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What's Up At Microsoft! — Nearly a year ago, I wrote, Microsoft is not smart, its just that, its competitors are stupid. Well, in years that have passed, that theory has been proved right. Look at Palm, a company which had the monopoly of the hand held business, and well, now the software is owned by a Japanese firm.
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Scobleizer
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Is Bill Gates the Cat with Nine Lives? — Conventional wisdom says tech companies rise and fall with the waves of innovation that lash the shores of the technology business. There are so many examples of this that I won't bother to repeat them. — But there is one cat out there that has so far avoided that fate.

"Microsoft is Doomed !!" —> Buy MSFT — Only Fortune magazine running a "Microsoft is Doomed !!" cover next week could make things any cheerier for Bill Gates and his Washington-based software company. After all, this week we have a contrarian two-fer, with both BusinessWeek ("I'm Outta Here!:
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The Blackfriars Blog

SPARQL: Web 2.0 Meet the Semantic Web — The Semantic Web. It's an odd duck, and not only from the publishing point of view. Academic computer science is starting to take the Semantic Web (which means, for them, webizing the Knowledge Representation part of AI) seriously. There are conferences, journals, books.
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SPARQL to ignite web 2.0 — Kendal Clark, managing editor of XML.com, just wrote: "SPARQL over AJAX just by itself is so cool it gives me a headache!". — What problem does SPARQL solve? SPARQL is here to replace the SELECT part of SQL query statements, the long standing standard for database access.

Petitioning parliament by mouse — If e-government seems to be mainly about doing tax returns online, then e-democracy is its more exciting cousin, promising to put citizens at centre stage of the political process. — E-democracy projects are springing up all over the UK.

Analyst says Google may bid on AOL to fend off Microsoft — Google, the most-used Internet search engine, may consider making a bid for America Online to keep the company from switching to Microsoft Corp.'s search technology, a Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst said Friday.

Acer Unveils Tablet PC, Plans to Enter U.S. LCD TV Market — The tablet computer has a sliding LCD panel that allows for quick conversion. — Sept. 17 ATHENS, Greece—At its Global Press Conference here Saturday, Acer rolled out a brand new tablet PC with an innovative pop-up hinge.

A Microsoft switch: Vista feature to go cross-platform — As part of the announcement of the next generation look and feel for Windows Vista, Microsoft said that it will make a subset of the new presentation layer available for other platforms. — Windows Presentation Foundation …

IDG drops Boston Macworld — Once-popular trade show falls victim to Apple's decision to end its participation — The annual Boston Macworld trade show, which once attracted 60,000 users of Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh computers, is shutting down, the victim of Apple's 2004 decision to end its participation in the show.

Microsoft 'bars' Mono from conference — But are Microsoft developers even interested in developing .NET applications for Linux? — Mono project founder Miguel de Icaza claims that Microsoft prevented the open source project from holding a meeting at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.
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Slashdot

The RSS, er, PDC is over and I screwed up by not getting Dave there — Note to Dave Winer: I'm sorry, you should have been at the PDC. I didn't even realize just how big a deal RSS was going to become there and I screwed up by not pushing to have you there. — A couple things, though.