Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo

This NYT article starts with the sentence “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”

A Giant Bid That Shows How Tired the Giant Is - New York Times via kwout

My own take is this is a desperate act, an admission that Google is dominating Microsoft in the state of the art area of online or so called “cloud” applications. MS, of course, still owns the desktop especially in larger organizations.

I don’t think this merger would work, even if it gets by the EU regulators who have seen MS as being anti-competitive in the past. The US regulators have been either asleep or for sale regarding MS’s behavior. These companies have very different cutures and technology bases.

kwout - a cool tool for bloggers

It’s really cliche to blog about blogging. I have found a very cool tool for bloggers call kwout. It lets you grab a section of an html page and insert that section into your blog post. More than an image grabber, it creates a link to the web page. Here is a post on this blog using kwout.

Worth trying.

Chinese Hackers Penetrate Petagon?

There’s an article on Yahoo news asking if reports that the Chinese army has succeeded in hacking into a Pentagon computer system. The Chinese deny this. True? False? I don’t think we’ll know for sure. Can you imagine the US military leadership admitting it, even if it did happen? Or the Chinese admitting to trying and failing?

Has there been anything good coming here from China recently? Ever since the poisoned dog food, all news has been bad. Perhaps we need to consider “living locally” to a greater degree?

E Text Editor - Recommended!

I have been using a text editor called E on windows for some time now. I’m one of those programming dinosaurs that dislike IDE’s with a passion. Programming is about code. End of story. I also do my html and css by hand with a text editor. BTW I am stuck on windows at my work.

E  brings to windows the functionality of  TextMate on OSX.  Very good stuff! Highly recommended. Not free, but inexpensive at $35.

What prompted me to write about E was an email I got from E’s developer. I reported a minor bug a few days back, and today I got an email thanking me for the report and providing a link to new version of the program with the bug fixed. Is that a responsive company or what?

Microsoft Dead?

In Microsoft is Dead, Paul Graham says “Microsoft’s biggest weakness is that they still don’t realize how much they suck.” He describes how Web 2.0 breaks the desktop monopoly MS has owned since the late 80’s.

Good read. How long before major organizations decide to diversify off the MS platform? Couldn’t happen too soon to suit me.