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Apple has always been hostile to unified look on their platform.

You do realize, of course, that you are talking about the company that literally wrote the book on good, consistent UI design, right?

The above, linked pdf copy dates from 1995 (the earliest actual copy I could find in a 2 minute search), but Apple first published their most-excellent HIG manual on or around 1985, before most slashdotters were even born.

Now, get off my lawn!

For anyone that doesn't believe the parent poster, go look up the old, classic Mac HIG. I found a link for the 1995 edition here. This is actually quite a bit different from the OSX HIG, which throws several of the well-reasoned and researched conventions of the earlier HIG out the window. The OSX HIG does not provide justifications for these alterations in most cases, which points to "UX" crap starting its takeover as long ago as 2000.

Dave Winer has some interesting thoughts on this, arguing that the Chromebook market was Microsoft's for the taking, but they instead chose to cut bait on netbooks, ceding the market to Google.

Dave Winer's take is more interesting for what it doesn't say. It suggests that he and Aaron weren't close.

As long as Google earns revenue by selling ads to me, then yes, they are the antichrist.

If that was the only thing they sold: http://scripting.com/stories/2011/07/25/whyGoogleCaresIfYouUseYour.html

"There's a very simple business reason why Google cares if they have your real name. It means it's possible to cross-relate your account with your buying behavior with their partners, who might be banks, retailers, supermarkets, hospitals, airlines. To connect with your use of cell phones that might be running their mobile operating system. To provide identity in a commerce-ready way. And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms.

Simply put, a real name is worth more than a fake one. "

Karl Marx said that the industrial revolution polarized the world into two groups: those who own the means of production and those who work on them. Today’s means of production aren’t greasy cogs and steam-spewing engines, but that doesn’t mean they don’t divide us. Industrial data is all around us, and search engines, governments, financial markets, social networks and law enforcement agencies rely on it. We willingly embrace this “Big Data” world. We share, friend, check in and retweet our every move. We swipe loyalty cards and enter frequent flyer numbers. We leave a growing, and apparently innocent trail of digital breadcrumbs in our wake. But as we use the Internet (Internet) for “free,” we have to remember that if we’re not paying for something, we’re not the customer. We are in fact the product being sold — or, more specifically, our data is. So here’s a tricky question: Who owns all that data?

Who Owns Your Data?

But what are we complaining about? It’s all free. Having to move our bookmarks is not really a huge problem, but we all seem appalled that large companies care about money. Since when is this an anomaly? Company sees something cool, hopes to make money, buys it, doesn’t make enough money, poof. Here’s a truth for you: most companies only care about your data insofar as this data can help them make money. They have this site and you fill it. You fill it.

"Death to web services. Long live web services!"

So to the extent you're locked in, that's the extent you are not on the open web. The perfectly open web has zero lock-in. The silos are totally locked-in and therefore not on the open web.

What I mean by "the open web"

Your site should be the source and hub for everything you post online. This doesn't exist yet, it's a forward looking vision, and I and others are hard at work building it. It's the future of the indie web.

Tantek Çelik

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

A. J. Liebling ("Do you belong in journalism?", The New Yorker, 14 May 1960)

This kind of panic has happened before. I don't understand why so many people freak out any time Apple gets serious about distribution.

Apple's decision to open its own retail stores nearly a decade ago was attacked as a move that would destroy Apple's retail presence and piss off consumers. One clever analyst told MacWorld: "It's another case of Apple being Jobs driven and not consumer driven." Guys like him got it completely backwards. Customers didn't actually enjoy having to look all over the place to find Apple products. Apple customers benefited from the stores. Developers benefited. Apple benefited.

A few years later, Apple created the App Store. It was widely derided as being overly restrictive for developers. There were a lot of statements about how it would strangle the platform. We all know how that turned out.

As for Winer, I think he'd rather Apple stick with the Mac as the future of the company. That ain't gonna happen. Consumers have voted with their wallets. They want an easier experience all the way 'round, from finding apps to purchasing and using them, and Apple is providing that. The company has become a global powerhouse over the last few years by giving people what they want; developers can either get on board with that and find ways to profit, or they can develop on other platforms.

There's a fair amount of snarkiness in the tech community about all those fools in the business world, about all the dinosaurs who can't keep up with the times, but when it comes right down to it, we're often just as attached to the status quo, and just as slow to react.

He had little to do with Azure, didn't talk much at company meetings, didn't inspire, didn't do anything.

You sure about that? According to Wired , Ozzie had everything to do with Azure, and spent his first two years on the job reorganizing the company to produce a services platform for the Web. He's quite clear about his intentions and the direction he was pushing the company in his original memo to Microsoft senior management, which was sent out under Bill Gates's email address. And longtime Microsoft observer Mary-Jo Foley says:

As I discovered during the course of my Red Dog meetings, Ozzie was anything but uninvolved in Red Dog and Azure. In fact, I heard from team members time and time again, without Ozzie’s oversight and direct intervention, Red Dog and the broader Azure platform wouldn’t have come together as quickly or comprehensively as they did.

Unsurprisingly, Dave has been made aware of this joke, and has already put up a response. The sidebar listing many quotes praising his and Adam's contribution each of which predates the patent application date is pretty funny.

Maybe... In the trenches you can learn from your co-workers, and you can learn from your mistakes. But it's often lonely at the top, "White boy welfare" makes even the latter difficult.

This is an alpha release, as others have pointed out. It's not even part of the default browser install - it's a separate download. Treat it as a proof-of-concept and kick the tyres.

Also, this is 2009, not 1995. We know a lot more about developing more secure software, having secure development lifecycles, and reacting to vulnerabilities and updating software.

Fractional horsepower web servers are not a new idea, but baking them into the browser is, and assuming the feature is off by default, it's a great idea. It makes the web a bit more equal and opens up new avenues for collaboration.

Alternate app stores would only work on jailbroken phones...

Aaaaand you have just discovered why they call developing for a closed platform "being locked in the trunk."

This reminds me of Dave Winer's 2001 idea of Microsoft-Free Fridays from the (2001) days Micrsoft played with the idea of implementing smart tags in IE6. An Apache mod was crafted for it.

After the spectacular failure of their first attempt, you would think they would learn. But noooooo! They have to try again.

Every time they do this, they leave out some critical part that made the ad work for Apple. In the first attempt, the Microsoft "switcher" was a PR hack who worked for the ad agency that created the page (stock photography and all). Apple used real customers. Perhaps MS tried and failed to find someone who switched from OS X back to XP and was happy about it.

Ironically, there ARE more people than ever before who are happy about switching to XP. Problem is, they are switching from Vista.

the Internet is just another distribution method, the beauty of the 'net is that it is inexpensive for individuals to have their own "station" (blog, youtube channel, whatever)

The 'net has/is fundamentally changing "media" in general (Dave Winer has been writing about this for sometime) - so the question is probably moot. as others have pointed out, there is a tv/web convergence going on

the "old media" (good ol' Time magazine) had "You" as the "person of the year" last year - recognizing the "user generated content" phenomenon

anyway, I still think ytmnd is funny

Quote from the linked article: "That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share."

Bill Gates is one of the most disliked people on earth for his refusal to finish his products, and his reliance on adversarial business tactics.

See Microsoft Memories. See Another Bill Gates Meets Satan story.

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.

A rich person can give a lot of money to charity to try to give people a better impression of himself. With Bill Gates, that isn't working.

You forget the point of Dvorak.

at Microsoft or they're hiring stand-up comedians.

This is the company that wanted to decommoditize standards and protocols, yet they come out with the line "The Web is built on open standards and we at Microsoft believe that we have to enable those open standards"

Ever read the infamous Bill Gates memo about this very subject (circa 1985).

http://www.scripting.com/specials/gatesLetter/text .html

Read after me: Steve will never license the OS. Back in the Mac clone days he considered clone makers theives because their cheap machines bit into the high end Mac sector, just like it would do now.

It's Sony. They get to:

1) HDCP protect their own movies playing on the PS3
2) Sell their Sony Bravias to people burned by the requirement

Look at the other post on this story from somebody who describes Windows MCE's ridiculous "protection" of analog content.

Also: http://davenet.scripting.com/2001/04/30/strategyTa x

Dave is not amused by the sly implication contained in that description of him:

http://www.scripting.com/2006/12/23.html#anatomyOf AHack

Ask anyone who's followed the SCO lawsuit saga and they'll tell you about the major Microsoft shills. Enderle (his own "group", just him really), Didio (garner), Daniel Lyons (forbes), and Maurice (sorry, didn't follow that part so well).

These folks know how to work the media. They appear quoted over and over again. They have massive bias. Enderle is the by far the WORST.

Of the many Enderle stories, he gave a keynote speech at some SCO developer conference... after things had gone pretty far south for SCO and they were well on their way to being the laughing stock they are now. Enderle reportedly was cussing and swearing about the open source world, practically paranoid that someone in the audience was an open source spy or some-such.

Sure, the register likes to bash other more, er, established publications at any chance. And yes, the "policy" doesn't seem to make sense. But if you read the register article (yeah, I know, this is slashdot, but still)... it doesn't take a lot of reading between the lines to see this is probably the NYT finally getting fed up with Rob Enderle.

1: Here's how wrong Rob Enderle has been about Apple

2: More Enderle stuff

3: Enderle's take on SCO's lawsuit with IBM - yeah, right

4: Even Wikipedia has a Enderle entry, listing his poor prediction history, if only briefly

Rob Enderle is quoted VERY FREQUENTLY. If you read this little comment (likely to remain only +2 cause it's not posted in the first several minutes), please remember just one thing:

Whenever you see Rob Enderle quoted, read with skepticism.

Sadly, he's very good at getting quoted all over the place. Hopefully the NYT will no longer be among the rags that takes the easy way out and prints whatever convenient sound bite he's serving up that day.

Check this out: http://www.scripting.com/2006/11/12.html#When:9:52 :06AM
Apparently if you want to do some cross promotion with Microsoft, you have to agree to not make disparaging remarks about Microsoft or the Zune. It will be interesting to see which websites are willing to be muzzled in order to get some traffic.

Bravo to Andrew Baron of Rocketboom for not selling out.

-ec

Of course I've heard of Steve Mann's work, and his Gnu/Linux Wristwatch Video Phone, which used pie menus (but didn't talk as far as I know). He built his prototype pie menu watch in 1998, about 10 years after we (Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Ben Shneiderman, Mark Weiser) published a paper about pie menus at ACM CHI'88. But in 1988 (and 1998), not many people had hardware they could carry around that was suitible for implementing talking pie menus.

Speech synthesis requires a lot of memory to store a good voice, and speech enabled applications require a lot of task-specific scripting control (so they don't start talking and talking at length about something the user is no longer interested in). I'm using the Lua scripting language on the Pocket PC, to develop flexible speech enabled touch screen pie menu based interfaces, which will run on commonly available Pocket PC phones. (I've done a lot of Palm programming in the past, but that's a dead platform.)

Here's a video that Dave Winer took of me demonstrating an example application: a remote control for "Rock and Roll".

-Don

My opinion may be incorrect. After all, I formed it only after reading some of Enderle's quotes and writings here and there. But he made enough of a negative impression that I remember him by name.

Anyway, I decided to glance around on the internet for a few anti-Enderle web pages. See here, here, here, and here. Here's a good quote from the second to last link:

Enderle's presence is a warning sign. I see a quote from him I get the message. The reporter is out of ideas and has decided to cut corners.

My opinion may be incorrect. After all, I formed it only after reading some of Enderle's quotes and writings here and there. But he made enough of a negative impression that I remember him by name.

Anyway, I decided to glance around on the internet for a few anti-Enderle web pages. See here, here, here, and here. Here's a good quote from the second to last link:

Enderle's presence is a warning sign. I see a quote from him I get the message. The reporter is out of ideas and has decided to cut corners.

Microsoft is going to war led by the newcomer Ray Ozzie. An internal memo he wrote was released last fall calling for a dramatic shift in the way Microsoft operates in order to compete with online services.

http://www.scripting.com/disruption/ozzie/TheInter netServicesDisruptio.htm

Its pretty long, but it spells out where Microsoft is trying to go.

That's a pretty well-known dataloss bug in iTunes, and a lot of people have gotten bitten by it - random example. Of course, because Apple did it, it's okay. OTOH when Windows reboots because you've set it to reboot after applying updates automatically users rip it a new one.

Of course, there are easier ways to trick people into landing on your site. Apparently just taking out an ad for your site with the keywords "download firefox" is enough to confuse some people and get them to think you're the official Firefox download site.

This, I think, lends a bit more credence to Jakob Nielsen's anti-search diatribe earlier this year.

All that said, I agree with your point that in the long run, it's easier and more effective to write good content and do the necessary promotion than it is to try to cheat the system.

Anybody have any insight, or even a good suggested name for these people?

"Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a conflict of interest," blogging and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer wrote in his blog.

Isn't this kind of like the pot calling the kettle black? I mean, blogs are also often considered authoritative, even though they're clearly partisan and written by someone with a conflict of interest.

"Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification's extensions"

Yes they do have patents on their RSS SSE implementation. It's just they don't know of any similiar patents held by others which might infringe their patents. In other words, this is catch-all phrase. I have patents; somebody else might have similar patents but we're unaware of them, therefore we will cross-licence if it turns out that there are patents.

Of course they have patents. I'm afraid it's a bit premature for peace breaking out. The sharing stops at the MS borders. No, hang on. The sharing ends at MSs hand in my wallet. That's the only sharing they know. Has nobody learnt anything? It appears not.

while not 4B but still had excess of 1.4B cash by 1997

Dave Winer seems to some sort of bee in his bonnet over OpenDoc. He doesn't seem to say why.

Ask and ye shall receive...

Why would Google want to get into the ISP biz, which is already crowded and a halo-killer to boot (practically no one loves their ISP...)

I think it's media distribution: given that Google has taken baby steps in online media distribution (Google Video), it isn't farfetched for them to be thinking about getting into the media distribution biz for real (as rumored here) and beat Apple to the punch by licensing it to all comers *and* making it usable by mobile users.

Once.

Preach it, brother!

I've got an open source aggregator (<plug mode="shameless">Feed for Mac OS X</plug>) and it seems most of the 'bug fixes' I have to do are directly related to some fools home-grown interpretation of how to deliver content.

Effectively, RSS (the concept, not the format) is in the 'tag soup' phase that the web was in seven years ago. While I expect this will all settle down as the concept (and value) of standardization is realized by content publishes and CMS vendors, it currently sucks rocks. It'll take time for all of this to shake out. Hell, I'm amazed anything works at all considering Dave Winer pretty much pulled it out of his ass in the first place...

As far as which standard to embrace - it really doesn't matter. You hook a namespace aware XML parser up to an HTTP request and then look for the interesting bits of information. The problem at the moment is that you have to look at lots of bits to find out which ones are the interesting ones - like writing browser sniffing web code. That'll settle down as the technology matures, though - just like web code.

Oh, and don't even get me started on the folk who abuse the entire concept by shoehorning fundamentally mismatched content into RSS. I'm looking right at you, Netflix Queue...

The article in wikipedia on RSS is more balanced.

The fight between Atom and RSS2.0 was fueled for a while from (in my opinion) a clash of egos between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer. Nowadays heads are cooler and there might be some kind of standardization in the long end.

In passing, look at the interesting rant by Dave Winer in his blog not too long ago.

He's a whiny, unhappy man. Because of that, I don't pay attention to him. I don't need to read his blog or listen to his podcast to get my fill of adolescent "give me credit, mommy" angst.

Is anyone actually going to sit there and tell me in all seriousness that their primary source of news and info on 9/11 was somebody's blog?

Here's the archive of Dave Winer's Scripting News blog from September 11. Read it starting from the bottom and scrolling up and it's like watching the day happen all over again.

I was in Ohio on 9/11 after many years of living in Washington, DC (a city to which I have since returned). When the attacks began to unfold I was dreadfully worried about all the friends I had back in Washington. The "professional journalists" you are so enamored with weren't helping -- I remember breathless reports from CNN of helicopters crashing on the National Mall, and NPR reporting a car bomb taking out the State Department.

Like most people who were far from the scene of the attack, I was hitting as many news sources as I could to try and figure out what was true and what was BS. Scripting News was incredibly helpful in that effort. There's some stuff in there that turned out to be false (rumors of a fifth and sixth hijacked plane), but overall the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty good, all things considered.

And this is what you're missing -- "blogs" are not a monolithic entity. The world is not made up of professional journalists who meticulously check every last fact, opposed by dropout bloggers who post anything that comes over the transom. There are good bloggers and bad bloggers, just as there are responsible and irresponsible journalists. The methods to figure out which are which are the same regardless of format.

Of course they're part of the political system. ALL Americans are part of the bloody system - that's the point.

Now, now ... I know corporations (we all) act in their own enlightened self-interest ...

But this should remind us all of how important it is to watch out for self-appointed (market-appointed) "gatekeepers" of information.

Bill Gates on the subject of freedom.

yes, it has an optional feature that does this. and that optional feature has different levels of link creation.

and for pete's sake, slashdot, if you're going to get paranoid and argumentative, at least do it on the day the story broke so it has some currency.

I always thought that OPML and Google-like search powers was the beast for this job. Is it being used? It would certainly gather together the disparate threads in a self boot-strapping manner.

Dave Winer (of Scipting News fame) always had a bee in his bonnet about this subject and on this he makes sense.

As I read this, and from the postings made by Dave Winer, this is intended to be used by blogs. If /. is CmdrTaco's blog, which it still really is (though it's owned by VA), then /. should be able to use these links to keep the links to the stories permanent, as NYT intends to do with this mechanism. So why don't they? This way, searching the archives of /. won't give you links to stories that don't work!

If VA needs to work with the NYT to get a partnership with VA as Userland has done, then it makes sense for them to do it. Users might stop Karma Whoring the NYT text, and NYT could keep their advertising revenue. It would benefit all! This is what doing business is supposed to be like.

(Anyone from VA or /. management care to say if this is in the works, or if it's been tried, ect?)

I'll nominate Rob Enderle of Enderle Consulting as a raving looney.

Today Dave Winer wrote, "I won't use any non-Internet Microsoft product until they start investing again in MSIE. I don't hold out much hope, but it's the least I can do for the Web."

Not using MS products IS probably is the least you can do. Whatever happened to Microsoft Free Fridays? With FireFox aiming for 10% of the Web, it seems like it might be time to do more than the "least" for the web.

Any interest in a javascript alert message campaign to promote Firefox on Fridays? People could add the script to their site and on Friday an alert message would display saying something allong the lines of "The browser you are using isn't startard compliant or secure. Please consider upgrading to Firefox."

Today Dave Winer wrote, "I won't use any non-Internet Microsoft product until they start investing again in MSIE. I don't hold out much hope, but it's the least I can do for the Web."

Not using MS products IS probably is the least you can do. Whatever happened to Microsoft Free Fridays? With FireFox aiming for 10% of the Web, it seems like it might be time to do more than the "least" for the web.

Any interest in a javascript alert message campaign to promote Firefox on Fridays? People could add the script to their site and on Friday an alert message would display saying something allong the lines of "The browser you are using isn't startard compliant or secure. Please consider upgrading to Firefox."

I'm quite aware of the religious war between RSS and Atom, thank you.

End of the day, Atom was and always has been on a track to be a by-Hoyle standard. RSS was and is not, and in fact one of -- if not the -- most influential people in the RSS world, Dave Winer, has specifically disavowed any such intent for RSS.

Dave has his reasons, to be sure. But none of them change the fact that Atom can be said to be a standard in a way RSS cannot.

And you might wish to read up on what, exactly, Blogger offers. You can indeed get RSS on Google blogs; you just have to sign up for Blogger Pro.

Before Netscape developed RSS, Dave created the scriptingNews format. Dave/Userland also took up RSS development after Netscape stopped working on it. See RSS history.