Microsoft is...

…dead!

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they’d positioned themselves as a “media company” instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn’t understand. It was as if I’d told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

[…]

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called “Ajax.” And that was the second cause of Microsoft’s death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

“[E]veryone can see the desktop is over.” What does this mean for the “GNOME … and Development Platform”?

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.

Living in a college town, I can certainly relate to this. The number of students toting Apple hardware—iBooks, MacBooks, and iPods—seems significantly greater than that of students carrying Dell or HP laptops around. Whether at the library or in any of Athens’ coffee houses, all tables belong to Apple’s shiny white plastic machines.

Green Biotech Hackers

Interesting thought from a not-so-interesting article:

[Steward Brand] thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster are as overstated as the counterculture’s fears of computers turning into Big Brother. “Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational control machines into individual freedom machines,” he told Conservation magazine last year. “Where are the green biotech hackers?”

An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’, New York Times, February 27, 02007

Life Is Unfair; Graphic Design Is Hard

Step 1: spend some time designing something nice, for free.

Step 2: watch as someone else tries to reuse your work, fails miserably, and gets paid.

Step 3: sigh.

Piano Phase

I have a terrible memory so I'm always surprised when I remember events about my childhood. I'm particularly interested in those memories which have stuck with me over the years, events that didn't just come back to me one day but memories I know have always had, permanent memories of certain events.

One of those events is the first time I heard Steve Reich's "Piano Phase." I distinctively remember being absolutely amazed by that piece. It was unlike anything I had ever heard, which already made it interesting, but more importantly it was beautiful.

If you've never heard it, the Internet Archive has a recording of "Piano Phase" by Peter Aidu available under Creative Commons license.

While I'm on the topic of amazing things, you really ought to watch "In My Language," a short film about what language and communication mean to its author.

In other news: I got a pair of screenprints in a juried student exhibition three weeks ago! Quite happy about that.

Michael Dell on Supporting Linux

Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Inc. — and Richard Kind's long lost twin brother ;-) — on selling and offering support for Linux:

We love Linux, and we're doing our best to support the Linux community. We see lots of opportunity there. If the Linux desktops could converge at their cores, such a common platform would make it easier to support. Or, if there was a leading or highly preferred version that a majority of users would want, we'd preload it.

Mr. Dell opens up about Desktop Linux, DesktopLinux.com, March 7, 02006

Seth Godin Speaks at Google

Seth Godin speaks to Google employees about marketing; a video worth watching for all GNOME “marketers” out there.

[I]t's thinking about… not that you deserve the conversation with regards to how good [your product] is but how can you cause conversations to take place.

EU-lympics

The 2006 Winter Olympic Games are over and I have not watched a single minute of it. What can I say; I'm just not into sports. But I did check the final medal count and the ranking by number of gold medals won is:

                gold      total
Germany          11        29
USA               9        25
Austria           9        23
Russian Fed.      8        22
Canada            7        24
Sweden            7        14
Korea             6        11
Switzerland       5        14
Italy             5        11
France            3         9
Netherlands       3         9
Estonia           3         3
Norway            2        19
China             2        11
Czech Rep.        1         4
Croatia           1         3
Australia         1         2
Japan             1         1
Finland           0         9
Poland            0         2
Belarus           0         1
Bulgaria          0         1
Great Britain     0         1
Slovakia          0         1
Ukraine           0         2
Latvia            0         1

The europhile in me could not resist creating the following revised ranking:

                gold      total
European Union   42        116     wow!
USA               9         25
Russian Fed.      8         22
Canada            7         24
Korea             6         11
Switzerland       5         14
Norway            2         19
China             2         11
Croatia           1          3
Australia         1          2
Japan             1          1
Belarus           0          1
Bulgaria          0          1
Ukraine           0          2

Darwin Day

February 12th is Charles Darwin's birthday — his 197th this year — and your opportunity to celebrate Darwin Day.

Happy Darwin Day everybody!

A Logo For GUADEC

Quim Gil announced about a month ago that, instead of having a different logo every year for GUADEC, the GUADEC organizing committee wanted to create a single logo for all future editions of the event and that it was organizing a design competition to find that new logo. That competition, which stipulates that the new logo should contain the word GUADEC and the GNOME foot, is coming to an end on January 31st 02006.

Generally speaking, I do like the GNOME logo. But I also find it extraordinarily hard to combine with anything, except perhaps for bold letters. I'm not sure why this is but I believe that it might be 1) because it is non-geometric and hence hard to anchor to external elements and 2) because it lacks a strong center or balancing point and hence is hard to align to external elements. Additionally, it is a fairly large mass of a single color or tone and therefore requires complementary elements to be at least as strong and pregnant as it is. Individually these characteristics are OK but the GNOME logo combines them all which throws me off every time I try to do something with it.

To be fair to Jimmac — he created the current version of the GNOME foot from tigert's original design — I want to make it clear that those reasons why I find it difficult to work with his logo are obviously subjective and only reflect the fact that my designer skills are limited. Many seem to have no problems (re)using that logo in their own projects.

Anyway, after a couple of weeks of trying to design a logo according to the rules I finally decided that I would leave out the GNOME foot and that I would instead create something that I liked, even if it meant that it couldn't be entered in the competition. At this point it wasn't about the contest anymore but about my completing this project for myself. One of my earliest ideas included a word balloon to represent the exchange of words and ideas taking place at a conference — someone else actually had the same idea. I reworked it to come up with this:

I believe the logo would work well in colors too and could easily be used to create t-shirts, bags and other conference trinkets. It could also be adapted to include, where appropriate, the name of the hosting city. The typeface used for the word GUADEC is FreeSans.

There is no god

“Sir,” Saint-Savin replied, “the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void.”

The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco

and …

Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That's just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” […] Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

There Is No God, Penn Jillette

… all on the same day.