Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
scriptingNews outline for 4/26/2001
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 4/26/2001; 7:16:21 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 4/26/2001 Msg #: 22160 Prev/Next: 22159 / 22161
eWeek: Foundation to promote Jabber. After skimming the Jxta docs yesterday I wondered why they didn't build on Jabber. It's open source (so is Jxta), it's been ported, Jeremie is a smart guy, and generous, so why reinvent what they've already done. Maybe I'm missing something, but I like the idea of working with Jabber.
Benjamin Franklin: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Is Red Hat using XML-RPC to do software updates?
A Red Hat whitepaper (PDF) from Dec 2000 indicates that they are using XML-RPC for their updates service.
David Singer, who I met last year at the WWW9 meeting in Amsterdam, is now in Hong Kong for WWW10. I hope he and others will let us know what's happening. Last year I was looking for the heart of the Web. I met TBL and Rohit, and went to Dam Square with Sanjiva and Andre (and Andrea) and the guys from Allaire. I had dinner with Edd Dumbill, and met with Martijn from ZopeLand, and Ken MacLeod, and saw some weird things. I wish I was in Hong Kong, I'm sure there will be some very interesting discussions about Web Services and such.
The Standard: "Investment bankers have been parading a string of eligible acquisition targets before Microsoft – among them EarthLink, Interwoven, Macromedia, SilverStream and WebMethods. 'You name it, they've been shown it,' says one Microsoft insider."
News.Com: "Sun Microsystems' Project Jxta is an interesting attempt to create a set of totally platform- and language-independent protocols for peer-to-peer networking, amounting almost to an operating system for the Web."
News.Com: "Martin Garbus, a lawyer for the Margaret Mitchell Trust, said he asked eBay to remove the books. 'My fear is that the whole book is going to end up published on the Internet,' he said." Good idea!
Yes Paul, there is sex at Davos.
Chinese philosophers
Some Chinese philosopher said if you live long enough you will see the bodies of all your enemies floating down the river. I'm sure that's not an exact quote. But I thought of it when I read this Evhead note about the looming demise of iSyndicate.
Former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards offers a clue: "The Chinese have a saying that if you sit by the river long enough, the dead body of your enemy will come floating down the river."
Speaking of dead bodies floating down rivers, apparently My.Netscape has lost its RSS capabilities. Andrew Wooldridge, who works at Netscape, is grateful that My.UserLand is still here, but it's seen better days too. Last night Jake and I were talking about fixing the problems, now it looks like we might have to push that closer to the top of the to-do list.
Computer industry books
I'm reading a draft of yet-another history of Microsoft. I can't say who wrote this one or what the thesis is. But I can say this is a tired overworked genre. Is it the reporters who write the stuff that make these stories so boring and dry? Or is it that the subject matter isn't that interesting. Even a Stephen King novel has more twists and surprises. The subtext is more interesting. Nathan Myrhvold made gazillions of dollars because he tells good stories and wears a chef's outfit. Now that's interesting. Somewhat. (But they don't say it.) Another possibility is that there are so few women at the top of our industry, so there's little opportunity for sex (assuming the men are heterosexual). Regardless, these are sexless books. No sex? Hmm. Not very interesting.
My two favorite computer books are and probably always will be: Microserfs and The Next Big Thing.
Smart babes
I got a little pushback on my reference yesterday to Kim Polese as a smart babe. I thought a lot about that. I think Kim deserves credit for making Java the juggernaut that it is, her off-the-scale intelligence coupled with her babeness made it work. I couldn't find a better way to express that as concisely.
I also liked the term because it rings of smart bomb.
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