There's a very sobering article posted by none other than Miguel de Icaza (Gnome and Mono project founder in case you don't already know  ) that pinpoints rather precisely what the problem is with Linux that it hasn't successfully managed to obtain parity with Windows and OSX on the desktop. Definitely worth a read if you're a Linux user or spectator.

Link to full post here.

What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop

In my opinion, the problem with Linux on the Desktop is rooted in the developer culture that was created around it.

Linus, despite being a low-level kernel guy, set the tone for our community years ago when he dismissed binary compatibility for device drivers. The kernel people might have some valid reasons for it, and might have forced the industry to play by their rules, but the Desktop people did not have the power that the kernel people did. But we did keep the attitude.

The attitude of our community was one of engineering excellence: we do not want deprecated code in our source trees, we do not want to keep broken designs around, we want pure and beautiful designs and we want to eliminate all traces of bad or poorly implemented ideas from our source code trees.

And we did.

We deprecated APIs, because there was a better way. We removed functionality because "that approach is broken", for degrees of broken from "it is a security hole" all the way to "it does not conform to the new style we are using".

We replaced core subsystems in the operating system, with poor transitions paths. We introduced compatibility layers that were not really compatible, nor were they maintained. When faced with "this does not work", the community response was usually "you are doing it wrong".

As long as you had an operating system that was 100% free, and you could patch and upgrade every component of your operating system to keep up with the system updates, you were fine and it was merely an inconvenience that lasted a few months while the kinks were sorted out.

The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Either they did not agree, the schedule of the transitions were out of sync or there were competing implementations for the same functionality.

The efforts to standardize on a kernel and a set of core libraries were undermined by the Distro of the Day that held the position of power. If you are the top dog, you did not want to make any concessions that would help other distributions catch up with you. Being incompatible became a way of gaining market share. A strategy that continues to be employed by the 800 pound gorillas in the Linux world.

To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions.

This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the "top" distro or if you were feeling generous "the top three" distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later.

Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers.

But at this point, those of us in the Linux world still believed that we could build everything as open source software. The software industry as a whole had a few home runs, and we were convinced we could implement those ourselves: spreadsheets, word processors, design programs. And we did a fine job at that.

Linux pioneered solid package management and the most advance software updating systems. We did a good job, considering our goals and our culture.

But we missed the big picture. We alienated every third party developer in the process. The ecosystem that has sprung to life with Apple's OSX AppStore is just impossible to achieve with Linux today...

Read the rest here.

You'd think by now that Gizmodo had had its fill of messing with Apple and it's legal department wouldn't you?

Well...apparently not. They recently got access to Apple's internal training manual for "Geniuses" and decided to share their impressions of what it's all about. Full article here.

How To Be a Genius: This Is Apple’s Secret Employee Training Manual
Sam Biddle

We recently showed you just how badly some of Apple's retail elite behave when no one's watching, but surely they were taught better, right? You bet they were: Apple tells its new recruits exactly what what to think and say. How do we know? We read Apple's secret Genius Training Manual from cover to cover.

It's a penetrating look inside Apple: psychological mastery, banned words, roleplaying—you've never seen anything like it.

The Genius Training Student Workbook we received is the company's most up to date, we're told, and runs a bizarre gamut of Apple Dos and Don'ts, down to specific words you're not allowed to use, and lessons on how to identify and capitalize on human emotions. The manual could easily serve as the Humanity 101 textbook for a robot university, but at Apple, it's an exhaustive manual to understanding customers and making them happy. Sales, it turns out, take a backseat to good vibes—almost the entire volume is dedicated to empathizing, consoling, cheering up, and correcting various Genius Bar confrontations. The assumption, it'd seem, is that a happy customer is a customer who will buy things. And no matter how much the Apple Store comes off as some kind of smiling likeminded computer commune, it's still a store above all—just one that puts an enormous amount of effort behind getting inside your head.

Not surprisingly it reads like a mixture of Hubbard, Napoleon Hill, and Tony Robbins spiced with some standard "consultative selling" seminar work. Small surprise in that Apple is based in CA, that lovely State that brought so many great ideas and unique outlooks to the American experience.

Fun read. It explains a lot. I mean we all suspected that's how they train them. But at least now we know we're not just imagining things.

An interesting read about how an interesting technology company could not make a profit.  Note the theme we've discussed before -- completely fantastical ginned-up grossly inflated membership/customer numbers, designed to create a false sense of momentum and source of profit, and a giant pile of cash being burned through at an astronomical rate.

The problem was simple. OnLive never made any money, and it was burning through as much as $5 million a month. As Perlman himself explained during the fateful all-hands meeting, the company had deployed thousands of servers that were sitting unused, and only ever had 1,600 concurrent users of the service worldwide. Over the past week, OnLive has tried to distance itself from that 1,600 number, but every former employee we spoke to in a position to know told us that it was true. "We were so optimistic at launch, but the users never came," one long-time staffer said. "There were all these reasons why we were going to be an instant success, but it didn't succeed instantly." Even if the users had come, though, some employees dispute whether the service could scale: OnLive needed a physical machine for each concurrent player, and though Steve continually pressed the team to figure out a method to virtualize the load, the current model might have been untenable.. Officially, the company states it has 2.5 million users, and 1.5 million active users, but staffers tell us those numbers count every single person who ever signed up for a free account, or tried it in the last year. The other thing you need to understand is that many of those users never paid a dime.

http://mobile.thever...274739/onlive-report

A nice set of posts by Scott Hanselman describing how to be productive with Windows 8.  I've been hard on Windows 8 preview but some of this stuff looks pretty good.

• http://www.hanselman...eeseOhThereItIs.aspx
• http://www.hanselman...ndows8StartMenu.aspx

http://www.forbes.co...amazons-rotten-core/

Leather admitted to creating accounts on Amazon under assumed names in order to leave positive reviews of his own work.  ...  Leather is not the only one engaging in such practices. On 25 August, the New York Times revealed that the use of fake reviews is widespread. In exploring the case of reviewer-for-hire Todd Jason Rutherford, the NY Times exposed self-publishing poster boy John Locke who bought 300 reviews from Rutherford’s business, GettingBookReviews, spending about $6,000 to do so

Stuff like this makes it really hard to trust public user reviews .

Paste As File has been updated to v2.1.0.0

I have changed the UI to allow easier editing of the file name without having to also type the extension.

It now also supports pasting as RTF (rich text format) files. This will allow you to copy formatted text from applications such as Microsoft Word and paste as a RTF file and keep the text formatting intact. There are some applications that may not keep the formatting when pasting to a RTF file. You will just have to test your application to see.

More info and download on my site: http://starpunch.net/#PasteAsFile

There is also a write up on Instant Fundas about Paste As File!

Another write up on FreewareGenius.com