This page has strategies for reducing your dependence on Microsoft. I'd like to submit that that page is really way too complex. Like any other massive company, it's better not to think of it as a monolithic entity but a tight coalition of many entities. Microsoft makes significant money in only two divisions, Windows and Office. It is no coincidence that the things that bother people most are how they handle Windows and Office.

Cold fusion, briefly hailed as the silver-bullet solution to the world's energy problems and since discarded to the same bin of quackery as paranormal phenomena and perpetual motion machines, will soon get a new hearing from Washington.

Despite being pushed to the fringes of physics, cold fusion has continued to be worked on by a small group of scientists, and they say their figures unambiguously verify the original report, that energy can be generated simply by running an electrical current through a jar of water.

I just discovered Pink Floyd.

Yeah, I'm behind the times. (My tastes have crept out in both directions from the late 1950s/early 1960s over the years; in the past I just recently got into pre-Equal Temperament (Bach) music, and I just got into the late 70's/early 80's apparently. Disco really impeded my 70s exploration, but I've discovered there was more to 70s pop then disco and disco wannabes. Sometime around 2025 I should catch up to, and subsequently pass, the present.)

Dotan Dimet has some comments on Iron Lute, which I think contains some misunderstandings about Iron Lute that mostly stem from the developer-centric view of Iron Lute y'all have seen so far. I posted a comment containing some follow-up on his post, and I replicate it here for posterity and RSS readers. Note it contains links to some of the actual code which I posted to provide evidence of how hard it will be to provide bi-directional text support in Iron Lute, so if you want to see some of my actual code, now's your chance. Comment I posted follows:

"Iron Lute, on the other hand, looks like another case of someone falling in love with the technology...."

I strongly disagree. Iron Lute is being created because there is no good platform to create LEO on. LEO is, with all due respect, a hack with regard to outlines, in the sense I can't build anything interesting on top of that, other then LEO. I don't care about outlines intrinsically and I look forward to the day I can actually do things with them. If a good platform existed (in a reasonable, non-Java language) I would have used it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, no such open platform exists.

Since 1996, a handful of foreign-policy wonks have been kicking around the idea of a "democracy caucus" at the U.N. Two administrations, first Bill Clinton's and then George W. Bush's, took quiet but significant steps in that direction. Now, according to Bush administration officials, the concept will be test-flown at the six-week meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that began on Monday in Geneva.

I am one of those people who is very down on the United Nations in its current form, believing it to be worse then useless. I think it is worse then useless because along with being nearly useless, without only some humanitarian programs to its credit, it seems to be impeding the creation of some group that wouldn't be so useless.

I have a case of the multi-disciplinary writer's block.

I'm having a hard time writing the outline saving code in Iron Lute. I have an essay I want to post here, but it is obstinately refusing to go into focus. (I may yet just post it in a nebulous state, as I'm not convinced it's ever going to focus, by its very nature, but I think it's important that I write it.) I also have a technical post on the inner workings of Iron Lute which I'm having a hard time writing; I've mostly written it, but it's quite dull.

Just a quick note: I'm still working on the XML save format for Iron Lute outlines. I'm trying to use a library I've put together for XML serialization and it's not going so well right now. I think it still has potential but I may need to re-work it into a "version 2", because version 1 is sucking pretty badly.

What is the purpose of computers in education?

To cut the feedback time down.

That is all they can do, and all they should do.

Why? Feedback is vital for learning. Without feedback, you have nothing that most people would think of as "learning".

Proper use of computers in education requires some "out-of-the-box" thinking. Proper use of computers would largely eliminate the test structures we have now, but anybody who proposes that is promptly shot as a heretic. (Have you noticed this schizophrenic approach to education reform, where we all agree that schools really need reform, but consider the way schools are doing things now holy, such that any significant reform is immediately discarded?)

Microsoft reacts to marketing pressure to make design decisions favoring running a few processes faster but then finds itself forced first to layer in backward compatibility and then to engage in a patch-and-kludge upgrade process until the code becomes so bloated, slow and unreliable that wholesale replacement is again called for.

Despite the obvious Linux slant, this is probably one of the most coherent discussions of the structural differences between the Linux kernel development process and the Windows kernel development process, resulting in the differences between the Linux kernel and the Windows kernel, that I've ever seen. Recommended.

We've been reduced to the status of consumers and nobody seems to object. Think of the imagery: a creature with a huge mouth and an enormous gut, no brain and no soul. Consumers get points for consuming junk, the more they consume, the more points they get. They can retrieve these if they can remember their PIN numbers because unlike the customers of another era who had names, consumers have numbers. When they've gorged enough, they can consume more, and they seem to believe that these points are bonuses....

And yet, there is no consumer rebellion. Men, women and children all press buttons and follow instructions like robots with nothing better to do. They're not customers demanding service, they're consumers attached to some enormous electronic teat that will feed them what it wants, when it wants.