Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
scriptingNews outline for 11/24/2000
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 11/24/2000; 5:46:58 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 11/24/2000 Msg #: 21996 Prev/Next: 21995 / 21997
Reuters: Supreme Court to hear Bush appeal. "The US Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear an appeal by Republican George W. Bush challenging the use of hand recounts of ballots in Florida's final make-or-break presidential results."
Survey: Over the last week have you been following the US presidential election more or less closely?
Thanks to Adam Curry for the great Radio UserLand peptalk.
Lance: "Some conclude that in Europe, people work to live; in the US they live to work."
Teaser for tomorrow's Scripting News. Forgive us dear Europeans, we do work hard in the USA. We're chumps because the bosses are so dishonest. In the meantime, directory inclusion works across the Atlantic. I'll explain tomorrow.
December 5-6, Ken Dow's Mastering Manila training in Toronto.
New sample: workspace.soapForManila. "This sample is a table of four scripts which exercise the new SOAP Interface for Manila."
Damien Barrett: In Defense of AppleTalk.
Brent: "I'm posting via MacPython and xmlrpclib. Cool. It works." This is a hint. We're going to do sample code that shows you how to program a Manila site using Python.
Inside.Com: "RealNetworks was granted a patent Tuesday for an 'audio-on-demand communication system' that 'provides real-time playback of audio data transferred via telephone lines or other communication links,' as a continuation of a patent the company was first granted in 1998."
Another candidate for Picture of the Year for Y2K.
Librarians and search engines
Wired: "According to the Association of Research Libraries, the number of reference queries handled by librarians has declined over the past two years."
Google founder on the future of Google: "In five years I hope [Google] will be able to return answers, not just documents."
To Google I say Bravo, I'm glad you have this vision. It's the yin to our yang.
To adventurous librarians and educators, let's build a tree of knowledge on the Internet that has integrity. We're engineering the tools now.
Radio's corner-turn
I've been telegraphing this for a while, hopefully.
A simplified pitch for Radio UserLand, which we will restate and refine over the next few weeks.
"Search engines are great, they're solving half the problem. The other half is providing tools for smart people to record and evolve knowledge on the Web."
That's why we did "Manila", and why we're remixing outlining into the writing environment in a highly directed way.
Three views
And don't forget time-based stuff, that's what weblogs are about. Three views. Each fully supported and integrated. That's where we want to go.
More thoughts on the Radio mail list.
Keeping the name
We're keeping the name Radio UserLand. I like the word Radio much the way I liked "ThinkTank" in the 1980s. Now we're doing something different, there's communication in our idea processor, in fact its purpose is communication. What word says that better than Radio?
Outlining for the next 20 years
Outlining in the 80s was a bootstrap for what we're doing now. Intuitively it always seemed that outlining was a structure for groupware. Now that this works, we have to streamline, groom, document, present and evangelize these ideas, not only to writers and thinkers, but also to developers of tools and server-side runtimes. Even widgets that run in the browser can benefit from hooking into great authoring tools.
viewDirectoryBox macro
When we released the directory feature on Wednesday, we provided a macro that allowed authors to include the top level of a directory inside a table that you constructed. This gave you a lot of power, but it was more power than anyone really needed. So between meals on Thanksgiving I thought it through, and created a new macro that's higher level, it makes it easy to create a nice-looking box without having to think too much. It's called viewDirectoryBox.
What about music?
We will loop back to music when the legal michegas is over and there's an economic system that works for honest people without limiting the role music can play in the evolution of the new medium. I will continue to be active in the discussion about music on the Internet, but we're going to stay pure, to provide tools for people to create and distribute their own knowledge and ideas.
What about Lieberman?
Oh Lieberman! He was supposed to have values.
Today he spoke for moderation, while characterizing demonstrators as a mob. Sure it was a staged demo. Just watch the faces. But they were certainly no more unruly than the ones Jesse Jackson whipped up for the Dems in the first days after the election.
Lieberman's call for moderation was itself immoderate. Remember those who made excuses for the Reps and Dems who signed off on the CDA. They depended on the courts to do the right thing. The courts did cover them. Here we go again.
Do you trust the Supreme Court? I'm not sure I do. We're proud that there are no tanks in the street. Let's keep it that way.
"dorothy"
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