because capital letters are unprofessional.
To find a goal;
To find my soul.
Is this my quest,
Or just a silly test?
Oh, what will I find,
When I abandon this grind?
When will my head be free,
Such that I’m able to see?
Droning along,
In search of a song,
My time is expiring,
These lives are so tiring
- How in hell can they still be hiring?
So many questions,
The answers to which,
I really don’t know.
The first time I had heard of Microsoft’s “Codename: Longhorn”; the Windows OS that would be XP’s successor, I was enamoured by the plethora of futuristic aspects that Microsoft was showing off at various conferences, such as the Professional Developers Conference of 2003. This was in early 2004. Sadly, the Longhorn vision, for those who know it well, has yet to be achieved by Microsoft. In early 2004, Microsoft executives decided that they had dreamed too big with Longhorn - and the project simply wasn’t going to be “doable” in it’s current state. So they scrapped large chunks of that vision. In typical, overbloated fashion, what arose out of the ashes of the Codename: Longhorn project was the finally-branded “Windows Vista”. Early iterations already showed marked differences from that of the alpha builds and screenshots users had become accustomed to seeing. Here’s a few: - There was no unified, database-driven relational-file-sharing system a-la “WinFS” that Microsoft had clearly labeled one of the core pillars of the Longhorn foundation.
- In time, we would see the various components of WinFX - Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Workflow Foundation - increasingly began to play a less significant role in the actual operating systems. *It’s worth noting that the WinFX components, rebranded as the .NET Framework 3.0, are very powerful, however. I certainly can see various third-parties taking advantage of them in the future, and perhaps Microsoft as well.
- The [exceptionally powerful] C#/WinFX-based Windows Sidebar was dropped in favor of a dumbed-down JS/HTML driven Sidebar; for various reasons, including the need to make gadget creation more accessible to a larger group of people. Considering the years of R&D Microsoft has poured into the “Sidebar” idea, it’s a pretty sadistic result…
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These points are only scratching the surface - and at that, a very condensed one. The reason why I won’t bother going on about that, is because I’m ranting about something completely different. If you like, this can be considered the “root” of the above “issues”. At the root, is Microsoft’s PR team’s rather lackluster performance of late.
In reading an issue of Harpers magazine, I came across what appears to be a very interesting article. I found this specific paragraph to be very representative of the common logic most of us in today’s modern world tend to argue for - even while President Bush sits there on his fanny talking up a storm about god knows what new folly he’s got in store for the world…
“One need not endorse either the ideology or the tactics of these groups to wonder if the wholesale rejection of dialogue with them is truly in the long-term interests of the United States. Indeed, looking beyond the disastrous war in Iraq, perhaps the central questions facing American foreign policy are as follows: How is it possible to promote democracy and fight terrorism when movements deemed by the United States to be terrorist and extremist are the most politically popular in the region? And given this popularity, what would true democracy in these nations resemble? It is impossible to answer these questions without first listening to these movements, but the U.S. government and, frequently, the media have deemed them unworthy even of this; their public grievances—over America’s seemingly unconditional support for Israel, its invasion of Iraq, its backing of dictatorial regimes that rule much of the Muslim world—are dismissed as illegitimate or insincere, their hostility explained away as a rejection of “Western freedoms.†In fact, as I discovered during my own visits with Islamist leaders over the past year, these groups are busy forging their own notions of freedom, some of them Western and some of them decidedly not. If we want to envision a democratic future for the region, we need not embrace these ideas, but we most certainly need to understand them.”
Check out more excerpts from the article: Harpers.org
They’ve been saying for a while that a rumoured interface lift was coming to Leopard; perhaps the new iTunes-esque nature of Spotlight (see image above) is a hint of more to come. MacRumors has coverage on a few other notable changes in this build, but by and large, it seems that if there’s any major Leopard development going on presently, Apple is still keeping it hush-hush. It’s also not clear as to when “late Spring”- the timeframe Steve Jobs has consistently given for Leopard’s release - will actually be. Many have speculated that a newly-rumoured late March/early April release is far from possible with Leopard in it’s current state. However, most are in agreement that by WWDC 2007, Leopard will probably have arrived - in time for the iPhone’s release in North America, as well as perhaps a few hardware changes. As per the usual, the Apple rumors never stop; the expectations are never low. The wait times, however, often seem unbearable =P.
Read More: Mac Rumors: Leopard Build 9A377a Details Emerging
“The entire catalogue of information from 1,800 courses at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT will be available free online by
the end of the year. Once uploaded, it will represent one of the internet’s most important resources.
By providing free access to course material such as lecture notes, assignment details, podcasts and videocasts, MIT’s Open CourseWare programme will transform the e-learning landscape.”
As others have been saying in the blogosphere, it will be interesting to see whether other top universities follow suit. Who knows what this could mean for the future of learning; the possibilities with such ease of communication these days seem endless.
Check it: Information World Review