Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
scriptingNews outline for 4/16/2000
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 4/16/2000; 7:03:25 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 4/16/2000 Msg #: 16300 Prev/Next: 16299 / 16301
NY Times: Opening Bell Could Be a Test Case for the Lessons of 1987. "Nearly 13 years ago, investors stunned by the worst stock market week in memory spent the weekend pondering whether a great bull market was over. On the following Monday, so many of them decided to sell that the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 22.6 percent, or 508 points. Oct. 19, 1987, became known as Black Monday."
AP: Asian Markets Open Sharply Lower. "Asian stock markets plummeted as they opened Monday, reacting to the record losses on Wall Street last week that left many investors wondering if its bull market was over."
63% of yesterday's survey respondents agreed "it was just a correction." You can change your vote if you want. Tomorrow could be quite a day in NY.
Today a new Manila feature allows you to create not just stories and pictures, but "gems" which can be any type of object you can upload. There is an initial limit of one megabyte of gems per UserLand-hosted site. We want to get a feel for how this works. There aren't a lot of places on the net where you can get free hosting of arbitrary file types served through HTTP, for good reason. It costs money to store and serve the objects, and there's no obvious way to monetize the service, if it's free. There may be an opportunity for a for-pay service that hosts arbitrary file types in Manila. We're releasing the software to all Frontier customers, that's the most important thing, esp for private internal sites where this is not a big issue.
BTW, our use of the term "gems" dates back to 1995. It was one of the menus in Clay Basket. It's also a repository of patent prior art.
Jakob Nielsen: Reset and Cancel Buttons. "The Web would be a happier place if virtually all Reset buttons were removed. This button almost never helps users, but it often hurts them."
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: "Several friends and readers have pointed out that our icons are used extensively at Dave Winer's weblogs.com. Actually, Dave has been doing this for a while, now. But does he call? Does he write?" Many apologies, and many many more thanks!
Hey I got a You're Welcome from The Man. (Zeld Man.)
I know everyone is heaping praise on Greenspun's ArsDigita University, so let me take a contrarian point of view. If you go there, you'll come away believing that Oracle is great, that Larry Ellison is god, that no one actually uses Windows, and Davos is a circle-jerk, no one cares about fonts and that undergrads can implement an object database in a relational DB as a first semester project. But your education *will* be free.
I learned all these things in a public discussion at the Seybold/Boston show in February. (I didn't pay for the education.) After Greenspun said it was silly to use fonts in web pages I asked for a show of hands. How many people care about fonts? Every hand went up. Of course if you learn how to develop web apps from Greenspun, you might have trouble selling your services to the kinds of people who go to Seybold. (People who develop websites, mostly.)
Greenspun drinking coffee.
NY Times: Bill Gates's Money. Hmm. I wonder what they would teach at Bill Gates U?
7/3/97: Bill Gates's Money. "He could send a Pentium box with NT 4.0 and MSIE to Alpha Centauri."
This is certainly one of the more interesting dialog boxes I've seen in my day.
DevShed tutorial on regular expressions.
Chris Cothrum groks the philosophy of Manila.
Reuters: "Police in full riot gear used batons and pepper spray on Sunday in several violent clashes with protesters who were trying to stop meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund."
Sheila has "dome chunks." They could come in handy the next time the WTO meets in Seattle.
Wired: Crypto-Convict Won't Recant. "I once believed it's too bad that there are a lot of people who work for government who are hard-working and honest people who will get hit (by Assassination Politics) and it's a shame," he says. "Well, I don't believe that any more. They are all either crooks or they tolerate crooks or they are aware of crooks among their numbers."
What is Vanilla? "Now we all know that the Web is all about porn^H^H^H^H links."
MonkeyFist has a special site covering today's protests in Washington.
I finally went to see American Beauty yesterday, what a great movie. Life is more complex than it seems, and then simpler once you get through the complexity.
On Brdbrain, I said: "We're in a fast-moving business, right on the precipice of success. We depend on connectivity. Yes, you can expect a cry of pain when the problem isn't being dealt with in a professional manner. Did I say things I regret? Yes I did. But in the bigger picture, we contracted with Conxion for connectivity, and they failed, and they never apologized or issued a credit."
I hate (but love) movies with people hanging from precipices.
Jason Levine's DeepLeap Plug-In for Manila.
Tim O'Reilly: Open source blah blah blah.
Has Dr John Grohol found his niche? Kind of embarassing to see a doctor behave this way. Oh well. My own opinion is that sarcasm is better left to professionals. ";->"
Qube Quorner is the first statically-rendered Manila site hosted by UserLand.
Andrea takes us to Capitol Reef National Park in Utah.
BTW, we've been working on a design for a new Doc Searls weblog. Talking with Doc on the phone yesterday, I said I believe that a picture of Doc must be frontmost on the site. That's the first thing I want to know when I get to a new weblog. Who is the editor? Doc asked me where is my picture? Oy. So there it is, up-top, where it belongs. Click on it to get to my personal page, which I will update more often.
An oldie but goodie survey from April 1. Six people said they were Jason Levine! Someone's lying. People never lie on surveys! Do they?
How could someone the same age as someone else conclude the other person is "wise beyond his years"? How could you know?
What a gorgeous site.
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