Although my first programming experiences were on a unpopular platform called MSX, which was a Microsoft initiative somewhat popular in Europe at the time. I really got into Visual Basic after a tip by a programmer friend. Visual Basic was cool, you could draw a button and then add events to it. It just seemed to make sense how it worked and the principles behind it. I can still recall the pleasure that I enjoyed making my first programs in that early version of visual basic.

Over the years Microsoft advanced Visual Basic actively for a while. Then it stalled while they seemed to focus on the C language. I believe this around the time of Windows NT 3.0 to 4.0. My early experiences with Visual Studio were not as enjoyable as those with early Visual Basic.

Time went on and my duties changed so I didn’t work as often with the Visual Studio system. Soon I fell behind by a revision and I was not able to get my head around the newer user interface. What happened to the fun? How did this happen?

In the early days it seemed that Microsoft spend a lot of thought and time creating their programming systems. Although operating systems were cool and Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 were seriously awesome, it seemed like they were simply platforms to host these cool programming tools for the purpose of allowing people to make whatever programs they wanted or needed.

Today it feels that the roles have somehow reversed. Now it seem that the programming suites and languages are a byproduct of new operating systems simply so Microsoft can say yeah we have tools for programming this. Microsoft’s attention and focus has gone from creating really great programming tools to making business tools. Now Microsoft is too worried about changing the look and feel of their own applications than making good tools for other programmers to make their applications. Seriously, how many new features does Word or Excel really need? Do you use any more features that you can count on one hand, maybe two if you are a power user? Give me a break. And now with Office 2007 all your employees need training, or at the very least you get a drop in productivity until they figure out for themselves where everything is and how to do tasks they could already do on the previous version? You could give your whole company masturbation breaks twice a day and get better productivity form your people.

So what does this have to do with Visual Basic on Linux? Easy. Microsoft is losing market to Linux. In fact my opinion is Linux will prevail over anything Microsoft can make from now on in the operating system space. Windows is going to be a period of history in a time line on Wikipedia whether anyone likes it or not.
Steve Ballmer has no capacity to lead the company in new directions simply because he is not technical. Bill Gates was technical and in those olden days he knew what products to make and where to apply focus, and most of all why.

At this point Microsoft would do well to start now by building or porting some of their programming tools to Linux. I personally believe that Visual Basic would be a great place to start.

Microsoft, make a Visual Basic for Linux. How much could that hurt anyway?

Anyway, I run a few web sites and I also do web development so I find myself testing different search engines to see how a particular site is ranking. I also consult others on getting their business web sites higher in the search engine rankings so I try to stay informed on the most popular search engines and their idiosyncrasies.

Recently I have noticed a drastic difference in the search results for these three search engines.

Relevance. Usually when you use a search engine you really want to see results that are relevant to your search words or phrase. I would say that a few years ago, 2003?, after Microsoft revamped Live.com that their search results were more relevant than the results from a Google search. Recently it seems that Live.com has lost that edge and Google has really improved. I am not sure exactly when this happened, but it is noticeable.

In my opinion Yahoo! has never been a very good search engine. Maybe they only have one or two bots cruising around the web updating it's index because it is very slow to notice changes to web site, or even to get newly launched sites into their index in the first place. I used to know some people who used Yahoo! but they kind of sucked so it just seemed to be a good fit for them.

See for yourself. Next time you need to search for something try a few different search engines using the exact same keywords or phrase and see how your results stack up. For me as I write this Google is definitely the leader in relevance and, in my opinion, the winner.

Then Apple came out with a update to the iPhone OS and again a short while later someone hacked that update also.  By now it was getting old to read about.  No big deal.

Now Apple released  the latest version of the iPhone software, version 1.1.3, which has added many good features.  It was felt by many that some of these features should have been included in the original iPhone release last June.  Whatever.  I guess a lot of people buy things and then take them home and figure out what they got.  I knew exactly what I was getting when I purchased my iPhone and surprise surprise I was (and still am) very happy with it.  BTW, I was one of those early adopter folks who received the $100 rebate.
If Apple adds functionality to my device as time goes on that is really great and I am happy to get these added features.  I don't feel Apple is obliged to add functionality to a device that I purchased half a year ago.

Anyway, with all this new functionality added with the new firmware, and the SDK around the corner it starts to get really boring to read about new iPhone jailbreaks.  Not to mention that there is not one, but several posters all pissing themselves about it.

Did you hear that dear iPhone jailbreak Digger?  I think you're Mom is calling you to come downstairs for dinner.