Damn, it’s begun again. Germany now, of all places. Bad!

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Paraphrasing my /. post here: in the Gates testimony, who’s leading who?

Could the new found focus on XP Embedded (in the testimony) have something to do with the fact that it doesn’t sell very well, as of now? I wonder how QNX, Lineo and the others would feel if/when `XP Embedded for PCs’ starts being burnt into Flash RAM of each PC that’s sold. Make no mistake, Microsoft could do this, while incidentally giving a black eye to the Free/Open Source communities who will then have additional rounds of reverse engineering to do. (And yes, the FSF’s silence on embedded software is becoming an increasing curiosity by the day) And when XP Embedded proper begins to ride the tailwind of PC version, QNX et al will really begin to feel the heat.

Remember, if you look at MS’s vision for the PC in 3-4 years time, it approaches a TV/stereo-like electronic device more than anything else. So, again: who was leading who in this cross-examination?

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Jack Bryar of NewsForge: While reporters for The Register dismissed it as nothing more than “a long tedious advertisement for Microsoft”, it is just possible that Gates saved his company.

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An aside: why do the content mills (I like that phrase) like the word ‘consumer’ so much? Has the image of couch potatoes slumping before television made them used to the passive ‘consumer’? A customer by contrast is an active participant in a sale. He haggles, dissects, cribs, drives you wild. I think the content mills have forgotten how to deal with a creature like that, with their increasing dependance on statistical models of ‘consumer’ behavior.

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(Via kuro5hin): Frank et al, Viant Corporation: There are many who believe the first step should be to finish the job of eliminating the free competition, to drive piracy back underground,and to make it clear who is in control. In effect, many seem to be saying, “Let’s win the war before designing the peace.” Clueful essay, but with an attitude like that they’ll end up alienating most of their most astute — and passionate — customers before they get a chance to broker a peace.

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Memepool continues to scoop everyone else on weird sites: NYTimes random login generator. I hope the NYT takes this with a sense of humor.

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Seamus (X-Box) Blackley leaves Microsoft. The XBox was a good idea, one whose potential you can be sure Microsoft will revisit for years to come: it gives them an entry into the living room in a way nothing else will. And if rumors of the Homestation are true, you can bet someone in Redmond has already recognized that.

On the other hand — it is less clear that Microsoft needs to actually manufacture these things. Microsoft, as it found with Hailstorm, is a software company, and it might be within its best interests to make the reference designs and license — liberally — among a large number of vendors across the world. This would let it take advantage of PC-style hardware market dynamics and up the ante against Sony, potentially relegating them to be the Apples of the gaming world. In fact, if you look at the recently announced Longhorn hardware specs, it would be refute to say that they are — partially — moving on that path already.

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Note to Apple: In 1996, when Netscape 3 ruled the world and PNG was a newcomer, handling PNG via the Quicktime plugin made sense. In 2002, both IE and Mozilla have made significant advances and can now render PNG natively. So make Quicktime stop grabbing PNG images by default! Quicktime doesn’t do this when the a PNG image is displayed inline within a page, but on links like this one.) And yes, I’ve turned off this behavior in Quicktime’s settings, and now IE displays PNGs natively. But Mozilla 0.9.7 continues to show PNGs via Quicktime :(.

Update: Re-installing Quicktime solved that one.

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XFree86 celebrates its 10th anniversary. X is well designed, but the design assumptions it makes are disastrous for the personal desktop (or laptop) market. Just as Apple created Quartz, the Linux community will have to come up with a standard that at least allows changing color-depth on the fly, and does not suffer from degraded performance on the desktop in the name of `network transparency’. On that point, Directfb may be a good pointer towards the future.

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Scoble: Am I able to tell you that Bill Gates is lying? Can you?

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