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民主与自由之辩
2007-06-02
这几天抽空看刘军宁老师的文章，获益匪浅。好多以前自以为是或是认识上模糊不清的点让他分析得很清楚。要是早些读到他的文章就好了。
看到过几篇学政治和国际关系的人妄自菲薄的文章。其实，错不在人文学科本身，而在于说这些学科无用的人本身的素质就很值得质疑，仿佛七窍通了六窍——一窍不通。
读下面的文章时，可以结合实例来思考，真的很好玩的。台湾可以说很强调“民主”了，但民众自由吗？英国算是很“不民主”很“权威”的一个社会，但民众自由度很高。我们国家现在所处的状态是怎样的呢？值得一问。;-)
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当民主妨碍自由的时候
刘军宁多数自由的国家未必尽是民主的国家，而民主的制度也未必不会妨碍自由。历史上有许多自由的国家，但其公民对政治的参与却受到严重的限制。自由与民主，尽管是同为世人所追求的两个目标，但却有着各自的内在逻辑。一旦这两种逻辑互不相容，两者就会发生冲突。
这是我读罢法国自由主义思想家托克维尔的《旧制度与大革命》（北京，商务印书馆，1992 年）的最大感想。因为，纯粹民主的核心特征是建立在平等主义的多数决定的原则基础之上的。可是，多数一旦拥有绝对的权力，轻则滋生弊端，重则导致恐怖，最终混灭了自由。与多数决定相一致的原则是平等的原则。该原则认为，众人的力量应该凌驾于个人的力量之上。多数人的智慧优于个人的智慧，立法者的人数比产生文法者的方式更为重要。一旦多数人的权力成为决定一切的权力，这时虽有民主，但却没有自由。然而，在这种没有自由的民主之下，“公民”们充其量不过是心满意足的奴隶，因为民主中孕育着新专制主义，其形式是中央集权的、全能的以及人民作为一个整体直接参与的多数专制的政治权力。这种民主不足以防止、反而加剧了自由在社会中的逐步失落。这套排斥自由的民主理论源自卢梭。
该理论认为，民主是一套以多数统治为原则的政府制度，人民的声音即是上帝的声音。
在表达这一声音时，多数的意志是至高无上的，而且是分辨政治是非最高的裁判者，少数总是错误的。除去生存的权利和成为多数的权利外，少数不能要求任何权利与多数对抗。这种“天使的蜚语”所产生的疑问是，假定全人类都持有一个观点，而只有一个人持与此相反的观点，那么，全人类的观点就一定正确，而后者就一定错吗？即使如此，全人类有理由让这个人保持沉默吗？若是这个人有足够的理由，而且他的观点正确，他有理由使全人类都保持沉默吗？
可见，从某种意义上讲，多数和少数都不握有绝对的权利。多数统治剥夺少数人自由和权利的可能性同样体现在人民主权的原则之中。可是，如果人民都是主权者，谁是主权的对象？要么是他们自己，要么是特选的少数人。与多数统治相比，托克维尔发现，对自由的珍爱有其独到的魅力：自由制度的最大用途在于，当人类精神不关心自由时，继续当自由的后盾，并给与自由它固有的某种植物性生命，以便人类精神到时候能回到它那里来。这些制度的形式保证人们即使一时讨厌自由，也不会丧失自由。
我认为这是自由制度的主要优点。当人民执意要当奴隶时，谁也无法阻止他们成为奴隶； 但我认为，自由制度能使他们在独立中支持一段时间，而无需他们自助。基于自立的自由是可以培养的，而对自由的真正热爱则是不可传授的，因为它来自所有伟大的人类的情欲的神秘处：我也不相信真正的对自由的热爱是由于人们只见到自由带来的物质利益，因为这种看法常常使人模糊。的的确确，对于那些善于保持自由的人，自由久而久之总会带来富裕。福利，而且常常带来财富；但有些时候，它暂时使人不能享受这类福利；在另些时候，只有专制制度能使人得到短暂的满足。
在自由中只欣赏这些好处的人，从未长久保持自由。（第 202-203页）他也发现，多数人呼唤平等自由，一旦得不到，他们便呼唤平等的奴役。基于民主和自由可能存在的冲突，以及民主对自由可能造成的妨碍，托克维尔的困惑是，在一个民主社会，自由还能生存吗？若是能，自由又如何生存呢？常识告诉人们，民主与专制是相对立的。在欧洲的君主专制时代，民主的敌人是君主个人的独裁专政。一旦民主取胜，它还有新的敌人吗？
托克维尔在《旧制度与法国大革命》中令人信服地证明：有！这个敌人就隐藏在民主内部：即多数人的专制。美国的民主与法国的大革命从正反两个方面表明：多数人的民主的确可以蜕变成多数人的专制。建立在多数同意之上的不仅可能是理性、和平的民选政府，而且同样可能是高高耸立的断头台。通过对美国民主的考察及对法国大革命的研究，托克维尔发现，民主作为所有人都参与公共事务的政府参与形式带有多数人暴政的危险。同样，民主中隐含着平等主义的倾向，这又带来了泯灭个性的危险，最终带来专制主义。这种专制主义的共同特征就是否定自由，因此，这表明，他是个始终如一的保守的自由派，而非民主派。他宣称，“在思想上我倾向民主制度，……但我无比崇尚的是自由。”（第 4 页）他毫不犹豫地把自由置于社会平等之上。尽管人们需要在自由上的一律平等，但是作不到这一点时，他们就会选择奴役上的平等，他们宁愿忍耐贫困，也容不得贵族。这就是他对大革命前法国人政治心态的写照。基于对民主可能妨碍自由的担心，自由主义提出了衡量自由的另一条标准，即政治问题的关键不在于拥有权力者的人头数，而在于对权力运用方式的控制和运用。
判断政府的好坏，不在于该政府的权力是在多数人手中，还是在少数人手中，而是这种权力运用的方式、服务的目的和所受限制的程度。对托克维尔这样的自由主义者来说，权力，不论归多少人所有，总是危险的。所以，当民主妨碍自由的时候，保守的、古典自由主义的答案是，民主应该服从自由。民主是自由的手段，自由是民主的目的。民主不是与自由同等重要的目的。民主更不仅仅应该是多数人的统治。民主是人民可以撤换统治者的和平的程序，是保守人人自由和国内和平的一种有用的工具。民主不仅在于主权者的人头数，更在于运用权力的方式。从某种意义上讲，法国大革命只是自由与民主的早期争论的一个历史记录。在这场争论中，焦点是多数的专制。在这一问题上，托克维尔像其他保守的古典自由主义者一样，奋力为个人的权利免受国家的权力，哪怕是民主国家的权力的入侵加以辩护。当代保守的自由主义者也回应了托克维尔的观点。
哈耶克认为，民主并不是多数人的主权，多数人的主权实际上很可能与专制或寡头政体一样，是专制主义的。在自由与民主问题上，托克维尔的观点只不过是古典自由主义大传统的一个缩印。托克维尔的思想可归入自由主义和保守主义的大传统，或者保守的自由主义大传统。这种传统起源于柏克、斯密、休谟、弗格森等苏格兰启蒙哲学家，与法国的孟德斯鸠、贡斯当，瑞士的布克哈特，美国的联邦党以及二十世纪的哈耶克、波普尔等一脉相承。对自由时代的保守主义者来说，还有什么比保守自由更加至高无上呢？ 所以，托克维尔是真正的自由主义者，也是真正的保守主义者。自由主义者一向认为，自由高于民主，民主不过是自由的一个手段。正像英国的著名自由主义者阿克顿所说的那样，自由不是通向更高一级政治目标的手段，它本身就是最根本的目标。当代保守的自由主义者则把自由主义与民主之间的界限划得更清楚，走得也比托克维尔更远。哈耶克认为，不仅民主政治是个人自由的手段，而且政治自由在很大程度上也是经济自由的手段。
在哈耶克看来，个人自由的第一要件是经济自由，而且有其内在的价值。民主的价值，只是一种工具性的。民主政治可以与伸张自由的自由主义并行不悖，甚至在反专制主义的长期斗争中相互融合，但是一旦民主成为现实，就有必要把两者的关系重新区分开来。自由主义和民主是针对不同问题作出的不同反应。自由主义涉及的是政府的职能，而且特别要限制政府的权力。民主的问题涉及的则是，谁通过什么样的程序来进行统治。自由主义要求所有的权力，包括多数人的权力都应该受到约束。民主则把多数人的意见看成是对政府权限的唯一限制。民主的反面是君主，自由的反面是奴役。由这种相对应的差别，我们可以看到，自由主义与民主的差异。在自由主义要求限制政府权力的一般法则面前，民主并没有豁免的特权。所以，意大利政治哲学家博比奥指出，若是把自由主义仅仅看成是维护资产阶级统治的思想工具，你可以不加思索地摈弃它，然而，自由主义被理解成致力于限制国家专横的权力时，你还能轻松摈弃它吗？根据自由主义主张限制国家权力的大传统，个人在政治权力出现之前就已是特定权利和利益，包括财产权的拥有者。不论是什么人掌权，甚至是由多数人产生的民主政府的权力，在这方面也应受到限制。在自由的民主国家，消极的自由最为广泛。
所以，一切权力都有其危险性。因此，唯一公道的政府只是权力受到合法限制的政府。多数人的绝对主权并不比专制君主或贵族统治的绝对权力更值得信赖。
因此，民主与自由的不相容之处，就在于当所有的人都参与决策时，个人就不得不服从于集体的权威，因此，也就有可能失去只属于个人的自由。所以，民主的产生有其有利于保护自由的一面，同样，也存在着妨碍自由的危险。如何使自由和民主相容呢？托克维尔把目光投向了市民社会。他认识到，市民社会是民主化和民主制度的一项重要领域，他强调的，不是公民参与政治，而是积极地参与自愿的结社，否则就难以保证政体的自由性质和公民个人的自由不致失落。市民社会自身就是社会整合和公众自由的最重要的领域。考虑到市民社会有助于限制国家政治权力，托克维尔情不自禁地欣赏法国大革命前普遍存在的封建的自由，即建立在封建等级基础之上的自由，甚至对法国大革命把这种自由扫荡掉都深为惋惜。
所以，在这一点上，他与柏克颇为接近，即都十分珍视传统。他认为，旧制度正是大革命的起源和条件。他发现，法国之所以长期受害于威权传统，是因为行政上的中央集权把社会原子化为个个孤立的个人了，即在社会中铲除了作为中介组织的等级和结社，因而在没有市民社会的情形下使个人直接地暴露于国家的权力，这样，个人就形不成民间的力量，也就难以对国家的权力构成有效的牵制。民主政治建立在介于个人与国家之间的独立组织和社会集团的存在的基础之上。若是没有社会中介的存在，就会出现独裁或集权政权。这种存在如果不能构成稳定的民主政治的充分条件，至少也构成其必要条件。像在柏克的著作中一样，在托克维尔的著作中，我们可以找到与激进主义相对立的保守主义哲学路线。我们可以看到，两人对自发的社会结构，如父权制家庭。地方社区、教会和行会等旧制度的尊重（见第二编，第十一章），而激进主义则视之为万恶之源，并发誓要连根拔除，大有“即使毁灭世界，也要伸张正义”之势。在挖掘大革命与多数暴政的思想根源时，托克维尔发现，十八世纪法兰西启蒙的理性主义难辞其咎：有人说，十八世纪哲学的特点是对人类理性的崇拜，是无限信赖理性的威力，凭此就可以随意改造法律、规章制度和风尚。应该确切地解释一下：真正说来，这些哲学家中有一些人并不崇拜人类理性，而是崇拜他们自己的理性。从未有人像他们那样对共同智慧缺乏信心。…… [ 这种理性 ] 只不过发明了一些新的奴役形式。（第 259-260 页）对于作为近代激进主义、极端理性主义、极权民主思想三重始作俑者的卢梭，柏克和托克维尔既欣赏他的天才，但又厌恶其政治与道德学说。柏克宣称，卢梭是法国大革命的主笔；托克维尔则认为，激进的理性主义应对法国的大革命负责。
根据已知的事实，像罗伯斯庇尔和圣。茹斯特这样的雅各宾派在革命的高潮期间，虔诚而频繁地阅读卢梭的作品。卢梭谴责一切传统团体，如行会，教会和企业。托克维尔则认为，民主的最大危险就是把普通人摆在第一位，强调多数的价值观。对大众的过分依赖会导致平民专制。众所周知，自由是法国大革命的口号。但是，大革命中的自由不仅成了空洞的口号，而且成了少数人独享的专横的权力。因为，卢梭的自由思想本身就是空洞的。卢梭说，“人生而自由，却无往不在枷锁之中”，这有如说，“鱼生来要飞，却无往不在水中。”（赫尔岑语）
托克维尔则直截了当地指出了自由的界限，“谁要求过大的独立自由，谁就是寻求过大的奴役。”（第 179 页）所以，在托克维尔和柏克看来，法国大革命不是对自由的追求，而是对绝对权力的追求。
雅各宾派把法国大革命变成一个对传统及道德的征服，以自由与平等的名义搞虚无主义，以人民的名义实行极权的专制统治。他们以为，通过对群众进行说服和教育，必要时借助强力和恐怖，可以实现对市民、知识分子和农民的改造。用当代自由主义哲学家柏林的分类法，法国大革命的自由口号不过是伸张性的积极自由、无政府主义的自由，而不是消极的自由和有序的自由。若是以为大众民主，或是建立在代表大众利益基础之上的民主可以对人为所欲为，那么，其所面临的极权专制的威胁也最大。二十世纪以来，民主变得更加神圣。
1951 年，联合国教科文组织的一份报告中这样写到，“在世界历史上，第一次没人再以反对民主的面目提出一种主义。而且对民主的行动和态度的指责常常是针对他人的，但现实中的政客和政治理论家在强调他们所拥护的制度和所主张的理论中的民主因素方面却不遗余力。”
在当代，对民主的威胁，不再是来自公开的敌视，而是来自对民主的过分热衷和颂扬。
这种热衷与颂扬，不是给民主以恰当的位置，而是把民主抬高到与自由并驾齐驱的程度，乃至以民主的名义变相地妨碍、抵消自由。所以，继法国大革命之后，当自由再次让位于极端民主的时候，当民主沦为仅仅是多数人的声音的时候，当这个声音已不再是正义的声音，而是恐怖的咒语的时候，法国大革命中的大民主与大恐怖就注定要重演。试想，文革中哪一桩暴行不伴随着振臂高呼出的多数声音。这种声音和暴行又曾令多少人心惊胆颤。受尽凌辱，乃至命归黄泉。文化大革命声称摧毁封建旧制度余毒，却通过个人崇拜与全面专政使人受害更深。托克维尔对多数人暴政的担心绝不是杞人忧天。因为摧毁旧制度不能靠大革命，同样，“将巴士底狱片片拆毁，并不能使囚徒变成自由人”。追求民主只能缘着追求自由的路径才能得到；若放弃自由去追求民主只能导致大革命式的奴役和暴政。这或许是托克维尔为全人类总结的政治教训，这也正是《旧制度与大革命》的价值日久而弥新之所在。 -
宁宁，节日快乐！
2007-06-01
“六一”节快乐！
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我和你妈妈昨天许了一个愿，希望我们能帮你实现。我们会尽力！ -
性感超男
2007-06-01
乔老爷和盖茨大叔在D5上的讲话。执着的男人很性感。
乔老爷好像在开发什么新产品，说话的时候藏着捂着的，好玩。不过那家伙已经用上了iPhone，真是让人嫉妒（拜托，什么时候开卖啊）。盖茨大叔老成持重，不过畅谈业界未来的时候，一付很沉迷的样子。很超男，呵呵。
他们接受interview的视频Following is a transcript of the interview Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg conducted with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the D5 conference on May 30, 2007.
[Video plays]
Kara: Well, thank you.
Walt: Before we get started, there were some pioneers–of course, we have the pioneers here on the stage, but there were some other really important pioneers in the video we just saw and a couple of them are here in the audience. Mitch Kapor, who is a regular, could you just stand up, wherever you are? There he is.
[Applause]
Walt: And Fred Gibbons, who has not come to D before, but is here tonight. Fred. There’s Fred right there.
[Applause]
Walt: And I don’t know if he’s in the room, but I do want to recognize our fellow journalist, Brent Schlender from Fortune, who, to my knowledge, did the last joint interview these guys did. It was not onstage, but it was Fortune magazine. Brent, I don’t know if you’re in the room. If you are, can you stand? Maybe he’s way over there.
[Applause]
Kara: So let’s get started. I wanted to ask, there’s been a lot of mano-a-mano/catfight kind of thing in a lot of the blogs and the press and stuff like that, and we wanted to–the first question I was interested in asking is what you think each has contributed to the computer and technology industry, starting with you, Steve, for Bill, and vice versa.
Steve: Well, you know, Bill built the first software company in the industry and I think he built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was, except for these guys. And that was huge. That was really huge. And the business model that they ended up pursuing turned out to be the one that worked really well, you know, for the industry. I think the biggest thing was, Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software.
Kara: Was important?
Steve: That’s what I see. I mean, a lot of other things you could say, but that’s the high order bit. And I think building a company’s really hard, and it requires your greatest persuasive abilities to hire the best people you can and keep them at your company and keep them working, doing the best work of their lives, hopefully. And Bill’s been able to stay with it for all these years.
Walt: Bill, how about the contribution of Steve and Apple?
Bill: Well, first, I want to clarify: I’m not Fake Steve Jobs.
What Steve’s done is quite phenomenal, and if you look back to 1977, that Apple II computer, the idea that it would be a mass-market machine, you know, the bet that was made there by Apple uniquely–there were other people with products, but the idea that this could be an incredible empowering phenomenon, Apple pursued that dream.
Then one of the most fun things we did was the Macintosh and that was so risky. People may not remember that Apple really bet the company. Lisa hadn’t done that well, and some people were saying that general approach wasn’t good, but the team that Steve built even within the company to pursue that, even some days it felt a little ahead of its time–I don’t know if you remember that Twiggy disk drive and…
Steve: One hundred twenty-eight K.
Kara: Oh, the Twiggy disk drive, yes.
Bill: Steve gave a speech once, which is one of my favorites, where he talked about, in a certain sense, we build the products that we want to use ourselves. And so he’s really pursued that with incredible taste and elegance that has had a huge impact on the industry. And his ability to always come around and figure out where that next bet should be has been phenomenal. Apple literally was failing when Steve went back and re-infused the innovation and risk-taking that have been phenomenal. So the industry’s benefited immensely from his work. We’ve both been lucky to be part of it, but I’d say he’s contributed as much as anyone.
Steve: We’ve also both been incredibly lucky to have had great partners that we started the companies with and we’ve attracted great people. I mean, so everything that’s been done at Microsoft and at Apple has been done by just remarkable people, none of which are sitting up here today.
Kara: Well, not us.
Walt: Not us. So in a way, you’re the stand-ins for all those other people.
Steve: Yeah, in a way, we are. In a very tangible way.
Walt: So Bill mentioned the Apple II and 1977 and 30 years ago. And there were a couple of other computers which were aimed at the idea that average people might be able to use them, and looking back on it, a really average-average person might not have been able to use them by today’s standards, but it certainly broadened the base of who could use computers.
I actually looked at an Apple ad from 1978. It was a print ad. That shows you how ancient it was. And it said, thousands of people have discovered the Apple computer. Thousands of people. And it also said, you don’t want to buy one of these computers where you put a cartridge in. I think that was a reference to one of the Atari or something.
Steve: Oh, no.
Walt: You want a computer you can write your own programs on. And obviously, people still do.
Steve: We had some very strange ads back then. We had one where it was in a kitchen and there was a woman that looked like the wife and she was typing in recipes on the computer with the husband looking on approvingly in the back. Stuff like that.
Walt: How did that work for you?
Steve: I don’t think well.
Walt: I know you started Microsoft prior to 1977. I think Apple started the year before, in ‘76.
Steve: ‘76.
Walt: Microsoft in …
Bill: ‘74 was when we started writing BASIC. Then we shipped the BASIC in ‘75.
Walt: Some people here, but I don’t think most people, know that there was actually some Microsoft software in that Apple II computer. You want to talk about what happened there, how that occurred?
Bill: Yeah. There had been the Altair and a few other companies–actually, about 24–that had done various machines, but the ‘77 group included the PET, TRS-80 …
Walt: Commodore?
Bill: Yeah, the Commodore PET, TRS-80 and the Apple II. The original Apple II BASIC, the Integer BASIC, we had nothing to do with. But then there was a floating-point one where–and I mostly worked with Woz on that.
Steve: Let me tell the story. My partner we started out with, this guy named Steve Wozniak. Brilliant, brilliant guy. He writes this BASIC that is, like, the best BASIC on the planet. It does stuff that no other BASIC’s ever done. You don’t have to run it to find your error messages. It finds them when you type it in and stuff. It’s perfect in every way, except for one thing, which is it’s just fixed-point, right? It’s not floating-point.
So we’re getting a lot of input that people want this BASIC to be floating-point. And, like, we’re begging Woz, please, please make this floating point.
Walt: Who’s we? How many people are in Apple?
Steve: Well, me. We’re begging Woz to make this floating-point and he just never does it. You know, and he wrote it by hand on paper. I mean, you know, he didn’t have an assembler or anything to write it with. It was all just written on paper and he’d type it in. He just never got around to making it floating-point.
Kara: Why?
Steve: This is one of the mysteries of life. I don’t know, but he never did. So, you know, Microsoft had this very popular, really good floating-point BASIC that we ended up going to them and saying “help.”
Walt: And how much was the–I think you were telling us earlier …
Bill: Oh, it was $31,000.
Walt: That Apple paid you for the …
Bill: For the floating-point BASIC. And I flew out to Apple, I spent two days there getting the cassette. The cassette tapes were the main ways that people stored things at the time, right? And, you know, that was fun.
I think the most fun is later when we worked together.
Walt: What was the most fun? Tell the story about the most fun that was later.
Kara: Or maybe later, not the most fun.
Walt: Let them talk.
Kara: Teasing.
Bill: Well, you know, Steve can probably start it better. The team that was assembled there to do the Macintosh was a very committed team. And there was an equivalent team on our side that just got totally focused on this activity. Jeff Harbers, a lot of incredible people. And we had really bet our future on the Macintosh being successful, and then, hopefully, graphics interfaces in general being successful, but first and foremost, the thing that would popularize that being the Macintosh.
So we were working together. The schedules were uncertain. The quality was uncertain. The price. When Steve first came up, it was going to be a lot cheaper computer than it ended up being, but that was fine.
Kara: So you worked in both places?
Bill: Well, we were in Seattle and we’d fly down there.
Walt: But Microsoft, if I remember correctly from what I’ve read, wasn’t Microsoft one of the few companies that were allowed to even have a prototype of the Mac at the time?
Steve: Yeah. What’s interesting, what’s hard to remember now is that Microsoft wasn’t in the applications business then. They took a big bet on the Mac because this is how they got into the apps business. Lotus dominated the apps business on the PC back then.
Bill: Right. We’d done just MultiPlan, which was a hit on the Apple II, and then Mitch did an incredible job betting on the IBM PC and 1-2-3 came in and, you know, ruled that part of the business. So the question was, what was the next paradigm shift that would allow for an entry? We had Word, but WordPerfect was by far the strongest in word processing dBase database.
Walt: And Word was kind of a DOS text …
Bill: All of these products I’m saying were DOS-based products.
Walt: Right.
Bill: Because Windows wasn’t in the picture at the time.
Walt: Right.
Bill: That’s more early ’90s that we get to that. So we made this bet that the paradigm shift would be graphics interface and, in particular, that the Macintosh would make that happen with 128K of memory, 22K of which was for the screen buffer, 14K was for the operating system. So it was …
Walt: 14K?
Bill: Yeah.
Walt: The original Mac operating system was 14K?
Bill: 14K that we had to have loaded when our software ran. So when the shell would come up, it had all the 128K.
Steve: The OS was bigger than 14K. It was in the 20s somewhere.
Walt: I see.
Steve: We ship these computers now with, you know, a gigabyte, 2 gigabytes of memory, and nobody remembers 128K.
Walt: I remember that. I remember paying a lot of money for computers with 128K in those days. So the two companies worked closely on the Mac project because you were maybe not the only, but the principal or one of the principal software creators for it, is that right?
Steve: Well, Apple did the Mac itself, but we got Bill and his team involved to write these applications. We were doing a few apps ourselves. We did MacPaint, MacDraw and stuff like that, but Bill and his team did some great work.
Kara: Now, in terms of moving forward after you left and your company grew more and more strong, what did you think was going to happen to Apple after sort of the disasters that occurred after Steve left?
Bill: Well, Apple, they hung in the balance. We continued to do Macintosh software. Excel, which Steve and I introduced together in New York City, that was kind of a fun event, that went on and did very well. But then, you know, Apple just wasn’t differentiating itself well enough from the higher-volume platform.
Walt: Meaning Windows, right?
Bill: DOS and Windows.
Walt: Okay. But especially Windows in the ’90s began to take off.
Bill: By 1995, Windows became popular. The big debate wasn’t sort of Mac versus Windows. The big debate was character mode interface versus graphics mode interface. And when the 386 came and we got more memory and the speed was adequate and some development tools came along, that paradigm bet on GUI paid off for everybody who’d gotten in early and said, you know, this is the way that’s going to go.
Walt: But Apple wasn’t able to leverage its products?
Bill: After the 512K Mac was done, the product line just didn’t evolve as fast–Steve wasn’t there–as it needed to. And we were actually negotiating a deal to invest and make some commitments and things with Gil Amelio. No, seriously.
Kara: Don’t be mean to him.
Bill: I’m sorry?
Kara: Just saying the word Gil Amelio, you can see his…
Bill: So I was calling him up on the weekend and all this stuff and next thing I knew, Steve called me up and said, don’t worry about that negotiation with Gil Amelio. You can just talk to me now. And I said, “Wow.”
Steve: Gil was a nice guy, but he had a saying. He said, “Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom leaking water and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.”
Walt: Meanwhile, through all this–I want to get back to the thing we saw in 1997 at Macworld there–but Windows was just going great guns. I mean, Windows 95, to whatever extent earlier versions of Windows had not had all the features, all the GUI stuff that the Mac had, and Windows 95 really was an enormous, enormous leap.
Bill: Yeah. Windows 95 is when graphics interface became mainstream and when the software industry realized, wow, this is the way applications are going to be done. And it was amazing that it was ridiculed sort of in ‘93, ‘94, was not mainstream, and then in ‘95, the debate was over. It was kind of just a commonsense thing. And it was a combination of hardware and software maturity getting to a point that people could see it.
Walt: So I don’t want to go through every detail, the whole history of how you came back, but…
Steve: Thank you.
Walt: But you in that video we all saw, you said you had decided that it was destructive to have this competition with Microsoft. Now, obviously, Apple was in a lot of trouble and I presume that there was some tactical or strategic reason for that, as well as just wanting to be a nice guy, right?
Steve: You know, Apple was in very serious trouble. And what was really clear was that if the game was a zero-sum game where for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose, then Apple was going to lose. But a lot of people’s heads were still in that place.
Kara: Why was that, from your perspective?
Steve: Well, a lot of people’s heads were in that place at Apple and even in the customer base because, you know, Apple had invented a lot of this stuff and Microsoft was being successful and Apple wasn’t and there was jealousy and this and that. There was just a lot of reasons for it that don’t matter.
But the net result of it was, was there were too many people at Apple and in the Apple ecosystem playing the game of, for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. And it was clear that you didn’t have to play that game because Apple wasn’t going to beat Microsoft. Apple didn’t have to beat Microsoft. Apple had to remember who Apple was because they’d forgotten who Apple was.
So to me, it was pretty essential to break that paradigm. And it was also important that, you know, Microsoft was the biggest software developer outside of Apple developing for the Mac. So it was just crazy what was happening at that time. And Apple was very weak and so I called Bill up and we tried to patch things up.
Bill: And since that time, we’ve had a team that’s fairly dedicated to doing the Mac applications and they’ve always been treated kind of in a unique way so that they can have a pretty special relationship with Apple. And that’s worked out very well. In fact, every couple years or so, there’s been something new that we’ve been able to do on the Mac and it’s been a great business for us.
Steve: And it’s actually–the relationship between the Mac development team at Microsoft and Apple is a great relationship. It’s one of our best developer relationships.
Kara: And do you look at yourselves as rivals now? Today as the landscape has evolved–and we’ll talk about the Internet landscape and everything else and other companies that have [gone] forward, but how do you look at yourselves in this landscape today?
Walt:Because, I mean, you are competitors in certain ways, which is the American way, right?
Kara: We watch the commercials, right?
Walt: And you get annoyed at each other from time to time.
Kara: Although you know what? I have to confess, I like PC guy.
Walt: Yeah, he’s great.
Kara: Yeah, I like him. The young guy, I want to pop him.
Steve: The art of those commercials is not to be mean, but it’s actually for the guys to like each other. Thanks. PC guy is great. Got a big heart.
Bill: His mother loves him.
Steve: His mother loves him.
Kara: I’m telling you, I like PC guy totally much better.
Steve: Wow.
Kara: I do. I don’t know why. He’s endearing. The other guy’s a jackass.
Steve: PC guy’s what makes it all work, actually.
Walt: All right.
Steve: It’s worth thinking about.
Kara: So how do you look at yourselves?
Walt: I mean, let me just ask you, Bill. Obviously, Microsoft is a much larger company, you’re in many more markets, many more types of products than Apple is. You know, when you were running the company or when Steve Ballmer is running the company, you think obviously about Google, you think about, I don’t know, Linux in the enterprise, you think about Sony in the game area. How often is Apple on your radar screen at Microsoft in a business sense?
Bill: Well, they’re on the radar screen as an opportunity. In a few cases like the Zune, if you go over to that group, they think of Apple as a competitor. They love the fact that Apple’s created a gigantic market and they’re going to try and come in and contribute something to that.
Steve: And we love them because they’re all customers.
Walt: I have to tell you, I was actually told by J Allard, I’m serious, that because of the nature of the processor, the development platform they used to develop a lot of the software for the Xbox 360 was Macs. And he claimed that at one point, they had, like, placed the biggest order for whatever the Mac tower was at the time of anybody, and it was Microsoft.
Bill: I don’t know if it was the biggest, but, yeah, we had the same processor essentially that the Mac had. This is one of those great ironies is they were switching away from that processor while the Xbox 360 was adopting it. But for good reasons, actually, in both cases. Because we’re not in a portable application and that was one of the things that that processor road map didn’t have. But yes, it shows pragmatism, but we try and do things that way. So that was the development system for the early people getting their software ready for the introduction of Xbox 360.
Steve: And we never ran an ad on that.
Walt: I see. Admirable restraint. That’s wonderful restraint.
Steve: There were hundreds of them.
Bill: Steve is so known for his restraint.
Kara: How do you look at Microsoft from an Apple perspective? I mean, you compete in computers and…
Walt: I mean, you can say you don’t compete, you know, the era of destructive whatever, whatever you said in 1997, but you think–you’re consciously aware of what they’re doing with Windows, you followed Vista closely, I think.
Steve: You know, what’s really interesting is–and we talked about this earlier today–if you look at the reason that the iPod exists and the Apple’s in that marketplace, it’s because these really great Japanese consumer electronics companies who kind of own the portable music market, invented it and owned it, couldn’t do the appropriate software, couldn’t conceive of and implement the appropriate software. Because an iPod’s really just software. It’s software in the iPod itself, it’s software on the PC or the Mac, and it’s software in the cloud for the store. And it’s in a beautiful box, but it’s software. If you look at what a Mac is, it’s OS X, right? It’s in a beautiful box, but it’s OS X. And if you look at what an iPhone will hopefully be, it’s software.
And so the big secret about Apple, of course–not-so-big secret maybe–is that Apple views itself as a software company and there aren’t very many software companies left, and Microsoft is a software company. And so, you know, we look at what they do and we think some of it’s really great, and we think a little bit of it’s competitive and most of it’s not. You know, we don’t have a belief that the Mac is going to take over 80% of the PC market. You know, we’re really happy when our market share goes up a point and we love that and we work real hard at it, but Apple’s fundamentally a software company and there’s not a lot of us left and Microsoft’s one of them.
Walt: But you may be fundamentally a software company, but you’ve been known, at least to your customers and to most journalists as the company that kind of pays a lot of attention to integrating software and hardware. Microsoft has made some recent moves to be a little more like that, obviously not in your core biggest businesses, but with Xbox and Zune and, you know, the Surface computing device we saw today is another example. These aren’t markets that hold up in size to Windows or Office, but they’re some of your more recent initiatives. Are the companies’ approaches to this merging a little or …
Steve: Alan Kay had a great quote back in the ’70s, I think. He said, “People that love software want to build their own hardware.”
Walt: Well, Bill loves software.
Steve: Oh, I can resist that.
Bill: The question is, are there markets where the innovation and variety you get is a net positive? The negative is that in the early stage, you really want to do the two together so you want to do prototyping and things like that, you know, really as one thing.
And then take the phone market. We think we’re on 140 different kinds of hardware. We think it’s beneficial to us that even if we did a few ourselves, it wouldn’t give us what we have through those partnerships.
Likewise, if you take the robotics market, very undeveloped. We have over 140 tiny-volume robots using Microsoft software. And the creativity, building toys, security things, medical things, we love the innovation and the ecosystem that’s going to grow up–who knows when, but we’re patient–around that and we’ll have a great asset with this robotic software platform.
So there are things like PC, phone, and robot where the Microsoft choice is to go for the variety.
Apple, it’s great. For them, they do what works super well for them. And there’s a few markets like Xbox 360, Zune, and this year we have two new ones, the Surface thing and this RoundTable, which is the meeting-room thing, where we’ll actually, through subcontractors, but the P&L on the risk and all that for the hardware, the design is completely a Microsoft thing.Walt: The RoundTable: Is that something you’ve announced or were you just announcing it here?
Bill: We’ve shown prototypes of it. That’s the thing where it’s got the 360-degree …
Walt: Oh, right. It’s like Cisco has something in that market and HP too, right?
Bill: Oh, HP has a very high-end thing that’s a tiny bit like it, but anyway.
Walt: All right. Do you ever regret–was there something you might have wanted to do differently? And maybe you feel like this happened after you left Apple, something you might have done differently where you could have had a much bigger market share for the Mac?
Steve: Well, before I answer that, let me make a comment on Bill’s answer there, which is, it’s very interesting, in the consumer market and the enterprise market, they’re very different spaces. And in the consumer market, at least, I think one can make a pretty strong case that outside of Windows on PCs, it’s hard to see other examples of the software and hardware being decoupled working super well yet. It might in the phone space over time. It might. But it’s not clear. It’s not clear. You can see a lot more examples of the hardware/software coupling working well.
So I think this is one of the reasons we all, you know, come to work every day is because nobody knows the answers to some of these questions. And we’ll find out over the coming years and maybe both will work fine and maybe they won’t.Walt: Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. It’s good to try both approaches. In some product categories–take music players–the solo design worked better. In the PC market, the variety of designs at this stage has a higher share.
Walt: It has a higher share? It has a lot higher share.
Steve: It’s not that much different than music players the other way around.
Walt: Is there some moment you feel like I should have done this or Apple should have done that, and we could have had …
Kara: You stuck to this idea of the hardware/software integration and it’s working very well right now.
Steve: There’s a lot of things that happened that I’m sure I could have done better when I was at a Apple the first time and a lot of things that happened after I left that I thought were wrong turns, but it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter and you kind of got to let go of that stuff and we are where we are. So we tend to look forward.
And, you know, one of the things I did when I got back to Apple 10 years ago was I gave the museum to Stanford and all the papers and all the old machines and kind of cleared out the cobwebs and said, let’s stop looking backwards here. It’s all about what happens tomorrow. Because you can’t look back and say, well, gosh, you know, I wish I hadn’t have gotten fired, I wish I was there, I wish this, I wish that. It doesn’t matter. And so let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.
Kara: We’re going to talk a little bit tomorrow, but let’s talk about today, the landscape of how you see the different players in the market and how you look at what’s developing now. What has surprised both of you since having been around for so long, and still very active and everything, and your companies are still critically key companies? There are many, many companies that are becoming quite powerful. How do you look at the landscape at this moment and what’s happening especially in the Internet space?
Steve: I think it’s super healthy right now. I think there’s a lot of young people out there building some great companies who want to build companies, who aren’t just interested in starting something and selling it to one of the big guys, but who want to build companies. And I think there’s some real exciting companies getting built out there. Some next-generation stuff that, you know, some of us play catch-up with and, you know, some of us find ways to partner with and things like that, but there’s a lot of activity out there now, wouldn’t you say?
Bill: Yeah, I’d say it’s a healthy period. The notion of what the new form factors look like, what natural interface can do, the ability to use the cloud, the Internet, to do part of the task in a complementary way to the local experience, there’s a lot of invention that the whole approach of start-ups, the existing companies who do research, we’ll look back at this as one of the great periods of invention.
Steve: I think so, too. There’s a lot of things that are risky right now, which is always a good sign, you know, and you can see through them, you can see to the other side and go, yes, this could be huge, but there’s a period of risk that, you know, nobody’s ever done it before.
Kara: Do you have an example?
Steve: I do, but I can’t say.
Kara: Okay.
Steve: But I can say, when you feel like that, that’s a great thing.
Kara: Right.
Steve: That’s what keeps you coming to work in the morning and it tells you there’s something exciting around the next corner.
Walt: Okay. So the two of you have certainly–you’re involved every day with the Internet, you have Internet products, you have a whole slew of stuff on the Internet, you have iTunes and “.Mac” and all of that, but on another level, you’re the guys who represent the rich client, the personal computer, the, you know, big operating system and all that. And there is a certain school of thought–and I’m sure it’s shared by some people in the room–that this is all migrating to the cloud and you’ll need a fairly light piece of hardware that won’t have to have all that investment, all the kind of stuff you guys have done throughout your careers. So as much as people might think of you as rivals, one way to think of you is the two guys …
Steve: We’re both dinosaurs?
Walt: Huh?
Steve: That we’re both dinosaurs?
Walt: Dinosaurs? Yeah, whatever. I can talk about that. No, seriously …
Kara: You’re betting on a system that is changing.
Walt: In five years, is the personal computer still going to be the linchpin of all this stuff?
Bill: Well, you can say that it will be predicted that it won’t be. You know, the network computer took this over about, whatever, five years ago we disappeared. Remember the single-function computer? There was somebody who said that these general purpose things are kind of a dumb idea.
Kara: Larry Ellison.
Bill: The mainstream is always under attack. The thing that people don’t realize is that you’re going to have rich local functionality, I mean, at least our bet, whereas you get things like speech and vision, as you get more natural form factors, it’s a question of using that local richness together with the richness that’s elsewhere.
And as you look at the device, say, that’s connecting to the TV set or connecting in the car, there are lighter-weight hardware Internet connections, but when you come to the full screen rich, you know, edit the document, create things, you know, I think we’re nowhere near where we could be on making that stronger.
Steve: I’ll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the backend service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.
And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.
So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you’re connected or not.
But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower cost devices, on lower and lower power devices. And so there’s some pretty cool things you can do with clients.
Walt: Okay. So you’re saying rich clients still matter, but–maybe I misunderstood you, but your example was about a rich client that is not a personal computer as we have thought of a personal computer.
Steve: What I’m saying is, I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful and right now, can be way more powerful than just having a browser on the client.
Kara: You’re talking about a software company being a software and services company rather than a …
Steve: I’m saying the marriage of these services plus a more sophisticated client is a very powerful marriage.
Walt: Bill?
Bill: Yeah. Architecturally, the question is, do you run just in the cloud and all you have downloaded locally is the browser? And that is the same question for the phone as it is for the full-screen device. There will always be different screen sizes because these are, you know, the 5-inch screen does not really compete with the 20-inch screen, does not compete with the big living room screen. Those are things that there will be some type of computing behind all of those things, all connected to the Internet, but the idea that locally you have the responsiveness of immediate interaction without the latency or bandwidth limitations that you get if you try and do it all behind, that’s what leads to the right balance.
Kara: What does that device look like in five years? What would be your principal device? Is there one or…
Walt: I could be wrong, I think you carry a tablet with you, right?
Bill: Right.
Walt: Which has not necessarily stormed the world yet.
Bill: Yeah. This is like Windows 1992, I think. That is, I’m unrepentant on my belief.
Walt: Okay. But to go back to Kara’s point, what would you each imagine that you would carry as your principal, let’s say, thing to do the Web and…
Kara: I mean, Jeff Hawkins showed a very lightweight device.
Walt: Yeah. I don’t know if you guys saw, but Jeff Hawkins showed a Linux-based, very small–I think he called it a companion to a smart phone today.
Kara: A phone companion, which sounded a little naughty.
Walt: It doesn’t matter, you weren’t there, but what would you think you each would be–I assume you carry a tablet PC. I don’t know what brand it is. Maybe you change them up, I don’t know. You obviously carry a MacBook Pro, I would guess, or a MacBook.
Steve: Yeah. Well, and an iPhone.
Walt: And an iPhone?
Kara: You have one?
Steve: I do.
Kara: Right here?
Steve: Yes.
Walt: Well, he has one. He took it out before. Really.
Kara: Sorry.
Walt: He flashed his iPhone earlier today.
Kara: Anyway, go ahead. So what is your device? What’s the device that we should be carrying?
Walt: What’s your device in five years that you rely on the most?
Bill: I don’t think you’ll have one device. I think you’ll have a full-screen device that you can carry around and you’ll do dramatically more reading off of that.
Kara: Light.
Bill: Yeah. I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you’ll have voice. I think you’ll have ink. You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. And then you’ll have the device that fits in your pocket, which the whole notion of how much function should you combine in there, you know, there’s navigation computers, there’s media, there’s phone. Technology is letting us put more things in there, but then again, you really want to tune it so people know what they expect. So there’s quite a bit of experimentation in that pocket-size device. But I think those are natural form factors and that we’ll have the evolution of the portable machine. And the evolution of the phone will both be extremely high volume, complementary–that is, if you own one, you’re more likely to own the other.
Kara: And then at home, you’d have a setup that they all plug into?
Bill: Well, home, you’ll have your living room, which is your 10-foot experience, and that’s connected up to the Internet and there you’ll have gaming and entertainment and there’s a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world. And then in your den, you’ll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work. You know, the view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector so you can put information, you know, your desk can be a surface that you can sit and manipulate things.
Walt: Can I please have a room in my house that doesn’t have a screen and a projector in it?
Bill: You bet.
Walt: Thanks.
Bill: The bathroom.
Walt: Well…
Kara: That’s the perfect place for it, actually.
Walt: So what’s your five-year outlook at the devices you’ll carry?
Steve: You know, it’s interesting. The PC has proved to be very resilient because, as Bill said earlier, I mean, the death of the PC has been predicted every few years.
Walt: And here when you’re saying PC, you mean personal computer in general, not just Windows PCs?
Steve: I mean, personal computer in general.
Walt: Yeah, okay.
Steve: And, you know, there was the age of productivity, if you will, you know, the spreadsheets and word processors and that kind of got the whole industry moving. And it kind of plateaued for a while and was getting a little stale and then the Internet came along and everybody needed more powerful computers to get on the Internet, browsers came along, and it was this whole Internet age that came along, access to the Internet. And then some number of years ago, you could start to see that the PC that was taken for granted, things had kind of plateaued a little bit, innovation-wise, at least. And then I think this whole notion of the PC–we called it the digital hub, but you can call it anything you want, sort of the multimedia center of the house, started to take off with digital cameras and digital camcorders and sharing things over the Internet and kind of needing a repository for all that stuff and it was reborn again as sort of the hub of your digital life.
And you can sort of see that there’s something starting again. It’s not clear exactly what it is, but it will be the PC maybe used a little more tightly coupled with some backend Internet services and some things like that. And, of course, PCs are going mobile in an ever greater degree.
So I think the PC is going to continue. This general purpose device is going to continue to be with us and morph with us, whether it’s a tablet or a notebook or, you know, a big curved desktop that you have at your house or whatever it might be. So I think that’ll be something that most people have, at least in this society. In others, maybe not, but certainly in this one.
But then there’s an explosion that’s starting to happen in what you call post-PC devices, right? You can call the iPod one of them. There’s a lot of things that are not…
Walt: You can get into trouble for using that term. I want you to know that.
Steve: What?
Walt: I’m kidding. Post-PC devices.
Steve: Why?
Walt: People write letters to the editor, they complain about it. Anyway, go ahead.
Steve: Okay. Well, anyway, I think there’s just a category of devices that aren’t as general purpose, that are really more focused on specific functions, whether they’re phones or iPods or Zunes or what have you. And I think that category of devices is going to continue to be very innovative and we’re going to see lots of them.
Kara: Give me an example of what that would be.
Steve: Well, an iPod as a post-PC…
Kara: Well, yeah.
Steve: A phone as a post-PC device.
Walt: Is the iPhone and some of these other smart phones–and I know you believe that the iPhone is much better than these other smart phones at the moment, but are these things–aren’t they really just computers in a different form factor? I mean, when we use the word phone, it sounds like…
Steve: We’re getting to the point where everything’s a computer in a different form factor. So what, right? So what if it’s built with a computer inside it? It doesn’t matter. It’s, what is it? How do you use it? You know, how does the consumer approach it? And so who cares what’s inside it anymore?
Walt: So what are the core functions of the device formerly known as the cellphone, whatever we want to call it? The pocket device. What would you say the core functions, like, five years out, what are the core functions of that pocket device?
Bill: How quickly all these things that have been somewhat specialized, the navigation device, the digital wallet, the phone, the camera, the video camera, how quickly those all come together, it’s hard to chart out. But eventually, you’ll be able to pick something that has the capability to do every one of those things.
And yet, given the small size, you still won’t want to edit your homework or edit a movie on the screen of that size. And so you’ll have something else that lets you do the reading and editing and those things. Now, if we could ever get a screen that would just roll out like a scroll, you know, then you might be able to have the device that did everything.
Walt: You know, in the very first D conference, we had these guys from E Ink here.
Kara: Yeah.
Walt: I’m sure you’ve both talked to them. They were talking about that. That was five years ago. It’s always five years out. So do you…
Bill: Yeah. There’s some advances in projection technology that are more likely to be delivered, I think, than the flexible material guys, but it’s not even on the horizon, no matter which of the two approaches are pursued.
Kara: And any kind of quality.
Bill: We have some Microsoft research people who work on [that] and there’s a lot of investment, but it’s at least in the five-year time frame.
Walt: You, five years from now, what’s going to be on that pocket device?
Steve: I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is because I wouldn’t have thought that there would have been maps on it five years ago, but something comes along, gets really popular, people love it, get used to it, you want it on there.
So people are inventing things constantly and I think the art of it is balancing what’s on there and what’s not on there, is the editing function. And clearly, most things you carry with you are communications devices. You want to do some entertainment with them as well, but they’re primarily communications devices and that’s what they’re going to be.
Kara: Outside the computing area, what are the exciting areas in the Internet space at all that you’re looking at that’s interesting to each of your companies and in general for you? Any social networking, any kind of the Wikis, those kind of things, things we’ve talked about in the past couple–today, essentially?
Steve: You know, we’re working on some things that I can’t talk about, but…
Kara: Again.
Steve: Again, yeah.
Kara: It’s very beautiful, I think.
Steve: There used to be a saying, isn’t it at Apple …
Walt: Going to blow us away, though, when you can talk about it.
Kara: Blow us away, wow, it’s great.
Steve: There used to be a saying at Apple, isn’t it funny, a ship that leaks from the top. So the…
Kara: That’s kind of like a sweater without sleeves is a vest. I don’t get that.
Steve: That was what they used to say about me when I was in my 20s.
Walt: Okay.
Steve: There’s a zillion interesting things going on on the Internet. The most interesting things to me are these incredible new services that people are bringing up and…
Kara: Surrounding entertainment or…
Steve: There’s a lot of them surrounding entertainment, but there’s a lot of them that have to do with just sort of figuring how to navigate through life a little more efficiently. And I think, you know, it’s really great when you show somebody something and you don’t have to convince them they have a problem this solves. They know they have a problem, you can show them something, they go, oh, my God, I need this. And I think you’re going to see a lot of things like that happen over the next year or two.
Walt: You obviously have a very large Internet business with iTunes and you sell a lot of stuff in the Apple Store, but, you know, you were early with this idea that when you bought a computer from Apple, you had this kind of Internet service back end, and it was called “.Mac”. And I think a lot of people feel you haven’t developed it very much.
Steve: I couldn’t agree with you more, and we’ll make up for lost time in the near future.
Walt: And in your case, you obviously have huge things like Hotmail, for instance, which is, I guess–and Windows Messenger, which are both widely used and I don’t even know how many users.
Kara: A gazillion.
Walt: Huge numbers. But on the other hand, as Steve Ballmer was talking about today, you know, other people have much stronger positions in things like search and other parts of the Internet. So are you guys, because you are the personal computer companies that are, you know, best associated with that, not as nimble as some of these competitors at this point? Do you worry about not being as nimble, both of you? I mean, obviously, Microsoft’s a much bigger company, but you’re a big company, Steve, Apple is. Do you worry about not being as nimble as somebody sitting out there with, you know, the kind of ten employees that you guys had in 1977?
Bill: Well, there’s always going to be great new things that come out of other companies, and you want to be in a position to benefit from those, to have those inventions drive demand for Windows and personal computers and then some of those upstream things you want to participate in. I hope Steve mentioned we are going to participate in search, hopefully to a higher degree in the future than at present.
Walt: He did mention that, yeah.
Bill: So we’ll see what we can do there. A lot of the applications are more specialized so they’re not areas we’ll go into. You know, take what can happen with education now that video is mainstream and all these tools that let you do rich interactions are very mainstream. I’m very excited about that. You know, the idea of empowerment goes back to the very beginning of our industry and some of those dreams that this would be used by students or that teachers could get better and learn from each other in these new ways, we’re just at the threshold where some of those things can happen. And, yes, our companies can contribute to that, but as a whole, it’s the ecosystem jumping on and building on each other where you can finally say finally technology did something for education.
Steve: See, I look at this a little bit differently, which is, we’re not trying to do a lot of this stuff because it’s not what we do. We don’t think one company can do everything. So you’ve got to partner with people that are really good at stuff. Like, we’re not, I mean, maybe Microsoft is great at search. We’re not. We’re not trying to be great at search so we partner with people that are great at search. And we don’t know how to do maps on the back end. We know how to do the best maps client in the world, but we don’t know how to do the back end so we partner with people that know how to do the back end. And what we want to do is be that consumer’s device and that consumer’s experience wrapped around all this information and things we can deliver to them in a wonderful user interface, in a coherent product.
And so in some cases, you know, we have to do more work than others. You know, in the case of iTunes, there wasn’t a music delivery service that was any good and we had to do one, so we’ll do one. But in other cases, there’s companies doing a way better job because we’re not as good at this stuff as other people are and we’d love to partner with them and so, you know, we selectively do that. And I think it’s really hard for one company to do everything. Life’s complex.
Kara: Let’s talk about entertainment. Entertainment’s important to both your companies. For yours with music right now and as you get into Apple TV. Microsoft has been within the Hollywood era. Where do you see that going in the era of YouTube? We’ve had a couple of network people here talking about changes that are happening in Hollywood and everything else. What is happening now to entertainment delivery and where do you all play? Because you’ll be the delivery mechanism in one way or the other for most people.
Bill: Well, the big milestone is where the delivery platform is the Internet and so you bring the richness and the interactivity. I think you can get a little bit of a glimpse of the future of TV more from looking at community-type things like Xbox Live, where people are talking to each other, finding friends, you know, watching things together, talking about those things.
As you map that onto genres like educational shows or sports shows or watching the Olympics, the elections, that ability to navigate becomes very, very powerful. And we’re not in entertainment. Yes, we do Halo, which is this big video game, but by and large, we’re a platform and so it’s the tough software things, whether it’s the speech or the ink or the deep graphics, that’s where things that take 10 years to get done, the IPTV stuff, the foundation there, you know, took ten years to get it done. Now it’s finally coming to fruition and we have people like AT&T betting their company on putting that together.
So we’re just at the start of having a scale-entertainment delivery vehicle, both through PCs, unfortunately not connected up to the TV set in most cases, but that’s a point of innovation, and now things like IPTV and Xbox that are connected up in the living room.
Walt: Bill, you weren’t here, but Steve showed a new function of Apple TV that brings YouTube directly to the TV. Is there going to be more of that from you? Do you see yourself the way Bill says, as an enabler of entertainment or, I mean, putting aside your Disney role, but your Apple role?
Steve: I mean, I think people want to enjoy their entertainment when they want it and how they want it, on the device that they want it on. So ultimately, that’s going to drive the entertainment companies into all sorts of different business models. And that’s a good thing. I mean, if you’re a content company, that’s a great thing. More people wanting to, you know, enjoy your content more often in more different ways, that’s why you’re in business, but the transitions are hard sometimes.
And, you know, the music industry, it turned out that the Internet got fast enough to download songs pretty easily. There was no legal alternative and maybe they made some bad choices in how they reacted to that, but, you know, they’re still trying to make the transition to a very different way of doing business, or ways of doing business while they’re under attack from piracy. And we can all highlight some of the mistakes that have been made, but, you know, still, it’s a tough job.
And Hollywood, I think, you know, has watched what’s happened in music, learned some things to do, some things not to do, but, you know, they’re still trying to map this out. How do they make some of these transitions, some new business models, different platforms, allowing their customers way more freedom on when they want to watch stuff and how they want to watch it. And I think there’s a tremendous amount of experimentation and thought going on that’s going to be good. It’s going to be really good if you’re a content owner.
Walt: Can I ask about the user interface of the personal computer for a minute? Vista has just come out, which is your best version of Windows you’ve done, has some UI improvements in it. You’re about to do yet another version of the Mac OS called Leopard in the fall, which, from what you’ve shown publicly at least so far, has some improvements. But fundamentally, these are still the kind of file icon, folder icon, dropdown menu. I know I’m minimizing. There’s a lot of other things. There’s gadgets and widgets and all kinds of other cool things in there now, but, you know, you can see that it’s still all built on what you started with, with what Xerox did research on.
In the offing in the next four or five years, is it possible there’s a new paradigm for organizing the user interface of the personal computer? Let’s leave cellphones and things out for a minute, but just the personal computer. Bill?
Bill: One of the things that’s been anticipated for a long time is when 3D comes into that interface. And there was a lot of experimentation, sites on the Internet where you’d kind of walk around and meet people, but in fact, the richness, the speed, it just didn’t sustain itself. Now we’re starting to see with some of the mapping stuff, a few of the sites, that the quality of that graphics, the tools and things, are getting to the point where 3D can really come in. So I’d definitely say that when you go to a store, bookstore, you’ll be able to see the books lined up, you know, the way you might be interested in or lined up the way they are in the real store.
So 3D is a way of organizing things, particularly as we’re getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we’ve ever had before. And we can take that into this communications world where the PC is playing a much more central role, kind of taking over what was the PBX, sort of one of the last mainframes in the business environment. That will be a big change that will come to it. And as we get natural input, that will cause a change.
Walt: And what about this multi-touch stuff? It’s really interesting. Obviously, Steve showed some of it on the iPhone when he introduced the iPhone. Steve Ballmer today showed a bunch of it with the Surface computing device. It happens, although it’s not part of our program, that HP, which is a sponsor of this conference, has a multi-touch sort of display over here out in the foyer. Will this make its way into…
Kara: Sort of the Minority Report, this kind of thing.
Walt: Yeah. Will this make its way into–maybe you call it direct manipulation of objects with your hands and your fingers. Will this make its way into mainstream, let’s say, laptop computers as a new UI or an additional part of the UI or is that just a thing for specialized devices?
Bill: Well, go beyond the laptop. Vision. Software is doing vision and so, you know, imagine a game machine where you’re just going to pick up the bat and swing it or the tennis racket and swing it.
Walt: We have one of those.
Kara: Yeah. Wii.
Walt: Well, the Wii.
Bill: No, that’s not it. You can’t pick up your tennis racket…
Kara: Oh, your tennis racket.
Walt: Oh, I see what you mean, yeah.
Bill: And swing it.
Kara: Right.
Bill: You can’t sit there with your friends and do those natural things. That’s a 3D positional device. This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing what’s going on. And, you know, in the meetings, like you’re on a video conference, you don’t know who’s speaking, you know, they’re audio only, things like that. The camera will be ubiquitous. Now, of course, we have to design it in a way that people’s expectations about privacy are handled appropriately, but software can do vision and it can do it very, very inexpensively. And that means this stuff becomes pervasive. You don’t just talk about it being in a laptop device. You talk about it being part of the meeting room or the living room or…
Walt: But on the laptop, the way that–and, you know, maybe what we have is great and we don’t need any new big radical change, but when I turn on my laptop, whether it’s my Vista laptop or my Mac laptop, you know, there have been improvements, but it’s a lot like it was 10 years ago. It’s much better, the graphics are better and all that.
Kara: We talked about that radical change to happen for both your companies.
Walt: But, you know, you have the mouse, you have the icons, you move around, you have the–I mean, and you talked about what a big gamble it was in ‘84 to do that and then the follow on with Windows. We still essentially have that approach and I’m just wondering is that going to change.
Bill: Touch, ink, speech, vision, those things come in, but they don’t come in as a radical substitute. I think you’re also underestimating the degree of evolution. Because you’ve lived with it year by year, you know, say we’d sent you away for 10 years and you came back and you said, wow, there’s a search par
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[转载]无锡考虑炸坝引入长江水稀释太湖受污染水体
2007-05-30
无锡考虑炸坝引入长江水稀释太湖受污染水体
2007年05月30日15:01 新民网【新民网•独家报道】今日，有网友向新民网爆料称“从5月29日开始，家里的自来水就开始发臭，不是单纯的漂白粉味道，而是类似于阴井盖下淤泥 的臭味，5月30日，臭味更甚！ 洗手完手上一股臭味。没法漱口，煮出来的饭更是没法入口！超市的纯净水价格猛涨，甚至已经脱销！” 据网友反应，目前无锡已陷入自来水危机，至今无锡政府部门尚未对水污染事件发布官方声明。
随后新民网连线无锡市居民调查情况，家住锡山区查桥镇的钱小姐告诉新民网，大概一个星期之前，家里的自来水变得非常腥臭，无法使用，只能买纯净水。情况持续了大概2、3天，后来经过治理，水质开始好转。
5月30日下午13点，新民网连线无锡市自来水公司，就当地网友所指水污染事件进行核实，该公司负责人向新民网表示，网友所述水污染情况属实，有市民家里自来水发臭也是事实，水质变差的主要原因是从昨天开始无锡市的水源水受到污染。
无锡市自来水公司称受到污染的原因是因为连日干旱导致太湖的水位下降了1米多，而太湖水位本来就很低，所以很快就引起 泛浮现象，导致太湖底下的脏东西全都浮了上来，另一个原因是太湖蓝藻爆发，而且情况比较严重。
无锡市自来水公司向新民网表示，本次水源污染是个突发事件，之前就已经预计到了，因为太湖的水受污染已经不是一两天的 事情了，只是今年藻类爆发的非常厉害，导致现有普通的净水工艺很难达到净化标准，因为情况实在是太过严重，指标现在是几十倍的往上走。
“(污染)这个问题是早晚要爆发的，现在的水质，只要是太湖的水，水质都有问题，这次污染是加净水器、活性碳、强氧化 剂都没有效果，因为污染太严重。”无锡市自来水公司告诉新民网，本次污染，来势凶猛，他们已经束手无策，他们建议无锡市民 先暂时使用纯净水。至于此次污染事件何时能够解决，无锡市自来水公司坦言，暂时还无法预计。
此外，据无锡市自来水公司透露，无锡市政府昨天都在通宵开会考虑解决措施，可能会考虑将无锡外围的大坝炸掉，引入长江水，稀释污染水源。 另外，无锡市自来水公司还表示，引入长江水稀释污染水源，不会对上海市民饮水安全造成影响。(新民网 陈佳宜 黄杏莹)
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春来江水绿如蓝 能不忆江南
2007-05-30
蓝藻学名为蓝毒素，在蓝藻内部的特定区域存有蓝毒素，蓝毒素内的毒素分为很多种，其中一个分类为肝毒素和神经毒素，它们是已知的会侵袭肝脏和神经的毒素，另一个分类的毒素对皮肤有刺激作用，当蓝毒素细胞破裂或死亡时，以上分类的毒素就会被释放到水中。
当暴露在含有蓝藻毒素的湖水中，虽然一部门人会生病，但是饮用含有受污染藻类的水却未必会导致死亡。长期地暴露在含有蓝藻肝毒素的水中，即使含量较低，也有可能对人体产生长期的或慢性的不利影响。
如果你不断的摄入含有蓝藻的水，鱼或者其他水产品，就可能会产生头痛，发烧，腹泻，腹痛，反胃或者呕吐。如果你在受污染的水中游泳，也有可能会产生皮肤发痒或者眼睛\皮肤受到刺激，如果你怀疑直接接触到了污染水源并且身体发生了不良反应，用干净水冲洗身体并立即联系医生。
煮沸的水不会去除蓝藻中的毒素，因为你不可能凭借水的外表，气味或者味道去检测毒素的存在，只有化学测试才可以。
如果条件允许，不要使用受污染水洗衣服和餐具，如果实在没有其他水源，做家务要用水时必须戴上橡胶手套，使用受污染水洗澡应该避免，因为皮肤直接接触水会造成皮肤刺激和皮疹）
藻毒素具有水溶性和耐热性。易溶于水，甲醇或丙酮，不挥发，抗pH变化。MC-LR的分子式为C49H74N10O12，分子量为995.2（计算时往往按1000计)。
其在水中的溶解性大于1ｇ/Ｌ，化学性质相当稳定。在水中藻毒素自然降解过程是十分缓慢的，当水中的含量为5ug/Ｌ时，三天后，仅10%被水体中微粒吸收，7%随沙沉淀。藻毒素有很高的耐热性，加热煮沸都不能将毒素破坏，也不能将其去除；自来水处理工艺的混凝沉淀、过滤、加氯也不能将其去除。有调查试验研究表明在某湖周围3个自来水厂的出厂水中检出低浓度的藻毒素(128～1400ng/L)，结果提示采用常规的饮水消毒处理不能完全消除水体中的藻毒素。
它是一种肝毒素，这种毒素是肝癌的强烈促癌剂。
家畜及野生动物饮用了含藻毒素的水后，会出现腹泻、乏力、厌食、呕吐、嗜睡、口眼分泌物增多等症状，甚至死亡。病理病变有肝脏肿大、充血或坏死，肠炎出血、肺水肿等。
对于人类健康，微囊藻毒素也具有很大危害性。其中MC-LR的半致死剂量（LD50）约为50~100 ug/kg。人们在洗澡、游泳及其他水上休闲和运动时，皮肤接触含藻毒素水体可引起敏感部位(如眼睛)和皮肤过敏；少量喝入可引起急性肠胃炎；长期饮用则可能引发肝癌。医学部门已发现饮水中微量微囊藻毒素与人群中原发性肝癌的发病率有很大相关性。1996年在巴西造成100多名急性肝功能故障，7个月内至少50人死于藻毒素产生的急性效应，引起举世瞩目的关注。淡水水体中的蓝藻毒素已成为全球性的环境问题，世界各地经常发生蓝藻毒素中毒事件。 -
神奇的土地 伟大的民族 ！！！
2007-05-30
今天上在新浪看到无锡市一部分地区（天知道是不是真的只限于一部分地区）供水出现问题。主要表现是自来水有恶臭。赶紧打电话回家，岳母证实自来水的确发臭，已不能饮用。街上也已经买不到纯净水。她还说，电视台已经播放了公告，说是水质没问题，可供生活与饮用。是，我们的新闻媒体有好多的事情要宣传报导，这样说已经尽了义务。
大热的天，宁宁刚洗了个臭水澡。他还开玩笑说我们没带他来英国，才害得他要洗臭水澡。我和他妈妈相对无言。怎么办？怎么会这样？！
我从不怀疑类似这样的事会发生在我亲近的人身上，只是没想到它会以这样的方式出现。我只看到天怨，却没有看到人怒。也许只能让我加以赞美：神奇的土地，伟大的民族！！！愿你的GDP继续猛增，愿你的股市大好，愿社会一片和谐，愿世界更加详和！
太湖美呀太湖美，美就美在太湖的水。想起一个诗人，和他写的《死水》。痛彻心肺。天作孽，尤可活；人作孽，不可活。就这样，遥想起一块神奇的土地，一个伟大的民族！！！
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五体投地
2007-05-25
今天听到几个打扫卫生的老太在那里抱怨，说不知道哪个淘气学生在她们摆放的防滑警示牌上贴了个莫名其妙的纸。她们也看不懂是什么意思，不过反正那个学生肯定没安好心，所以她们准备报告给系里，准备好好查一下。
看不懂当然不好笑了，但是看过今年的猛男电影300的，一定会乐得下巴掉地上。学校的哥儿们居然能把歪点子用到Yellow warning signs的小人上去，实在太有才了！！！佩服得五体投地，赶紧拿手机拍下来，与大家分享一下。看出门道的同学，请跟贴。看不明白的，请找电影来看，xixi... ...
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张牙舞爪的爸爸
2007-05-25
在MSN上给宁宁写了一行字，“爸爸想宝宝”。宁宁马上回了这样一句。鼻子很酸。小家伙拿鼠标写的字，所以“爸爸”两个字才会这样张牙舞爪~~~
小家伙识字速度很快，现在一般的汉字都考不倒他了。 -
五月·苏格兰
2007-05-25
出火车站往Market Street走的时候，在墙上看到这一行粉笔字。
“我们是苏格兰人，不是英国人。”
这么“大逆不道”的口号也不知道是谁写的。一直觉得英伦本岛好像不存在那么严重的种族对立问题，现在看来问题不那么简单。
苏格兰经验主义哲学家、历史学家和经济学家大卫·休谟（1711-1776）的像
即便是俺这样只看过最基础的哲学入门书的人都要在这拜一下的。
在Royal Mile（皇家大道）上和卖苏格兰围巾的店员大婶合了一张影
Castle Rock Hostel
位置就在爱丁堡城堡的南坡街道边上。A stone's throw away.也就是说从山坡上扔块石头过来就能砸到这家招待所。
平生第一次在国外住Hostel，到处乱拍
这是厨房，提供必要的厨具，住店的客人可以自己烧吃的。用的是常见的电炉架。架子上五颜六色的塑料箱是客人自备的食物。另一个房间里有冰箱、微波炉。个人觉得只要不是太挑剔的人，应该可以接受这样的条件。
看到住店的背包客自己烧Pasta煎bacon。还有比较强的版本是有人用那边的烤炉烤点心，还有个GG干脆拿个大锅在那儿爆玉米花（喝啤酒的时候吃？），实在是佩服。
我们第一天晚上烧了方便面，配上面包黄油，凑乎了一顿。
这是我们预订的房间
每人每晚13镑，16个人1间。17日晚上入住的第一印象有点失望，因为房间里有点味（毕竟入住的人太多了），床单被子也没有换的样子。不过想想也就是将就一晚上而已，没法高标准严要求。
21日从翅膀岛回来还是住在这个房间，这次房间就打扫得很干净，床上用品也都换了。
还有，办入住的时候，感觉这边店员的态度不算太好。不过在Hostel，不管做什么都自助，也麻烦不到他们。店大欺客，总是有点道理的。
很宽敞的休息室
办完入住手续后，抽空先去爱丁堡城堡门口转一下
郁闷的是城堡门口正在搭看台，可能是为八月份的爱丁堡军操表演（The Edinburgh Tattoo)做准备？
这边的店好像五点就关门了
休市后宁静的街道
Yuan同学在一个森林公园拍的石拱桥
第二天从爱丁堡出发去翅膀岛（The Isle of Skye)
一辆小面包车，连导游和司机（都是MM）在内是29个人。上车后，团员自我介绍了一下。有加拿大来的，有爱尔兰的、美国的、法国MM、英国本国的... ...还有两个趁暑假出来玩的香港中文大学的小MM。有点小地球村的意思。
Culloden古战场遗址
1746年，苏格兰各部落支持查尔斯·斯图亚特(Bonnie Prince Charlie)复辟的起义在这里被镇压。此后，英王室制订了严厉的法律，苏格兰部落的许多风俗被禁（如穿呢裙或是擅自集会等）。Culloden之战是英伦本岛历史上最后一次战争。
这个... ...导游Kate MM和司机Julie MM在我们游苏格兰的三天里，给我们讲了n个苏格兰人民英勇抵抗英格兰统治的故事。俺偷偷跟LP说，咱们好像是在接受苏格兰国民教育。总的感觉是，古时候的英国统治者和中国古代君主做起事来一样心狠手辣。
很和善的导游Kate MM
长得很瘦弱的样子。绝大部分英国MM都比较，呃，chubby一点。Kate讲话口音不重。司机MM Julie应该是比较正宗的苏格兰口音，每次要跟我们讲什么话的时候，就aye~~~地这么先打声招呼。
再一张Culloden的风景
不要以为天气一直都这么亮丽。苏格兰的天气比英格兰的要怪上十倍，也就是说在我们Coventry那边一上午出一次太阳下一次雨，在这边就隔几分钟下一场雨出一次太阳。绝不夸张。只能一直把相机裹在衣服里，郁闷得我。
这个就是有名的尼斯湖(Loch Ness）了
停车的时候雨下得大，下到岸边的时候，天可怜见，雨终于稍停了几分钟。赶紧拍了几张照片就跑回车上了。据Kate MM说，这个湖暴深，要是把艾菲尔铁塔移过来沉到湖里，还不会冒尖。hoho... ...真的假的？
不过，没见到怪兽。居然还有几位大叔不畏风雨，在湖里玩帆板。不畏风雨可以，怪兽俺却是怕得紧，借我十七八个胆儿也不敢沾水。
没见到怪兽怪可惜的，俺在湖边留个影儿
雨下得这么勤快，在尼斯湖边拍到彩虹了
傍晚的时候到达Skye岛南端的小渔村Kyleakin
经过Inverness的时候没有停，有点可惜。从车上看，那座城市还是很漂亮的。不过，我们这次到苏格兰只有三天，行程上也只能这样排了。
这是Skye和与苏格兰相连的长桥，逆光下很不好拍。
几分钟后雨停，再拍。这边瞬间来去的风雨把我这个冒牌摄影师快要弄疯了
我们在Kyleakin住的小招待所
每人每晚12.5镑，算是相当便宜的了。
这次住的地方相当不错。如果以五星区分，在爱丁堡住的Castle Rock只够二颗半星，这间小楼房可以打四颗半星。
小房间一屋五个铺。我们和两个香港MM合住一室，实际上只住了四个人。房间、床单被子很洁净，床边有充电插座。
这是楼下的厨房
要用的厨具一概都有。还有免费的咖啡、奶茶和巧克力。架上的调料也齐全。
到Kyleakin之间，司机带我们去超市停了一下。我们买了简便牛肉饭、鸡块饭、面包片和果汁。后来发现厨房里居然没有微波炉，后来用煤气烤箱把饭闷熟的。
Portree 1
处于Skye岛南侧从南往北中点的一个小渔港。镇上的小店里卖很有特色的小挂件小摆设。店员MM还会很主动地问我们要不要来一杯免费的咖啡。真的很温馨。本想从那里寄明信片回家的。不过找了半天，居然没找到邮局。
Portree 2
英式小镇就是这样，百十来户人家。给人很宁静平和的感觉。就算偶尔有我们这样的游客到来，也不会打破这种平静。
海边的瀑布
在一处高地拍的
路极窄，又崎岖难行。有下山的车过来时，我们的车还要很艰难地贴边才成。要是冬天时候走这段路，就会非常不容易。让人讶异的是看到七八辆大摩托车，骑手皮衣皮裤，基本上还是每车两人，组着队，打着大灯，从山下呼啸而来，不知道是哪路神仙。
要不是这边天气变化快，其实Peter Jackson选这边当Lord of the Rings的外景地说不定更有震撼力。
在Stein Inn
一个只有十几户人家的小港口（忘了名儿了），这是那边惟一的一家小酒馆，好像也有上百年的历史了，看墙上挂了不少奖状。照片里最左边的那位就是我们的司机Julie。
下午去看苏格兰长毛牛
导游MM叫它们Hairy Fairy Coo。Hairy当然是说它们长得毛绒绒的样儿了，Fairy据说指它们这些长得像Teddy熊一样的牛牛是Skye岛上的精灵送给自己女儿当嫁妆的，Coo当然是指牛牛本身了。这张照片里是没牛牛，拍的是它们玩儿的地方。
接下来，就是牛牛们的照片了。
爸爸和儿子
一只小毛牛很好奇地冲过来盯着我看
喂，小家伙，留长头发可不行！（小家伙长得太可爱了，像个毛毛熊，要不是长得大一些，俺把它偷偷塞背包里背回家算了）
不过，后来好像被牛爸爸看出我的坏心思了，冲着我警告性地哞了一下。-_-b... ...还真的是怕它过来顶我。
去Coral Beach玩
没见到有海豹。不过风景还是很奇幻，呵呵。
很美的弧线
看到写在沙滩上的Scotland 2007了吗？xixi... ...
古堡
Ben Nevis
英国第一高峰（海拔1344米）。好像不是画面正中那座山，而是靠右侧被云挡住的那座。
Kate还给我们讲了一个自己登山迷路的故事，说是带了地图没带指南针，好像很初级的样子，呵呵。反正最后有惊无险就好。这边的女生比较猛一点。看她瘦削削的样子，倒是没想到。
Commando Memorial
为什么要在这边立这么一个纪念碑捏？忘了问导游MM了。
在山坡上野餐
Kate居然很辛苦地背了两大瓶的热水过来让大家冲热巧克力喝。有位老兄还拿了瓶威士忌出来让大家分享。对了，第一天组团出发的时候，Kate也拿了一瓶Whisky出来让全车的喝，说是送大家的礼物。也没杯子也没什么的，从第一排第一个人开始，拿着酒就直接喝。转了一圈，回到Kate手里的时候，只剩下半瓶了。Kate不由自主wow了一声。等她让大家喝完第二圈，那瓶酒就给喝没了。
Aaaaaaaaa.....oooooooooooo.....oooh
William Wallace纪念碑
看过Brave Heart没？没看过？没看过就跳过这一节吧，呵呵。
Julie给我们讲]民族英雄William Wallace的英勇事迹时语带哽咽，都快哭了。山脚下有一块雕工极其拙劣的石碑，据说是根据Brave Heart的Mel Gibson制作的。Julie劝我们千万不要看，直接上山顶看原装正版的华莱士。
从Wallace纪念碑所在的高地看苏格兰风光
这张照片是沈同学从车里往外拍的风景
云啊，田野啊，树啊什么的，漂亮得仿佛假的一样。只有在Ghibli的动画片里才能看到。
回到爱丁堡
苏格兰议会
建筑风格怪怪的，绝对和爱丁堡整体的风格不搭。据说是大师作品，不好评说。
从山下看Edinburgh Castle
北桥（North Bridge）
王子大街（Prince Street)
王子大街（Prince Street）
总觉得一座城市，让人感觉有历史才好。爱丁堡是一个很有历史氛围的城市。
即使只是匆匆而过，也了无遗憾。
更清楚的大幅照片，可以访问我的Flickr相册
http://www.flickr.com/photos/warwicker/
***
5月17日上午交论文，下午2点从Canley前往爱丁堡。两个多月的阅读与写作，心里的压力一直没有减轻过。当然想过自己不要太在意，但是世事如棋局，不知不觉间就投入进去，不愿意轻弃一子，能轻松放下，跳出来看的有几个？叹一下。
这次与其说是游玩，更像是疗伤。
21日回来后，和导师商定毕业论文题目，还有最后的12000字。 -
IPE写得自己开心，IRPA过得去。PIT写得极烂，不知所云，有及格就不错了。
中午出发去爱丁堡。希望能见到晴天。菩萨保佑... ...
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吹牛大王历险记
2007-05-11
杜维明谈儒学的至高境界，说那就是宋儒张载所说的：为天地立心，为生民立命，为往圣继绝学，为万世开太平。
要是早几年，也许会被这种百无一用的读书人吹的大牛吓倒。现在不了。开什么玩笑。现在有人要在我面前讲这话，当场呸将上去。 -
看了一个假期的书，郁闷几个月，终于在今天上午，感觉好像这么一瞬间，aha!有个很棒的想法就出现了。循着这个思路下去，原先迷乱无比的概念被一一梳理出来。而原先看过的书里的概念与系统分析就自然而然地和自己要批评的对象对应起来。然后再回去看Robert W. Cox的书，豁然开朗。真希望时间能多点，再多点，这样在写论文的时候，就可以写得更好一些。这种写作的感觉比较好。
IPE是要聪明孩子去学的，我是笨笨，本来想得多也不见得想得出来（感觉有点像Winnie the Pooh?)，不过俺算比较有恒心。一直想一直想，结果还真的是冲破了原先的状态，虽不说打通任督二脉，但有此一“役”（不是不是，是“有此一文”），这一年的IPE就算没有白学。v_^_^_v...(这不是表示一只青蛙，是一张笑脸加上左右两手比V字的意思。反正我是这样设定的...反正就是很开心的样子... ... -_-b)
我的IPE research essay的题目是：'Confucian capitalism' in the Age of Globalisation:A Critical Analysis
很BT吧。定题的时候刚写完第一批research essay，根本没时间想第二批写什么。在网上看到国内一直炒于丹，刚好自己又看到几篇Confucian capitalism的文章，觉得很值得讨论一下。和导师商量了一下，担心自己可能会写跑题，一不小心跨河越界写成了社会学的东东，那可糟了。Ben说可以从IPE角度切入的（我觉得他应该是不知道我那时候还很晕，根本不知道怎么写吧），'Go ahead!'结果就壮着胆子上路了，根本不知道前面多少豺狼虎豹等着拿我当点心。这根本不是一个硕士写的题，写篇博士论文都够了。下午听了Shaun Breslin的一堂课：China in Global Political Economy
讲得很棒！可惜只讲了46分钟，时间实在是给得太少。很想多了解一下老外是从哪个角度来观察中国，评价中国的，具体的结论又是如何。当然，Shaun讲完了也没给个定论，但思路是很清楚地在那儿的。当然，要做到像他那样熟练运用IPE进行分析，可不容易。有的时候，真有这种感觉：要是有哪个人，用我能理解的语言，把IR或是IPE的某个课题——不用非得是“人的一生该如何度过”这样的大题目——讲通透了，真的会觉得人生无憾。虽然生肖属猪，不过不想挂掉的时候真的和猪一样，live to eat, not eat to live，那可糟糕之极。
还有七天时间，时间应该来得及了，可能会不一样的，只是论文的完善程度。当然我希望这篇IPE文章能尽可能写得好一些，再好一些。加油！
可怜的Yuan同学，对国际政治经济国际关系安全理论之类根本不感兴趣的她，被我天天拉着当传说中“诗圣”写名句时做试验对象的老婆婆，灌了一套又一套的理论。每次听归听，脸上显然很不耐烦（因为根本不知道我在说什么），而且估计背着我已经因为我那套“歪理邪说”吐过n次了。对不起对不起~~~
写完论文后，通读四本书：Robert Cox的Approaches to World Order
Susan Strange：States and Markets; Authority and Markets
Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation -
加油！！！
2007-05-08
隔壁家的房子
后园
今天是Bank Holiday。上午天气还阴沉得像旧抹布，下午突然放晴，天色亮丽得让人直想叹气。
赶紧上楼拿了相机下来，坐在园子里照了两张。不过，我能做的也就仅此而已。
这三天一直闷在家里码字，真的很想出去走走啊，但是还有论文要写。再过十天就要交稿了，还有许多字要赶呢。对着自己写出来的东西，实在是不满意。但也没办法啊。
对了，抽空在e