The Next Right: Jerome Cosi

By now, I'm sure many of you have heard of Jerome Corsi's new book The Obama Nation. (I made that pun up months ago, dagnabit!) You've probably heard the likes of O'Reilly, Limbaugh, or Hannity praise it to high heaven, but there's a problem. It's filled with wild inaccuracies. Here are some summaries:

• Politico: Obama Pushes Back Hard on Corsi Book
• NY Times: Book Attacking Obama Hopes to Repeat ’04 Anti-Kerry Feat
• Washington Post: Par for Mr. Corsi

In this title article posted on conservative blog The Next Right, Jon Henke takes a brief but hard look at Corsi's methods and history, finding him severely lacking. He strongly recommends that conservatives distance themselves from Mr. Corsi as much as liberals do. I can't express it better than the article's author:

I mean, c'mon. Have some standards. This guy does not deserve the platform, he does not deserve the publicity, and he does not deserve to be treated as member-in-good-standing on the Right.

The Right seems to engage today in social promotion of hatchet men, bullies and political hit men. Those people poison the Right, and - whatever their temporary electoral effects - they serve to discredit us all.

MarketWatch: How Adobe can stop Microsoft

Columnist John C. Dvorak opines over Adobe's tumultuous relationship with Microsoft. To give some context, Adobe is probably the biggest non-OS software vendor on the market. Their products are as ubiquitous as Microsoft Office, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, or iTunes. Occasionally, however, Adobe's products run into traction when a company like Apple or Microsoft creates a similar product to Adobe's. In the case of this article, Mr. Dvorak looks at the Flash-Silverlight rivalry that is beginning to brew over Internet media delivery.

The author recommends Adobe adopt a Linux strategy, making their products more universal due to being available on all three major computing platforms. He encourages the software developer to face Microsoft head on rather than continue to outrun them. Unfortunately, Mr. Dvorak fails to address a couple of problems.

1. Licensing. Adobe builds closed-source applications with no sharing among competitors (with a couple notable technologies such as PDF and FLEX). In contrast, any Linux application I can think of is licensed through some sort of open standard such as GPL. I doubt it is required, but open-source is certainly expected on the Linux platform. How would Adobe adapt to this? Would they at all? How would the Linux community react to the applications retaining their proprietary status? Reaction is important because of the second major problem.
   
   
2. Profit. Again, how many Linux applications can you think of that cost money? Of those, how many cost several hundred dollars? If Adobe doesn't consider revising their prices, the Linux could very well balk at the investment required to purchase Adobe products. On the other hand, if they offer their products on Linux at reduced prices (if not free as is standard practice), they risk angering and alienating their core customers on Windows and Macintosh systems. Let's not forget to mention that Adobe also has to worry about shareholders.

Now I could be wrong about these issues as my current experience with Linux is shaky at best. Furthermore, Adobe could possibly pull some amazing strategy to appeal to Linux users that I couldn't imagine, but I don't see it happening easily or soon.

Tags: politics, adobe, technology, linux

I saw this a while ago but forgot to post about it. It seems Microsoft is subtly trying to steal thunder from Ubuntu nowadays. Compare below and ask, "Could this be mere coincidence?" I think not.


Here is the Ubuntu logo.


Here is the Microsoft Alumni Network logo.

Aping a Linux distribution logo? I mean really. Props to whoever pointed this out to me...

Tags: technology, microsoft, opinion, linux