Talk To an Astute IT Industry Observer

Dan Gillmor is about as high on the IT journalist and industry pundit "respect" totem pole as you can get. Slashdot has linked to hundreds of his articles. What do you ask this veteran observer of the Silicon Valley scene? Whatever you like, one question per post. We'll email 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Dan 24 - 36 hours after this post goes up, and run his answers shortly after he gets them back to us.

I just had to ask

[dmuth]

Vi or Emacs?

Silicon valley businessmodel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think this is a good businessmodel that will survive?

1) Give stuff away for free.
2) ???
3) Profit!

Re:Microsoft .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Having just attended some sort of MS conference, I can say that .NET is a webified cloud of stuff. Does that help?

follow up

[geekoid]

and what is its stock symbol?

on the serverside

[kisrael]

J2EE vs .Net in a room, with some knives: who wins? (Maybe with Perl, Ruby, Python in there for good measure)

Hello Dan

[Jack Wagner]

I don't know if you remember me but we sat together at the IOAC conference in Cupertino back in 1998. I still impress my friends with that story. Anyways, what I want to know is:

If two trains are exactly 150 miles apart and one of them heads north on the tracks at 30 mph heading into wind gust of 25 mph which only occur at 15 second intervals for exactly 10 seconds and the second one heads south at 27 mph on a 15 degree incline with a crosswind of 12 mph at an angle of 42 degrees, how long will it take for them to meet?

Warmest regards,
--Jack

Re:Microsoft .NET

[tadas]

Given that Microsoft has inflicted COM on us, and is now working on .NET, can "Microsoft .ORG" be far behind?

IT style

[Charlie Bill]

Why is it that IT style is so godawful: polo shirts, Saturn sedans.

Is there any hope, or should we all be sent to camps?