What I would do

Whenever I write a post about Microsoft, I get private emails along the lines of, "If you're so smart, what would you do?" Well, here's one idea: I'd copy California's Voluntary Accelerated Vehicle Retirement Program (aka the smoggy old car buy-back deal):

Voluntary accelerated vehicle retirement (VAVR) programs, sometimes referred to as scrap, clunker, or old vehicle buy back programs, pay owners of eligible vehicles to voluntarily retire their older, higher-emitting vehicles. The primary goal of vehicle retirement programs is to reduce ozone-forming emissions by accelerating normal fleet turnover so that newer, cleaner vehicles can be put into use sooner than what would occur naturally. Voluntary accelerated vehicle retirement is one of many components of the State Implementation Plan (SIP), California's comprehensive strategy to achieve the federal ozone standard throughout the state.

In other words, when Longhorn ships, I'd have an outdated PC update program. You bring in your old, running, Internet-capable machine running Windows 95 or 98, and MS moves your files and apps over onto a new low-end white box PC. No charge.

No, MS doesn't make any money out of this, so why should they do it? There are lots of reasons, but here's a few: Good PR. Ability to say that they've got lots of new Longhorn installs. Increased sales of Longhorn-related apps. And a whole lot fewer zombie spambots on the 'net (which is the only one that I actually care about).

Yes, this implies that MS isn't going to break anything, because it wouldn't work if they did. But I think that they've gotten themselves into a box where they simply can't break anything, whether they want to or not — which in my viewpoint, means that they're screwed; it's just a matter of when, not if. This proposal would, I think, delay that day for a while. But then, Bill Gates thinks I suck, so it's not as if what I say could possibly be useful.

Personally, I'm busy prepping for WWDC (including trying to figure out how this whole OS X-on-Intel thing is going to work), so don't expect to see much posting from me over the next week.

Gentleman's Emporium

I know I'll want to find this later: Gentleman's Emporium:

We are proud to provide a complete line of authentic Victorian men's clothing and furnishings, as well as traditional fine writing sets. Because we sell clothing, not costumes, you can be assured of an authentic period look and feel, and clothing that will last for years of comfortable wear.

They also have some nice women's clothing, too, as well as accessories.

Macs, passion, and continuing the conversation

I got mentioned over on a Jupiter Research blog today by Michael Gartenberg: Our Passion, Your whatever :) - Microsoft's Mediocre Marketing. Sadly, he didn't actually link here.

The backstory: I wrote this piece in March about how early adopters and influencers are switching to Mac. Yesterday, Kathy Sierra wrote Creating Passionate Users: Tell Microsoft it's YOUR passion in which she quoted me. Today, Scoble pointed to her, and I guess Jupiter picked it up from him.

I just wanted to link it all here, and give a few points as feedback:

• People keep thinking I'm talking about bloggers. I'm not. Explicitly NOT. I'm talking about influencers, some of whom blog and some of whom don't.
  
  
• Scoble says that if he was a Mac evangelist, he'd be talking about Windows security issues. That's a fair point, but if I had the job, that's not what I'd be talking about. I'd be talking about the misconception that Macs are more expensive. That just ain't the case any more, and there's a lot of people who would buy Macs if they heard dollar for dollar comparisons.
  
  
• OTOH, he's making the big bucks as an evangelist and I'm not. So maybe he's right?
  
  
• He also says (in response to my original comment that "people run Windows because that's what their boss gave them") that there are lots of other reasons why besides that, and gives a few. Having read them, they mostly boil down to: I'm forced to run Windows because of [some factor which may or may not actually be the case] or, I stay on Windows because I haven't bothered to check out the competition. Wow. That's really sad.
  
  
• And finally, he says If Longhorn does only one thing, it better be "no admin mode by default." Snore. As I've said before, I think that Microsoft is boring. I've got "no admin mode by default" on the machine I'm running today. If Longhorn's "one thing" is something that the Mac's had for ages, that's beyond sad. I'm easily excited by tech, and I appreciate his offer to show me Longhorn. But if it's as dull as that? Eh. I read Vic's post, and it didn't sound like anything new or cool. Not to a Mac user, at least.
  
  
• Kathy wrote about MS's ad campaign Your Potential. Our Passion. Nobody should ever use the word "potential" in an ad unless they're being ironic. When I hear it, all I think of is my parents talking about how I wasn't living up to my "potential." When I hear it in MS's ad, the impression I get is "MS thinks you've blown it. Again." Great. My parents had plenty of passion for me getting good grades, and I know I had the potential — but why MS thinks that sounding like my parents nagging me is a positive thing, I have no idea.
  
  
• And finally, finally: Matt G over in Kathy's comments says that he's seen a lot of Macs in TV shows this last season, but most of them have the logo covered up, and he wonders why. My guess: Apple gives shows free hardware, but doesn't pay for product placement. The shows take the free hardware, and then the suits show up and say, "They didn't pay a product placement fee? No logo onscreen for them!".

Right-wingers want to steal your (potential) babies

Let's say that you're part of a couple that have fertility problems. So you decide to go through the expensive and difficult process of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Typically, this process harvests many eggs from the mother (after she undergoes intensive preparation, including fertility drugs to maximize the number of eggs), and fertilizes them with sperm from the father in a petri dish. Then some of the resulting embryos are implanted in the mother, where if all goes well, they grow into a baby. The chance of a continuing pregnancy being achieved by IVF is approximately one chance in 4 to 6. That's a best case; depending on many other factors, a couple could easily have a much lower probability of a pregnancy.

Because the preparation and egg harvesting are relatively difficult and expensive, there's a desire to harvest as many eggs as possible. Because most implantation attempts result in failure, most of the embryos are frozen and held in reserve for subsequent attempts. But when an IVF pregnancy is achieved, those frozen embryos are left in cryogenic storage. Proponents of stem-cell research want to use your leftover embryos to help cure disease. So you and your partner think, "This is our genetic material. We created it, and we paid a lot to create it. We'll donate it to science and maybe it will help cure juvenile diabetes, or Parkinson's, or help someone with spinal-cord damage to walk again."

"Not so fast!" say right-wingers. "You and your husband or wife and doctor shouldn't be able to decide what to do with your own embryos! We know better, and you're only allowed to turn that clump of cells into a baby! We'll decide for you! In fact, they're not really yours! And we're going to pass laws to take any embryos you don't use away from you. And we have Congress and the President on our side, so we can make it happen."

Sound like I'm being too partisan, too alarmist? Read Leave No Embryo Behind - The coming war over in vitro fertilization by William Saletan in Slate. When you're done, you'll realize that right-wingers want the state to intervene in what you can do with your genetic material. They think that the state has the perfect right to take your embryos away from you and implant them in another mother. And they think that they have the right and obligation to do this, even over your objections.

My dictionary defines fascism as "an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization." A government that wants to take away the ability of couples to control their own fertility certainly qualifies.

Update: I thought it might help commenters and potential commenters if I made some of my beliefs explicit. I believe that embryos are not human beings. They are, at best, potential human life. I believe that embryos are no different than any other biological tissue from the standpoint of property and ownership. The people who made them, own them, and they should be able to do with them as they see fit. It would be unacceptable for the state to dictate whether or not I could donate a kidney; it's no less unacceptable when the tissue is an embryo. I believe that a woman has the right to choose an abortion until the fetus she is carrying is viable outside of her. However, because one must draw a line for the sake of law and practicality, I'm OK with an arbitrary cutoff for abortion at the end of the second trimester. In general, I believe in the least amount of government interference in private areas such as personal medical choices.

More about me

I believe that we're supposed to have a certain amount of Canadian content on this blog, so here's a link to an article from the Canadian Information Processing Society. It's, uh, an interview with me. Short version: I've got to stop wearing quite so many hats, as it's getting kind of confusing keeping them all straight.

Disneyland notes from Chuq

Chuq wrote a few notes on the Disney Resort..., which I guess is true, for some meaning of the word "few." It's a handy reference, because I haven't been to Disneyland in ages and we're planning on going next year (current probable date: 22 August 2006, the day before WorldCon starts).

Also on the agenda for that trip: dinner at either the Napa Rose or The Vineyard Room, just because the idea of driving to Southern Cal and eating as if we're at home amuses us. Hey Chuq, are you and Laurie going to WorldCon? Wanna join us?

An Apple product I'd like to see

One of the great things about Tiger, the multi-person video chat, has a not-so-great limitation: that you need a pretty powerful machine to host the chat. No current Apple laptops can host a multi-party video chat, for example. So I'm wondering where the limitation is. Is it that the host machine is overwhelmed by having to convert and compress its own video, as well as negotiate the chat with others? Would things be helped with a more powerful iSight? I'm thinking that an iSight Pro that did hardware encoding to H.264 in the camera could take a load off all of the machines in a chat. Perhaps someone out there who knows more about how iSights and iChat work could chime in and let me know if I'm correct or not. Is there some other hardware that could help bring multi-party video chat to laptop users?

It's simple. Right-wingers are scum.

I stopped into a local restaurant today for lunch, and they had Fox News on the tube. Unfortunately, I was treated to the sight of scumbags like G. Gordon Liddy (remember him? Convicted felon and amoral crook?) and Michael Deaver trashing Mark Felt, the guy who's turned out to be Watergate's Deep Throat. The show's host kept trying to goad his guests into ever-greater bouts of character assassination. Lost in the howling, of course, was anything but the political dimension. But history has recorded Felt's role correctly: his actions helped bring down a corrupt president who pissed on the Constitution, and helped bring down many of his thugs and henchmen. It's no surprise that some of those underlings are around to try to throw mud on an old man. But Felt is a hero, and the buzzing gnats will not damage his legacy. Now, where's the Deep Throat for the current corrupt occupant of the White House?

Random scene from my life

I took my car into the shop for its regular servicing this morning, and I got comfortable in their waiting room while repairs occurred. The service guy sees me on my PowerBook, and said, "Hey, it's too bad that you're not here in two weeks — our network guy says we'll have wireless access for everyone who's waiting then!"

I said, "Actually, you should tell your network guy that he should pick harder passwords to guess."

While the above actually happened, that particular network didn't let me onto the net. Which was probably a good thing, as I then got a couple of widgets written (whew!).

Not enough cat pictures on the net?

From CNN Money, Bank of America gets personal:

Bank of America will require Internet clients to register their computers and assign a digital image, such as a photo of a pet, to their accounts in an effort to cut down on fraud, the bank announced.

Because, y'know, it's not as if people have easily-found pictures of their pets online.

Once more around

From the NY Times, At This Restaurant, the Video Games Come With the Meal:

Nolan K. Bushnell, the creator of the Pong video game and founder of the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain, is innovating again. He is about to open a restaurant where the servers will have novel attributes: triple redundancy and backup batteries.

In this case, the servers will not be human waiters but powerful central computers that will record food orders and display video games that customers can play while they eat.

Mr. Bushnell calls the concept the Media Bistro, and he plans to open the first one in West Los Angeles this fall. The point, he said, is to get gamers out of the house.

From Wired Magazine, Chuck E. Cheese University:

Nolan Bushnell - famous for inventing the videogame Pong, founding Atari, and starting the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain - is hard at work launching E2000, a 35,000-square-foot complex in Burbank, California, that features networked game rooms, digitized dining theaters, a Web pub, and facilities for teaching computer-education classes during the day. "By using revenue from entertainment uses to subsidize the facility and equipment, we can deliver computerized education to the masses at the lowest cost possible," Bushnell says. He even promises that 20 percent of E2000's computer time will be given away to kids from low-income families. If everything works out as planned, an E2000 facility will open in Silicon Valley by next year.

One of these pieces was written in 1995. The other was written in 2005. Can you tell which?

Your questions, answered

I've gotten a few questions lately about a variety of things, all of which ought to be longer blog posts but I just don't have the time. Here's the quick & dirty answers:

Q: Did you ever hear back from Jesse James Garrett regarding his blog post about Women doing Ajax work?

A: Nope. He did write today about how he "was especially disappointed by the number of women we were able to bring in [to the Ajax Summit]", but I haven't received a personal response.

Q: Did you ever hear back from 37 Signals about your response to their search for a Javascript guru?

A: Nothing there either. Between that, JJG's non-response, and no invite to the Ajax Summit, is it time for me to break out into full-fledged paranoia?

Q: Are you going to the blogher conference?

A: Nope. ADHOC asked me first and pushed harder first, and as both conferences are at the same time I can only attend one. And somehow, I thought that I'd be more of force for "more women speakers at tech conferences" by being, well, a woman speaker at a tech conference.

Q: What are you talking about at ADHOC?

A: I initially said that I wanted to do a talk called, "JavaScript is too a real programming language so STFU already". They laughed. I listened to the tone of the laugh, and said, "Okay, really, I want to talk about Inside Dashboard Widgets," and they said yes, so that's what I'm doing. Someday, I really am going to give that JavaScript talk somewhere, though.

Q: Can you do a follow-up on your opinions on the Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard you bought last year?

A: In a nutshell? I hated it. Just like the Microsoft Natural Keyboard that I bought based on other people's recommendations, I used it for six miserable months. My favorite keyboard of all time was the Apple Extended Keyboard, and the Matias was supposed to be the closest you can get to that in USB. I found it to have a very different feel, such that my typing speed slowed waaay down and I got a lot less work done in that time. Those gray letters on white rubbed off too quickly. The worst feature, though, was the clear plastic covering. If you're like me and you eat at your desk, you'll quickly get tired of seeing last week's and last month's food bits inside your keyboard. It's now serving occasional duty as the keyboard on our Mac mini, and I've brought back my old Macsense. I'm in the market for a new keyboard again, but after two expensive mistakes, this time I will not buy one without trying it first.

Q: You're going to WWDC, right?

A: Yep. I'll be coming into SF sometime on Sunday, so let me know if you want to get together while I'm in town. I'll be at The Mosser Hotel, or just call my office number, which automatically forwards to my cell phone.

Q: What's the current gender ratio look like for the WWDC 2005 Weblogger Dinner?

A: My count is 72 men and six women, but I could be off by a few. But if you're there, come say hello — I should be fairly easy to pick out of the crowd.

Q: What's new with the Wise-Women?

A: Quite a bit! There's a brand-new interview with Kelly Goto up, and we're asking for new helpers to work on the Web site. If you're interested, join the WW-Workers mailing list.

Q: When's the Dashboard Widgets book coming out?

A: Sadly, not until I finish writing it — which I'm getting back to now.

Q: Did you ever hear anything more about that Microsoft Team 99 thing?

A: No, but that site implies that no final decisions have been made as yet (or at least none have been announced). I'm still very interested, and Scoble knows where to find me if I make the cut.

Ajax info and pointers

Tara asks:

I'm looking for doofus-level (that's me!) introductions to AJAX functionality and perhaps a tutorial or two. Since this stuff seems so JavaScript heavy, and since for all JavaScript wisdom I look to Dori, I'm hoping she'll chime in with some thoughts and pointers.

Since it appears she has trackbacks but not comments, I'm answering here in the hope that she'll see it (she sees everything, so I'm sure she will).

The important thing to understand about Ajax when you're looking for more info about it is that it's the technology formerly known as XMLHttpRequest. My best recommendation for where to find references and tutorials is here at this wiki page. There are also two blogs worth keeping an eye on, with too-similar names: Ajax Blog and Ajaxian Blog.

Tara, if those three don't give you enough info to get started with, let me know, okay? And anyone else reading this, if you have other must-read resources, drop me a line in the comments.

Vote for your favorite Dashboard Widget

Over at DashboardWidgets, voting is now open for their Mac mini contest. Vote for your favorite widget, and the winner gets a Mac mini.

Can't decide which to vote for? Then please allow me to suggest this one.