Microsoft and Yahoo! imminent merger
The wwworld is about to change sooner than later. Microsoft's take over attempt buyout offer is bound to succeed, one way or another. I doubt there is a way for Yahoo! to deflect that one. This new offer by Microsoft would make the Y! shareholders very happy; should Yahoo! decline MSFT's offer, the shareholders would probably sue Yahoo! for doing so thereby not acting on their interest, or at the very least could give Y!'s management some very tough time. Indeed, according to the mail sent by Steven Ballmer to Yahoo! board of directors:
"Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!¢s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal."In other words, Microsoft will let the shareholders know that shooting the offer down would harm them financially and the shareholders will of course demand the sale anyway.
We live in interesting times.
Friday, 1 February 2008 9:14 pm
Concurrency
I have been studying Erlang for a few days. I dislike functional languages for various reasons, but I like Erlangs defining characteristics, especially the share-nothing, actor model based concurrency, which makes a whole lot of sense, compared to shared resources that require locking, synchronized and serialized access to them and that leads to problems - sooner or later. Some day I hope I will have the chance to revise our home-grown SGL (Switch Glue Language) based on my findings while groking lua, erlang and other languages. It should make for a really nifty little language.
Tuesday, 29 January 2008 9:27 pm
Bill Gates on Microsoft's vision of tomorrow, and whatnot
We have been invited by the, otherwise, lovely folks at Microsoft Hellas to Bill Gates keynote speech, entitled something like 'The World of Tomorrow: Microsoft's Vision for the Future of Technology'. My brother, Dionysis (a beloved phaistonian) and yours truly took advantage of the precious invites and attended that said event.
Once we managed to enter the conference hall ('Music Hall', whatever its called), we found ourselves among a million strangers, looking sharp and always hungry, devouring anything those catering folks would dare place on the buffets in zero time -- that's a typical Greek trait; love for food and free stuff.
Bill Gates seemed tired and somewhat not that excited to be there, talking to mere mortals. He was nice though, he expressed his condolences on the passing of Archbishop Christodoulos and even took the time to demo something for us. He demoed Microsoft Surface, which didn't impress me at all. His hands driven actions suffered from latency and the whole thing seemed not much alike to what all Microsoft products, save the Xbox 360, to me. Ugly and almost deliberately engineered as to be hard to use by every day Joes. Bill Gates's vision of tomorrow is not different than just about everyone's vision. Break down software to services and components, move everything on the Net, come up with new ways to interface with software ( hand-writing, gestures, speech recognition,..), take advantage of the Cloud. Again, everything looked ugly. The slides ( stupid color themes and font text colors ), the screenshots and applications demoed by some Sr.Tech.Evangelist, .. Microsoft products are so freaking ugly. Perhaps I spent too much time drinking the kool aid, using Mac OS-X and apple products that I can't "tolerate" that kind of ugly UIs. I dare-say I like Microsoft, they may luck the cutting-edge tech of Google, the amazing usability and looks of Apple products, but that doesn't make any less important in the grand scheme of things.
Tuesday, 29 January 2008 8:24 pm
