intel the only loser would be Linux.
Microsofties won’t know/care about it and the Linux groupies would have a new, very shiny toy to play with. Most of the /. crowd would definetly try it out and most of these would switch.

Personally, I blame it on Gnome/KDE.

writing this on a mac

sort of. A sign in page comes up but even after giving it my (correct) password it just takes me back to the sign in page.

Interesting post by Jonathan Schwartz (COO of Sun):

“The two features every single user needs are: Save, and Open. So wouldn’t it be interesting if rather than exploring your local file system on your local PC, the Save and Open panels simply looked to a network account on Sun’s Grid? Shareable like any of the mainstream photo services are today? Or how about saving to that 2.5Gb allowance Google gave you in your GMail account? And wouldn’t it be great if you could save to ODF, or translate to Microsoft Word, or generate a podcast or mp3 file - on the fly? From within any app?”

The game plan as I see it: you save your document to base.google.com which kindly hosts it for you for free. Google will most certainly index it - for two reasons: for search purposes but also to learn more about you. A nice addition to the just hosting the document would be a Writerly style offering which allows you to edit the documents you upload. The aim is not to supplant Word, which is hard to do anyway, but to extend it a little. I don’t think Google actually aims to kill Office; they just want to peek at the files you create using it.

And then? Then they sell you even more targeted advertising.

Google already give out freebies to developers who write plugins Google Desktop Search. I wonder if they should offer similar incentives to developers who extend their applications to save to base.google.com.

Microsoft just relaunched some warmed over bits of MSN sporting a new AJAX UI. The design is pleasing and overall the site is well executed. MS may have been thinking about it for some time, but I’m sure Google helped concentrate minds

From this point onwards, Google’s job just got harder, and it will be increasingly hard to make headway in gmail, talk and news usage. I have long feared that Google is more fragile than it appears. Technical improvements are great but they come at an increasingly greater cost until the next paradigm. And the financials are ephemeral - the billions have come quickly, and could evaporate just as quickly. At this point, all Microsoft has to do is to copy Google, while relying on the usual cash cows. Google doesn’t have this luxury. I think that Google declared war too early - a touch of hubris I suspect. My fear is that 5 years from now Google will have faded from view, with most using IE and live/msn. Another win for One Microsoft Way. Ah well.

Incidentally, I don’t see the same happening to Yahoo, which was always more of a portal player then Google. Its popularity as a search engine will be eclipsed by msn but it will still be a destination for all the celeb gossip / lifestyle fodder.

The Google killers are here and here.