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Permanent link to archive for Saturday, April 08, 2000. Saturday, April 08, 2000

I swear I didn't touch up the wisteria. They look that way.

NY Times: Microsoft Plans a New Strategy for the Internet. "The new strategy, pursued under the awkward rubric of Next Generation Windows Services, or NGWS, is to translate many of the features of the Windows operating system into free-floating utilities available to users not just on the desktop but on the Internet and accessible from anywhere."

Email to John Markoff: "Bill Joy has it wrong. SOAP, the protocol on which this architecture is based, of which I am a co-author, is totally open, works with all platforms and operating systems, including Solaris and Java. If it didn't I wouldn't let my name be associated with the protocol."

Aside from carrying a ridiculous quote from Bill Joy, that wouldn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny, the Markoff article and presumably the Microsoft pitch behind it, really muddies up the whole thing and makes it another war against something. Part of the problem is that Gates doesn't believe the public can understand the importance of RPC over the Internet. I had this discussion with him, in public in Davos.

I think anyone with a college degree and a little curiosity can understand what's going on, the same way we learn about medicine from doctors or taxes from accountants. Compare the lifeless Times article with XML-RPC for Newbies. Playing to a stupid audience is a good way to get stupid customers. That's the real lock-in, keep the customers stupid. Yuck. I want smart users. In this case, Microsoft is really doing something brave, I think, so why not tell it like it is?

And now what about Bill Joy. Has he even looked at the SOAP spec? Could his claim stand up to peer review? I don't get it. If we were talking about physics or medicine would they do such a rough job on a big story? End of rant.

Hey we're getting Slashdotted tonight. Not sure I like the subject. OK. They spelled the name right.

Docs for a new Frontier verb that was released today. A bit of code that was being replicated in many places.

Interesting. You can read Scripting News over at O'Reilly.

Samuel Reynolds has started a 3rd Party Plugins site for Manila. Good idea!

Eric Soroos: XML-RPC via SMTP.

I think Samuel Reynolds and Eric Soroos have shipped more software than Bill Joy has in the last 20 years, in one day.

Wired: "Last summer, more than 40 people came from as far away as the United States, New Zealand, Italy, and Russia to Tuchersfeld, Germany, which also included a bus excursion for better viewing of the total solar eclipse. There was a giddiness to the event as participants reveled in meeting face-to-face with like-minded people they were used to dealing with on modem." LinuxPalooza?

Blogger: Auto-Text Bookmarklet.

Tuneups and a new feature on Weblogs.Com today, including a challenge for icon designers.

Pics from yesterday's MozillaPalooza: Cameron Barrett (he wasn't wearing shorts), Jeremie Miller (turned 25 yesterday, couldn't rent a car the day before, but get this, he has two kids, one who's six years old!), Paula Ferguson (editor of Web and XML books at O'Reilly).

Check out the very special mpeg on today's NetDyslexia.

If you love to whine, you're going to love sucks.com.

On Monday, Andre is going to the Körperwelten exhibit in Cologne. I heard about this on NPR and it gives me the shivers. Phil Suh: "I recall walking through the entire exhibit almost wordless."

Clint Laskowski: "Yes, Dave, it did snow in Milwaukee. I too flew thru Chicago last nite, like your friend, Jeremie Miller of Jabber. I spent 15 hours trying to get home from LAX. Fun, fun." Pictures?

Luke Tymowski: "You know you're in Canada when ... after wearing shorts for several weeks you're forced to put jeans on because it's snowing."

People are always asking what camera I use.

Thanks to Kottke for the pointer to this interesting example of user interface design.

It's worth noting that there hasn't been an outage in 1331 minutes. That's pretty good for these days!

Track-PacBell says at 7:24AM there were 87 outages since 3:17PM Sunday. The line was down 5.7% of the time.

     

Last update: Saturday, April 08, 2000 at 10:12 PM Eastern.

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