Depression:Hardcoded?

Researchers found that violence in adults could result from the interaction between an abusive childhood and two different versions of a DNA switch that controls a gene called monoamine oxidase. Both childhood abuse and a particular version of the switch are needed to give a high chance of a person's becoming violent. In other words, then, it is nature with nurture that is the key, and not nature versus nurture.

Causes of depression:
The story starts with a gene called 5-HTT that controls the uptake of a chemical called serotonin into nerve cells. Serotonin carries signals between nerve cells and helps to regulate a person's mood. Persistently low levels of it are thought to cause depression. Several antidepressants, including Prozac, are thought to work by blocking the uptake of serotonin into nerve cells. If it hangs around longer, it produces a stronger signal.

People can inherit different versions of a region of DNA—known as a promoter region—that is responsible for switching 5-HTT on and off

5-HTT-promoters come in two flavours, known as “short” and “long”. Since people inherit one version of this promoter from their mother and one from their father, they can have two shorts, two longs, or one of each

Severe stress alone will not cause depression; the sufferer must have the short promoter variant. And the two-thirds of the population that have this must suffer severe stress before they are likely to become depressed.

The Anthromorphic explanation ?

Why are critical values so perfect in our universe? Are there infinite universes where these critical numbers can take all possible values?

So an infinity of universes with infinities of critical values and an infinity of universes with the same values as ours, but split from our universe on account of each decision taken ( Like the schroedinger's cat example). Should really try to understand Cantors infinity of infinities. Gangu first intriduced me to the concept and for almost 15 years now, I'm no closer to understanding it, apart from the fact that "All infinities are not created equal :o) "


If protons were 0.2 percent heavier, they could decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms. If the electromagnetic force were 4 percent weaker, there would be no hydrogen and no normal stars. If the weak interaction were much weaker, hydrogen would not exist; if it were much stronger, supernovae would fail to seed interstellar space with heavy elements. If the cosmological constant were much larger, the universe would have blown itself apart before galaxies could form.

DNA Computers:

After a longish time lag, have just started understanding the beauty of organisation of DNA. HAve no idea yet about how DNA computers work. The following article offers tantalising glimples of what it could be....

DNA is also a wonderful way to store information. One gram of genetic material, which would occupy about one cubic centimeter, can hold as much information as 1 trillion CDs, according to Adleman. It's also incredibly cheap: Commercial labs sell a molecule of DNA for about one-thousand-trillionth of a cent. The cost is about $30 for a DNA sequence big enough to compute on. Intel sells its latest P4 chip for more than $500. "DNA has been storing the blueprint of life for several billion years," says Adleman. "Its powers are an untapped legacy for the 21st century."

billions of years of evolution have pushed cells to the brink of what thermodynamics says is possible. Take ligase, a molecule whose job it is to stick strands of DNA together. With just one joule of energy -- the amount of energy a human expends to lift one kilogram one meter, ligase molecules can perform 20x10 to the 18th operations, Adleman says. That's a million times a million times a million times 20 operations. Such efficiency could push computing to new levels since electronics are limited by the amount of power -- and the heat it gives off -- needed to run increasingly sophisticated operations.

In the lab, Adleman made a strand of DNA to represent each city and the path between each city. He then encoded the sequences so that a strand representing a road would connect to any two strands representing a city according to the rules of DNA binding. Then he mixed trillions of copies of each strand in a test tube. Within seconds, the strands wove themselves together in a myriad of possible combinations.

Over a period of time, Adleman performed a series of biochemical reactions to eliminate the wrong answers -- strands encoding routes that either started or ended in the wrong city, those that visited a city more than once, and so on. When all the wrong answers had been destroyed, Adleman was able to look under the microscope and find only strands that carried the right answer.

Adleman's experiment used just seven cities, a problem that isn't hard to solve on modern computers. But Adleman's biological computation showed that DNA has the potential to solve far more complex problems than even the most advanced electronic computers can. The fastest supercomputer wouldn't be able to solve a problem with more than about 50 cities, Adleman says. He believes that a test tube full of DNA could solve the problem with as many as 200 cities.

. Take the Traveling Salesman problem. The DNA in the test tube produced 100 trillion answers in less than one second. Most of those answers were repeats -- and incorrect. Adleman had to discard the erroneous answers using lab procedures that took about a week.

O Reilly again !

Could'nt get my fill of O'Reilly today. Makes excellent reading !

On where the Net is heading

The new medium will eventually drive the development of new intermediaries who help people to find the content they want. (Think google and the web.)

I'd say that you want to watch the folks who are figuring out that applications are no longer local to a single machine. Whether it's p2p or web services or distributed computation, we're moving to a world captured by Dave Stutz's great phrase, "software above the level of a single device."


individual hackers -- the folks who are comfortable enough with computers to make them do what they want, and who aren't dependent on vendor-supplied solutions -- show us future directions. Eventually entrepreneurs take what the hackers have done and make it more accessible for ordinary users. And then someone figures out how to turn it into a platform on which the cycle can repeat at a higher level.

but the ultimate outcome is what I call "building the internet operating system." The question is what kind of operating system it will be -- a "one ring to rule them all" OS like Windows, or a "small pieces loosely joined" OS like Linux and the existing suite of internet and web technologies.

Microsoft has many advantages, but far from a lock on the future. The days of their operating system monopoly are over. They've been saying this, and working furiously to enter new markets

I find Macromedia Central fascinating, because I do think that we're deconstructing the browser these days. Central is one of several attempts to take the web apart and put it together in new ways.( O Reilly is now on the board of Macromedia Directors- Ramki)

We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software. The frameworks that enable the manipulation and distribution of that data are yet to be defined. Flash does enable great cross-platform interfaces using a small client footprint (orders of magnitude smaller than Java), so if we can just open up the right kind of innovation and sharing on top of that platform, a lot of great stuff can happen.


"small pieces loosely joined." This is the current architecture of the internet. Tools like Flash and Central are really useful, but they don't currently support that architecture. However, I believe there is an opportunity for them to play better on the Internet, and by doing so, to become even more successful than they already are.

Air Guitar, by Dave Hickey. The subtitle says a lot about the book: "Essays on Art and Democracy." The essay I've been pointing to a lot is called "The Birth of the Big Beautiful Art Market." It describes the way Harley Earl of GM turned the marketing of automobiles "from being about what they do to what they mean" (or some such -- I don't have the book with me to check the quote.) His point was that as industries become commoditized, as is now happening in the computer market, intangibles play a greater role in product differentiation. Apple has been a pioneer in marketing computers for what they mean rather than what they do. Everything from the 1984 ad to "Think Different" speaks to the self image of the user who chooses an Apple product.

Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. I'm not a big baseball fan, but this book is a revelation. Anyone in business should read it. It describes the superior results that come when you throw away what you think you know, the accepted wisdom of an industry, and rebuild your efforts around a deeper understanding of what matters in your success. A wonderful insight into what happens when statistics become more than just numbers, but, to use the wonderful phrasing of pioneering baseball statistician Bill James, "acquire the power of language."

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christenson
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, by Lawrence Lessig
Small Pieces Loosely Joined, by David Weinberger

Starbucks !

I'll never forget the day I mistakenly ordered a 10 Dinar awful tasting Starbucks at Dubai Airport.

But have been pretty fascinated about what drives the company's success. This article does'nt answer it, though makes an interesting read.

From one coffee-bean store in 1971 (the outlet still in Pike Place Market), Starbucks now has 6,458, mostly in the U.S. and in all but one state (South Dakota)—so far. That number will click relentlessly upward, as steady as an atomic clock, advancing at least once every eight hours, three times every day, 23 times in a week, 100 times a month. By the end of this year, during which Starbucks expects a record $4 billion in coffee

Though Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spices dates to 1971, the Starbucks Corporation of today wasn't born until August 1987, when new owner Schultz launched his marketing strategy: "More than retail, but not a restaurant," as he explains in his 1997 autobiography that details the birth of a company and an industry—and his eureka moment when he suddenly realized that selling specialty coffee by the cup was a profitable entrée to the land of steamed milk and honey. Until then, Starbucks was essentially a bean store.

it wasn't until the sixth store opened, at Fourth Avenue and Spring Street 19 years ago this month, that Starbucks introduced its coffee bar

we are part of our customers' daily routine, often crossing a street could interrupt that routine

But big as it is, Starbucks has cornered only 7 percent of the overall coffee market

that its customers choose among retailers primarily on the basis of product quality, service, and convenience, and, to a lesser extent, on price," referring, perhaps, to the $4.75 Frappuccino

choices include tall, grande, and venti, Starbuckese for small, medium, and large). Its ice cream is "superpremium," its beverages "expertly crafted," and its product line "best of class." Starbucks sees all that as part of its coffee "culture," which it guards carefully.

Tim O Reilly speaks about how MS almost won the Web

The antitrust suit and Judge Jackson's finding of fact have focused on how Microsoft used its operating system dominance to wrest control of the Web browser market from Netscape. Perhaps even more significant is the untold story of Microsoft's attempts to corner the Web server market. As someone whose company competes directly with Microsoft, (we sell a Web server called WebSite that runs on Windows NT, and we are active in promoting Perl, Linux and other open-source technologies), I've been privy to some of the not-so-small details that have guided the course of this recent history. And, it seems to me that if it weren't for the work of a small group of independent open-source software developers, the Justice Department intervention might have come too late not just for Netscape but the Web as a whole.


Judge Jackson made the astute point that the browser is a kind of middleware and, though it uses the features of the operating system, it provides additional "applications programming interfaces" (API) of its own. The most familiar of these aren't APIs like Win32, which describes how to write programs for Windows, but rather languages and protocols like HTML, Javascript and HTTP. Anyone who runs a Web site is intimately familiar with the attempts by both Microsoft and Netscape to turn these open standards to their advantage by introducing proprietary incompatibilities into the version of HTML recognized by their browsers. But the APIs that have turned out to matter don't just reside in the browser.

Judge Jackson's analysis completely avoided the server side of the equation -- and it is the server which has turned out to be the real next-generation platform

most interesting new applications of the past few years don't reside on the PC at all, but on remote Web servers. I'm talking about Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade, Yahoo Maps and so on

The company clearly has a monopoly on client-side operating systems and has consistently tried to use that monopoly to extend its leverage to any new platform it can.


Originally IIS, Web server software that runs only on the NT operating system, was bundled "free" with a version of NT called NT Server. Web server vendors such as Netscape and O'Reilly responded by pointing out in our advertising and PR that if customers ran our third-party Web server software on NT Workstation (a less expensive version of NT, which came without the IIS Web server software), they would end up with a more powerful server than Microsoft's IIS running on NT Server -- and it would cost less too.


Much as it had done by bundling the browser with Windows 98, Microsoft was bundling an application -- the IIS Web server -- as part of an operating system, (NT Server). But in this case, the company offered another version of the same operating system without the bundle, (NT Workstation). It seemed natural to competitors to offer our products on top of the version of the operating system that came without IIS.

It did not, however, please Microsoft that we did so. In June 1996 Microsoft responded by changing the license to NT Workstation to prohibit its use as a server platform. (At first, the company went further, and actually crippled the version of TCP/IP provided in NT Workstation, but the outcry from users forced it to backtrack.)


Microsoft argued, quite rightly, that it had the right to create two different versions of NT, with different price points, and different functionality. But the company went a step further, and used its operating system license (and more specifically the license to the parts of the operating system that implemented TCP/IP, an industry standard protocol) to prohibit the use of third-party applications that duplicated the functionality of Microsoft's more expensive platform.



The main point is that in each case, Microsoft used its power over the operating system to tilt the playing field in its favor, doing its utmost to crush the competition in a hotly contested Internet application area. In the browser arena, Microsoft bundled a browser into the operating system that runs most of the world's PCs and then created obstacles for Netscape to package its browser on new PCs. In the server arena, Microsoft used a very similar tactic; it bundled the IIS Web server software with the NT operating system and then created roadblocks and financial disincentives for NT users to use alternate server applications. As a result, Microsoft was able to reserve the greatest slice of Web server space on NT for itself.


But Microsoft's operating system is not nearly as entrenched in the server world as it is in that of the PC. So, once the company effectively blocked third-party Web server vendors on NT, Microsoft next set its sights not just on servers that ran NT, but on all Web servers. It was widely reported that during the summer of 1996 (that same summer that Microsoft revised its NT Workstation license to disallow its use as a server platform), Bill Gates told securities analysts that he considered Apache, rather than Netscape, to be his company's chief competitor in the Web server space

Microsoft's IIS is today the number two Web server -- with 25 percent market share to Apache's 54 percent

The infamous "Halloween Documents," internal Microsoft documents analyzing a possible response to Linux describe a strategy of "extending" the "commodity protocols" on which open source projects depend, as a way of denying open source an entry into the market.



it is clear that if not for Apache's continued dominance on the server side, the protocols and APIs on which the Web depends would have belonged almost entirely to Redmond. (The Apache Group's firm embrace of open standards is one of the great unsung stories of the Web, and a key part of the magic that has kept its innovation alive.)

. If Microsoft, having trounced Netscape, hadn't been surprised by the unexpected strength of Apache, Perl, FreeBSD and Linux, I can easily imagine a squeeze play on Web protocols and standards, which would have allowed Microsoft to dictate terms to the Web developers who are currently inventing the next generation of computer applications

MS Failures

In 1993, Microsoft hoped to appeal to the masses of "multimedia PC" buyers (that is, PCs with both a CD-ROM drive and a sound card, revolutionary at the time) by introducing a line of software called Microsoft Home. More than 100 products were launched in rapid succession over 18 months, from childhood creativity (Fine Artist) to a cartoony "social interface" to make Windows appear friendlier to the pathologically computer phobic (1995's Microsoft Bob, a much-maligned happy face with geek glasses). Microsoft quickly discontinued more Home products than most other consumer software publishers released, and the brand itself eventually disappeared. The Encarta Encyclopedia was one of the few titles to successfully leave Home alive.


, Microsoft tried its hands at toys, introducing the ActiMates line of interactive plush in 1997. The toys reacted by talking and moving, especially when wirelessly activated by a software program or TV show

Microsoft at Work, an effort to embed Windows into copiers and other office machines, failed miserably. So did Microsoft's initial forays into portability: WinPad (handheld PCs) and Windows for Pen Computing (pen-based tablet computers).

Microsoft has had successes. Its mouse and keyboard business is highly regarded for creating innovative products, from the ball-less IntelliMouse Optical to the odd-shaped yet comfortable Natural Keyboard

The new server version of Windows for corporations, Windows Server 2003, evolved from Windows NT and Windows 2000 and is lauded by Davis as "an enterprise-grade operating system without too many qualifications." Two Microsoft corporate server applications, Exchange Server for e-mail and SQL Server for databases, likewise have established themselves. Research firms Gartner and IDC both place Microsoft SQL Server as a fast-growing third behind databases from Oracle and IBM. "They've done a really brilliant job in leveraging their strengths in the desktop operating system and applications and tying it to the server," says Davis

Microsoft's fate might be as tied to personal computers as IBM's was tied to mainframes

Tim O Reilly on DRM

DRM is a non-starter, at least as currently conceived. It's baffling to me that the content industries don't look at the experience of the software industry in the 80's, when copy protection on software was widely tried, and just as widely rejected by consumers. As science fiction writer William Gibson said, "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." The software industry was the first to face the issue that bits are easily copyable. It was also the first to try to create artificial boundaries to that copying. But because copy protection greatly inconvenienced customers, it slowed the adoption of any software that used it. We're seeing exactly the same thing now with music, where copy protection schemes have caused consumers to reject the crippled offerings of the commercial online music services.

I believe that the content industries will flourish online once they stop fighting their users and start offering them what they want at a price they think is fair. That's the way it works in every other field of commerce! And we're already seeing this with Apple's music service, the closest yet to a system that users feel is fair and usable. As soon as Apple rolls it out on Windows (or as soon as competing vendors learn the lessons Apple is teaching), we're going to see a whole new ballgame.

: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy

Piracy is progressive taxation
Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.

Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price.


Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.

. If a bookstore has only one copy of your book, or a music store one copy of your CD, a shoplifted copy essentially makes it disappear from the next potential buyer's field of possibility. Because the store's inventory control system says the product hasn't been sold, it may not be reordered for weeks or months, perhaps not at all.

File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.


: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service


: There's more than one way to do it

And that's the ultimate lesson. "Give the wookie what he wants!" as Han Solo said so memorably in the first Star Wars movie. Give it to him in as many ways as you can find, at a fair price, and let him choose which works best for him.

Who's right ?

I'm biased against pdf, as it is a pain in the butt. But was checking out what Adobe has to say about Nielson's report. They have not made a good job of replying, instead resorting to cheap tricks and base allegations against Nielson.

Nielson's basic complaint is "A computer screen is not a good way to veiw documents. So use PDF to print it out if you want, but don't force readers to read it online"

Adobe counters that PDF is great for both viewing AND printing, which is crap.

The creator of PDF, in his reply also claims the fault of bad PDF documents lie with the users, not himself :o)

And he goes on to list the zillions of wonderful things you can do with pdf and not with html.

Why can't adobe accept the fact that PDF is excellent for printing, and position it that way ? It is sad they chose to take a stand " PDF is great for everything you can think of ". I expected a more mature response from a company which has created Photoshop, which is a delight to work with.

Nielson suggests the following guidelines for when PDF is used, all of which make good sense to me :

create a 'gateway' HTML page that summarises the PDF file in sufficient detail, including page count and file size, allowing users to decide whether it is worth downloading.

state clearly that the PDF file is for printing only, offering the same content in hypertext

link only to the gateway page from any other part of the website, not to the PDF document

do not let your search engines index the PDF file, instead ensure that the 'gateway' is indexed.

ensure that the PDF is formatted for different sizes of paper, for example both A4 and the 8.5 by 11 used in some countries and professions.

PDF Unfit for Human COnsumption

From Nielson...

Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation.

Problems with PDF
Optimised for printing, not for viewing
Don't follow standard browser commands
More likely to crash than html pages
Not in context and breaks flow as you have to wait for document to load
No link to document it opens from. User has to figure how tp get back to previous document
And IMHO, the worst of all, not able to click links in the PDF file
Most pdf files are huge content chunks, which don't scroll nicely, but in fits and starts and lack internal navigation or nice search capabilities.

Why can't you have a file which looks like html, but prints like pdf?

Print Vs Paper

From Jacob Nielson

Computer screens lead to a reading speed that is approximately 25% slower than reading from paper. Users do like the ability to get long documents in hardcopy. So even online publishing systems need a print feature. The implication for web design is to provide printable versions of any long documents.

Now comes in PDF claiming to solve this problem...

PostScript and Acrobat files should never be read online. PostScript viewers are fine for checking out the structure of a document in order to determine whether to print it, but users should not be tricked into the painful experience of actually spending an extended period of time with online PostScript

And this Nielson report 13 July 3993 , bombs PDF and might give Flash paper a head start.

I've never liked pdf anyway and being an anti-printer guy, never knew why such a format is needed. Then I realised it is the only format over which the author can have total control over how the document gets printed out.

Contribute
Macromedia unveiled contribute in The FFC 2003. Here's what it is...

Web browser cum editor.

Contribute browser looks like a standard web browser. Like earlier netscape, you can view a site or open a site in it to edit

It can
Add content to existing web pages easily.
Add paypal buttons and instantly accept credit card payments
Convert any document to flashpaper

Prices start from $20,000.

Flash Paper.. Taking on PDF ?

Macromedia FlashPaper lets you publish any document with total control as to how it will come out on a printer. It is a printer driver technology for Windows 2000 and XP that can transform any printable document into a compact, web-friendly Macromedia Flash format and then embed the document as an intrinsic part of a web page.

Inserting documents os simple. Just Insert >> Document as flash player lets you insert Word , PowerPoint Excel,Microsoft Project, AutoCAD and even PDF documents.

FlashPaper documents open inside webpages, unlike annoying PDF.

Zoom/ scroll /print supported

Only Flash 6 required to view the paper

Comes from the server. So FlashPaper can only be viewed in a web page, which means you can’t email FlashPaper documents directly to others

The text in FlashPaper documents cannot be searched or selected

FlashPaper does not support digital signatures, annotations and many other features of enterprise document sharing technologies like PDF

Matador and Toreador.
( From the Goog...article since removed)

Toreador - A bull fighter ( Toro Lat, Bull.)
Matador - A Bullfighter who kills the bull ( Mata Sp,To Kill )

There are now two versions of Flash: Matador and Toreador.

Matador: For beginners ,Web designer, interactive media professional, or for the teacher developing multimedia content. Emphasis is on creation, import, and manipulation of many types of media (audio, video, bitmaps, vectors, text, and data).

Toreador: For Experts . Advanced Web designers and application builders. Toreador includes everything Matador has along with several powerful new tools. It provides project management tools for better coordination between designers and developers.

It suppors External scripting, databinding, and can be used well for large scale, complex projects that will be deployed using Flash Player along with a hybrid of HTML content.

New features available in both Matador and Toreador (PARTIAL LIST):

Document launch, doc tabs (Windows), Find and Replace, Undo/Redo, History panel, Commands menu, Dynamic toolbar configuration, extensible tools, Spell checker, Import Power Point and Authorware Behaviors and Effects, Video importing, encoding, and editing, Full Unicode support, Accessibility in the authoring environment, Accessibility in Flash documents, Editing external scripts, Script navigator, ActionScript

New features available in Toreador only: Data binding, Device sound, Edit external scripts, External Players, Advanced Effects, Project workflow, Script navigator, String panel, Tab order indexing, Pro Player features

Some new AS commands:

MovieClip object:
_lockroot - Forces references to _root in a movie clip or its children to resolve to that movie clip
getInstanceAtDepth - Returns the movie clip instance found at the specified depth
getNextHighestDepth - Returns the next highest "z" order depth available

Context Menu object:
Context Menu - Objects for customizing context menus

Mouse object:
onMouseWheel - Listener invoked when mouse wheel is scrolled

MovieClipLoader object:
MovieClipLoader - Object that can be used to load SWF and JPG files into a movie clip or level
onLoadComplete - Listener invoked when the download completes
onLoadError - Listener invoked when the download fails due to an error
onLoadProgress - Listener invoked when the download progresses by a Flash player defined amount
onLoadStart - Listener invoked when the download starts

The Flash 7 player stats.

Though I can only guess the function of some of the terms, the speed of the new player is 4 to 7 times faster than version 6 in almost everything.


:: Component Initialization Performance
Windows
Flash 6: 41 ms
Flash x: 7 ms

:: Filling Array Performance
Windows
Flash 6: 1929 ms
Flash x: 511 ms

:: Populate Data Grid Performance
is the time it takes to populate & sort the Data Grid component
Windows
Flash 6: 1353 ms
Flash x: 357 ms

:: Sort Data Grid Performance
Windows
Flash 6: 4098 ms
Flash x: 678 ms

Question : I wonder how much of the performance boost is caused by the new player and how much by revisited components
Mike Chambers replies : Those numbers are all player.

Grant Skinner's 3 C's of UI design

Context

Ensure that the options and content presented to the user are relevant to their context. Showing a user too many options at a time will confuse him, hiding too many will obstruct his ability to get anything done.

Consistency

Maintaining consistent interface standards throughout your application will reduce your users' learning curve for your application. They can learn once and apply them throughout the app. This applies to virtually everything you create in your interface development process: interface widgets, keyboard shortcuts, metaphors, icons, placement of buttons, error message text, help systems, etc.

Communication
The sole task of any interface is communication. It must communicate to the
user the available methods of interacting with the data, in a responsive and intuitive manner. It must then facilitate the user's requests in as transparent a manner as possible

With an RIA the interface's environment will include a server and a browser. Most online applications also have an important branding or marketing component and it will be up to the interface team how to incorporate these elements without sacrificing the usability of the interface.

India Key Stats from the Economist

Population 1 Bn

Population growth 1.6%

Land area : 3.3m sq km

GDP US$500 bn , US$2.73trn (at PPP)

GDP per head : US$480 , US: $2,610 ( at PPP)( Half of China's)

GDP growth: 4.%
Inflation: 4.%

Two-thirds of India's population work in agriculture. Agriculture,forestry and fishing account for a quarter of GDP. Services account for about half the GDP.

Dowry Economics

Caste remains a source of status. Women compete for the limited pool of men in castes above them. They bid up the price of this scarce quantity claims a theory ( Siwan Anderson, economist at the University of Tilburg)

But,
1. Why are men suddenly scarce ?
2. Intercaste marriages are becoming more common and why has it not reduced dowry ?
3. What happens in same caste marriages where a woman is not trying to marry up in caste ?

Though it is true women tend to marry up ( In terms of status in society), it is very rare they marry up in caste.

This theory throws up more questions than it answers and I suspect the economist has not really understood what Caste means in an Indian context.

Backing up your brain

If you are just a sum of your memories, backing up your brain could be the way to eternal life.

Getting hardware and wetware to talk to each other is becoming a reality. Researchers have successfully developed the cochlear implant (a device that can restore a semblance of hearing to the severely deaf). We still have to learn a lot, but we are getting there fast

A team in Los Angeles, announced they are beginning trials with the world's first brain prosthesis, an implantable hippocampus.
Hippocamus stores new memories. When it stops functioning, new memories cannot be 'written' on to the brain. This device lets the recording begins once more.

The principle ? One set of electrodes detects the electrical activity coming in from the rest of the brain, while the other sends appropriate electrical instructions back out to the brain.

A team from Stanford University is attempting to develop an artificial synapse on a silicon chip (the junctions between nerve cells). These are more elegant ways of stimulating individual nerve cells than sending electrical impulses.

A team at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have announced the first robot controlled by a network of nerve cells in a Petri dish.
This neural network consists of a few thousand neurons from a rat brain. The neural signals are picked up by microelectrodes, amplified, digitised and sent to a computer. The computer then separates real signals from background noise and drives the robot.

Can I back up myself in 50 years ? A good chance I'd say !

Riemann's hypothesis

No one knows how prime numbers are distributed. At some places they crowd together and at others they are sparse. Mathematicians have succeded in proving only that prime numbers become rarer as they grow larger. But how exactly they are distributed is still not known.

Riemann observed that the frequency of prime numbers is very closely related to the behaviour of an elaborate function, Zeta(s). It is unproven yet.

Leonhard Euler stated " prime numbers could be a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate". Contrastingly Hilbert declared " Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen" (We must know. We will know.) and had it carved on his tombstone.

Will we ever know?

Kepler's Laws

Till the 16th century people believed Ptolemy's ( 85 - 165 AD) words,spoken 1400 years earlier, that the planets, Moon, and Sun orbited around the Earth.

In 1543, Copernicus proposed that the planets and the Earth orbited around the Sun. But his proposal was not very useful in predicting the motion of the planets.

The world had to wait for 50 more years and Johannes Kepler to throw light on the movement of planets. Kepler had the advantage of having access to the best possible observations of his day, painstakingly collected, at an enormous expense , by his master , Tycho Brahe, a rich Danish nobleman.

These observations did not come easy to Kepler. Tycho guarded them jealously and Kepler had to wait till his master's death to get them.

Kepler writes of Tycho, "My opinion of Tycho is this: he is superlatively rich, but he knows not how to make proper use of it, as is the case with most rich people. Therefore, one must try to wrest his riches from him."

He did suceed in 'wresting Tychos' riches as he confesses ""I confess that when Tycho died, I quickly took advantage of the absence, or lack of circumspection, of the heirs, by taking the observations under my care, or perhaps usurping them..."

Armed with Tycho's precious data, Kepler was able to publish the laws of Planetary motion. In 1609, The first and second laws of planetary motion were published. Ten years later, the third law, The Harmonic Law was publisehd.

The world now had an elegent framework to study the mysterious movement of planets.

The laws below changed our understanding of heavens forever and Issac Newton's Theory of universal gravitation was made possible because of these laws.

The Law of the Ellipses :
The orbits of the planets are ellipses with the Sun at one of the foci.

The Equal Areas Law
The line that connects the planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times.

The Harmonic law :
" The square of the orbital periods are proportional to the cube of the semimajor axes

Kepler's laws are not only valid for the Solar System, but also for any system with a massive central body with minor bodies rotating around it.

DRK 4 Flash Charts

http://www.macromedia.com/software/drk/productinfo/product_overview/volume4/

Sample chart at
http://www.macromedia.com/software/drk/productinfo/product_overview/volume4/flash_chart.html

and at
http://www.peterjoel.com/upload/pie.html

http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/bigflash.htm

Flash - Little Known Facts

Stand-alone projector files can be created from flash movies. This lets the movie to play outside the browser, even without flash player installed. But these typically double ( or more) the file size.

The limits of Flash
A Flash movie can have up to 16000 frames. Exceed this and the movie stops. For movies with more frames,create multiple movies and link them with a method Load Movie.

16000 is also the maximum limit for layers, loaded movies and symbol instances.

Infinite loops are broken by flash by limiting loops to 200000 operations Functions such as Int() and Random() are limited to numbers around 2 billion

Flash loads most media into RAM, So if heavy media is loaded with less RAM available, the playback slows down.

The background of a Flash movie can be set to transparent. This allows the background color or image of the HTML page that contains the Flash movie to show through and allows the layering of Flash content with DHTML content.

http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/wmode.htm


http://www.macromedia.com/support/general/ts/documents/tn3504.html

Optimisation strategies

Create 8-bit color graphics instead of 24-bit color graphics.

Keep sound short by breaking them into multiple files.

Sample sounds at the lowest acceptable sample rate.

Use Mono.

The Art of Travel

Like Sex, it is all in the mind. When Peter Macinnis says " ...My hand on sedimentary rock spans a gap of 100 million years in geological history.
", it lets you see everyday objects in a new light. Imagine the millions of years when the sediments were deposited layer by patient layer, embedding clues of interesting events from each eon, the process proceeding patiently, over countless millions of years.

Carl Sagan says " All the heavier elements were synthesised inside the nuclear furnaces of the stars. You and I are made of Star Stuff". So touch a lump of coal and visualise the billions of atoms gradually being shaped from Hydrogen in the heart of a distant star, the star spewing this carbon out when it dies, the spewed material floating around in the wilderness of space for countless eons, finally being aggregated into our solar system and now takes the form of a lump of coal.

How puny man made attractions seem compared to these heady stuff.

How much people miss, when they take a package tour to half a dozen tourist attractions in a day, rush through the hurried commentary of the guide, snap a few photos to 'prove' they'd been there,fantasizing about the looks on their neighbours faces when the 'evidence' is flaunted.

For me an ideal trip would be a leisurely unhurried one. Take up a house for say 15 days, shop at the local market, try cooking different cuisine, read elaborately about the history of the place, understand the local culture, spend time with the locals ( get invited to a drink or a meal ) observe their customs, behviours, marvel at the nuggets of quaint value systems and other quirks which show up from place to place and leave unhurriedly.

Load a JPEG in a single Line of Code

this.createEmptyMovieClip("img_mc", 0).loadMovie("my.jpg");

That's it !

Flash Forward Conference in NYC.. Key developments ( Summary of various posts)


DRK 4 announced. Advanced Charting component set shown ( Bar, Line, Area, Pie, Combo). Features include support for multiple datasets, 2d and 3d rendering, and the ability to chart different chart types in a single chart. Should integrate this with the COT module soon.


Stock Chart Sample Application : Using Flash within windows applications. This is a windows application which is written in C# and utilizes the Microsoft .NET framework. In the example, the Flash Charting Components Set 2 are used to chart stock data within the Windows application.

Internet Search Sample Application : An advanced Rich Internet Application which provides a Flash interface a popular search engine. It demonstrates a number of techniques, calling web services from Flash via Flash Remoting, encapsulating client / server code in reusable classes etc. Should read more about it once Macromedia puts it on their site.

Flash Application Layout Library : The is a library of graphics of components which can be used to quickly mock-up and layout application interfaces within Macromedia Flash.

Commerce Sample Application : This is a sample Rich Internet Application that provides a Flash interface to a popular commerce site on the internet. It demonstrates how to build advanced applications and client / server communication within Flash MX.

Polling Application Source Files : COmplete flash source files for using Instant polls included in the DRK4

Pollster: Macromedia Pollster is a hybrid ColdFusion and Macromedia Flash application for easily creating and deploying polls and poll results to your website. Pollster consists of a ColdFusion-based administration interface for managing polls, and a Flash movie that users interact with to submit answers and view poll results.

Royale: Flash for Programmers

Royale will be a form-based development tool, no timeline, no drawing tools, just an interface to accommodate data and components. The Flash IDE, in the other hand, will provide added functionality to speed up production tasks.


Faster Flash
The performance of the current version of the Flash Player (6.0.79) and the next gen Flash Player compared. The new player is 6 times faster !

Breeze Live Announced. Macromedia Breeze Live is a server-side presentation environment for running online presentations. All you need in the client side is the Flash Player. You however need to be a Breeze Live customer.

Flash on Embedded devices.

The system also allowed them to select Radio Stations and play them throughout the house. Very cool. Controls lighting, everything.

An application was demoed that showed the earth and it would say things about certain places where you zoomed in, such as weather. It runs on the I-MODE service.

A demo of a phone running Flash Lite from NTT Docomo was shown. The Charlies Angel Flash movie played wonderfully on the phone.

A flash enabled phone from Nokia was demoed.The sound quality was good.

Multi user Content

In a network, users create content. This live content is best suited for network delivery.

I've been breaking my nead as to how to make animations on web different from animations delivered on a CD. Moock hits the nail on its head with this example. Should build a proto application fast.

Presentation at
http://moock.org/webdesign/lectures/ff2003Harmony/

The utulip app is at http://www.moock.org/unity/clients/uTulip/

Principles

people affect and change everything they experience

a path forms across a field when enough people walk across it

a tree branch used by hikers to climb a rocky section of a trail will eventually wear smooth

on the web, the effects of users viewing and experiencing content are rarely obvious

the motive of uTulip is to portray the effect that users have on content when they observe it and interact with it

uTulip displays 4 drawings on screen at a time

each drawing can be changed to one of the 21 drawings in the tulip series, allowing composition of 4 "time slices"

each user experiences his/her own interpretation

each user's interaction is reflected to other connected users

the uTulip piece shows the users' collective effect on the content

uTulip represents remote user activity...the feeling of being in a crowd

uTulip makes user changes persistent (morphable worlds, the worn branch)

uTulip portrays user trends (reveals the most common images selected, paths across a field)

uTulip contrasts sequence of time vs sequence of human exploration

uTulip reveals "echoes" of user actions and reactions

What is Apple up to ?

Adobe Premiere ( video editing software) has stopped producing for MAC. Internet Explorer has done the same for Mac last month.

Apple has launched products which directly compete with Adobe's Premiere and Microsoft's IE. Did this prompt the move ? Apple hasn't built its version of Microsoft Office, but reports say it is working on it.

What is Apple trying to do ?

Apple has the advantage(?) of developing both the OS and the hardware and so could build more tightly coupled hardware support into the OS. By developing everything itself,it can deliver a great user experience.
But will it work ? My gut feel says NO ! There is only a limited set of stuff a company , however great) can do and do well.

Unicode Converter

For using Unicode characters in the FLA file the only way is to use notations. This application converts the typed string into the escape sequence

Ellison on the future of Databases

"We sell databases, and y'all have bought too many of them," Ellison quipped. "The reason you can't find out what's going on in your business is that information is stored in too many databases."

Ellison's vision of the immediate future, is one of consolidation of existing databases. It's something that he says Oracle itself did in the late 90s, before which "we stored information about our customers in hundreds of separate databases." Thus, Ellison says that setting up a global data model and pursuing related consolidation rather than adding in new customer relationship management (CRM) or other applications is the way for enterprises to save money and get the most out of their IT investments

Ellison said that he "hates" being number two in the applications marketplace behind SAP, and wants to catch up, he believes that Oracle's database expertise is the rock on which enterprises should build their e-business. "We think the database business and the apps business are very closely related," Ellison said, adding that the ultimate value is more in the information delivery capability of the database and transactional systems in general. "Modern systems will deliver information so people can log on and see how well they are doing."

"We thought about it as automating departments, not as keeping track of information." Ellison cited sales practices that have historically focused on heads of departments such as sales and marketing. Going forward, Oracle has its eye fixed on the larger problem of automating the business, said Ellison, reiterating that linking these silos was an issue of data model and database consolidation, not an enterprise application integration (EAI) fix.

Apple's G5 Powermac designer, Ive, speaks...

"Keeping it simple was the overall design philosophy for the machine. "

"It became an exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build and easier for people to work with."

The internal bays for accommodating extra hard drives are good examples of that philosophy in action. A set of plastic mounting fixtures sit next to the drive bays, ready to be used if and when the owner wants to add an extra drive.

Likewise, the ribbon connectors await, neatly tucked away above and below the drive bays. Ive said they can be simply pulled out and plugged into the new drive. It's very neat, ordered and simple.

The Network Effect
Kevin Kelly argues "In the Old Economy what was rare was valuable. In the New Economy what is common is valuable." This theme is echoed in Ross in Living Networks which argues " as more people use a technology the greater the positive returns to each"

In the SWF format Macromedia gave up proprietary advantage in creating and using SWF in order to expand the pool of people who could find SWF useful... a smaller piece of a larger pie. Macromedia might have charged a royalty for each swf file produced , but that might have limited the market.

In a chart Ross plots technologies across two axes: Who creates the technology, Vs who uses it. (Playstation is created by one group and competes against other technologies created by other groups; Acrobat is mono-developed but is currently widely accepted ; Linux is group-developed but competes against similar solutions; TCP/IP is group-developed and universally accepted).

.NET the past, present and the Future

" Three years after .NET was announced with much fanfare, most of the hopes behind the .Net initiative have not been realized, and .Net has now almost vanished from Microsoft's vocabulary. This is partly due to web service protocols being still immature.

Microsoft's has decided to drop the .Net moniker from almost all product names

MS chose to implement .NET in two phases

1. Build the tools and technologies to enable developers to start building solutions

2. Teach businesses the value of Web Services and how it could greatly help them. ( A business might have an inventory management system that's home-grown in one factory and uses SAP AG in another. If they wanted to look at inventory information across a set of factories, the company has to manually build a solution. .NET was created especially to address such problems.)

It is interesting to note Macromedia Central aims to do precisely this, on a smaller scale.

Gates on Spam, Longhorn, Linux and Office

On Anti Spam solutions

Strategy 1:
If you want somebody to read an e-mail you would put up a certain amount of money. So you say, "OK, if he reads this e-mail, I offer 20 cents for the person to read the e-mail." What's the valuable resource? It's the reader's time. And if they read it and say, "Oh this is my long-lost brother." Then they can say, "No don't charge them the 20 cents

If you ring my phone at 4 in the morning, all right, that's 10 bucks. You better put 10 bucks at risk. And if you tell me my house is on fire, I won't debit you

Strategy 2 :
Using filters, you won't be able to catch all junk mail. But it is still ok. If you can delete 80% of spam mail and make the cost per mail, say 100 times what it is today, then you make things much, much tougher for spammers.

What are your number one and two priorities for the company ?

My role is the product strategy, so things like speech, handwriting, making work flow more efficient and making sure that as you do these things more effectively, digitally, that you actually have better security than the equivalent non-digital processes

We call this the digital decade, and it's where you get the devices of all sizes working together as opposed to requiring a lot of work to move information around between them effectively. Your information is all stored in a very encrypted way in the sky and whenever you authenticate yourself to a device, whether it's a tablet, desktop, pocket sized whatever it is, then your information automatically shows up on that device.

Taking the research breakthroughs that we've made and getting those into products is the thing I spend most of my time on.

On a Forbes Article which said MS was boring :

Well, let's take a look. Expedia. We sold that for a billion dollars. It cost us $70 million to create it. We sold it for a billion. Of dotcom start-ups, is that a terrible record relative to others? I don't know. CarPoint makes money.It doesn't make a huge amount of money, but it's a very good business for us.

Set top boxes, we're number one. Phones, we're number 2 in that. Video games, we're number 2 in that.

What's Longhorn( Sucessor to XP) and what will that do so differently that we'll care that much about it?

"Longhorn makes it easy for your information to show up on any device"

Say you have two PCs today. It's a huge pain that your Favorites on this machine are different than on this machine. Moving your files from this machine to this machine, getting your e-mail, your calendar, it's painful. Say you have a work calendar and a family calendar. Is it really easy to coordinate your family's schedule and see which events should be on both ones? Longhorn makes it easy for your information to show up on any device. It makes it easy to navigate that information.

Today navigating files is different than navigating e-mail, which is different than navigating the Web, which if you ever get into printers or fonts, those things are all different too. There are just way too many concepts on the PC. So taking this one storage metaphor that supersets those things , it's sort of like e-mail navigation though it's much richer than e-mail navigation is. And using that [type of navigation] for everything just reduces what you have to learn. And you put the rich searching in that's called replication that's showing up on all these devices and you get a very powerful platform.

Say you keep lists. Anytime that you've mentioned a restaurant, it automatically goes onto this list of restaurants, and your system would automatically keep track of what are the hours there, how that menu has changed. If you've mentioned a stock, it just goes on this list. It will keep track of what the price is, what's going on there. If you've mentioned a movie, keep track of is that in the theaters,, is that out on video, what have the reviews of that been?

If I said to somebody today how on your PC do you keep track of stocks, movies, music, restaurants, you can do it, but it's pretty painful, pretty manual. The system doesn't have this innate understanding of all the things you deal with in typical life. You go and get directions on the computer, you get this funny Web page, and you probably just print the thing out. The idea of storing that, having it when you're offline anyway a lot of these things are still pretty complex. So Longhorn is a change of the user interface to unify a lot of things that have been disparate. But it's a huge project. It's a very ambitious piece of work.

How long can you keep rolling in continuous upgrades of your desktop products, which are the linchpin of your business model?

As long as we can make people more productive through those tools, that we see about 15-20 years of pretty clear milestones that we can drive into those things. Until we've done a perfect job of that, we'll keep investing in those things.

Every time we do a new version, one of the competitors we face is the previous version. People have to decide whether we've made enough breakthroughs that it's worth buying that new version. I remember when we came out with Excel, people said "Hey everybody's got 1-2-3. Excel will never be successful. 1-2-3 does everything that we'd ever want it to do." But how do people take notes today? They take them on paper. Does that make it searchable? Does that make it easy to share with other people? No. Is this the ideal way notes can be taken? You have to assume hardware keeps advancing, because one of the key things that allows us to do better software are things like flat panel displays, better batteries, faster chips. It's the combination of hardware advances where we say "OK now those things we dreamed about for a long time we can do on the software." It's how those two things come together has always created the opportunity for new versions.


We're doing anything where software runs on TV, watches, video games, you name it. If it's about writing great software that can empower people, we're doing software for every one of those things. As long as we're doing a good job writing software we're targeting our software at the full range of devices. Think of these different categories. Software for watches not too many people in that work and we're pioneering that. Software for the pocket-sized device , well that's Nokia and Palm, and we're in that. Software for the TV set, which is clearly a very important center. Software for being in the car. Software for when you want to be at your desk. Software for when you want to carry things around and read the information. Software for major servers. So we're targeting software at all those different things.

Not just because we see individually that these are each exciting, profitable things, but also because we think people want a holistic view. If I teach my pocket-sized device how to recognize my speech, I'd like my Tablet PC to understand my speech, the computer in my car to understand my speech. I want my schedule to show up on all those things. And so by making it easy to integrate across those boundaries using a common use interface, a common set of development approaches, we think we can actually make this whole Digital Decade thing a reality. So we're not just betting on the desktop.

Technology is actually doing better work today than any year during the boom. The focus now is on making these systems easy to administer, the focus now is on what value you get out of the systems.

On linux and other competitorsWell those are our current competitors. I mean, it's no different than in the past people used [IBM's operating system] OS/2.

USA TODAY: Nobody used OS/2.

BG: Are you kidding? I mean, let's be serious. That was IBM, a company 15 times our size. Name a bank that didn't use OS/2. OS/2 was IBM's product, and the IBM army marched behind that product. People always think today's competition is somehow different and unique in some way. Let's be serious. I mean, we've had to bet the company many times on big technological advances. We bet on the 16-bit PC. We bet on graphical user interface. We bet on the NT technology base. Now we're in the process of betting on a combination of technologies called .Net; Longhorn Web services go along with that. You always have to do something very dramatic to move things up to the next level. Who has the guts and the willingness to do risk-taking to get ink into the standard user interface? Who else is going to push that forward? Who else has the guts to get speech, get the recognition levels up, get the learning levels up in the standard interface? We've chosen to do that. If we didn't believe in those things we wouldn't be increasing the R&D budget the way that we are.

On competing with Linux

BG: We will never have a price lower than Linux, in terms of just what you charge for the software. We compete on the basis of, if you look at the value you get out of the system and the overall cost that the system has that apply in our software. For any project, if you look at communications costs, hardware costs, personnel costs, all that, software licensing ranges the highest you'd ever find is, like, 3% of any IT-type project. And so the question is can that 3% compensate in terms of how quickly you get the system set up? How much value you get out of that system, can it justify itself in that way? And that's the business that we're in every day.


USA Today : A lot of people talk about making a lot of money in their lives but say that the most rewarding thing was to give it away. How does it feel to be helping so many people in this way? Is that the most satisfying part of your life?

Well the most satisfying part of my life is having kids, playing with my kids, things like that. If you get past that it's hard to pick between the satisfaction of developing smart people to build these software products that empower people and the impact that [the Foundation has] on a worldwide basis, the excitement of taking the latest medical technology and saying, "OK, there's this poor guy who's been wanting to work on malaria his whole life and nobody pays attention, nobody gives him money." And then we can come along and say "Hey, you are doing God's work. This is so important. Here, we'll fund your malaria vaccine" that type initiative.

In a networked Economy everyone is a competitor !

Read an article which argues Google and Ebay are competitors.

" If you're a vendor, you can advertise on a search page, or put up your wares on EBay's bazaar

A vendor pays EBay roughly 7 percent for an item worth $100. In the same way, Google gets a fee for sending a prospective buyer to a seller. In time, as Google and other search engines understand consumer behavior better, Google might get a fee for matching a buyer and seller -- similar to EBay's final value .

Fortune's advice on building a business

Step 1: Figure out the needs of your most profitable customers
Step 2: Get creative
Step 3: Test and verify your hypotheses
Step 4: Tell customers how great your value propositions are
Step 5: Apply the best value propositions on a large scale
Step 6: Begin anew


Space and PlaceTuan suggests that "space" is freedom and "place" safety. Although space will be eventually transformed into a concrete place as it acquires definition and meaning. A big factor he points out that will contribute in that transformation is how intensive, sometimes intimate and valuable are the experiences we live in those spaces - not how long we stay in them.

Is Google God ?

"If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for any questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."

MSN taking on Google ?

MSN Search is currently at #3. It is the most profitable unit at MS (less than 50 people, $150 million in profit in 2002).

They are onto their favorite tricks, yet again. Replicate google, tie it into IE, word documents, excel sheets... etc and leverage on their desktop superiority to get more users to use MSN search by default. They did bid for Google and were rebuffed.

But MS could, for example, embed connections to related Microsoft search directly into Word/Excel documents or Web sites built with Windows development tools.

Would this kill Google? A pity if it happens.

Five Clues for Geeks

(1). Intermediaries add value.

The Internet does not mean that the destiny is for producers to launch creative works directly to consumers. On the contrary the low cost of producing on computers and distributing over the Internet means that filtering by intermediaries becomes even more important.

(2). Property is not evil.

Searls and Weinberger point out that the Internet works most efficiently when it does not attempt to discriminate among the different types of bits that are carried over it.

However, they write as if discrimination is linked to property - that private ownership leads to discrimination. In fact, large parts of the Internet backbone are privately owned without threatening nondiscrimination. Conversely, even where television and telephone systems are not in the private sector, they are administered to limit certain types of content to certain media.

(3). Computer animation is not a killer application. ( RIA's may be ! )

Geeks who impress one another with fancy Flash stuff and other animated pyrotechnics are kidding themselves if they think that the rest of us care. The typical reaction to just eye candy, no purpose animated web sites is to leave as fast as you can click.

(4). Bashing Microsoft does not make you smart.

Microsoft makes business mistakes. Microsoft software is imperfect. However, its competitors have made business mistakes that are worse. And competing software has been imperfect in ways that are more significant to many users. Just because you are thrilled with the way that some Linux-based app runs on your Mac does not mean that the clueless guggles ( Non-geeks, ala Muggles) would be better off without WindowsTM.

(5). Markets are not exploitative.

The attempt to replace markets with communitarian sharing tends to deprive people of freedom. It also tends to slow the pace of innovation, because markets are more ruthless about letting outmoded companies and processes "fail faster."