“Anyone who likes competition and choice should root for Microsoft and Google, not Apple, in phones.”

Yeah – this guy clearly has nothing to do with Microsoft. Apart from he writes for PC Mag – owned by MS since forever. But otherwise, judging by the tone of this article he has never actually heard of Microsoft before at the CTIA Wireless trade show this week.  Not surprising – he doesn’t sound like he has enough of a clue to have thought up the topic of this article all by himself.  Not by a long shot – he must have either been:

1. Born yesterday
2. Come down in the last shower
3. An alien that immigrated to Earth in the last few weeks
4. Another one of MS’s stooges

The premise of the article is that Apple, Palm Pre and Blackberry are ‘bad’ (but mainly Apple) because they are so bad-ass, so evil that they have the gall to design not only the hardware, but the software as well for their smart phone offerings. Can you imagine that? What bastards!

The doofus explains:

“Before you mock, understand that putting together a mobile OS is a huge investment. If every mobile manufacturer had to create its own mobile OS, you’d have either a huge barrier to entry, hideous fragmentation with dozens of incompatible platforms, or both. Think about how many platforms and how few manufacturers are already out there. It would be worse.”

Let’s just have a quick look:

• ‘A huge barrier to entry’ – Right, and owning a mobile phone fabrication plant isn’t a huge barrier to entry in the mobile phone market? For crying out loud!
• ‘Hideous market fragmentation’ – so market fragmentation is hideous eh? Now we *know* the guy works for Microsoft.
• ‘Incompatible platforms’ – GAF. As long as the data can be shared, differences in platforms is a non-issue.

So what the guy is saying is that someone has to stand up for the poor guys with the shitty mobile phone fabrication plant that can’t possibly afford to get the talent together to make an SmartPhone OS specifically for the phones they manufacture. Android and MS are good – it’ll give the rubbish handset manufacturers a shot at the smart phone market, which is unfairly dominated by those horrid companies that design and manufacture both the OS and Handsets.

Unfortunately, Windows 6.5 is a bag of shit and everyone knows it. So what if a shitty phone manufacturer can use it – it will only add competition to the ‘rubbish smart phone’ sector of the smart phone market – it won’t actually be competing with the top 3 smart phone providers.

Android, on the other hand, I like. In Google’s typical fashion they’ll dump a whole lot of resources into developing a Smart Phone OS that makes using and accessing their services easy, conforming to open standards, and then releasing it under the GPL. However, much like the Windows Phone OS, they will be competing in the ‘rubbish smartphone’ sector of the smartphone market, and not with Blackberry, Palm and Apple.  They will be competing with Windows Mobile, Symbian and Linux.

Can’t wait how this competition pans out for Microsoft.

There is enough science out there to throw doubt on the entire premise of carbon trading, and worse, it’s all valid. It’s because it’s about carbon emissions. Geologists, or any scientist with an affinity with the last billion years of climate on Earth, will tell you that the climate has gone through patches where the earth was so warm there were forests that went all the way to the poles. Is that bad? In the grand scale of things, no it’s not. In the grand scale of things our civilisation is so negligible is mathematically isn’t even there – so really, why even give a shit?

Personally, my thing with carbon trading has bugger all to do with climate change. Climate changes, it’s natural. Even if humans do, or *could* affect the climate does it really matter in the long run? We will all die out eventually – apparently we only have another billion years or so before our sun turns into a giant red star and engulfs Venus and Mercury. Life won’t continue on Earth after that, so therefore it’s pointless forcing the current sentient inhabitants to take responsibility for what they consume.  Carbon trading won’t affect the continuance of life on earth – nothing in Earth’s history has.

Maybe the fact that we are burning all fossil fuels and releasing all this carbon into the atmosphere will allow earth to go through another dinosaurean-like renaissance – another biological peak of evolution. Perhaps all the extra carbon on the atmosphere will allow forests to flourish in a big way again, seeding the next era of mega-fauna, especially if it gets rid of those pesky humans. After all, what are we actually here for? Is it so that we can live forever? Is it so that we can seed the universe with life and technology? Are we supposed to all become gods? Does anyone have any science on this?

Short answer is no, no, no and no.

What I like about carbon trading is that it makes us more efficient. There are a bunch of things that being efficient makes better for humans. Less degradation for a start. More resources for things for another start. Initially, sure it’s gonna cost humans a bit more to move to a more efficient way of life. There will certainly be an outlay to get there, and there is no two ways about it, we will absolutely have to do it. If it isn’t climate change, then it’s over population. If it isn’t either of those then it’s a lack of cheap, non-renewable energy sources – or some other catastrophic event that makes life for humans on Earth a lot tougher. Regardless of how you view it, people are never going to volunteer to die so that there are more resources for everyone else – and if you look at the Easter Island scenario, it becomes a life that’s hardly worth living. Life like that doesn’t progress – it simply disintegrates.

If there is a way to make human life on Earth happier it’s about having an abundance of resources to go around. Being efficient is only going to help that cause. Paying a bit of extra cash now is going to make life way better for the our progeny, so it comes down to an ethical decision. Do you like beautiful landscapes? Do you like to see an abundance of biodiversity? Do you like nature and the environment? Do you like being happy? Do you want your future generations not to stuggle? If you do then carbon trading is at least doing *something* about maintaining those parts of our lives. Doing nothing because you don’t want to part with a few greenbacks, is simply preventing progress for humans on Earth – unless, of course, you have a better idea.

You got a better idea? I really fucken doubt it.

How is it that it’s so incredible that a ‘herd of cows’, which is 75 to 125 times the weight of a car, emits more CO2e than a vehicle over an entire year?

Is this stupid web site article suggesting that we drive herds of cows around instead of cars? Is it suggesting that we should convert our cows to ethanol? Is it suggesting that ‘Big Cow’ should stop lobbying the government against climate change and start producing the ‘E.B.’ (electric bovine)?

Who the fuck knows?

Just so that people can actually get some perspective here, the problem with the man made portion of climate change is the fossils we dig up and release into the atmosphere via the burning thereof. All we really have to do to halt the vast majority of our contribution to climate change is to stop doing that.

Just for a bit more cow perspective, apparently there are just under a billion cows on the planet, which means there are roughly 5 million herds of cattle (going on the ’200 cows per herd’ number published in the stupid article) compared to 625 million cars. This means that cars out-pollute cows by 125 times alone. Cow methane is a friggin piss in the goddam ocean! For fucks sake, stop pointing the finger at developing countries and get rid of your stupid SUV you fucken dick head!

*yawn*

I know – millions of you are wondering where the noise is in this post. Millions of you are thinking, ‘Geez Dal, why are you holding back? Where’s the normal level of juice for this article? It’s almost as if you have whored yourself to the ‘corporate machine’ to help pimp their community philanthropy to give it more visibility on web!”

*cough*

Yes, er, well, I realise it may appear that way, but I assure you I am still a man of the people and that my heart is still with….

***zap!!!***

Oh crap I just got struck by lightning.

….anyway, one of the things that Carbon Planet did was put together a set of educational materials for kids about Climate Change, the causes, the effects, and what can be done about it.

Motiv designed the resource pack – their graphic design work was excellent, but they were expensive and the girl working on the job was often grumpy and short with us.

Nahum Ziersch designed the art work used for pretty much everything else. Nahum is a total pro and a brilliant artist – really pleased to have worked with him.

Classic Clips: Bill Gates Chews Out Microsoft Over XP over at Gizmodo.

It’s replete with a carefully manicured forum of breathlessly drippy Mac fan people (mainly boys) loving every second of Bill Gate’s very eloquent ‘alleged’ feedback memo to the Windows dev arm about the user experience of trying to install Windows Movie Maker. I found it amusing too, but I never believed for a second Gates wrote that mail.

Go and search online, a cursory glance will give you the impression it’s legit – down to the faked interview with Bill where the guy shows him a printed version of the memo, and then Gates shrugs and says he sends emails like that everyday because it’s his job.

Erroneous!

The email was in fact written by Steve Jobs as a favour to Bill. One of the informal clauses of the contract between Apple and MS when MS bought 5% of Apple to help them out of a tight patch, was that Steve was to assist Bill with improving Windows usability. Of course, the shareholders weren’t to know, nor the boards of either company because of the ruckus, as you would expect. According to Steve, it was that or a solid tea-bagging from Bill.

Think about it – if Gates really did have that eloquence when it came to describing an appalling user experience, don’t you think that Windows would have been a whole lot better? Why else would his executive team be so incompetent when it comes to UI? It’s because Bill never gave a rats arse about the UI. He left the UI decisions to a bunch of money grubbing pricks, so self centred they never cared if their stuff makes your life miserable.

You can believe it or not, it makes no difference to me. But re-read it and instead of thinking Gates is telling it, imagine it’s Jobsy dealing with the user experience after a nice fat doober. It then makes perfect sense.

That announcement alone is life changing enough – there is a whole continent in my own mental landscape devoted to hating on IE. I find it hard to envisage the land being devoid of inhabitants, and I wonder what I am going to do with all those extra mental processes. I think there would have been a bunch of web developers that would have been languishing in the after-glow of the announcement thinking, ‘Thank goodness, soon I can start doing what I have always wanted – designing the way I have always wanted.’

I couldn’t help but think (because my brain is ‘cognitively locked in’ to thinking of MS and IE in this way) that it would seem that the IE team somehow managed to pull a swifty on MS executive management. As we all know, Microsoft are fundamentally opposed to interoperability. If they had gone interoperable 10 years ago, they probably wouldn’t exist today (or so the executive team at MS thinks). Instinctively I felt that despite this incredibly good news about MS’s next browser passing the Acid 2 test, MS will get in there and make sure that they maintain the status quo and somehow continue to fuck things up for web developers, and stab the internet right in the back.

Drum-roll please… “IE8 to have three rendering modes”

1) “Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content.
2) “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content.
3) If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element.

Wha? ‘Quirks mode’, ‘Standards Mode’ and then ‘*Real* Standards Mode’ (but only if you bung in an IE specific meta tag). And so there we have it, in order for IE8 to render strictly to standards, we as web developers must insert a non-standard tag at the beginning of the page – which of course completely falsifies their claims of IE8 passing the Acid 2 test.

I don’t really need to point out this is complete and utter shit, as we all know that MS’s customers wouldn’t know their own arse from Arial when it comes to crafting layouts.

The ramifications for everyone that uses email is that those that use MS Outlook 2007 will not be able to correctly view HTML-Email, and they will no-longer be able to send well laid out emails to anyone without Outlook 2007.

I am sure Ballmer was thinking it was totally fucken genius because clearly the plan was to get everyone using the Word layout renderer in emails so that anyone that wanted to send a formatted email had to use Office, just like they did with ordinary documents in the 90s. Slight problem with the plan – people aren’t upgrading to Outlook 2007 in the droves MS had predicted and now all their Outlook 2007 customers are the ones locked out of the world of email formatting – ooops.

This move also put a lot of developers, designers and email marketers (and spamming bastards) noses out of joint, but instead of just rolling over with their arses in the air and asking MS to be gentle as a lot of soft-cock web developers have done time and time again in the past, there has actually been some collaboration, organisation and a general hardening-the-fuck-up and a new movement has started in the area of HTML Email Standards.

Link to these awesome people and tell all your friends. They have moxy. They have chops.

P2P vs Radiohead’s “free” Rainbows: why P2P can be a hard habit to break

Radiohead’s innovative digital distribution arrangement for their new album, In Rainbows, lets people pay whatever they want for the music, including nothing at all. Despite that, BitTorrent swapping of the album has been on the level of other major releases. Are people really so cheap that they won’t even register with the band in order to snag a free download? The answer appears to be yes.

The article talked about how you can also download the song from Bit Torrent, making it sound as if Radiohead are as beleaguered as the Labels and completely missing the point as to why Radiohead, and a bunch of other popular bands are leaving the labels to do their own shit. That’s because ARS Technica and their readership are a bunch of elitist tech snobs who don’t have the ability to see life outside of their own miniscule fish-bowl like realities. They reported on what they knew, which is P2P file sharing, rather than the album itself or the success selling the album this way, or the potential ramifications of a sea change like this for the music industry. The discussion forum about the article was even stupider than the article itself, the first page of the forum focusing entirely on the bit rate and format that the album was released as – bunch of wankers.

The real story is this one: Cash at the End of Radiohead’s Rainbow?.

As has been widely reported and blogged about, the album logged 1.2 million downloads on its first day.

and

Rumors, polls and inside sources circulating indicate that the average buyer paid £4, or about $8, which would mean that Radiohead has made about $10 million or more since the record’s release on Oct. 10.

Now *that’s* a story. That sounds like a decent amount of cash to me – more than enough for a decent living, and all without an arsehole label backing them. Give a shit how much people are downloading from Bit Torrent – Radiohead is *made*. They don’t have to do any gruelling PR tours, they don’t have to kiss anyone’s arse, they don’t have any massive debt to pay back to any label. Now they have their music, and their fans and their own recording and distribution. Freedom 1. Labels 0.

That is by far the best news to have come out of the music industry ever and it points to a lot more of that going on in the future. Happy Days.

At least Microsoft representative, Doug, had the decency not waste everyone’s time. If Doug wanted to make a really great contribution to the state of global web interoperability, he could have given a history lesson about the Microsoft culture being completely against the concept of interoperability, regarding it as ‘suicide for their platform’. I personally would have found something like that enthralling.

But I guess that would have gone against the spirit of the conference, although no more than Doug being there in the first place. I mean, an MS stooge at an interoperability conference? I can think of four reasons as to why he would be there: 1) to gather information about their competitors 2) to have someone guard against any negative sentiment against Microsoft 3) a PR stunt to trick unsuspecting newbies into thinking MS gives a rats arse, and 4) it makes them look good on paper when defending themselves against their detractors:

Stinky Freetard: You suck at interoperability!
Ballmer: We’ve attended every interoperability conference in the world for the last 5 years. You been to one of them lately?
Stinky Freetard: Hey Ballmer, you suck in general, and if you had been born 10 years later you and Gates would be running a small 2nd hand computer shop funded by your rich parents!
Ballmer: Taste my lightning fucker! *zap!*

Everything that Microsoft sticks their god-awful nose into degrades interoperability and somehow adds up to something that sucks for me:

1) They stuck their nose into web browsing, illegally killed a company, and held back the progress of web interface design for 10 years

2) They got into the gaming market and turned Bungie, a great mac gaming developer, in to an X-Box developer and I still can’t get Halo 2 for the Mac, let alone Halo 3.

3) They decided to make an open standard document format, all the while destroying the integrity of the standards process by stacking the international voting system, and holding back the widespread adoption of ODF – which means I, and a bunch of other doc geeks, are stuck dealing with fucking-annoying-Word for another few years.

*sigh* now they want to get into the online world by buying up online companies. They are looking for new ‘lock in’ methods for the emerging online software market in the form of ‘Windows Live’ – the MS web platform of closed, non-standard software that will only work properly on Windows. Clearly there are a lot of reasons for MS to do this: 1) they can augment their languishing Search business 2) they can augment their languishing Ad business 3) they can augment their languishing control of the online software market by converting all those web businesses to the Windows Live platform, hence further protecting the Windows OS monopoly.

Quite frankly, I don’t see how that will benefit anyone apart from MS, let alone me. My gut feeling is that the Windows Live strategy will fail. Microsoft have done bugger all for the web apart from fuck it up, and one of the reasons why the web is such a successful platform is because it lacks exclusivity. Do you think after Microsoft have bludgeoned all web developers with it’s fucking-annoying-browser for 10 years that suddenly web developers are going to turn around and see the ‘value’ in using MS products to start a web business? Fuck no – most web developers would be fantasising about a world where MS was no longer relevant, and interoperability reigned supreme.

Even still, it will be yonks before that ever happens, if the browser spokes people doing presentations on interoperability can’t get their shit together, how the hell are the plebs supposed to?