Google and Microsoft

Maybe you didn't notice, but these guys are fighting with each other. Read the story here.

In related news, IBM encourages now its employees to use Firefox. That's good news for my favourite piece of software. How is this related to Google and Microsoft? Well, Firefox is erroding Internet Explorer's market share. Since IE is the de facto standard in browsers, Microsoft controls what technologies people use when accessing the web. This way Microsoft can trump Google when they try to introduce more and more web applications to the public. So the interest of Google would be (IMHO) is to have more browsers competing and web standards defined by a third party like W3C. And Google already hires two main Firefox developers.

Toronto, China, and a new book

I think I forgot to post here some of the books I read recently. I was both lazy and busy, because just got back from Toronto (more on that later).

Currently I'm reading Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, a funny book about football (i.e. soccer), and life.

As for China, on BBC there are often reports about the new China, economics and social perspectives. This is just one of them.

The world is flat

One of the columnists I read in New York Times is Thomas Friedman. He often writes about globalization, and its effects. And one of them is the global competition in job's market. For example, computer programming can be done almost anywhere, so I (more or less) compete for my job with both Americans and Indians. People often don't realize that, or when they do they want the goverment to rescue their jobs by imposing retrictions on free trade. But that will be harder and harder to do, so they should start to adapt to that, learn more, etc. And the best place to learn these new skills is in school. The signal Friedman triggers is that the American education system is not prepared for this global competition. See his latest column, and his latest book. And it seems most of the them are not even concerned about this, but about teaching or not teaching evolution in schools. See the latest developements here.

Update: the link to Friedman's column is fixed now