My friends harass me because I refuse to tip the barber?! Personally, I don't like tipping any entity that either (1) sets their own prices (barber), or (2) doesn't directly affect the product (pizza delivery guy). I know I am ignoring "preventive tipping" -- tipping to prevent he pizza guy from spitting on your pizza the next time -- but what other substantive differences to you draw between the people you tip and the people you don't tip? Where do you draw the line? Should I tip the checker at the grocery store? Should I tip my doctor after he checks my prostate? Who should I tip?

I submitted this as an article before realizing that this is not article but just a rant. So, here it is.

Seemingly, it has been a recent trend for Microsoft Windows Streaming Media to be incompatible with Safari and Mozilla. I cannot tell you how many times in the past two weeks that I have seen the message "We're sorry, the page you are viewing requires a media player plug-in that is not available for this browser." Funny thing is that I have Windows Media Player installed (on OS X). But even more perplexing is that it always happens in MSDN: TV. Is this Microsoft's Grand Marketing Scheme? Piss of non-Windows users who are interested in new Windows APIs. I am a fan of technology, and I genuinely wanted to learn about WinFS; in fact, maybe it would have convinced me that Longhorn ain't bad. Instead, Microsoft further jaded the audience that they should be trying to convince.

[ this is a post a I wrote on OSNews.com 'bout a critical review of Longhorn by a dewd named Phil ]

The OSS movement needs more people with Phil's attitude. Instead of blindly hating M$ like most readers of OSNews, he evaluates M$ software with a critical eye.

Frankly, I am sick-and-tired of the "M$ SUX" crowd. I don't use Windows because I don't think it is a particularly good OS, but I respect it at the same time. OSS users flaming M$ all the time gives OSS a black eye.

Loving OSS doesn't mean hating M$.

Most of your flamers just need to cool your jets, remember the first time you saw a computer, and just get excited about technology. This is a very exciting time for Operating Systems. Open source is driving close source innovation; close source is driving open source innovation.

I am genuinely excited 'bout the direction of software. Join the excitement and stop blindly flaming!

[ For the record, I don't have a single machine running a M$ OS ]