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Permanent link to archive for Friday, October 05, 2001. Friday, October 05, 2001

MSNBC: "US troops trained in mountain warfare began arriving Saturday in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan’s northern neighbor, military officials told NBC News." 

DaveNet: What to do about the W3C?  

Barry Bonds hit number 71 tonight. The people are happy. A new record. That's cool. 

"Bonds - never the most likable player among fans, opponents and even some of his teammates - wasn't embraced by any of the Dodgers on his trip around the bases. Earlier this season, the rival Dodgers were infuriated when the Giants stopped the game at Pac Bell after Bonds hit his 500th home run against them." Gotta love it. That's how baseball is played folks. You don't hug the other guy when he sets a record. Ugh. 

Update: He just hit #72. Wow. 

I'm getting some interesting pushback from an informed source close to the patent wars between the BigCo's. This person says that Microsoft is not playing hardball over patents in the W3C situation. I asked this person and I ask you to check out the discussion about patents at the O'Reilly Open Source convention, particularly comments from Microsoft's Craig Mundie and David Stutz. There was a corner-turn there, I had never heard Microsoft be so menacing of independent developers. If you believe Mundie was speaking for MS (he's a vice-president) it would be hard to say that MS isn't in league with the most brutal and unprincipled abusers of patents in the software industry. 

Heh. I told you this was coming. I think I'm beginning to really get how perverted Microsoft is. First they make big hay about how they're booting Java out. Everyone gets their panties all tied up in a knot and throws hissy fits. Then they bring it back (of course it's totally polluted, non-standard, lots of extra lock-in). Guess what, the same people will be upset. They'll write articles about how nasty Microsoft is. And in doing so will miss other cool stuff they could have been writing about. And miss the really devious things Microsoft is doing that they don't want you to write about. They get coverage both ways!  

Number of times "Microsoft" or "MS" appears in today's Scripting News: 15. Number of times "UserLand" appears: 1. (This item.) See what I mean?  

6/5/01: "When a magician wants to trick you he gets you to look over there while the action is over here." 

Q42's chat system keeps getting better. I added it to the navlinks to the left, click on Chat. 

Apple is opening a new store in Palo Alto tomorrow, the first in Northern California. 

Richard Wiggins: "The apparent terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed the skyscape of New York City, and the political and emotional landscape of the United States. The attack may have also changed how the leading search engine, Google, thinks of itself." 

It's so confusing. As a developer, how can you show, in a positive way, that you support the spirit of the Web? With all possible humility, may I suggest that in addition to supporting the controversial technologies, state publicly that you support XML and XML-RPC. When you support these two layers you are supporting the philosophy of the HTTP and HTML. Brain-dead simple, and free in every way, not just royalty-free. 

Digital Rights Management. DRM. How about a new higher level mission. HRM. Human Rights Management. 

The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Is this a bug? What about corporations or consortia prohibiting the free exercise of speech, etc? 

Small improvement. I added a white-on-orange XML icon on the Updates page leading to changes.xml. 

On the Free-W3C list: "I think people misunderstand what the W3C is -- it's a consortium, and most of its bills are paid by the BigCo's. It's going to do what the BigCo's want to do. Now was it a good idea to mortgage the future of the Web in this way? I think we now know the answer -- it wasn't." 

I had not been following this mail list. It's awesome -- the BigCo's are totally cornered. Bravo Web developers. Keep on truckin. 

W3C: "In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science in collaboration with CERN, where the Web originated, with support from DARPA and the European Commission." 

Nazim Amin: "We were about 5 hours out of Frankfurt flying over the North Atlantic and was in my crew rest seat taking my scheduled rest break. All of a sudden the curtains parted violently and I was told to go to the cockpit, right now, to see the captain. As soon as I got there I noticed that the crew had one of those 'All Business' looks on their faces. The captain handed me a printed message. I quickly read the message and realized the importance of it. The message was from Atlanta, addressed to our flight, and simply said, 'All airways over the Continental US are closed. Land ASAP at the nearest airport, advise your destination.'" 

The town of Gander welcomed many stranded passengers. 

The Onion: Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes. "With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones — the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs—unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant." Heh. 

Steve Lohr: The Microsoft Conundrum. "With Windows XP, the new operating system that goes on sale later this month, Microsoft is aggressively pursuing its bundling strategy. The new system tightly integrates software for online shopping, playing music and video distributed over the Internet, personal identification and digital photography." 

     

Last update: Friday, October 05, 2001 at 9:45 PM Eastern.

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