Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
scriptingNews outline for 5/7/2001
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 5/7/2001; 7:02:35 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 5/7/2001 Msg #: 22173 Prev/Next: 22172 / 22174
Dori Smith and Tom Negrino tied the knot. Mazel tov, best wishes for much happiness.
Fortune: "Lemelson would figure out where an industry was headed--and then place a patent claim directly in its path. 'In many cases, Lemelson didn't patent inventions,' says Lieberman. 'He invented patents.'"
Of course a friendly Scripting News reader sent me a MP3 of Lucinda Williams' (same last name as Evan, see below, wonder if they're related?) Can't Let Go. Rockin to it right now. Oooooh. The slide guitar makes it so sweet. "He won't take me back when I come around. He says he's sorry then he puts me out. It's over, I know it, but I can't let go."
Evan Williams sends a screen shot of Windows XP's file system browser with a caveat. "This is XP Server -- perhaps the consumer version is different. (And, of course, this is Beta 2.)"
YahooGroups is off the air today. "I know it but I can't let go."
NY Times: "Characteristic of its style of creating drama among its followers by staying mum on pending announcements, Apple declined to confirm details of the strategy, including where the first store would be."
Dan Gillmor wants to know if Microsoft has changed. I want to know if Dan has changed. "And please give me concrete examples." ";->"
Cameron Pope of the Prism working group says it didn't grow out of ICE. Sorry for the misunderstanding, no sarcasm, and thanks for the correction.
Dan Libby is looking for consulting work in XML-RPC.
David Feldt on Ken Dow's on-line Manila course.
In the 1980s and 1990s there was a debate about whether or not you could completely insulate the user from the file system. All the files that make up an operating system must be in very particular places. Same with apps and web servers. So we, collectively, decided to try to hide these things from users. A line was drawn between easy and hard to use that left the newbies lost in a world where they can't find anything they wrote more than eight hours ago, and fragile poorly understood file system structures that even a commited expert couldn't always figure out. Windows had the philosophy that it was necessary for users to see the file system. Mac users had a superior attitude, but I don't know how deserved it was. Now I hear that Windows XP is going to put the filesystem out of the users' view. And Apple is bringing Unix to Mac users, saying "Here's this strange file system, figure it out."
Moral of the story, if you sit on the bank of a river long enough eventually you'll see all operating system philosophies floating by.
That said, what does the Windows XP file system browser look like?
In my programming work I'm doing a lot of bootstraps, building things that form layers, some of which will eventually be hollow, gone, replaced by more general functionality in the next-layer-up. It's confusing at times, but very interesting work.
I've got another outage here, software-related, it's keeping me out of the news loop. It's related to last week's disk crash, that I still haven't fully recovered from. If experience is any guide, I never will fully recover from it. You just move on, the bits come and go.
There's been some discussion on the Syndication mail list as to how many RSS 0.90 feeds there are. So I wrote a script to see how many of the My.UserLand sources were in 0.90 vs 0.91. I ran it this morning. Of the sources that had updated in the last day, 23 were 0.90 and 164 were 0.91. I'll re-run the script tomorrow morning, the numbers should go up, not so many sources update over the weekend.
So many people asked about the public service message that appeared here on Sunday. "Where did it come from?" and "What's it about?" they ask, apparently puzzled. Let me answer. It came from the world we live in. And what's it about? Abuse of children. It's not about anyone in particular. There's no doubt the message evokes a strong reaction in almost everyone who reads it. But read the words carefully. It's not about you. Your name is not in the message. So whatever personal response it evokes is happening inside you. Nothing wrong with that. Go deeper. Listen to the voice. What is it saying?
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