Steve Balmer (paraphrased) says that the $56 Billion belongs to
the shareholders, and shouldn't be used for employee benefits.
But just how did Microsoft achieve the market dominance it now
enjoys, if not on the shoulders of its employees?

Balmer goes on to say that Microsoft is facing mounting threats
to its dominance by Open Source Software, and a growing perception
among the common computer user that Microsoft Windows just isn't 
secure enough to use for business.

I think Microsoft is getting bogged down with too many projects, 
changing targets, marketing hype that doesn't match its technological
gains, and the realization that the Open Source community is 
producing much better software, much faster, and it is only getting
better at it over time.

Internet Explorer hasn't been upgraded in years, and now Mozilla
FireFox 0.91 is the best browser on the planet. In other words, 
given enough time, Netscape wins the browser war.

Outlook and Outlook Express are becoming more irrelevant. Most 
people only use the email/address book capability of Outlook, and
Mozilla ThunderBird does a better job of handling email and contacts
than Outlook does. There are other upcoming offerings that will 
replace the calendaring features of Outlook. Actually, if you are 
running Linux, the alternative is already available to you:
Novell/Ximian Evolution.

The security problems with Internet Explorer and Outlook/Outlook
Express are too great to be ignored. Switching to FireFox/ThunderBird
is probably the single-best thing you can do to minimize your risk
while still using Microsoft Windows. This realization, should it 
become widespread, could undermine Microsoft in many ways, as it 
would untangle the consumer's reliance on Microsoft's bread and butter,
the operating system.

Office XP is Microsoft's flagship product now, but let's be honest:
how many more features could you possibly put into a productivity
suite? I think the 80/20 rule applies: 80% of Office users use only
20% of the features. In other words, 80% of the Microsoft Office users
in the world can choose to download, for free, the Open Source alternative
known as OpenOffice.org, and they can run this on Linux, Macintosh,
and Windows for true collaboration. Once a critical mass of users/managers
figure this out, Microsoft will have to start giving Office XP away
to compete.

They keep pushing back the release date of Longhorn, and taking
features out of the product. Administrators have been waiting for
Longhorn, the next major release of the Windows NT-based operating
system, for years now, and by the time it is finally released, it
may be too late to stem the tide of customers converting to Linux-based
solutions.

Balmer is worried. $56 Billion is a lot of cash, but a company of Microsoft's
size could burn through that pretty fast by using it to prop up their share
price and maintain credibility.

© 2004 Paul McNett       [/Computing/Opinion] permanent link

Every morning, my Linux box plugged into my amplifier plugged into speakers
in my bedroom starts up RealPlayer and connects to KQED, the San Francisco
affiliate of National Public Radio. As I can hear these speakers from most
areas of the house, I like to leave it on past morning shower time.

Using cron, it is easy enough to start KQED at 5 am with a crontab entry
such as:


	00 05 * * 0-6 realplay http://www.kqed.org/w/streamingfiles/kqed_real.ram


However, frequently enough (1-10 times per day), probably ultimately due to
network issues on the KQED side, the realplayer process kills itself, requiring
me to start it again manually. As I'm lazy, this never happens, and I end
up not being adequately informed for the rest of the day.

Now, being a good liberal citizen, I spent a half hour about 6 months ago
coming up with a solution using Python, my now-favorite programming language.
Basically, instead of my crontab looking like the above, it now calls a script
called kqedKeepAlive.py at 5 am, and another script called kqedKeepAliveKill.py
at 7 pm. Here is my crontab:


	# have bob edwards wake us up in the morning:
	01 05 * * 0-6 /home/pmcnett/pm-sc/pkm/kqedKeepAlive.py

	# turn off the kqed keepalive after 7pm:
	01 19 * * 0-6 /home/pmcnett/pm-sc/pkm/kqedKeepAliveKill.py


kqedKeepAlive will make sure kqed is always playing, and kqedKeepAliveKill will
make sure it will stay dead when I kill it at bedtime.

Anyway, here are the files:

	kqedKeepAlive.py
	kqedKeepAliveKill.py

You will probably have to tweak them to suit your specific needs.

© 2004 Paul McNett       [/Computing/Programming/Python] permanent link