Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
scriptingNews outline for 4/18/2001
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 4/18/2001; 6:41:04 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 4/18/2001 Msg #: 22151 Prev/Next: 22150 / 22152
Good morning Pulitzer Prize winners!
UserLand now has a COO, John Robb. Having John on board means a major increase in bandwidth for UserLand. We finished the deal over the weekend, we're just getting started on lots of new stuff.
Today's Craig Burton tutorial is on channels in Radio. It's by far the best docs on our software. I hope everyone runs his latest tutorial, it's a Java window, he presses all the buttons and narrates. Craig talks very slowly and explains everything. His tutorials are eye-openers.
Jonas Mauras on Mozilla: "The software sucks, the code doesn't."
WSJ: Surprise rate cut electrifies market. "Stocks rallied Wednesday after the Federal Reserve surprised investors with another half-percentage-point cut in interest rates."
Dan Bricklin: "It was a misquote." Cool.
Let's not limit the dreams of people who use our tools. That would be like saying no one could win a prize for writing they did with a word processor. When it happens, the tool is the last thing people talk about. It may not even be mentioned when the first web-writer wins a Pulitzer, because, by then, it will be so commonplace. "He won the Pulitzer without a website," will be more newsworthy.
BTW, some people still write with typewriters, believe it or not.
I also said this to Dan: "Philippe used to say you couldn't do commercial software with Turbo Pascal. I thought that was a huge mistake. When I went to Symantec, I immediately wanted to challenge him. It's a long story, but because of company politics we never got the chance. (Symantec bought THINK C.) It's the old integrity thing again."
MacTech on THINK C 5.0.
Borland's antique software page for Turbo Pascal.
What the heck is Tom Fuerstner up to?
Dan Gillmor: Be looks for another chance.
Derek Willis: The New Journalism. "The barriers to entry still exist largely because of the requirements of doing journalism, not just publishing it."
Marc Andreessen: "We not only closed the window," said the co-founder of former Net highflier Netscape Communications, "we blew up the bridge behind us. I think we might have nuked the whole continent."
Rocky Mountain News on Jabber.Com.
Integrity
More pushback from the last sentence in yesterday's piece. Three people have asked if my view about writing is in conflict with my view of software. It may be, but that doesn't mean I don't believe the last sentence.
Probably the highest-integrity software is the stuff you create for yourself, to express something that's inside of you that demands expressing. Doing anything just to make money makes it all weird. We certainly have seen a fair amount of that in the last few years in the dotcom distortion. I don't think open source, as some people have said, equates to individual web writing. I put copyrights on everything I write, all rights reserved. You can't legally take my writing and put your name on it. This is about as far from open source as you can get, although there are enough different open source licenses to make almost any statement about open source null and void.
Anyway, on more reflection, my software work may not have as much integrity as my writing work. A lot of the software work I do is to make Frontier, Manila and Radio useful for other people, and to please them. I still work for myself though, so perhaps there's more integrity in what I do than there is for software people who work for others. Remember, integrity does not equal goodness.
However, a lot of the work I do in DaveNet is for the same cause. If I just wanted to express my own ideas so that I would benefit, I could write more quickly and be more direct. Maybe I should try that. Regardless, I wrote the last sentence of that piece carefully. Give it some thought, I think you'll see it's true.
BigPub's
Like people who develop software for BigCo's, people who write for BigPub's don't like to think about themselves that way. I know, and I'm sorry, but there is a difference in attitude that comes from having a big brand behind you, and a different result comes out the other end. I must have a way of writing about this. If you don't like the label, find out why, perhaps consider switching jobs.
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:57:01 PM.
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