1. A 12-year-old who killed himself, and in the suicide
note mentioned that the reason he was killing himself is
that he didn't want to go to school because he was overweight.
2. Hillary Rodham Clinton's speech tonight. Everyone who
calls in either loves this woman, or despises her.
3. Is Netscape trying to become Microsoft? This could
only be a talkradio topic in Silicon Valley. No female callers
for this one, though.
Me, I'm thinking about a half dozen letters I need to write
to various people, and munching on my eighth peanut butter
and jelly sandwich of the week. Rohit, I suggest you hang
up your bananas and switch to peanut butter and jelly.
There's something ridiculous about buying a loaf of bread
and a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly and keeping
them in your office in times of hunger.
ObFoRKpost:
Man, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/anniversary/party/
is filling up with a lot of cruddy propaganda. First there
was an opinion piece by Bill Gates, then John Warnock,
today's Michael Dell, tomorrow's Ted Waltt, and Aug 29 is
Gordon Eubanks.
Listen to the kind of pap John Warnock ended up smearing
at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/anniversary/party/warnock.htm
Forget the fact that this bonehead doesn't even have a vision
for applications 5 years from now. He's both a major butt smoocher:
> As long as there is a healthy mutual respect, and also a common set of
> shared goals, then it is always possible for competing companies to work
> effectively together.
and a nonsensical jargonmeister touting his own product as much as
possible:
> On the complex side, full multimedia control is possible using the
> Vertigo, Java or Visual Basic technologies.
FWIW, Michael Dell's "interview" is even worse in the butt smooching
and self promotion categories. For fun, full pap transcript of
Warnock's spiel for those keeping score at home:
-> What exciting multimedia applications are you working on today that you
can give us a hint about?
In May Adobe demonstrated a new technology code named "Veritgo." This is
very high speed, object oriented display rendering technology that we
believe will open up the multimedia possibilities in the future. Todays
multimedia authoring tools rely on combining bitmapped graphics.This
forces the multimedia author to fix on a specific format and precludes
doing a host of special effects. "Vertigo" is an object oriented, device
independent imaging model that will work across platforms and give the
author tremendous flexibility. Today, we are working on an easy to use
authoring system based on Vertigo.
-> Is all of your new application development for 32-bit Windows or are you
still developing new 16-bit MS-DOS or Win 3.x applications?
We develop for many platforms. The Windows side of our development has
moved to Windows 95 and Windows NT. Our customers would have preferred
continued work on 3.1, but there is no continuing operating system
support on this platform to allow us to enhance our products with a
single code base.
-> What do your customers feel are the most compelling reasons for them to
upgrade to Windows 95 or Windows NT?
The positive features of any new system cause customers to upgrade
quickly. Ease of use on Windows 95 is a big benefit for our customers.
Independent of platform, customers are faced with either upgrading their
operating environments, or forever remaining static with their computers
capabilities. Operating systems vendors move forward and usually drop
support for old versions. Because of parallel hardware advances,
application advances and systems infrastructure advances, a customer
really has little choice other than continuing to upgrade as releases
become available. They can temporarily delay upgrade, but they cant
avoid it in the long run.
-> What are the most significant educational and marketing issues you
face with your customers today surrounding the use of computers?
Communicating to customers what is easy and possible with todays
computers has always been a fundamental challenge. We are always trying
to make our products value easier to understand. We are always trying to
make every one of our products easier to use.
-> Are you creating any applications which dynamically interact with the
user across the Internet?
We think that two way interaction over the Internet is one of the
fundamental values that the Internet can deliver.
On the simple obvious side, most enterprises drive their processes
with forms. Acrobat 3.0 provides a very rich infrastructure for
communicating between the client and server, and sharing the attendant
computing loads.
On the complex side, full multimedia control is possible using the
Vertigo, Java or Visual Basic technologies.
-> In what way do you think the ISV community has benefited from the
release of Windows 95?
I think Windows 95 fulfilling some of the ease of use issues with
computers has increased the computer user population. This larger
population is a potential large market for ISVs. There are also many
system features in Windows 95 that make development for the platform
easier.
-> You compete with and also work with Microsoft in many areas. How do
you do that effectively?
As long as there is a healthy mutual respect, and also a common set of
shared goals, then it is always possible for competing companies to work
effectively together.
-> What new kinds of applications do you envision being available over
the next 5 to 10 years?
At the current rate of change, I think will have a hard time predicting
even 5 years into the future. I do expect that the future will look
nothing like the present. The term "application" may not even have the
same meaning that it has today.
We are going through a fundamental change in the way our society
communicates. This change will impact every aspect of our life.
Computing will shift from a personal productivity emphasis to a
communication emphasis. The seamless infrastructure of information
gathering and dissemination tools will not relate to our current model
of how computers work.
Computers will probably be undifferentiated and ubiquitous. Information
will depend less on time and space. The presentation and focus of
information will be more important than just the existence of
information. It will be a very, very different world.