Month: October 2007

Matt Mullenweg made the prediction.  I’m not all that good with specific dates, but it sounds somewhat reasonable.  There are many reasons for me to agree on this.  Here are some:

• Neither Microsoft in general, no Bill Gates are stupid.  They are very much profit oriented. Whatever makes them more money, they’ll go for it.
• Windows is not the only source of income for Microsoft – they make plenty of other software (office applications and games for example), hardware (game console anyone?), and services (web in particular).
• Every new version of Windows increases Microsoft’s costs with backward compatibility, testing, troubleshooting, etc  by a lot.  These things can be easily outsourced to the community.  Money saving.
• There is plenty of third-party software in Windows.  Pushing the system open source is a good chance of brushing it up and doing some refactoring.  As Matt said in one of the comments to his own post “If Sun can do it with Java, Microsoft can do it with Windows.”.  Agreed.
• Operating system per se becomes more of a commodity thing.  OS wars are in the past.  Of course, OS is an important part of software industry, but for more and more end users, the browser is the operating system.
• The mobile industry is growing as fast as ever, with the whole variety of new devices, applications, trends and ideas.  That’s a huge money pie, where open sourcing again makes a lot of sense.
• Google is hiring all the good people and allows them to work on their projects for 20% of their time.  With Windows being closed source, there is no way for Microsoft to exploit that resource. :)

These are just a few.  The more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

What do you think?

A List Apart, one of the most famous resources for web workers in general, and web designers in particular, has published the findings of its recent Web Design Survey.  More than 30,000 people from all over the world responded, which resulted in a lot of data.  The smart thing that A List Apart did was to hire a professional to analyze all that data.   The results are outstanding – 82 pages of stats, comments, and graphs in a single PDF file.

Some numbers were surprising, others – expected.  Overall, it’s a pretty good picture of the web industry.  I’m sure it will be used as a reference in many studies to come.  Also, the anonymized raw results of the survey are freely available for anyone who wants to dig through them.

P.S.:  Recently I twittered that I don’t have much trust into web professionals, who don’t have their own web site or blog.  It turns out that this more than 70% of survey respondents do have a blog or web site.  Why am I not surprised to find this number in A List Apart survey?

I’ve already mentioned before that I’m pretty bored with local radio stations playing the same music over and over and over again.  It’s like they all have a single CD which they load one one Monday morning and then… never eject.  I know all the songs on that CD and their order.

But that’s only half of the story.  Not only they play the same music, but they pre-record everything else – news, weather forecasts, interviews, etc – and they play them all over again and again too.  So, I listen to news while driving to work, and then I listen to exactly the same news in the office.

And the worst part is that it doesn’t matter which radio station I listen to – they all do the same to a certain degree.  And sometimes they overlap with their content too.  Like they play the same music on several radio stations at the same time, or even put on the same interview.

Weird, boring, and annoying…

Open source software is well known for its humor.  There are jokes everywhere – in application names, documentation, command line arguments, source code, etc.  Announcements of new versions aren’t an exception.  But the recent one, for Network Manager 0.7 wins the grand prize from me.  Here is how it starts:

NetworkManager 0.7 is the new Chuck Norris

It will cure cancer. It can divide by zero. It can touch M.C. Hammer.

This just blew me off, although there are a few more int he full text of the announcement.

P.S.: If you don’t get the Chuck Norris reference, here are some Chuck Norris facts.