Author: spierzchala

C|Net News has a great breakdown of this issue. [here]
C|Net’s Microsoft Blog has more. [here]
Here is the original story in The Stranger.
More in the NY Times.
Now that the bill has been defeated in the Washington State Senate (by a single vote), I no longer have any respect for Microsoft.
Shame on you Microsoft. You are now a complete pariah in my eye. An opportunistic parasite focused on sucking us dry, and not caring about making the world a better place. Your entire bank of social capital has been wiped out by this stupid, and misguided move.
Shame…Shame…Shame.

Business 2.0 pulls this nugget out of the SJ Mercury News:

Bill Coleman, CEO of Cassatt and SVLG board chairman, said he’s seen the cost of housing have a growing impact on businesses in his three decades in Silicon Valley. When he first arrived, the company he was building could afford to have all its employees locally. But over the years, Coleman said, it became increasingly difficult to pay mid-level employees the salaries they needed to afford the high cost of living in Silicon Valley. With his latest company, Coleman hired groups of engineers in Colorado Springs and Minneapolis, where housing costs are more reasonable. “You can hire really senior people that you can afford to pay big salaries,” Coleman said. “Or you can do the Google model and hire lots of people right out of college. But you can’t build a company long-term on either of those. You’ve got to be able to retain folks. And right now, housing costs are forcing those mid-tier employees out of Silicon Valley.”

REALLY?
Duh! This news is so 2001….

Good to see that the ancestral homeland now has its own eBay site — eBay Poland. [here]

Well, the sell-off of my geek gadgets and books is almost complete. The extra BEFSX41 went in the mail yesterday, and the Treo 90 is going in the mail in a few minutes. The iPod Shuffle (1GB) is on eBay right now.
All of this to pay the bills.
Poverty in the middle-class is hell. I hate it.
Atrios on the AMC. And on the definition of “high-income”.

Gregory Ng has a great post on being an ambassador for Mac. [here]
The question I have is: Apple, how are you exploiting this devoted team of followers? Are you rewarding them? Encouraging them?

Tim Bray. In BusinessWeek. On Web Services.
l33t.

The folks at NYU Secure Computing Services have developed a really cool open-source content distribution network (CDN) called CORAL.
This looks as though it has potential for us low-bandwidth hosters who get blasted when our content gets Scobelized or Slashdotted.
Via Jon Udell.

Jeff Nolan day here at the NI Factory. He points to an article on why a CRM company named Siebel is having trouble managing customer relationships. [here]
Hmmm…maybe they should engage some Accenture consultants to answer this for them.

Dare Obasanjo started singing the praises of RSS Bandit yesterday. [here]
I tried it. I’m hooked. Get it.
Sorry Nick.