Team Awards for Le Tour

The Tour de France just finished and Team CSC's Carlos Sastre won it. Once again, the rider with the best team won. Unfortunately, the tour does little to recognize the winning teams. The team with the best overall time (top 3 finishers from each stage) gets to stand on the platform, but they get no named trophy. The teammates of the yellow jersey don't even get that.

It would be nice if the winning teams could get a named trophy so they could be known for the rest of their careers as winners of that trophy. For example, if the teammates of the yellow jersey got a yellow cap, Carlos Sastre's CSC teammates could be 2008 yellow cap winners. George Hincapie would be an 8 time yellow cap winner. Teammates are a key part of winning the Tour de France and they ought to be recognized.

Claudio Reyna Retires

Claudio Reyna was probably good at some point in his career. But he was crap for the New York Red Bulls. He was too old, too hurt and too bad. Thankfully, he's finally retired. Enjoy your retirement Claudio. Red Bull fans will be enjoying it too.

Suicide Work

... is work that makes you want to kill yourself. For example, if you working for or with IBM, even indirectly, there's a significant chance you're doing Suicide Work.

Microsoft is writing another OS?

In this article, The Economist describes how Vista is struggling against XP and isn't as good. This may be true but it's an unfair comparison. XP wasn't very good when it was first released either. Businesses didn't upgrade, it used too many resources, it didn't work on old hardware. All the same problems for Vista. Microsoft OSes always struggle at first. 98 wasn't good until 98 SE (Second Edition), NT users didn't upgrade to 2000, and 2000 users didn't upgrade to XP.

In each case, the older OS was better than the new OS when first released. The reason XP has been so successful is that Microsoft spent 5 years rewriting Windows XP as Vista. While Vista was being built, XP was getting better. In 5 years, Vista will probably be much better than XP.

And now Microsoft is rewriting their OS again? In all this time, Linux just keeps getting upgrades. It's the natural path for software to be upgraded, not rewritten. That Microsoft has to rewrite their OS in order to create sales exposes the flaw in Microsoft's model from the consumer's perspective and conversely, an advantage of using Linux.

Hopefully Microsoft does write a new OS from scratch that isn't backwards compatible. It would be great to see Microsoft try to compete with Linux when it doesn't have the advantage of the huge backwards compatible software library to push sales.

Le Tour!

The Tour de France started on Saturday. Unfortunately Astana was banned so Alberto Contador and Levi Leipheimer are out. It's pretty good after the first 2 days and the mountains start early this year.

Funnily, Tom Boonen is out of this year's tour for testing positive for a banned substance: cocaine. Too bad they banned him for that, it's not exactly a performance enhancing substance.

Tivo it out on Versus (channel 603 on DirecTV) in the mornings, usually 8:30am eastern time.