Which makes Rob Weir what, exactly?

http://www.robweir.com/blog/rob.html

... I work for IBM, as Chief ODF Architect ...

Also interesting is the fact that, as far as I can tell, these "shills" are editing Wikipedia with their real names, or with well-known handles uses elsewhere that identify who they are. As opposed to "WackyButterfly1965" or something - not a particularly hard thing to do on Wikipedia at all.

Facts. Presented out of context (or without enough of it) have been used extensively on Wikipedia and elsewhere to paint Microsoft and everything they do in a negative light. I'd suggest these people either suck it up now, or stop whining about how Wikipedia is being gamed and use their considerable energy and time to work the website's bureaucracy. $Deity knows they're going to need it. I loved this part of that Groklaw article:

This certainly is an interesting statement. There is nothing I can point to that is false here. Everything here is 100% accurate. However, it seems to be reckless in how it neglects the most relevant facts, namely that the proposals did not make it into ODF 1.2 at Microsoft's sole election.

For anyone involved with OOXML on the Microsoft side, this is sweet revenge. Hoisted by their own petard and so on. I think it's funny as hell.

Yep, second the Astraweb recommendation. I was going to post about them as well. I started using them a few years ago when a move from one city to another left me with an ISP whose retention of some of the comp.* groups was terrible. And you can't beat the speed.

Actually I never rode a school bus... But if my school had had them, the magic marker solution would have probably crossed the feverish imagination of the evil proctors :)

Bah, when I was a kid they painted the bus number and route with magic marker on our foreheads. No one ever got on the wrong bus. Ever.

I don't know about Java, but I've been playing with Google's V8 and that sucker is fast, at least on Windows.

Why not develop a car normal people will actually buy and use? This is interesting but I don't think we have the luxury of trickle-down innovation at this point, seriously. Just start building the damn things in an industrial scale so a sizable portion of vehicle-bound humanity can start moving to them, FFS!

This whole ajax bullshit they've been ramming down everyone's screen is just annoying.

As long as this doesn't victimize legitimate users. That's where the whole anti-piracy thing usually breaks down.

I've pretty much given up on the Linux desktop. Server, yes. Desktop? Maybe in a few years. And Windows would have to get really bad for me to even consider switching. Oh, and Vim and Python and Firefox would have to stop running on it, and Microsoft would have to discontinue PowerShell and kill SQL Server, .NET and Visual Studio. And BizTalk and MSMQ and COM+ and WCF. And Office.

I have Django (!) instances running smoothly on Windows. Postgres works perfectly fine. MySQL 5 works perfectly fine. When I deploy to Debian, everything works just the same. Why the hell would I ever even contemplate getting rid of something that works.

I know. Too bad they insisted on making me use the BDE or Oracle instead of interoperating correctly with Jet/SQL Server and Sybase. That came later.

No, at the time the C++ Builder design-time environment in the IDE was far superior to the VC++ one. It actually approached VB in terms of functionality and ease of use.

A forms designer was ever high in the list of priorities for the VC++ team. At one point in the WinDNA/COM craze of the late 90s and early 00s (especially after ATL was first released and COM support was added to the compiler) some of the Microsoft TAMs were even recommending clients build GUIs in VB and actual application logic with VC++ [1].

[1] I'll refrain from repeating what I said to one of them when they tried to sell me that bit of nonsense. Let's just say it involved threats of physical violence and their mom, in that order.

Visual Basic killed Delphi. Delphi was always a better language/runtime/platform, unfortunately it was full of Pascal.

VB had the advantage of being far more approachable from a beginners standpoint, and I think Borland underestimated two things: the market for third party components (which was *huge* with VB) and the way businesses used development platforms - to talk to databases. The first few versions of Delphi were not exactly database friendly, while VB4 was Jet/SQL Server ready out of the box through DAO (and later OLEDB/ADO). Interop with Access also didn't hurt one bit, of course... though that gave way to some of the worst departmental apps in the history of mankind.

I think the Delphi saga is yet another case of a Microsoft competitor with an arguably superior product but completely clueless as to how it should have been marketed and at whom.

Anecdote time. Early last year I sat across a conference table with the CTO of a medium-sized manufacturing company (~3,000 employees) trying to nail a contract req for a custom inventory control system. They had pretty weird needs that didn't fit into any of the OTS solutions they had evaluated, so they decided to hire someone to do it for them.

In this particular case they were already using Linux for a few things, so I figured I'd go with that. It's always a risk to recommend a FOSS stack at companies which are Windows/Commercial Unix heavy, but my Postgres/Python/Apache would have fit quite well with their infrastructure. Otherwise I would have gone with the MS-based solution.

Keep in mind that "using Linux" here was essentially a few of their sysadmins deploying them as file servers and prefab CMS platform, so they didn't have any actual applications running on the OS. Everything else was Windows, but they didn't have any custom apps on that either. Their business ran, predictably enough, on Excel.

Me: "Well, I would recommend using a database called Postgres and a language called Python, a framework called Django plus the Apache web server and yadda yadda sales pitch"
CTO: "Hmmm, Linux. We already run some things on Linux, don't we?"
OtherGuy: "Yeah"
CTO: "What?"
OtherGuy: "Well, the executive blogs and the product wiki and the defect tracking system and a few other things. It's just stuff we downloaded and installed, PHP, MySQL, that sort of thing."
CTO: "Hmmmm. But I don't want to release this application"
Me: "Release the application? You mean the code? Why would you do that?"
CTO: "Well the other stuff we have running on Linux we downloaded it but this is something we're going to create from scratch"
Me: "... and why would you be releasing the code?"
CTO: "Because it has to run on Linux. Right? So it's open source and all that"
Me: "Uh, no. You don't have to release anything."
OtherGuy: "No"
CTO: "Oh, OK then. I thought we had to let other people download it because it would use all that stuff you said and runs on Linux and is open source and all that"

I didn't get the gig, but adding up a few other experiences I'd say this is fairly common, especially at medium companies that don't have years and years of IT experience.

It already does that to a certain extent. This must be something different, designed to up the number of sponsored crap that shows up on their search results.