SF Chronicle: Mystery links. T - SF Chronicle: Mystery links. TOPtext is an example of "contextual advertising," the latest attempt by online advertisers to reach the eyes and minds of Web surfers. TOPtext turns existing words on a Web page into hyperlinks that redirect a computer user to the advertiser's site.
[Tomalak]
Hot Damn! I thought we'd buried all this Smart Tags nonsense!

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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]