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I’m happy that Maker Faire in San Mateo is having great success, judging from today’s experience. Our family attempted to go today to take part in the clothing swap, mostly. But when we got there, all the parking lots were overflowing/closed and they had people walking around with bullhorns asking cars to turn around and park elsewhere.

It would have been nice if they had updated the website with this information. That could have saved us burning all that gas, just to turn around and go back home.

If you’re going, my guess is you should arrive right when the doors open in order to get a spot.

Or even better: take public transportation.

One side benefit for the local economy from this somewhat “wasted” trip: we spent some money at a local German butcher on the way home. Mmm. Delicious German sausages!

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Vista Service Pack 1 is in the can. It’s no coincidence that Vista SP1 and Server 2008 are “here” at the same time. They’re one and the same apart from the differences in “configuration”, i.e. Client vs. Server stuff. Server 2008 is the product that should have been released in a “Client” version under the Vista branding, but Microsoft caved to enormous pressure from the market and released it a little over a year too early.

Microsoft undoubtedly knew they could never afford to release a Server version in the state the code was in at Vista release. Corporations running mission critical things on Server would never adopt anything not rock solid. So Microsoft took the time they should have put into the “Client” version to finish things off properly for Server. Hindsight 20/20 and all that.

What can be expected of Windows “7″ after this? My guess is Microsoft will cave to market pressure again and release something not quite ready for the consumer market. With Vista, part of the reason for releasing too early was that Windows XP seemed to be getting too old. For Windows “7″ part of the reason will likely be a perceived need to catch up with Apple’s OS X.

With Vista, Microsoft was incredibly open about providing early builds to lots of people in order to get the quality right. And yet it wasn’t enough. It also seems that the biggest “achievement” that came from the openness was that people weren’t much impressed when the final product came out. In my view that’s a bit of a shame, because there are lots of truly great innovations in Vista (one of which is WPF). Microsoft will probably be more tight-lipped about Windows “7″ as a result. They might take a more Apple-like approach and keep things secret until the last minute. Surprise the world when they release Vista’s successor.

The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand what it is about Apple’s offer that makes it so compelling. It’s not OS X. It’s not iLife or iWork. It’s how it’s all wrapped up in an end-to-end package. Beautiful, well performing hardware; good OS; good everyday software with features that people find useable and useful, integrated with revenue generating .Mac Internet services. And all because Apple has control of the entire chain, from hardware to software and services. Heck, they even control the retail experience.

Microsoft doesn’t have an answer for that. They play a different game. They play in many arenas and with many, many different partners. The ecosystem Microsoft provides the basis for is much, much bigger than Apple’s. Microsoft can never be Apple. And I don’t think they should even try to be.

I’m hoping that Microsoft will not cave in to market pressure but chart their own course for Windows “7″. Perhaps kick off work for another “NT” project (from the Dave Cutler/NT 3.x days) and focus on creating an operating system that is focused on the total consumer experience. Throw away all backwards compatibility in the consumer market, if needed (ironically, sort of like Apple did for OS X.) Provide backwards compatibility through virtualization or by keeping a separate line for corporate mission-critical applications. But mainly chart a course that doesn’t look too much at Apple or Linux or anything else, but follows new visions for what can be done with software running on ever more capable hardware. They have enough smart people to lead the way. There’s no need to follow anyone.

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Categories: Opinion, Vista
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After looking through the comments to Jeff Atwood’s recent post on software product keys, I noticed that quite a few went down the rabbit-hole of  free versus paid software. People suggesting that if you don’t like paying for software, typing in license keys, managing them and other hassles, you can always go to using free software.

I can see where these people are coming from. I use plenty of free software myself: Windows Live Writer, Audacity, WinMerge, Process Explorer, PowerMenu, WiX, Notepad2, Firefox, Reflector, JAlbum, Gallery, Linux (contribs.org), Paint .NET, etc. etc. etc. Many of these are essential for productive work and I’m glad they let me accomplish things.

In October 2002 I attended a talk by Richard Stallman, where he was spreading the gospel of free software, which is often equated with open source software, or OSS. It wasn’t the first time I’d started thinking about the implications of OSS, but his comments sparked further puzzlement: Is it really possible for programmers to make a living on open source software? Seeing the comments on Jeff’s blog brought back that question.

It seems to me that a lot of the more successful open source projects out there had their origin in the world of what I want to call the free-conomy, or perhaps the carefree-conomy. It’s the world all around us consisting of people who do not have to worry about real-world problems connected to making a living: Students, living on their parents’ money or borrowed money; programmers employed by large corporations (that have other means of generating income that enable them to pay the programmer to work on free software); professors in tenured positions at universities, contributing as part of their research. You get the idea.

I’d be curious to know how many of the commenters to Jeff’s post fall into that category. I’d also be curious to know how all the people who contribute to open source, or free software make a living, or how they sustain themselves. These are honestly things I’m curious about. If you’re one of them, please tell me.

I think once you transition from the free-conomy to the reality-based economy (”real life”?), your perspective changes. You start realizing that you need an income to pay the rent, clothe yourself and your family, buy food, utilities and transportation. You begin to see that if you don’t pay for the music you like to listen to, the programs you like to use, the books you like to read, the movies you like to watch and the games you like to play, the people who produce those things will not be able to support themselves, and thus there may come a time when you will no longer have that music, those programs, those books, those movies or the games.

So all the hassles that the producers of software or other digitizable content make you go through to access their creations begin to seem like a small inconvenience to pay for the privilege.

Of course, you can still debate what a fair price for such creations is, but that’s a topic for a different post. You can also debate the principles of “fair use” of the creations you may have paid for. That’s also a topic for another post.

What’s your perspective on the implications of open source software for people who make a living at software programming/development?

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I downloaded and installed the latest version of the Media Center SDK just now, and was a bit surprised to see that WPF apps are now officially deprecated as a supported way of extending Windows Media Center on Vista. There’s no big announcement around this so far, it’s almost just a footnote in the “What’s New” section:

Deprecated features

The following features have been deprecated:

• Hosting for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) browser applications (XBAPs).
• The Triple-tap/Soft-keyboard ActiveX control for hosted HTML applications.
• Support for using alternative shells to run and host HTML applications.

The reason I’m surprised is that Microsoft announced the support for WPF based extensibility apps at PDC05 with some fanfare.

I guess interest among developers just hasn’t been there for WPF-based Media Center apps, and Microsoft needs to make judgment calls on where to invest in their extensibility platform. The rest of the deprecated features seem to have been made for the same reason: limited interest among developers for these features. In addition I think there might be issues of an architectural nature that just make the three things that got dropped too expensive to maintain or improve.

I’m sad about this development, mostly because I still don’t see a great set of development and design tools around for MCML. WPF seems to me to have a whole lot more momentum than MCML (WPF has the Expression suite of tools and has been billed as the “GDI for the next 20 years”), but who knows what may be coming for Windows 7, or even an earlier interim update for Media Center?

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Categories: Microsoft, Opinion, Software development, Vista, WPF
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It’s almost a sacrilege to admit it for someone working with traditional PCs for a living, but I’m just blown away by the new stuff Apple announced today. Their marriage of sleek, elegant hardware, fabulous software and web services just screams and screams “smart” at me. Now that I think about it, I’ve been blown away at almost every single announcement within the last three or four years.

But.

Aluminum?

Yes, it’s recyclable. And it’s highly desired by recyclers.

You know why?

Because it’s one of the most energy-wasting metals to extract from the ore. The more recycled aluminum you can get your hands on, the more money you can make.

And now they make the entire iMac shell out of the stuff? Ugh.

So Steve touts the recycling aspect in his presentation, making everyone think “Wow, Apple is doing a great thing. Great for the environment.”

They’re not doing a great thing. And it’s not great for the environment.

But of course they don’t tell you that.

See my previous post for more details on how much energy goes into making aluminum, illustrated by soda cans.

Now, this is about the only bad thing I have to say about the new stuff that came out of the buildings down the street today. Everything else sounds and looks fantastic. One of these days I’ll have to break down and get one of these JesusMachines.

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Over the last few months I have read bloggers and journalists complain and complain about the software that you find on PCs you buy from “major” manufacturers.

I’m tired of them. Very, very tired.

Yes, PCs get loaded with software that the “experts” do not want. And they all keep talking about it. Can you say “echo chamber”?

Let’s see. Where else in life do you find things you didn’t ask for but got as part of the deal anyway?

Buying processed foods at the supermarket? Check. No mention of health risks.
Getting a BigMac from McDonald’s? Check. See above.
Getting married? Check. No mention of hard times and fights.
Going to the movies? Check. Advertisements for half an hour before the show.
Watching TV? Check. Commercial breaks every 15 friggin’ minutes.
Credit cards? Check. Rude awakening after three years of paying the minimum payment.
Buying a car? Check. Pushy salespeople and immediate depreciation of what you just bought.
Surfing the web? Check. Google keeps tabs on you.
Listening to the radio? Check. See watching TV.
Driving on the highway? Check. Ugly billboards in your face, rude drivers everywhere.
Sitting home alone quietly reading a book? Check. Telemarketing calls.

Get the picture? It’s everywhere. Things you didn’t ask for. Why complain so much about software on computers when the rest of our lives are so full of crap that we probably don’t want?

Even when you install just the bare Windows operating system you get tons of stuff you probably don’t want. On Vista you have User Account Control prompts, a neverending stream of updates, WordPad, Solitaire, Purble Place and ”services” running that you don’t know about. Yes, it gives you the impression of being clean, but then why was there such an outcry over the bundling of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player way back when?

I don’t have a solution for any of these problems. But I’m tired of the whining and moaning.

There are so many other areas of life that are in more desperate need of fixing.

Start there, please.

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I’m nowhere near the crazy level of blog reading that Scoble goes through. I have 119 blogs in my google reader list. But I’m beginning to have blog reading fatigue.

You know how people who give you blogging advice say that you need to post at least once a day, maybe even twice or more? I don’t like that. When I see the number of “unread” posts since my last reading session, and it’s over ten, I’m very turned off and feel like it will be a chore to get through that many posts. So I skip it.

I’ve unsubscribed from a few blogs that went totally nuts and posted five or six items per day. With those blogs, if you stay away for a few days you have a mountain of stuff to go through. No thanks.

So what I do now most of the time is check blogs in this order:

1. People I know personally
2. People I’ve at least met
3. People I’ve read for for a long time
4. People who are “well known” (A-list bloggers?)
5. People who blog about things I don’t know much about, but want to learn

Everything else just piles up until I feel that I really have a lot of time. I think I need to unsubscribe more.

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It used to be that we were all inextricably connected to the planet and each other. We lived in small villages or other little communities, got our sustenance from farming or gathering, and bartered with each other. The baker would trade bread for horseshoes. The doctor would trade consultations for eggs. The farmer would trade grains for plows. Everyone took as much as they needed to live their lives. Manual and animal labor limited the amount of resources we could harvest. We had nowhere to put our waste, but nearby our communities, so we knew how to use and re-use things to their utmost potential.

Today, we have no idea how our actions impact the environment or society around us and far away. Machines powered by fossil fuels enable us to extract as many natural resources as we want, crave or desire from the planet. Industrial processes turn those resources into “stuff” for us to buy and use, and often use up and throw away. And machines transport our waste away from our communities.

Most of us are completely disconnected from the natural world by using money to buy stuff. All we know is that this widget or that gadget costs X.

We don’t know how much energy was used in making it. We don’t know what raw materials went into it. We don’t know how the raw materials were transported. We don’t know how production affected the environment. We don’t know how much the people working on it were paid, and whether that was a fair payment. We don’t know how discarding it will impact the environment.  

We don’t know anything except the price. And very often the people making the gadget externalize lots of costs. Especially the costs of throwing it away and how that contributes to slowly making our planet a pigsty for us to slowly suffocate in our own waste. Along with all other living beings. Everything we use and throw away still stays on the planet. It may not be in our neighborhood because it gets transported “away”, but it goes somewhere. We don’t know exactly where. We don’t know exactly how.

Since money is all we know, money seems to be the only answer to modifying behavior. That means that if a society wants to influence the way its members behave, the only way to do that is through taxation. If buying gas for your car causes the atmosphere to heat up, tax it some more to make people think of other ways of getting around. If buying a computer will cause toxic chemicals to leak into our water supplies once it’s discarded, tax it some more so people will think of other ways of accomplishing what they think they need a computer for. And use the taxes to support responsible re-use and final disposal, to support research into ways to design products with re-use in mind, to support mindsets that encourage living sustainably and lightly on the earth.

I know that lots of people bristle at the idea of taxes. It just seems to me that we as a society don’t understand anything but money, so we need to use monetary means to get to societal ends. The biggest of which is our obligation to future generations of the human species to enjoy life as we enjoy it right now.

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Categories: Environment, Opinion, Sustainability
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I’ve noticed a theme over the last couple of months, reading lots of blogs ranging from marketing to money management to coding to networking. The theme is “love”, in the form of giving something away, teaching something, showing someone how they learned something new.

Kathy Sierra most recently posted about it here. Keith Ferrazzi’s book “Never Eat Alone” is all about giving without expecting anything in return. Hugh MacLeod at gapingvoid uses cartoons he’s “giving away” on the back of business cards to promote Stormhoek wine. Guy Kawasaki showed how he made a photo-diary using iPhoto, Comic Life and Skitch. The Simple Dollar is all about sharing tips on money management and how to get out of debt, and there is a TON of good information there (I don’t know how that guy gets anything else done, he posts so much it makes my head hurt).

I’m just amazed that there’s so much great information out there, free for the taking. I hope to be able to contribute just a little in my own way as well. So far I’ve got a few posts out on Windows Presentation Foundation where I talk about some things I’ve learned.

I’m still struggling with one problem, though. How do you find time to write good posts with trying to read over a hundred blogs on all kinds of topics, distilling some of the things you learn into something useful? There is so much good stuff to link to out there, but would it provide value if I linked as well? How would that provide value? I like the link posts from Steve Rubel, but there are almost too many links in each post to really follow. I used to almost be unable to keep up with the Scobleizer’s posts, but he’s calmed down a bit recently. His link blog I don’t even try to follow for fear of suffering a breakdown from information overload. Oh, and I have a “real life” as well. Can’t spend all my time reading blogs and writing my own rants.

Something to keep working on, I guess.

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Robert X. Cringely says that what Microsoft is doing with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in Vista is help the media companies reselling us stuff we already have. He talks about how the media companies have been successful at this once already: when we bought CDs to replace our vinyl records, and when we bought DVDs to replace our video tapes.

True.

Then he goes on to saying that all the new Vista DRM technology will form the basis for selling us the same stuff once more, but this time protected from piracy.

I would add the following: The original “re-sell” happened to work because we saw value in going from analog to digital. No more worrying about scratches on the records and deteriorating magnetic tapes. We got better sound and picture quality to boot. Deep down though, I think, we wanted to make sure that we got content that would survive “forever” and be ours “forever”. Well, the transition to digital accomplished that.

So what can possibly drive this next wave of reselling us the same stuff? High-definition digital video (I think Robert Scoble said something like this a while back too). It’s the last chance the studios have to resell us the same stuff once more. And this time they want to get it right: no piracy, hence all the DRM technology.

I can’t wait for the mass market to wake up and find out how buggy, error-prone and restrictive the whole high-definition-with-DRM thing will be. It may not happen until it’s too late. I’m almost hoping that things will be so bad that everyone will just say “I don’t need to own those stinkin’ movies or the expensive equipment to play them. I’ll just invite some friends over and we’ll make music together or tell stories”.

Nothing beats the high-definition of your imagination.

And maybe we should worry less about “owning” hollywood-generated content. Maybe we should focus more on generating our own.

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