Vista, meet Vixta
Half Vista, half vixen, this sexy little number called Vixta is a Fedora Linux-based wilful rip-off of Microsoft’s crappy operating system. Ever smug, the Linux community has gathered together to embarrass Microsoft – which is getting easier and easier these days – by producing an operating system that takes the best of Vista’s look and feel and combines it with user and security settings that make a tad more sense. It’s kind of like when Microsoft ripped off the best features of Apple OSX, but without messing it up totally.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I consistently give Microsoft a boot in the pants for all the half-brained, half-developed software they release. But I think they really should take Vixta as a compliment. I mean, Vista looks pretty. No denying it. It just plain don’t work too good. Perhaps the johnnies in Redmond will look at Vixta as a challenge and come out with a whiz-bang Vista that people actually want. C’mon, Steve Ballmer, put down that doughnut and give us an awesome Vista!
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Facebook’s big kiss-off
Perhaps it’s the bad memories and empty wallets that followed the 2000 dot-com crash. Maybe it’s the fact that MySpace was so easily supplanted as the “must-see” site. Or it could be that people are already figuring out that a mini-app that generates your stripper name isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.The Chicken Littles of the Internet are predicting that Facebook is going to be a dinosaur in a few short years.
This Wired blog entry provides some possible reasons why it’s facing extinction: Users are going to leave in droves to embrace the next big thing (see MySpace); Facebook was developed by a smart college kid, not someone with a solid business plan; investors with the big bucks are eventually going to tire of waiting.
I am so totally on the fence about this one. No idea what’s going to happen to Facebook. None whatsoever.
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The gospel according to Gibson
This CBC profile of William Gibson – progenitor of all things cyberspace – reveals that the Canadian author has come to a profound if not entirely original conclusion: the future is here and its weirder than anyone expected (see previous blog entry for confirmation). Gibson’s latest novel is set in the present and isn’t strictly sci-fi.
“I had been saying for 15 or 20 years, ‘You know, I could write a novel set right now and you probably wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t set in the future.’ I guess I just heard myself say that one time too many,” he says.
Groovy.
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