Poor and Stupid

I was amused to read Tim Bray's conclusion that PHP is part of a plot to force everybody to replace their old PCs with powerful new servers. When I lived in Germany in the early 90s, my boss there told me that there had been a historical agreement between church and state in Europe: the church promised to keep the masses stupid if the state promised to keep them poor. That was, of course, meant to cement the positions of both.

At the time, it was suggested that this Machiavellian relationship between church and state had been replaced by the similar relationship between Microsoft and Intel. After all, what possible reason could there be for all the stuff they keep adding to Windows, except to slow your PC down enough to force you to buy a new one? Well, I don't really buy into conspiracy theories, but that one remains a popular one to this day. Let's see if Windows Vista will run on your existing PC, or if the new GUI will force everyone to upgrade.

By the way, I share Tim's dilemna about finding a good calendaring solution. I also want a solution

• that will let me share a calendar with a few colleagues;
• which is available offline when my laptop is offline;
• which can be synchronised with my phone calendar.

I don't use Microsoft Outlook or any similar combined calendar/e-mail program; I would prefer something stand-alone, or perhaps integrated (loosely or tightly) with my browser (Opera). Oh, and if the central calendar had an Atom or RSS feed, so that I know where to look for the latest changes anyone has made, even better (although, for a large number of users, you would need some filtering).

Let me know if you know a good solution. I don't yet have one, and I don't really want to write one myself. Life's too short.