12. 2006 December

12.1 Monday, December 12

1. ``Can Office 2007 Prevail In A Web 2.0 World?''. By Barbara Darrow. At Dr. Dobb's. [58]

2. ``As Microsoft looks ahead, will Vista be the end of an era?''. By Rhys Blakely. [35]

3. ``Streaming Presidents''. By Amin Ahmad. [5]

4. ``Streaming Architecture''. By Amin Ahmad. [4]

5. ``The psychology of a killer''. At BBC News. [337]

6. ``Bush faces pressure to act on Iraq''. By Nick Miles. At BBC News. [191]

12.2 Friday, December 22

Any program you can walk away from is a good one.

12.2.1 Precedence for cloning

A parent is an organism which donates tissue which becomes a new organism. A father is a parent which donated sperm; a mother is a parent which donated one or more eggs.

A clone is an organism with exactly one parent.^12.1

Turn your thoughts to mythology from the Bible. Think of Adam. Think of Eve. Who were Eve's parents? She was created from the tissue (a rib) of one donor, Adam. So Eve was a clone.

Adam & Eve had children (first Cain, then Able, then more). Adam was Eve's father. So Eve parented a child with her father. Adam & Eve were incestuous.

12.3 Tuesday, December 26

12.3.1 Open source windows

A friend sent me a link to ``A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection'', by Peter Gutmann. [109] It's a good read. Here are some thoughts it inspired.

This is further evidence that the Windows monopoly has outlived its usefulness to mankind. Notice that I said Windows monopoly, not all monopolies & not the Microsoft monopoly. Microsoft has many monopolies which may or may not still benefit mankind.

Monopolies exist with the consent of society while they benefit society. The Windows product may still benefit society, but the direction in which future releases will take us won't, & the most recent release is evidence of that.

What benefits does the latest Windows offer?

• Vista is pretty, but any window manager can be pretty, & all the open source window managers are so customizable that they don't need a new release to change their look.

• Vista claims to be more resistant to viruses & worms. but many of the new security features are just pop-up windows which ask the user whether she approves of some action. These features were probably created with good intentions, but without a knowledgeable user, they do not increase security.

What detriments does the latest Windows offer?

• According to the essay [109], Vista's Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) features limit even the legal capabilities of the computer which the user bought & owns, increase the cost of hardware & software, and decrease the reliability of hardware & software. What's more (& again according to [109]), they create the potential for massive Denial of Service attacks.

• Vista's performance is less than XP's performance on equivalent hardware (& XP's performance was nothing to be overjoyed about). A useful new feature might be worth the cost of some performance, but what new features did the user get from Vista? Other window managers can be prettier without a performance cost, its anti-virus security features are questionable, & its Digital Restrictions Management features are detrimental. I pay performance for this?

A friend of mine has said that a monopoly has out-lived its usefulness when it can no longer improve its product. Vista shows that Windows has reached that point. Society should reclaim Windows & make it open source.

By the way, ``Trusted Computing: An Animated Short'' is worth watching.

12.4 Friday, December 29

12.4.1 Google PDF

Why does Adobe PDF's installer insist on installing Google Toolbar? (It does not allow you to reject Google Toolbar. I had to un-install Google Toolbar specifically after installing PDF.)

Does ``Adobe PDF'' somehow imply ``I love Google Toolbar''? Is PDF an achronym for ``Toolbar'' or ``Google''?

By bundling Google Toolbar with the free PDF viewer, does Adobe hope to trick people into believing that Adobe is as cool as Google? Coolness by association?

How could the inventor of Post Script have fallen so low?