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Permanent link to archive for Friday, November 01, 2002. Friday, November 01, 2002

THINK!My own thoughts, nothing new here, it's all been said so many times before. But there's news today, so it must be said again. Here goes. There's no justice in today's decision. It won't stop Microsoft and other monopolists from seizing new monopolies through tying. It's anti-innovation because it paralyzes smaller developers, making it impossible for them to raise investment capital to pursue new software opportunities. Large companies don't innovate in software. To think they do is as wrong as it would be to believe that large corporations write innovative scripts, screenplays, novels, songs, plays. Government has yet to figure this out, nor has Microsoft or other big companies. Even so it's true. It's a sad day for software. It's a sad day for the USA. 

Scott Rosenberg (of Salon): "Will post links when the stories go live in a couple of hours." 

John Robb (of UserLand): "This is a depressing situation." 

Slashdot has links to the not-yet-released Microsoft decision. Here's the directory on the US Courts website. After a quick read of the introductory document, it appears that the judge accepted the settlement between the DOJ and Microsoft. 

Reports: BBC, AP, News.Com, InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, Motley Fool

Aaron Swartz has links and comments on the decision. 

Survey: "Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will announce her decision in the Microsoft antitrust case later today. What will the decision be?" 

News.Com: "The $399 Gateway PC comes with a 1.8GHz Intel Celeron processor, a 40GB hard drive, 128MB of memory, a CD burner." 

Scoble is getting married tomorrow. Congratulations! Now everyone wants to know if the chapel will have 802.11, and is anyone blogging it? What about the reception? How about the honeymoon suite?  

Hey I didn't know that Variety has an RSS feed. It's been out since July. Yow. Unfortunately it's not valid. It's got HTML markup in an item title.  

Anil Dash: Microsoft's Weblog Software.  

Sometimes it doesn't take much to make me happy. My system kept getting slower and slower. Finally today it ran out of disk space while getting my email. I looked at the system drive, it was full. Where did all the space go? I wrote a script to list all the files over 25 megabytes in size. It found a folder of backups going back to January that was 16.2 gigabytes. I trimmed it down to a small fraction of that. Guess what. The system is quite fast now. Go figure.  

All I Want for Christmas -- In RSS-Land 

It's November, we're going into the home stretch of 2002.

Thanksgiving is the next major holiday, it's one of my favorites. This year I will be thankful to be alive for Thanksgiving. No shit. More so than usual.

I will also be thankful for the progress we've made in RSS. We found a way to co-exist with RDF yet remain compatible with the installed base. We have a wealth of new tools and aggregators this year. The market is growing, people are saying this is the right way to do Push, but we still have a bunch of work to do, and that's good because it's interesting work.

So here's a brief list of my wishes for and from the RSS community for the remainder of 2002.

1. I'd love to see a validation suite for aggregators. We already have a way to validate feeds, thanks to the excellent work of Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby. Now we need to validate consumers of RSS with a suite a feeds they are able to process. We're basically flying blind now. This has been holding us back on the tools side. We don't dare use the main new feature in RSS 2.0, namespaces, for fear that it breaks some aggregators.

2. We need a private mail list for vendors of tools and aggregators. It should be hosted by a neutral party, a person or organization that is not a vendor and commits to never being a vendor in this market. The purpose of the list is to have place for product developers to exchange ideas, proposals, and complaints, privately. So many of our mail lists are full of competitive energy, and that's great. Now we need a clubhouse where we can relax and try out new ideas with each other.

3. We must address the issues of bandwidth. People are falling in love with the application. That's fantastic of course. But there's a problem. Bandwidth costs. UserLand feels this, because we host a fair amount of content that is consumed by our competitors' products. If we don't address some of these issues soon, they will fester, like the problems in the instant messaging market. We have made a proposal, released this week, on how to gain an order of magnitude improvement re bandwidth. It's our hope that this stimulates a discussion among the vendors. The list described in #2 above could be the place where that discussion takes place.

Anyway, that's it for now. Happy holidays and ho ho ho!

     

Last update: Friday, November 01, 2002 at 8:18 PM Eastern.

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