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The truth is finally revealed!

Roland Piquepaille is trying to turn himself into the Rob Enderle of Slashdot. Clueless prognostications by a self-described IT consultant.

The problem is:
Roland Piqupaille spam example 1
Roland Piqupaille spam example 2
Roland Piqupaille spam example 3
just leads to more Roland Piquepaille spam

The consultant description is especially funny and fascinating because it seems that Roland spends more time as a troll blogging and spamming sites to link to his blog than he does consulting with clients, just like Enderle spends his time as a quote-mill.

Do you think that the Jackito people would have even taken his phone call if he hadn't spent the last couple of years trolling and spamming Slashdot? Now he can claim he's a technology leader or the voice of Slashdot or some such nonsense ..... and I'll bet he promised to deliver the Slashdot audience in exchange.

Or is he actually working PR for Jackito and not disclosing it? It seems too many of his submissions are just more rehashed press releases ... like the original "TDA" description he "wrote".

Not to mention that he can now charge more for advertising on his blog.

This is really all about advertising and self-promotion in the most crass sense.

Support it and and you'll get more of the same spam from yet another Rob Enderle-type troll. Oppose it and we can be rid of Roland and the other Rob Enderle-s of the world.

The truth is finally revealed!

Roland Piquepaille is trying to turn himself into the Rob Enderle of Slashdot. Clueless prognostications by a self-described IT consultant.

The problem is:
Roland Piqupaille spam example 1
Roland Piqupaille spam example 2
Roland Piqupaille spam example 3
just leads to more Roland Piquepaille spam

The consultant description is especially funny and fascinating because it seems that Roland spends more time as a troll blogging and spamming sites to link to his blog than he does consulting with clients, just like Enderle spends his time as a quote-mill.

Do you think that the Jackito people would have even taken his phone call if he hadn't spent the last couple of years trolling and spamming Slashdot? Now he can claim he's a technology leader or the voice of Slashdot or some such nonsense ..... and I'll bet he promised to deliver the Slashdot audience in exchange.

Or is he actually working PR for Jackito and not disclosing it? It seems too many of his submissions are just more rehashed press releases ... like the original "TDA" description he "wrote".

Not to mention that he can now charge more for advertising on his blog.

This is really all about advertising and self-promotion in the most crass sense.

Support it and and you'll get more of the same spam from yet another Rob Enderle-type troll. Oppose it and we can be rid of Roland and the other Rob Enderle-s of the world.

The New York Times first opened up their archives to the bloggers over a year ago. At the time, I really wondered why the Grey Lady would give it away like that. Kowtowing to the blogosphere (barf), while ruthlessly nickel-and-diming all the poor schlubs who just wanted to do some research or get their work done.

But now it makes perfect sense! They were in it for the PageRank(TM)! (At least they didn't resort to a lawsuit, unlike these guys!)

However, in view of the upcoming IPO and Google's increasing attempts to work their grubby little fingers into every facet of your life, you have to wonder if Google is gaining more power than any publicly traded mega-corporation should have.

Look, I think your post (and many of the posts here) are overly harsh.

You know what? If this were the first time I had run across Dave Winer, I would agree. But Dave is constantly pulling these kinds of stunts and worse. It's not funny any more.

He saw Userland wanted to dump the blogs and tried to move it to his own private server.

The thing is, it was Userland that made the free blog offer in the first place, and at no point were the users told that Userland didn't want them any more. Dave quietly tried to shift them to a substandard server that couldn't handle them, and it blew up in his face, so he just said "to hell with it" and dumped the ones he didn't like. You'd think he'd be apologetic, right? From the front page of his website, talking about an article on this shutdown:

No question, Orlowski is writing comedy. I laughed five times reading this.

Are those the words of somebody who regrets this travesty?

By the way, there's a reason I quoted it rather than just link - Dave is in the habit of posting inflammatory stuff to his website, and once people start getting pissed off, removing it. His policy is that you aren't allowed to link to him before 10PM.

Manila (the software used on weblogs.com) has an export feature for exactly this purpose. (I just backed up my site right now. Luckily it wasn't on weblogs.com.)

Dave Winer has written in the past about why it's import for Web apps to export data: "So since we're going to have competition, I believe we must take extra steps to guarantee that there's no customer lock-in. It's even more important in the age of the Web when the user might not even have a copy of their own data. One of the cardinal requirements of this market, even before we try to get the UIs compatible, is an export function that leaves un-rendered text and data on the user's hard disk in a format readable by software that's available at a reasonable or no cost."

The problem with RSS is that the spec is sufficiently vague that it is practically guaranteed that any RSS parser you write will eventually encounter an RSS feed that is valid according to the spec but cannot be correctly parsed.

That's already happened. When Reuters launched its RSS feeds two weeks ago it was valid as per the RSS2.0 specification, but every news aggregator failed to display the stock-ticker names within the feed. Silent data loss.

What is unfortunate, from an RSS perspective, is that this problem has been known for quite some time. Previous efforts to correct this problem were mired (one of the factors that lead to the Atom initiative). But it took a public failure of Reuters feeds before the RSS folk took it seriously enough to think about discussing it. So far, with the help of Mark Pilgim and aggregator authors test cases have been established for this particular scenario.

As Tim Bray has pointed out, the RSS discussion has ended by rule of Godwin's Law. Dave was the first to bring up the Soup Nazi, and so he has therefore lost.

As Tim Bray has pointed out, the RSS discussion has ended by rule of Godwin's Law. Dave was the first to bring up the Soup Nazi, and so he has therefore lost.

This is the kinds of grass roots action I'd love to see from /. I believe it a was suggested that **AA has their own Senators (Senator Disney anyone?) so the net should work to "buy" their own Senator. Dave Winer in his infamous Scripting news pointed to this idea 2 years ago by Matt Goyer. Boucher isn't a senstor, and his actions say he doesn't (and han't been) bought. (Link to the contributionn database I can't recall right now, since I should be asleep.)

Anyone have nomination for someone in the senate with a track record like Boucher who we can put a /. lobby behind? Senator /. might turn out to be a good title. I'm sure Boucher would appreciate the contribution.

I may submit this as an Ask Slashdot. Now that is a useful Ask Slashdot if I ever heard of one.

Forgot to add the link verifying what I said. The above quote is from here.

Like, say, Microsoft. Gates urged Jobs to license, but he didn't listen. And the rest is history.

If you're interested in the types of content that are available in RSS check out scripting.com's Top 100 RSS Feeds. They generate their statistics from the users who upload their RSS feed list (called an OPML file) to the site.

It could be your RSS aggregator and I know wired.com doesn't put the full text of their stories in the feeds. A lot of sites do, however. If you want an idea of the kind of sites that are using RSS check out my Bloglines subscriptions or this list of the top 100 feeds.

No - for the love of Kibo, people, lets not worry about naming. Let's start building infrastructure that will make use of it. If it proves useful, people will use it. And yes, most people talk about web pages (or internet pages, or the interweb or whatever), but the important point is that an infrastructure was built to the point where it became useful to people outside the technology field. SNMP, FTP, and DNS may not be the most pithily named standards, but they allow developers to build the infrastructure we need. If end users want to call it biff, let them go ahead.

(My apologies to Alan Levine if his site gets /.ed)

And (donning asbestos underwear) let's stop multiplying standards for no apparent reason other than personality conflicts with the originator of a standard.

did anyone notice that the guy in the background on the picture of woz and steve jobs at woz.org is the same guy from that bogus 9/11 tourist photo that went around the net for a while?!!!!!!

Way to pick the quality writers. What's next, an article on kernel hacking from whoever gets kicked off Survivor next week?

This guys rant is a managers view if I have ever seen one : Mono and dotGNU are interesting projects for people who are interested in computer languages....and exist only with the patronage of Microsoft.

If he only realized that Mono will be one of the working blocks for GNOME, which will compose the Linux Desktop, a subject he may grasp better than Mono

Mono comes from the attempts that we have made before in the GNOME project to achieve some of the things .NET does: * APIs that are exposed to multiple languages. * Cross-language integration. * Contract/interface based programming.

Actually, De Icaza himself admits that CORBA causes all sorts of problems (slowness is only one of them). I think I'll trust Icaza's word about GNOME more than an AC's, sorry, especially when it's so easy to verify that De Icaza is perfectly right (even the improvements he announces there for GNOME 2 are somewhat underwhelming where speed is concerned, partly due to marshalling penalties, as he explains). GNOME is much slower than KDE; either deal in silence, or submit code to help improve GNOME, goddammit. Overtly lying to both yourself and the /. readership won't fix things magically, you know.

Oh, also, GNOME .IS. moving to DCOP-inspired D-BUS for interprocess communication, so apparently the devs also disagree with you about your amusing claims regarding DCOP.

KDE has the best technology and it's a GOOD thing that GNOME are starting to follow their lead. Don't like it? Start your own GNOME fork or shut up, please. Thank you.

In the end, Apple never did gain the corporate foothold that they wanted, and both Apple and IBM were eventually overwhelmed in the desktop market by MS. Apple didn't see this coming at all when they released the Mac, and neither, obviously, did IBM. MS turned PC's into commodities - it didn't matter anymore whether you had an IBM PC or a clone, because the clones would run IBM-compatible operating systems just as well.

I'd love to see more cross-pollination too. It won't happen. GNOME was started for ideological reasons (Qt wasn't GPL at the time), and then run into the ground for ideological reasons (refusal to do the right thing because KDE was already doing it, and this even after their own leader admitted that their own approach was faulty!).

Remember that there are people in this world who refuse to use 'make xconfig' in kernel 2.6 because it's Qt-based, and actually wasted time hacking up a GTK clone (one that keeps crashing at that).

There is probably some poetic justice to the fact that this mix of blind ideologism and idiocy would have been what ran GNOME into the ground until it had to resort to becoming a commercial product to simply survive, but I'd much rather live in a world where people aren't so dumb. :/

Wow, thanks for the tip, that was really interesting.

I like this quote:

One issue is the Unix roots in Mac OS X, which is based on the BSD operating system. "This Unix component is working against them," Enderle said. "It's basically Unix with an Apple front end, but from the administrators' point of view, all they see is Unix."

and this is pretty damning too.

To more closely model the real world, we should be able to simply open a document and have its application boot up to handle it. I shouldn't have to care what app I need to get my job done. The difficulty for software designers is that we still haven't developed a good way of handling this kind of functionality--Symphony and Framework being early, failed attempts.

What I'd like to see are different work organization systems (scroll to the third message) realized as software implementations, which we could then pick and choose from as our needs and personalities require.

Doomrat,

Someone who calls himself "Doom Rat" should not be calling other people mentally ill. That is not a name chosen by someone with self esteem.

On the other hand, your point should be considered.

Several years ago, a short piece in The Atlantic Monthly, a respected U.S. magazine, compared Bill Gates to Satan. I'm guessing Satan found that quite annoying.

Others have suggested that Bill Gates and Satan are friends.

Hmmm, let's see what Google has to say... Well, lots of people claim to have proof that Bill Gates is Satan. For example, this article quotes the Bible and uses numerology for the "proof". Some claim to have a photo.

The verdict: Saying negative things about Microsoft and Bill Gates is an obsession, and a widely shared obsession.

To follow up on my own post, the complete letter can be found here, the 1997 Wired article here. Note that the article mentions "Where once [Apple] commanded nearly one-fifth the world's personal computer sales, its share has dwindled to less than 4 percent." Now, 6 years later this has not grown (it may have even shrunk a percentage point)...

I wouldn't be surprised if face recognition searches worked in the future, but MS isn't going to be the ones who pioneer it.

Let's do a search for "Microsoft switcher" and see what comes up.

This is how a true geek thinks of himself.

Scripting News was most probably the first true blog, with Userland Frontier as the backend system [Aretha!]. Weblogs.com came shortly after but, I don't see an exact date. But I do believe it pre-dated Blogger and Pitas.

Scripting News was most probably the first true blog, with Userland Frontier as the backend system [Aretha!]. Weblogs.com came shortly after but, I don't see an exact date. But I do believe it pre-dated Blogger and Pitas.

I picked it up from the harvard mirror referenced at Scripting News. In it I read:

WASTE provides a generic virtual secure private network that other services can be built upon. Currently the following services have been implemented for use on the network and are very functional:

• Instant Messaging: allows users to communicate with other users on a private WASTE network in much the same way as when using AIM/ICQ/etc. This feature is primarily accessed through the main WASTE window.
• Group chat: allows two or more users to chat on a WASTE network in much the same way as when using AIM/ICQ/IRC/etc. This feature is primarily accessed through the main WASTE window.
• Distributed presence: allows users to see what other users are currently on a private WASTE network. This feature is primarily accessed through the main WASTE window, and facilitates ease in Instant Messaging.
• File browsing: allows users to browse a virtual directory structure for each user on the network. Each user can specify a list of directories to make available to other users on the network. This feature is primarily accessed through the WASTE Browser window.
• File searching: allows users to search other users? databases. Each user can specify a list of directories to make available to other users on the network. Currently searching for filenames and directory names is all that is supported, but full-text searching and meta-searching would be easily added. This feature is primarily accessed through the WASTE Browser window.
• File transfer: allows users to transfer files to or from other users. Files can be found via the file browsing and file searching features, or files can be uploaded to other users manually. This feature is accessed through many interfaces, and can be managed with the WASTE File Transfer window.
• Key distribution: allows hosts on the WASTE network to exchange public keys so that they can directly connect to each other (which helps the network optimize itself)

Many other services and capabilities can be added to the WASTE network, these are just the basics that have been implemented.

The Register
Scripting News
K5
What was the point of this again? For everyone to list their favorite sites? (Note, the list above is not my favorite sites, just some large ones that can cause /.effects.)

Look people, I can read this news, and get more comments on it at deadly.org. Let the specialty and community-oriented news sites do their thing. Why couldn't a link have been given to the place that first aired this story? Give credit where credit is due, damnit. What, is your next BSD story going to be the continued DARPA funding? If the news is happening at Deadly.org, have some class, and give them some flow. Take a page out of Dave Winer's book.

Also, by removing down-moderating this post, you are proving my point that you censor what isn't convenient or fits your own purposes. Objectivity is sorely needed here, and the best place to start is by rigorously acknowledging the origins of a story. Be a part of the solution and not the problem, take some criticism once in a while, don't restrict your news items to what is simply in your own best interest!

That is all.

In that case, Dave Winner and his XML-RPC project that existed before SOAP is very much prior art. I don't have time to dig up links right now, but he's written a lot about it, and SOAP.

See http://www.scripting.com for more info.

In fact, this is one of the many reasons why I feel that it was extra stupid of Saddam Hussein to call this catastrophe "God's punishment on America".

Please be careful throwing things like this around - if you check the actual Reuters story here, you'll see it was "a government employee" and "a car-mechanic" who are quoted as sources. I'm sure you could find an idiot within this country, heck even one working for local or federal government, who would say equally stupid things regarding disasters who happened to other countries (or even our own country - see Scripting News for a link to someone trying to auction salvage off on Ebay).

Punishing a group due to the words or actions of an individual is the cause of most of the strife in the world.

since the article is no longer in its cache. Fortunately, there's a mirror at scripting.com for those who haven't already grabbed this for desktop wallpaper.

No need to. Dave Winer already has most of that covered, along with blogrolling, too... Really, how could you leave THAT out?

Sometimes I walk into ReadMeDoc.Com and ask - did a tree really have to die for that subject? Not to disparage the writer, but I have to categorize this one under the "DUH" section along with "MacIntosh for Dummies."

Blogging can be learned two ways. Visiting blogs. Its easy, there are tech blogs, there are pundit blogs, there are blogs for dogs and blogs4God. There are even nichy topical blogs, such as how to fix your church's web page.

Then there are a variety of free or next-to-nothing tools to get the job done. For the absolute newbie, there is Blogger.com. Once you've figured it out a bit, you can graduate to MovableType. And if you're really afraid of HTML, you can spend $49 and do it brain dead with Radio Userland. There are also a gazillion of choices inbetween.

The point is, blogging is simple. Its not more difficult than back in 1995 when we all posted our first kitty-kat pictures using notepad or VI. Writing good content for blogs is the hard part.

This is not all that new. There is a UK based aggregatoin service called NewsNow that has been doing this sort of thing for years

This reminds of when I was reading Scripting News a while back and Dave Winer was saying how great it was that Google indexed news when really this type of service is nothing new...

Check out scripting.com, where Dave Winer and his friends have figured out a good response to this. Don't sit around bitching, learn how to game the legislative process and get good people elected.
They've started backing the Libertarian candidate to replace one of the Congress critters backing this nonsense and now she's getting real media coverage and is given a chance to win.
We don't need to put up with these yahoos in DC. God knows they need us more than we need them, so let's get moving on replacing their bought and paid for asses.
I'm certainly doing my partto spread the word.
Rustin

Fans of Userland Software may have noticed that Dave Winer hasn't been updating Scripting News since last week.

It turns out that on June 14th, the Userland offices were raided by the FBI under charges of pedophilia. Apparently, Userland's flagship product, Radio Userland, is actually a vast P2P network of kiddie porn.

David Winer is currently facing serious charges related to the distribution of child pornography. Frontier and Manilla users are unaffected.

'A "blog" is an online diary. Just because it's a "journal", doesn't make it journalism, by the practical definition.'

userland's dave winer has an image you can use to link to the animation from your own website.

(i humbly admit that i made it. i am biased.)

Yes, a lot of people got a lot of play out of them, but more and more developers are finding that they aren't that great. Dave Winer has found that they were great... for about a week and then just tinkered with other things. Yes, we do care about search, but we all no the url google.com. How can the APIs help out that much?

Google xml-rpc interface

I personally refuse to support and or recommend anyone using SOAP web services due to the patent fiasco. I asked on the xml-rpc list if anyone knew of a xml-rpc gateway and Dave Winer immediately jumped to the challange and put up a public gateway.

Thanx Dave

http://www.google.com/xml?q=slashdot

You'll (probably) get an error page.

I read about this on Scripting News in February:

Dave Winer made an inquiry to Google about accessing this XML API.

Their initial response was not very helpful, asking for the link to be removed, and saying that the link is "obviously reserved for Google partners." Eventually, Google let Dave access the API. Now, he sounds like he's under NDA about this.

Some examples:

• "Stallman's philosophy is not open source, it's not the spirit of sharing, it's not generous. It has other purposes, it's designed to create a wall between commercial development and free development." (9/7/2000)
• "Talking with Nicholas Petreley a few days ago I said that the problems that open source addresses have already been dealt with." (9/9/2000)
• "It's possible to be an open source developer with high integrity, I'm sure of that, I know people who do that. But it's not inevitable that all open source developers and middlemen have high integrity." (8/8/2000)

And that's just a few of the more recent posts to his log. Don't get me wrong, Dave is a very thoughtful, articulate guy who's no Microsoft parrot -- he and his company, UserLand Software, were one of the authors of the SOAP specification that is proving so critical for future interoperability. He's just got a keen intelligence and is fond of applying it, which means he'll often come up with a different angle on things than you might expect. Go search his site and I bet you'll find, if not the answer you seek, at least some interesting questions.

-- Jason Lefkowitz

There has been some good discussion and links related to this issue over at Dave Winer's scripting.com.

Also, over at Zeldman's www.zeldman.com.

Found picture of prposed new WTC over on Scripting News. Like the man says, it's very New York.

The linked site has something that Slashdot has never provided: a screen shot of Internet Explorer 6 with Smart Tags enabled. Although the site presumably contains many buzzwords (XML, SOAP, and even "Smart Tags") only one word is actually given the dreaded purple underline. That word? "Microsoft."

The suggested links aren't even as blatantly pro-Microsoft as you might think. It looks like they're the same content you could get about any company from any financial news site (news for MSFT, report for MSFT, chart for MSFT, etc.) and an option to search the web for the company name. In fact, when you search for "Microsoft" on MSN, there are still anti-Microsoft pages linked after the more relevant ones. (Check out link #25. Most people searching for just "Microsoft" aren't looking for MS-bashing, either.)

Please, stop overreacting until you've actually seen what Smart Tags do. The article cautions that Smart Tags are still in Office XP. Those are safer still: the usual company stock-price import facilities, as well as the option to automagically import addresses from your Address Book. That makes life simpler when you're typing a letter.

No, I'm not a Microsoft supporter or shareholder, but the constant MS-bashing is completely uncalled for. (Notice also how I did not use "Micro$oft", "M$", "Microsquish", or any other stupid manglings in my write-up here.)

From Dave's Scripting News on Friday, 27 Apr 01:

From the If-It-Weren't-So-Sad-It-Would-Be-Funny Department, yesterday when Netscape (apparently) deprecated RSS and broke all the links to their RSS stuff, they also broke people whose XML parsers require a DTD. The old URL for the RSS 0.91 DTD is totally 404 not found. John Munsch has a report from the field. I put a copy of the DTD into a folder here on scripting.com, and it will stay there, Murphy-willing, for perpetuity.

You can find his copy of the DTD here.

J.J.

From Dave's Scripting News on Friday, 27 Apr 01:

From the If-It-Weren't-So-Sad-It-Would-Be-Funny Department, yesterday when Netscape (apparently) deprecated RSS and broke all the links to their RSS stuff, they also broke people whose XML parsers require a DTD. The old URL for the RSS 0.91 DTD is totally 404 not found. John Munsch has a report from the field. I put a copy of the DTD into a folder here on scripting.com, and it will stay there, Murphy-willing, for perpetuity.

You can find his copy of the DTD here.

J.J.