my  block

where uzairs roam

There’s been some interesting stuff in the news recently:

• A guy traded a red paperclip for a house. This is just pure genius. A funny follow-up on what might result if one started with an iPod.
• Microsoft mulls offering a web-based productivity package. As pointed out on Slashdot, this certainly isn’t conclusive yet, but even so one wonders why Microsoft would consider such an offering seriously enough to announce it publicly. It’s more than a little worrying that a company that has that much invested in quality management folks doesn’t realise it’s being dragged into a fight it can’t win by Google, Yahoo!, et al. First of all, it simply can’t dominate the Internet the way it can the desktop (since the kind of advantage it wins instantly with Windows-on-every-desktop isn’t available on the Internet). More importantly, its desktop offerings are doing wonderfully well, and it has widely been recognised that Google’s online offerings aren’t powerful enough to take its customers. Then why bother? Why weaken its own offering? Why show that its worried about Google? Why not keep its pimp hand strong?
• Jason Whitlock blows up and says some very interesting stuff about Scoop Jackson. You should read that interview in its entirety just because Whitlock says important stuff about the state of black folks in the US, and how rap and other contemporary black movements that are understood to be empowering the common black person are retarded. The stuff he says about Scoop is totally interesting too, and is somewhat similar to what I wrote about him many moons ago — the first impression he makes may well be that of Ralph Wiley’s successor, but his constant assault on the English language and mountain-out-of-molehill articles quickly expose themselves as plainly juvenile.
• Anousheh Ansari has become the first female space tourist (though she objects to being called a ‘tourist’ — she prefers ‘Space Ambassador’). She’s got a reasonably interesting blog here. It’s a little ditzy but hey, she’s writing from zero-gravity, so I’ll cut her some slack.