Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
scriptingNews outline for 11/4/2000
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 11/4/2000; 5:28:43 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 11/4/2000 Msg #: 21895 Prev/Next: 21894 / 21896
Microsoft's instant messaging protocol is XML over HTTP.
What's going on at Eric Weissteins's MathWorld? According to an article on oreilly.com, he "turned the content of the site into a book, The CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, published by CRC Press. In the process, CRC Press acquired the copyright ownership of that material." Then they told him to take the material off the Web.
Interesting site.
I added a note to the What is Scripting News? page for people who use Netscape 4.
Frank McPherson has an HTML Directory done with Radio UserLand.
More referer pages: DaveNet, DocServer, UserLand.
Joel's site is lookin good!
Fuel-efficient luxury car?
Talking with my mom on the phone today, she's like me in a lot of ways (surprised?), an evangelical sort of person who wants to make a difference.
She complains about her eight-year-old Honda Civic, so I say, hey Mom, how about getting a new car? Something's always breaking on the old one, now it's the glove compartment. Who ever heard of a glove compartment breaking? Anyway.
She wants a new car, and is willing to spend up to $50K, but it must be fuel-efficient. Makes sense, why should leather seats or a nice stereo make a car less efficient? It also has to be automatic transmission and suitable for city driving.
So please send me an email if you know of a fuel-efficient luxury car.
Postscript: People like the Mazda Millenia.
The anti-weblog?
A new idea I'm exploring -- an anti-weblog weblog, one that accumulates information in an organized fashion and does it chronologically.
We've gotten so focused on the Web as a temporal medium, now perhaps it makes sense to think of it as a timeless one?
Cross-cultural Unix?
I had a long phone talk yesterday with Jon Udell. It's been too long since we talked. Jon wants to know why the Unix world doesn't have an integration architecture like Microsoft's COM. I've been asking the same question for years. It's not that the technology is so complex, it's not. And some easy first steps are possible, like providing a common interface for applications to integrate scripting.
I wrote about this in 1998. "Just as the push to do RPC over HTTP via XML has the potential of getting COM, CORBA and Apple Events to talk to each other, an open cross-platform scripting architecture holds the promise of bringing together cultures from every nook and cranny of the software business, from mainframes to handhelds, from graphics people to the folks who keep the Hubble telescope humming."
So, after sleeping on it, I think there's the answer. Unix is not cross-cultural, as a community it's very insular, and each scripting language is its own culture, and is similarly insular. So they solve the same problems over and over. Apparently knowing how to script a Web site in Perl doesn't help you learn how to do the same in Java, or Tcl, or whatever, the wheel has to be reinvented for every common language.
But certainly there must be some group of serious Unix developers who recognize the value in breaking down walls, it's a large enough world now that that must be possible?
On the current mail page, Jan Gray, formerly of Microsoft, explains that insularity is a feature of programmers, not any specific flavor of programmer. I agree.
Joel Spolsky, also an ex-softie, has his own view of Microsoft architectures. "Five years after Altavista went live, and two years after Larry Page and Sergei Brin actually invented a radically better search engine, Microsoft is pretending like there's no way to search on the Internet and they're going to solve this problem for us."
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:56:55 PM.
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