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The Demise of Hackable Computers - n/a [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

Prince Charles asked to start gaming - Stop talking to plants and start fragging [The Register]

Passport is Evil - After Passport, it will become even harder to use the Web without handing over control of your personal privacy, says Nat Torkington. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]
Yeah Right

Mobile operator HQs raided over price-fixing OFT! Get on the floor! Down! Down! Down! [The Register]

So what's the best country in the world for IT? And how about for living? Not what you'd expect [The Register]
Sweden's looking good. [jbond]

Tracking Microsoft is clearly getting to me. In the middle of the Smart Tags, .Net, Messenger crash, etc etc, I've just woken up from a vivid dream. Now to save you reading the rest of the product of my disturbed mind, here's the punchline.

If you were in a quiet, relaxed situation with Bill Gates and could ask him one question or tell him something, what would it be? Think carefully.

The Dream.

I'd been invited by a close friend to a meeting but had no idea what it was. He's got a doctorate in the psychology of visual responses and some wacky ideas about quantum time machines so you never know what's going to come up. I'm wearing Geek style jeans and T-shirt. I walk into a big boardroom with low lighting and a table that would seat 30. There's an endless supply of coffee and donuts on a sideboard. There's several groups of people and apparently several meetings happening at the same time. Round the table we have Bill Gates, two secretive people from NCR, 15 or so from a major PC Mfr, and a couple of 2 or 3 person groups, my friend and me. Bill's in a lounge suit with no tie. The atmosphere is quiet and respectful with private conversations happening around the room. Naturally I sit down at Bill's left. There's some serious business going down so I keep quiet and watch. Bill's engaged in some sort of negotiation with each of the groups and is working the room. In an idle moment, he pushes the NCR guy's contract towards me. It's a proposal to form a joint venture that effectively sells their Borland/Inprise division to Microsoft (it's a dream, right? The names are not completely accurate). I said something like "trying to imagine what's going to be "the next greatest thing" three years out is hard isn't it?" Somebody's got off their mobile and Bill's back to a negotiation, as his attention goes back he says, "Interesting, we must talk some more"

Which is about where I woke up.

I've been reading about the Messenger crisis and trying to imagine the buzzing swarm of angry bees that will be the operators, and middle managers trying to bring it back up with senior management throwing brick bats and demanding a report "on my desk at 9am". This must be so embarrassing for them. "I don't care what you do, wave a dead chicken over it if you have to, but BRING IT BACK UP!"

Then there's Cringely's article suggesting that as MS is already the size of a nation, why not just buy one and move off shore. Belize would do nicely.

And then I realized that we're watching something straight out of Macchiavelli's "The Prince". Bill hasn't made Emperor yet, but he's well on his way to being King. There are the trusted lieutenants, the court, the enemy states, the subservient and heavily taxed populace, and so on. To quote himself, like all states from The Moors, to Venice, to the United Kingdom, MS is only N years away from being irrelevant.

Before waking up, I thought of what to tell Bill and this was it.

"The next greatest thing, three years out, is going to be massively de-centralized databases"

Make of all that what you will.

We should all be basing apps on the browser...
P2P fat clients are wrong for Internet collaboration,. IDG Jun 25 2001 9:23AM ET [moreover...]

Hmmm? One of these days people will realize that HTML is appalling for a transaction based UI. It's pretty bad for a writing environment. We've been living with GUIs for 20 years now and are very used to tabs, menus, dialog boxes, listboxes, cascading combos, spell checkers and so on. Should we really chuck all this out so that we can just use a browser and nothing else? This is 1995 thinking isn't it?

I bet the guy who wrote this uses Outlook Express. I wonder what he'd say if you told him he is only allowed to use Hotmail for all mail?

Somebody at Plastic is bemoaning the poor state of SCi-Fi films.Where Are the Intelligent Sci-Fi Films? [Plastic]

But you might equally ask "where are the intelligent sci-fi novels?" Something that continually winds me up is that Sci-Fi is lumped togather in bookshops with what is laughably called "Science fantasy". So exactly where is the science in the average swords and scorcery, elf tome?

A completely de-centralized tax system. hmmm?
Peer-to-Peer Taxation.. O'Reilly Network: Peer-to-Peer Taxation. [Hack the Planet]

Gosh. People with good internet access watch less TV.

What's TV?

Internet Users Watch Less TV. Two in five Europeans have online access and consumer consumption of traditional media is changing, inform researchers at Forrester Research. 9 July 2001, 10 am GMT [Content Wire via NewsIsFree]

Time does a short piece about Moreover, one of our favourite sources of news feeds.
A Master of Headline Grabbing. Time Jul 6 2001 4:51AM ET [Internet Europe news]

"Web Services is Instant Messaging for computers" (Instead of people, via computers.) Great stuff, Walid. Not entirely true of course, as Web services can be non real-time and async, but a good sound bite.

And in contrast to "Where's the edge?" Here's where the mainstream is. At least according to Google.

Indiana Jones
Fourth Indiana Jones installment [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

I can't believe they're going to make a 4th Indiana Jones movie. Will they all end up doing the parts in wheelchairs?

Ballmer a member of the Addams Family?
'Ballmer doesn't look like Uncle Fester' MS flack lashes out [The Register]

But he does, he does!!

While the rest of the web argues back and forth about the benefits or not of GPL and Open Source, there's some Fallout in the PHPNuke Community over Open Source [Geeknews].

PHPNuke is one of the most widely implemented community journalism systems. It was pretty easy to get going but had evolved in to a not very pretty mess of code. This little story is instructive about what happens when one author tries to keep control of source when the source is distributed free due to the nature of the language. PHP is a wonderful language but there is a no compiled form, so this sort of thing is inevitable if you ever let other people see the code. Personally I prefer a PHP-Nuke competitor, Drupal because it's much better structured and written.

Douglas Rushkoff on what's "really" happening on the internet.
Douglas Rushkoff: [Scripting News]

When you're scanning all the headlines it's easy to get sucked into that full time job called "Tracking Microsoft". You begin to believe all those stories about how MS is going to "own" the web. But then an article like this one comes along and you remember that even while all this BigCo noise is happening, individuals are still making the web explode. There's more email traffic, personal web sites, Internet users and communities happening than ever before. And it's more global than it's ever been before as this article about internet use in Iran shows.

I recently talked to Mark Frauenfelder who runs a fun site at Boing Boing. This grew out of one of those wacky magazines from the mid to late 80s. I started to get quite nostalgic for those heady Cyberpunk days. It was all such fun "Learning how to be a happy mutant". But just like the late 60s before that, the lessons have been absorbed, mutated and just keep on blossoming. What's hard to deal with is that when you've felt like you've been in the middle of left field where the really interesting things are happening and it becomes mainstream, it can begin to feel like nothing new's happening any more. One of the commentators of the time said "Nothing interesting happens in the middle". But look around now and ask "Where's the edge?"

And of course the answer's "All over the place". There's more edgy stuff happening now than there's ever been. While at the same time, everything that there's ever been is still happening. no matter what your niche interest, it's easier than ever to hook up with the other handful of people world wide who never stopped.

I get a bit irritated with some of Rushkoff's work as he plays the role of professional commentator on "The Edge", but this piece is excellent.

Getting Paid for Content
Getting Paid for Content: from micropayments to shareware models. Discussion of online payment for content tends to be techno-centric: "If we only had micropayments, everyone could get paid for their art." via [kuro5hin.org]

After P2P Business models yesterday, we have content business models today. if it's art we're talking about, then the Patronage model has worked for centuries. Is this really so different from the "Sponsorship" model we have today?

Which country has 4% of the world's population but consumes 25% of the world's resources and generates 27% of the world's pollution?

I've just listened to a radio interview with a typical Californian housewife. "The Taco (sp?) is America's number one sport utility and I'm proud to be an owner", "but it gets 14 mpg. I've been driving a hybrid compact that gets 70mpg. Do you think these will be successful?", "I couldn't comment on that. You see I'm a Type A personality...". Bizarre. A weird combination of Brave New World and a life spent immersed in advertizing. I'm a Beta. I'm glad I'm a Beta. Alphas are too stuck up. Gammas are so stupid. Betas are the best...