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Microsoft today won the skirmish, the battle, and--in light of the leanings of a Bush/Ashcroft Justice Department--probably the war, in its fight against the pesky antitrust suit that's been nipping at its heels. With much of the decision accusing the behemoth of violating the Sherman Act exploded, Microsoft may now go down in history as the Little Monopolist That Could. In the short run, they've bought more time. In the medium run, settlement is probably inevitable, and in the long run, they have almost no possibility of a breakup. Not a bad day's work for a busy monopolist. (Full disclosure: Microsoft publishes Slate.)

Pretty funny quote: "I think the future is going to WebKit". Brad Neuberg is leaving the gDOCS-Chrome JavaScritpt team to strat his own "HTML5" business. He's an expert on the SVG Web. About a year ago i read a lament from a web developer concluding that SVG was destined to be the Web docuemnt format, replacing HTML. Now i wonder if that guy was Neuberg? http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20018687-264.html Sent at 10:05 AM on MondayGary: Finally, the money shot: "Somebody will take some HTML5, and geolocation, and mobile applications, hook into Facebook perhaps, and they're going to do something unexpected." Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20018687-264.html#ixzz124U9xTZ3 Sent at 10:13 AM on MondayGary: I think Brad is right about the combination of location with the rest of the App Web. Olivia and i have had our EVO's for about two weeks now and it's amazing. She also has Citania's iPAD, also an amazing device. What stuns me about the Android EVO is how extraordinary the apps are that combine location with information specific to that location. Incredible. I don't know how i ever lived withou this. One things for sure, my desktop can't do this and neither can my notebook. Sent at 10:16 AM on MondayGary: There is another aspect i see that i guess could be called "location switiching". This is when you QR Scan QR barcode on something and the location of that objects life is at your fingertips. Everything from maps, street views, web sites, product history, artist/designer/developer and on and on. We went to the San Carlos Wine and Art Festival yesterday, where Laurel and San Carlos streets are closed off to traffic, and lined with food, wine and beer vendors of all sorts, artists and craftsmen, and even an antigue car show with ully restored automobiles and other vehicles. It was amazing. But then i started QR scanning! Wow. The Web merged with life like nothing i've ever imagined possible.The key was having the Internet in my pocket, and the Internet k

We can all learn a lot of lessons from the history of DDE/OLE/ OLE3/COM /ActiveX/DCOM /COM+ (you can start reading up on Wikipedia to get some background) and how we went from everyone using best-of-breed standalone apps to one integrated, nearly monolithic Office. It basically all started with copy and paste. People who never spent a lot of time in singletasking, character-mode operating environments like the DOS command line don't recall that simply copying-and-pasting information between apps was difficult at the time. And part of the revelation of Windows for mainstream users (or Mac, for leading-edge tech fans), was being able to easily share data in that way. This was different than what Unix users were used to with the command-line pipe, or from what most applications do with feeds today, in allowing structured information flows between applications. There's a desire to combine data from different sources in an arbitrary way, and to have the user interface display the appropriate tools for whatever context you're in. The dominant model here, probably because of the influence of the early PARC demos, is to have toolbars or UI widgets change depending on what kind of content you're manipulating. Microsoft was really into this in the early 90s with OLE2, where your Word toolbars would morph into Excel toolbars if you double-clicked on an embedded spreadsheet. It was ungainly and ugly and slow, especially if you had less than an exorbitant 8MB of RAM, but the idea was pretty cool. And it still is. People are so focused on data formats and feeds that they're ignoring consensus around UI interoperability. The Atom API and Metaweblog API give me a good-enough interface if I want to treat a discrete chunk of information (like a blog post) as an undifferentiated blob. But all the erstwhile spec work around microformats and structured blogging (I forget which one is for XML and which one's for XHTML) doesn't seem to have addressed user experience or editing behavior

Lengthy article written by Tim Berners-Lee describes his concerns for the future of the Open Web.  Tim details the history of the Web, describing the principles that made the Web an Open Platform of universal access, exchange and collaborative computing.   excerpt: Universality Is the Foundation Several principles are key to assuring that the Web becomes ever more valuable. The primary design principle underlying the Web's usefulness and growth is universality. When you make a link, you can link to anything. That means people must be able to put anything on the Web, no matter what computer they have, software they use or human language they speak and regardless of whether they have a wired or wireless Internet connection. The Web should be usable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information, be it a document or a point of data, and information of any quality-from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. And it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large.

Good article with excellent URL references.  Bottom line is that the W3C will support the advance of HTML5 and controversial components such as "canvas", HTML + RDFa, and HTML microdata. excerpt: The key question is: who's going to get their way with HTML5? The companies who want to keep the kitchen sink in? Or those which want it to be a more flexible format which might also be able to displace some rather comfortable organisations that are doing fine with things as they are? Adobe, it turned out, seemed to be trying to slow things down a little. It was accused of trying to put HTML5 "on hold". It strongly denied it. Others said it was using "procedural bullshit". Then Berners-Lee weighed in with a post on the W3 mailing list. First he noted the history: "Some in the community have raised questions recently about whether some work products of the HTML Working Group are within the scope of the Group's charter. Specifically in question were the HTML Canvas 2D API, and the HTML Microdata and HTML+RDFa Working Drafts." (Translation: Adobe seems to have been trying to slow things down on at least one of these points.) And then he pushes: "I agree with the WG [working group] chairs that these items -- data and canvas - are reasonable areas of work for the group. It is appropriate for the group to publish documents in this area." Chop! And that's it. There goes the Gordian Knot. With that simple message, Berners-Lee has probably created a fresh set of headaches for Adobe - but it means that we can also look forward to a web with open standards, rather than proprietary ones, and where commercial interests don't get to push it around.

The three dominant cloud computing models -- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) -- are changing fast, as cloud providers reach up and down the stack to offer as close to a one-stop shop as possible. More news and analysis about cloud computing CIOs must manage changes in IT departments due to cloud computing services Experts debate the fate of cloud provider liability limits To understand how these cloud computing models are evolving and converging, it helps to know the history, said Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of ThinkStrategies Inc., a consultancy in Wellesley, Mass. For one thing, he says, SaaS was first.

Not sure what to make of this news.  XP continues to rule the desktop, Office 2003-2007 the productivity sweet spot.  I have used and researched Office 2010 and emphatically insist that it is a honey-trap for SharePoint and Live.com cloud-computing.  The MS-Cloud becomes THE default hard drive for Office 2010, with social networking-Facebook like contagion based on shared documents, crap collaboration and in-your-face insistent Live.com/Hotmail eMail.  Everytime i wanted to do something in Office 2010, there were 20 road blocks and hurdles MS put in the path forcing their Facebook-virus on my associates and myself.  Incredibly anti-productive.  Yet it's the only cloud-productivity solution capable of easing the difficult transition from desktop to cloud productivity environments.  Office 2010 does this by integrating into legacy desktop productivity  systems just enough that users will not realize until it's too late that a mine filed of hurdles and gotchas lies ahead. excerpt: Businesses are now deploying Office 2010 five times faster than they deployed Office 2007. Office 2010 is also the fastest-selling version of Office in history. "Nearly 50 million people worldwide use Office Web Apps to view, edit, and share their documents from anywhere with a browser and an Internet connection," added Numoto. Microsoft previously revealed in October that the company had sold six million copies of Office 2010. The company didn't reveal any additional sales figures on Wednesday but reaffirmed that the software is selling well. Office is currently used by more than 750 million users worldwide according to Microsoft.

I wonder about those numbers. 6 million copies of Office 2010 sold; total of 750 million users of all versions. That makes 0.8 per cent of Office users who had upgraded between June and October of 2010? Five times faster than Office 2007 would make Office 2007 sales in the same period of its release cycle 0.16 per cent of the 750 million, assuming the number of users had remained constant. I suspect there are some apples and oranges in that wood pile, to mix a metaphor. E.g., retail sales that exclude sales to OEMs?

Good article.  One of the first to go beyond the demo, recognizing that Wave is application platform - a wrapper for the convergence of communications and content. Excerpt: Wave is a new way to build distributed applications, and it will open the door to an explosion of innovation. What the Wave demo showed is support for a continuum from the shortest messages to longer and longer forms of content. All of it can be shared with precise control, tagged, searched. The version history is kept. No more mailing around a document. This takes the beauty of e-mail and wikis and extends it in a more flexible way to a much larger audience. Google Wave is a platform for creating distributed applications. Each Wave server can be involved in a number of conversations involving Wavelets, what most people would think of as a document. Wavelets are actually a much more powerful and general because they are based on XML, which means you can have lots of depth of content, like headings and subheadings of a book, but on steroids. Adding a document repository to XMPP is just revolutionary. The XMPP protocol manages the communication between the Wave servers so that all the Wavelets can synchronize as they are changed. Then Google finished the job by making Wavelets tag-able, searchable and versioned, so you can play back changes. But Google Wave goes beyond just managing the content--it also manages the programs that act on the content. At any level, a program can be assigned to a Wavelet to render it, that is, show it to a user and help manage the conversation. Google Wave also manages the distribution and management of these programs. The idea of a platform that combines management of the data and the code is really powerful.

Move over Flipboard, Push Pop and TreeSaver.  Here comes OnSwipe.  Packaging a Web site for a highly interactive and mobile world just got easier. excerpt: OnSwipe does something web developers should have been racing to accomplish ever since the iPad was first unveiled: it makes a website -- any website -- into a tablet-friendly experience. (It's already available to everyone who publishes their blog on Wordpress.com.) It uses HTML5 to make a site feel like an app, even though it's running in the browser. Onswipe points to a future of tablet media delivery that is incredibly simple, even boring: Websites that are designed to look good on tablets. Given the history of creating alternate designs for sites in order to make them mobile-friendly, why anyone ever imagined it would be otherwise is baffling. Probably, it was wishful thinking. IPad magazine app sales are tanking. Media aggregation apps like Flipboard and Zite are re-atomizing publishers' content into pleasurable, full-screen, mostly ad-free experiences. The great do-over that tablets were to represent for publishers like Condé Nast -- a chance to put the free-content genie back in the bottle, and charge for admission -- appears to have gone bust. Onswipe and the startups that will inevitably follow in its wake are the final nail in the coffin of the dream of appification of magazines and other media content

Haven't yet explored to see what's beneath the marketing hype. And I'm less than excited about the Skype with its NSA tendrils being the vehicle of audio translations of human languages. But given the progress in: [i] automated translations of human texts; [ii] audio screenreaders; and [iii] voice-to-text transcription, this is one we saw coming. Slap the three technologies together and wait until processing power catches up to what's needed to produce a marketable experience. After all, the StarTrek scriptwriters saw this coming too.   Ray Kurzweil, now at Google, should get a lot of the pioneer credit here. His revolutionary optical character recognition algorithms soon found themselves redeployed in text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition technology. From Wikipedia: "Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition." Not bad for a guy the same age as my younger brother. But Microsoft's announcement here may be more vaporware than hardware in production and lines of executable code. Microsoft has a long history of vaporware announcements to persuade potential customers to hold off on riding with the competition.  And the Softies undoubtedly know that Google's human language text translation capabilities are way out in front and that the voice to text and text to speech API methods have already found a comfortable home in Android and Chromebook. What does Microsoft have that's ready to ship if anything? I'll check it out tomorrow. 

The FCC issued its formal ruling on net neutrality today, over 300 pages. http://goo.gl/aX4fQg Now the battle shifts to Congress, where legislation has been introduced to reverse the FCC decision and permit fast lane charges by FCC  for web businesses that can afford it. The rest of us would be stuck in the slow lane.  Don't miss the link to the "How We Won" page that I've highlighted. It's very impressive, a compact history of a massive citizen victory over government resistance and entrenched interests like Comcast and AT&T. 

A more in-depth look at the issue. Unstated: this is only the latest round of the Deep State fight against digital privacy that has periodically recurred since the World Wide Web first appeared on the scene. The good news: all previous attempts have failed since Pretty Good Privacy broke the U.S. encryption export barrier beginning in 1991. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#History

This official app is free, syncs your history across devices, and brings you the newest model improvements from OpenAI. With ChatGPT in your pocket, you'll find: Instant answers; Tailored advice; Creative inspiration; Professional input; Learning opportunities.

Thankfully, there's buddying technology to block computer facial-recognition algorithms. http://tinyurl.com/mzfyfra On the other hand, used Hallowe'en masks can usually be purchased inexpensively from some nearby school kids at this time of year. Now if I could just put together a few near-infrared LEDs to fry a license plate-scanner's view ...  

DoD announces that they want to go beyond Google. Lots more detail in the proposal description linked from the article. Interesting tidbits: [i] the dark web is a specific target; [ii] they want the ability to crawl web pages blocked by robots.txt; [iii] they want to be able to search page source code and comments.