Bill Gates commits to interoperability and makes the insightful observation that open source leads to too many similar solutions, which is why interoperability needs to be tested more and that's a problem. Translation: Bill Moppelkotze thinks open source is annoying because it nibbles away at his monopoly
Archive 4. February 2005
Outrage over Deutsche Bank
Outrage over Deutsche Bank - well, now they're all outraged again, the politicians. And in the next round they'll demand relief for business at the expense of workers, because the wonderful economy would invest all that money - as you can see so clearly with Deutsche Bank.
It would be nice if politicians had even rudimentary learning ability and understood that they're simply being screwed by business right now. Large corporations have no interest in investing and stabilizing the economy when they can just squeeze society instead. You can see it in Ackermann's behavior in the Esser trial, you can see it in Deutsche Bank's conduct, you can see it in GM's extortion of Opel locations in Germany, in the fat salary increase of the global Daimler failure, and in Siemens' approach in the mobile phone division.
Corporations have no interest in their own market - they'll simply abandon it if necessary. Only short-term improvements to shareholder value matter - so the manager can reward himself with fat raises and nice severance packages because of his supposedly brilliant success. If the whole thing goes down the drain - doesn't matter. Quickly sell off the company to a foreign corporation and disappear. Even the dumbest manager always finds a job somewhere.
Entrepreneurial risk is now only borne by smaller medium-sized enterprises, where the boss still notices when his company goes down the drain. But they're just as naive as politicians and crawl up to the industry bigwigs instead of standing up for themselves.
Cosmic near miss in 24 years - so if it does hit us in 2037, we could manage to be wiped out before the Unix epoch overflow gets us
NZZ Online archive no longer freely available - and with that, the NZZ is no longer present on the Internet. What the heck is online availability supposed to accomplish if it's only available on the day of print publication? Ridiculous nonsense from those oh-so-professional media outlets, who are once again revealing themselves as complete amateurs on the Internet …
Trackback Thinking
A Whole Lotta Nothing: No one can have nice things! - Matt is disabling trackbacks on his site. Interesting is his observation that a few test trackbacks came through first, and only after these were still there 8 hours later did the big wave arrive. This aligns with the experiences of others - the spambots are probably still semi-automated at the moment.
At Phil Ringnalda there are more thoughts on trackbacks and whether they're even relevant anymore - and whether the way they're usually used even makes sense. His main point is the fact that many trackbacks are rather pointless - they simply point to a post that ultimately just contains a classic "me too" and points back to the origin. He would prefer context-based pings - you've written something on a topic that's being discussed elsewhere? A manual trackback to that post connects these two sites. This topic-based trackbacking was also the main idea behind the Internet Topic Exchange - basically just a trackback address and an attached wiki. It got off the ground to some extent, but it never really caught on widely. Similarly, LazyWeb - a post with a problem, a trackback to LazyWeb and maybe someone finds a solution - never really took off. Okay, it's running, but you would have expected more response.
These connections are exactly the sort of thing that's not so easy to do with Pingback - Pingback is based on bidirectional linking, whereas trackback would be interesting in these examples precisely because of its decoupling from actual links.
On the other hand, I constantly see poker spam on TopicExchange topics - and with that, such a system eventually just dies, unless enough gardeners are found to pull out the weeds.
That's enough from the self-referential techno-babble corner for now.
Rumsfeld thinks the US troops have killed an insufficient number of Sunnis - isn't it nice to have such simple worldviews? Evil Sunnis, good Shiites. That's how simple it is for Rumsfeld. Stupid politician. That's how simple it is for me.