Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 8/17/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:8/17/2000; 2:00:17 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/17/2000
Msg #:19769
Prev/Next:19768 / 19770

DaveNet: Dionne.

AP: Movie Industry Backed in DVD Trial. "Computer code is not purely expressive any more than the assassination of a political figure is purely a political statement,'' Kaplan said.

Atlantic Monthly: The Heavenly Jukebox.

It's nice to see that eBay users have a sense of humor or are extremely entrepreneurial. Given the choices in this year's presidential race, it seems pretty rational to offer you vote to the highest bidder.

Today's song: The Long And Winding Road.

Salon: To hell with hubris. "Priceline.com CEO Jay Walker has built a business around the 300 patents that he's been awarded or is expecting, demanding that we ignore the fact that most of his 'inventions' are nothing more than traditional money-making schemes with a dot-com twist. 'Expert-based commerce' is novel and unobvious? Tell that to my local hardware store owner, who's a licensed contractor." Amen.

News.Com: Jeff Bezos wants your help. Tell him to shove it up his ass. BTW, have you noticed how the categories in News.Com comment feature are all very corporate. How about a few artistic titles? I commented on this piece using my stage name. My title, this time, is Group Director of Architecture. Has a nice ring to it don't you think?

Hey I had a great idea. Jeff Bezos is a smart guy. I always like to get advice from smart people, so I sent him an email asking for his help with my site. He's a community oriented person. Let's get him to help us with our sites!

New feature: How to send email in Radio UserLand. "When you're browsing the user list, you may find you have something to say to a person that's quick and simple, and it would be too much trouble to start a chat, or bring your emailer to the front. So we made it really easy for you to send a quick email message to another Radio UserLand user."

New feature: How news feeds work in Radio UserLand. "Now we can bring the wealth of information available through RSS to people who browse and write with the outliner."

Matthew Barger is using the GNOME icons in Radio UserLand.

Robert Woodhead: Tipping.

Looks like Inprise really stepped in it when they opensourced Interbase.

Katie Hafner: In Praise of the Mom-and-Pop ISP. "My milk comes from a local dairy, and my Internet connection comes from a small company in Santa Rosa, Calif., called Sonoma Interconnect, or Sonic. Few people outside Sonoma County have heard of it."

Josh Hoover sent a pointer to a post from Steve Hindalong, drummer for The Choir.

New.Com: Banking on the need for weed. "We had a coffee moment one day where we realized that our contemporaries are basically the biggest wealth-generating generation of all time and they're all tokers," said Freccia, 35.

Great publicity for Alan Deutschman's upcoming Steve Jobs book. Nothing like a little controversy to create interest.

The Register: Hertzfeld spills all about Eazel.

Eric Kidd takes us on a tour of Nautilus, which is Eazel's desktop for Linux. (Eric's post already has 1400 reads at 7:30AM. He's the master flow-builder. Totally in awe.)

Reading Eric's description, and the Register article, it's becoming clearer what Nautilus is, and at the same time it's clearer what we're doing with Radio UserLand. They seem pretty close. A difference, we're bringing the power of the Internet, as a browsable editable hierarchy, to Windows and Mac users. At least for now, they're focusing on Unix users. Eazel probably does icons better. (Although we have users who can do icons, hint hint.) We do outliners pretty well. And we have an object database running behind it all, which is a important but largely secret ingredient. I'm sure they have some stuff we don't. (Yes, they're open source too, thanks for pointing that out. I love that this medium is so interactive, even at 4AM. My opinion, that and 50 cents won't get you on the subway anymore.)

One thing they will have is tight integration with the filesystem browser, because they *are* the filesystem browser. At one point I considered taking Radio in that direction, but punted. It's a lot of work, for not much gain, because people generally prefer to use the filesystem browser that comes with the OS. That's what Microsoft and Apple do, and Eazel. (Does Eazel have competition?)

The icon-capable version of Radio UserLand for the Mac is released. Brent works late. I started early today.

Dan Gillmor: "It's hard to argue with the customer,'' Dell said dryly. "Generally that's not a good idea.''

The Register has another Hertzfeld article.

On a mail list earlier today someone said we don't know that we exist, but that's the one thing that is not a mystery. Everything else, of course, *is* a mystery. Now I discover that unbeknownst to me, this exact topic is being discussed right here at UserLand.

I gave myself a lot of grief for revealing personal feelings on this site yesterday. "People don't come here for that," I said to myself. Wrong. Some complain about me doing that, that's for sure, and some tell me to stop, but they keep coming back. If I were to always paint a pretty picture like "Everything's always great!" then you might as well watch TV, the production values are better. The interesting thing about a weblog is that a little humanity might slip through. Ooops, they caught me being human. Shit happens. ";->"

No pain, no gain.



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