Maybe he should have switched to lion taming.

If you think of Xanadu as a highly available redundant P2P document system mixing in TBL's Semantic Web and adding more automation, you get a bit closer to what Ted Nelson was trying to do with Xanadu.

http://xanadu.com.au/general/faq.html

Section two of the FAQ covers what a Xanadu system was supposed to entail.

This article (originally on Wired) covers some of the controversies that have broiled up:

http://aether.com/archives/the_curse_of_xanadu.html

If you can find Nelson's 1982 Datamation article it is pretty interesting but I couldn't find it anymore after some quick Google searches (YMMV).

What? 3.5" drives???? What kind of spendthrift Buck Rogers crap is that?

I've got a bunch of perfectly good Shugart 8" hard drives, so make sure you don't skimp on the S-100 bus.

This is so off-topic it isn't funny, but powwow is by any standard a real English word.

You are right that it is derived from a Narragansett word (which was itself derived from an Algonquian term for a spiritual head of a tribe) but it has been used in English as a synonym for meeting or gathering since 1812. Even before that, the word was first used in English as a general term for native gatherings as far back at the 1600s.

Would you say that canoe or barbecue are not real English words? Both come originally from Arawakan.

flawwed isn't a word in English but there ARE English words that have the "ww" combo, that combination was fairly rare and you often tend to see them separated into word phrases but glowworm, powwow, and arrowwood are real words in English.

But there is one word which is quite common -- if you consider acronyms to be "real" words (and only Scrabble seems to think they aren't) -- then WWW is probably the most common.

Because Microsoft doesn't own most of the patents in the h.264 patent pool. The h.264 patent pool is made up of 1,135 patents from 26 different companies. Microsoft owns 65 of them.

Apple and Microsoft settle most lawsuits against them, big difference. And Google wants to own your eyeballs to sell to advertisers. So what? These are businesses, they will compete against each other for your attention but their genuine concern for the commonweal is pretty much limited to their own self-interest.

If there are actual monetary reasons why Microsoft wants h.264 to win besides the ones I've already shown don't really pay off handsomely, what are they? I'm genuinely interested in hearing it since I can't think of much which doesn't come down to lawsuit avoidance.

Now, why is Google doing this, how about this for an explanation:

Google was perfectly happy to be a h.264 licensee for Chrome until recently. So what changed recently? Microsoft decided to provide a h.264 plugin for Firefox.

What if Google wants Microsoft (and ultimately Apple) to pay for the privilege of having h.264 on their OSes. It saves Google $6.5 million in licensing costs (that the capped maximum for software licenses).

Google can then promote WebM free and clear while knowing that all costs for supporting h.264 are being paid by someone else.

In B, "Their share is based ..." should read "Their share of royalties is based .."

I don't think you are getting my point:

A. Microsoft pays a license fee for every single copy of Windows they sell. (alternatively, Apple pays a license fee for every copy of MacOS X and iOS they sell)

B. Their share is based on their portion of 1135 patents owned by 22 companies. How many? Microsoft has 65 patents in the pool. (How many does Apple have? 1 patent.)

A > B

The biggest patent holders are Panasonic (377), LG (198) and Toshiba (137).

Microsoft and Apple are doing this to avoid lawsuits, not because they are making off like bandits from royalty fees.

Hmmm ... so you're thinking in terms of a space elevator, but more horizontal and less spacey? Amirite?

Carriers don't "lose money" when they "subsidize" your cellphone. Carriers use their ability to buy large quantities of phones to gain a price advantage that they can then leverage into convincing rubes ... excuse me, customers, into signing multi-year contracts for voice/text/data plans.

Yes, the phone manufacturer gets paid for the phone, often ahead of time, but your contract is worth considerably more than either the cost of the cellphone or the services that the carrier provides.

Carriers have no incentive to keep you happy once you've signed your contract until such time as your contract runs out. Then they wave another "subsidized phone" and perhaps throw in some inconsequential benefit to get you to renew.

You are a small insignificant part of their customer base and if you become too much of a hassle or too expensive, then they will be just as happy to see you go.

I really hate my cable company, do you want to try another analogy?

It would probably be because most of the other Top 10 languages have been at (or near) the Top 10 for years, while Objective C has jumped up from #39 a year ago.

Here you can see the change in Tiobe's ratings for Objective C over time:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Objective-C.html

Compared to other languages like Java:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Java.html

Perl:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Perl.html

or PHP:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.html

That is a significant change.

Now Tiobe's methodology may be crap overall, but it is measuring a big sea-change ... not a change you'll probably like, but eventually you'll realize that the world rarely goes out of its way to please you.

I think the original comment was a shot at Dan Quayle not McGrew ... for misspelling potatos (Dan Quayle added an "e" to singular potato, mcgrew removed "e" from plural potatoes ... hence, "It's ok Dan, you can use 'Es' this time.").