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Since browsing technology has likely reached it's apex, all that's left are the small things.

Microsoft didn't give AOL a billion dollars (well, they didn't actually give them jack shit if AOL is so stupid as to assign value to the "right" to use MS's browser, but that's another topic) for nothing.

People want to deploy distrubuted multi-user applications. How? This is the big money bag. MS will lose a lot more than their shirt if people start deploying applications to XPFE.

This is not an original thought. MS want to squish this bug badly.

The most important thing about blogging IMO is that it allows the average person to easily be a producer on the net instead of just a passive consumer (ala TV). Weblogs also allow for the publication of very obscure and specific content that would not exist otherwise (such as a weblog about various things to wget and curl).

Sure, there is a lot of crap in blogs, but everyone has something worthwhile to say once in a while. There are a lot of very smart people who write weblogs.

Those who think blogging is pretentious should read the following entry on Dave Winer's Scripting News.

Those in power always resist something new that empowers the masses in what was formerly their exclusive domain (such as news organizations suppressing the weblogs of reporters, and elitist intellectuals who think expressing opinion should be their privilege only).

Personally, all I've ever needed as a content provider was one page...

Call me skeptical, but did occur to anyone else that Microsoft picked FreeBSD because
1) they despise the GPL for what it represents and
2) Mono is being developed on Linux?

Don't get me wrong, I run several FreeBSD servers and prefer the ports system over RPM. It just unnerves me when the Microsoft marketing machine starts mucking around on my chosen platform.

As a postscript, you all should be aware that PHP may well become the best platform for deploying .NET. Here's why and here's why this is irrelevant.

Speaking of security...

"Presidential candidate Howard Dean gave a talk at Harvard last night. He asked an interesting question. Next year, how will we feel when China invades Taiwan because they think they have weapons of mass destruction? Has the new Bush Doctrine, pre-emptive wars, unleashed a philosophy of world power that we may not be so comfortable with?" (reference)

It's RMS, Richard Matthew Stallman. GNU/RMS to you.

No, he was referring to, er, Richard's cousin, um, Really Simple Stallman. ;)

No, you are still wrong. SOAP really has nothing to do with web sites.

It *can* be used by web sites to provide an API for programmatic access to that site's data and functionality, but using SOAP in this manner is actually quite redundant: You can do the same thing without SOAP and in a more architecturally sound manner.

This is beside the point, however. SOAP has nothing to do with the web, or web sites, other than the fact it uses HTTP as it's default transport.

SOAP was a spin-off of XML-RPC. Dave Winer developed XML-RPC as a simple RPC mechanism for Userland Frontier, to allow other applications integrate with it. Microsoft picked XML-RPC up (probably becuase it is very buzzword-compilant, and can easily get through those pesky firewalls), turned it into a RPC mechanism for "objects" - which is a lie, they basically just gave it an extensible type system - and let it loose. See XML-RPC for Newbies for a more detailed early history.

"Um. Kind of like how people are using HTTP and the web for mission critical *manual* data input and presentation?"

No, it is being used for RPC (Remote Procedure Call) - a form of IPC (Inter-Process Communications). This is far more dangerous. People are exposing programmatic interfaces to mission-critical systems. These interfaces allow other computers to manipulate data on those remote mission-critical systems. Think of having direct access to Amex's customer database vs. having access to their web site. It is a massively different situation.

/mike

Why would one intentially seek to raise the hackles of the Google Lawyers?

We had the EXACT same idea and created a boadcast blog... but instead of video, we chose to use streaming MPEG4 audio. For content management, we use manilla.

The end result is a very refined, web radio show.

We got the company that hosts our portal to offer MPEG4 streaming AND Manilla hosting packages that will allow you to create your own radio or television web log very easily and with little training... not to mention for a a REALLY decent price. If you're interested in doing any of this, you should check it out.

Trying again...

It must be late or something.

... and Micro Channel Architecture (MCA)...

In my experience, many benefits of XML come when dealing with the presentation layers of many application architectures, with the ability to repurpose syndicated data at wil, here are a few examples:

• RSS which defines an easy standard for any site to provide "News" in a well-defined XML Format. This allows developers to write software to aggregate news from different sites into one convenient interface, sites to exchange news headlines with eachother.
• Google Web APIs which allow developers to create their own custom google-powered search site with their own look and feel by simply proxying a user's search query to the google server which returns search results in XML data which can subsequently be transformed in HTML before being sent back to the user via various processes such as an XSLT transformation.
• Amazon Web API, similar in principle to the above Google API, allows developers to enhance their sites by allowing their users to search for Amazon products without having to go the Amazon site itself. One interesting side-effect of such API is that an Amazon competitor, say Barnes and Noble, could offer a similar API to their own site. Now I could allow my users to use my service to search for books and offer them results and price comparisons from both Amazon and Barnes and Noble

Effective use of XML and XSLT allows you to easily aggregate informational data from one or multiple sources and "repurpose" for an infinite variety of business and technological goals.

One of the main benefits of XML is that it offers and effective, textual representation of "scructured data", that can be conveniently accessed and manipulated according to a slew of various surrounding standards such as XPath, DOM, XSLT, namespaces.

I've been reading about decentralized news for quite awhile now and have been waiting for some real, concrete results/products to be released. As such, here are some of my Mozilla bookmarks from my Decentralized News folder. Please enjoy!

Scripting News
... Call us cockroaches if you want, I'm sure IBM thought Apple, Microsoft and Intel
were cute and dirty too, but distributed and decentralized news is rapidly ...
scriptingnews.userland.com/backIssues/2002/02/15 - 25k - Dec. 9, 2002 - Cached

Research News: TVC Alert, 31 May 2002
... Before summarizing software available for reading RSS/XML news feeds (end of article),
the author opines about the value of decentralized news or information ...
www.virtualchase.com/tvcalert/may02/31may02.html - 38k - Cached

Hoosier Review
... used to their privileges as brokers of information in a top-down world, threatened
by the rise of new, bizarre, egalitarian and decentralized news sources? ...
www.hoosierreview.com/musgrave10.html - 12k - Cached

Netizens Info
... Non-electronic Reference Sources. Bellovin, Steve M. and Mark Horton, USENET
- A Distributed Decentralized News System, an unpublished manuscript, 1985. ...
www.columbia.edu/~hauben/CMC/netizen_thoughts.ht ml - 11k - Cached

www.columbia.edu/~hauben/CS/netizen_thoughts.txt
... and future of the data highway Non-electronic Reference Sources Bellovin, Steve
M. and Mark Horton, USENET - A Distributed Decentralized News System, an ...
8k - Cached
[ More results from www.columbia.edu ]

MetaLog
... just recycled news from major outlets. But what the weblogs did do
was provide a decentralized news source. At a time when all of ...
www.larkfarm.com/metalog.asp - 18k - Dec. 9, 2002 -

Michael Barone
... years ago. That's how it's bound to be in a country with increasingly
decentralized news media and a fragmented electorate. The ...
www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/barone100300.a sp - 17k - Dec. 9, 2002 - Cached

SubIntSoc.net: The Suboctagon Report - The Center Cannot Hold, ...
... Another example: personal video cameras. People on the streets with cameras formed
a decentralized news-gathering system that the TV networks couldn't match. ...
subintsoc.net/suboctagon_20011121.php - 39k - Dec. 9, 2002 - Cached

Wired Online: Brain Tennis
... Or will the many-to-many nature of the Net lead to self-correcting, decentralized
news media that nobody owns and everybody contributes to? ...
hotwired.lycos.com/braintennis/96/23/index2a.htm l - 11k -

Looks like Michael Eisner is a pimp and mickey mouse is his bitch.

Looks like Michael Eisner is a pimp and mickey mouse is his bitch.

That is good and all from your standpoint, being comfortable with HTML an all. However at our org. I needed to provide a way for our PR person to be able to update news pages all on her own.

Moveabletype works great for this (since I'm not a hardcore perl programmer, it was nice to have someone else do that work). I spent a few days building and modifying the page templates and setting up the site. Now all she has to do is login to a page, add a title and main story and click publish. Instantly several pages are updated with the appropriate news information, archives and search links, etc. Very nice since I don't have to waste time getting the information from her each time and create a new page. Great for her, because she can update the news website anytime she gets a press release.

I think Blogger itself is somewhat bland, mostly for the novice/home user wanting to get a voice out. For the professional there are some impressive tools that will save you time (Movabletype or Radio UserLand)

- A non-productive mind is with absolute zero balance.
- AC

Also, tara sue grubb is just plain HOT. And she's libertarian. so libertarian is good!!

Please ignore the last paragraph of my last comment.

. o O ( Preview button...oh, yeah! )

You could probably build something on top of Zope (which comes with a ZWiki component), and might find gZigZag interesting.

Tinderbox, and Userland's products, though not open/free, are two other platforms to build on or learn from.

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.

> They spent MILLIONS replacing 3000 mail servers with 32 Domino servers

Seems to me their biggest problem isn't switching to 100% Windows, it's running Domino as their mail server (for all your database needs! w00t!). Whoever thought of that brilliant idea should be shot. Then again, IBM seems to have some good salesmen and women. GOD HOW I MISS NOTES' INTUITIVE USER-FREIDNLY INTERFACE.

-- ex-Lotus Admin and Flamebait since 1978

Um, no. It would mean that your "state-o-the-art" PowerBook wouldn't run the previous version of the OS.

Clearly your sarcasm detector is set too high. When I said "the one you just bought" that means today (as in just, as in not 64 bit). So when Steve Jobs gets up and says "32 bits is dead" your screwed. Just ask all the people who bought quadras so they would be able to run OS X. Then it didn't appear for a few years and ... yes, they got "Steved".

Doubtful, if a 1GHz GPUL processor runs 2x faster than a 1GHz G4 processor

Clearly you have a short memory. The "emulated" 68k mode of PowerPCs (which were also supposed to be waaay faster) weren't because the emulator didn't fit in the cache. And for christ sakes, who the hell believes what chip companies say about speed anymore?

Yea, right. Since Apple has done such a poor job of allowing old apps to continue to function with a new their new OS, NOT!

I hope your fucking kidding. Clearly your not a Mac developer if you haven't been repeatedly screwed by Apple.

Go back to sleep, you clearly need it

So what's your excuse?

Um, no. It would mean that your "state-o-the-art" PowerBook wouldn't run the previous version of the OS.

Clearly your sarcasm detector is set too high. When I said "the one you just bought" that means today (as in just, as in not 64 bit). So when Steve Jobs gets up and says "32 bits is dead" your screwed. Just ask all the people who bought quadras so they would be able to run OS X. Then it didn't appear for a few years and ... yes, they got "Steved".

Doubtful, if a 1GHz GPUL processor runs 2x faster than a 1GHz G4 processor

Clearly you have a short memory. The "emulated" 68k mode of PowerPCs (which were also supposed to be waaay faster) weren't because the emulator didn't fit in the cache. And for christ sakes, who the hell believes what chip companies say about speed anymore?

Yea, right. Since Apple has done such a poor job of allowing old apps to continue to function with a new their new OS, NOT!

I hope your fucking kidding. Clearly your not a Mac developer if you haven't been repeatedly screwed by Apple.

Go back to sleep, you clearly need it

So what's your excuse?

Here. .com, not .org.

Here is the correct link for Radio UserLand.

I know Apache does not have any "customers" to support, but why were they so eager to break compatibility for Apache 1.3 modules in Apache 2.0? I know backwards compatibility code isn't sexy, but couldn't they keep the old module API and thunk it to the new API? Then Apache 2.0 could ship with rock-solid mod_php and mod_perl. Let modules developers migrate slowly on their own schedule.

Here's an interesting perspective from Ole Eichorn, the CTO of Aperio Technologies:

One of the more significant recent discontinuities occurred with the release of Apache 2.0. Although it has been under-reported, Apache 2.0 is significantly discontinuous (non-backward-compatible) with Apache 1.3. Many webmasters have decided not to upgrade for now, rather than have to recode their custom modules. And many of the custom modules out there are 3rd party, so the resources to make the changes are not readily available.

It is not clear to me why the discontinuity was required. There was no technical reason not to maintain backward compatibility. I think your essay gets it right, the people who made these decisions were not involved in the original development, and were not sufficiently aware of the impact their decisions would have on their developer community. Multi-threading processes, which inspired most of the discontinuity, primarily benefits Windows sites - a small proportion of Apache installations - and most Windows sites use IIS and aren't going to change.

I bet in a few years we'll be able to track Apache's decline as the leading web server back to this point.

Dave has written a ton of stuff...some of it might be useful.

A day without programming?

Patents and the W3C

Killer Patents

Amazon's XML Interface

Patents, lawsuits plague the Net (Dave is quoted.)

Notes on competing

Dave has written a ton of stuff...some of it might be useful.

A day without programming?

Patents and the W3C

Killer Patents

Amazon's XML Interface

Patents, lawsuits plague the Net (Dave is quoted.)

Notes on competing

Dave has written a ton of stuff...some of it might be useful.

A day without programming?

Patents and the W3C

Killer Patents

Amazon's XML Interface

Patents, lawsuits plague the Net (Dave is quoted.)

Notes on competing

Dave has written a ton of stuff...some of it might be useful.

A day without programming?

Patents and the W3C

Killer Patents

Amazon's XML Interface

Patents, lawsuits plague the Net (Dave is quoted.)

Notes on competing

MP3.com seems to have dropped out of the picture lately, but four out of the last five good bands that I've "found" were through this site. I really don't understand why more musicians haven't jumped on board over there. It seems to be working very well for Roger McGuinn. Why haven't more *established* artists tried this? Have you considered it? What there something unique about his timing, contract status, and/or fan base that that allows him to make better money on mp3.com than at the major labels?

Dave Winer wrote a great article about this, in 1994. Everything holds true today.

Platform is Chinese Household

i have been following Tara Sue for about a week now. Ed Cone, an opinion writer for the North Carolina News and Record introduced her to the online world last Friday and has been mentioning her on an almost daily basis.

Dave Winer and others bloggers who have been writing for some time now about the need to find a challenger against Howard Coble quickly linked with support. Tara Sue has become an online ray of hope for many.

http://www.userland.com/whatIsDrm:

What is DRM?

Tue, Jan 1, 2002; by Dave Winer.

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management.

---------------

Thought others might want to know, too. I was clueless before this post.

(ACing to avoid Karma Whore accusations.)

I always liked this doc telling the story of Demoing for Fun and Profit.

At the core of OSA are AppleEvents which are an RPC like communications mechanism. Using an app's published AppleEvent interface you can create the appropriate AppleEvent (some struct and params), bundle it up and send it to the application. When working with AppleScript the user just sees the AppleScript interface to the underlying AppleEvents. AppleEvents were even object oriented, in a strange mangled C kind of way.

However AppleEvents and OSA seemed relatively complex when they came out in early '90s and with the Mac's limited customer base few people have come up with alternative languages based on the technology. The most famous is Dave Winer's Frontier which started out on the Mac but has since evolved into a cross platform SOAP, XML-RPC, web focused product.

Just trying to set the record straight. :)

Dave Winer proposes a rather radical approach, but you could certainly pick up a few ideas from him.

A decentralized network of weblogs hosted by the paper would have greater 'network effects' that a Slashdot style site, because personal publishing spaces are les vulnerable to attack. Slashdot's meta-moderation, while necessary for this size site, also requires a large number of users in order to work. individual weblogs provide a more immediate benefit.

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

This isn't exactly related but then again maybe it is.... Is it marketing or journalism? [userland.com]

I think it's ironic, that in an article about journalism, by someone who's always touting the blog (Dave Winer) there is a *retraction* because he failed to do his basic fact checking!! That, right there, sums up why blogs, and I do like them, are not "journalism".

Besides, I can't read an article about "Mr. X" with out thinking of Homer Simpson... :)

This isn't exactly related but then again maybe it is....Is it marketing or journalism?

It can be tough to decide how to define something. A blog is a blog is a blog. The material posted by kids about their lives might mean nothing to you but everything to that kid and his/her peers. If you don't like it, move along. Call it a journal or call it something else. Call it a blog, or not. Fine.

On the other hand, there are some "industrial strength" blogs out there. At a minimum, this is going mainstream, for better or worse. For example, there are blogs written by folks that are employed by Macromedia. Examples...

Mike Chambers (Flash MX):
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/

Vernon Viehe (ColdFusion MX):
http://vvmx.blogspot.com/

Matt Brown (Dreamweaver MX):
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106884/

And then there a blogs by the professional folks at MSNBC:

Eric Alterman: Altercation
Michael Moran: World Agenda
Cosmic Log: Alan Boyle's Diary
Chris Matthews: Hardball
Jan Herman: The Juice

It's now an unobvious deep-link into the archives

Also available elsewhere

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Alan's ideas are usually good and I've been involved with the formation of the AFFS in the UK as well as having donated to the EFF in the US several times, but he will not make any friends by insulting some of the smartest developers on the Linux desktop today. Like it or not, .NET is becoming a force to be reckoned with on Linux.

The Mono .NET framework implementation is more complete than many people realise, and in terms of efficiency, design, feature-completeness, and best of all, freedom, it beats the non-free Java implementations hands-down.

Debian users will be able to apt-get install a JIT virtual machine that can play cross-platform applets in their browsers for the first time ever without resorting to propriterary software, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the most important thing we can ask for from a desktop OS -- a good, modern infrastructure for the development of desktop and server applications.

Any legal objections are simply false. Eben Moglen, rofessor of Law he will then once again have my full support.

Bite down on it!

Bite down on it!

Being a journalist with very little programming experience, I am really disappointed that there are still people out there either dismissing WS out of hand because of 'hype', or desperately trying to work out how it must be bad because of MS/.Net "Instead of arguing about how the world's components will connect, Microsoft is seeking to prove that it can help to produce the best components at the lowest cost. Duh, isn't that what companies *do*?? Like, competition n all that? Web services are kinda good in that they are open and attempt to SOAP was designed by Dave Winer from Userland who is a bit of a legend, and some other company called Developmentor, and they pitched around for support from big co.s, but no-one except Microsoft and IBM were interested. Yes, he did also design XML-RPC afaik. And I think he likes it better. There's a whole lot of stuff there. Dave is weird but deserves credit for this as i'm sure some other people do. Oh yeah, back to Microsoft... yep, they've seen the future and it probably has somethign to do with WS. So they're going hard. As much as I resent them for inflicting most corporate worker drones with inadequate software and making my time as a helpdesk operator a total misery, in this case they are doing something that is kinda good. I hope IBM and other vendors come out with some really cool IDEs though, because the word so far seems to be that kids love VS.Net.

Check out Radio UserLand. - It is what you say.

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.

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.

AFIK it is a protocol devised by Dave Winner from Userland and Microsoft, it has been rubber stamped by the W3C, and it's specifications can be found on their site: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1.

I think some of the most interesting things that have been written about SOAP have come out of the REST thesis, probably the best two introductory articles on REST and the ones on XML.com by Paul Prescod; Second Generation Web Services and REST and the Real World.

There has been quite a bit of interesting discussion on SOAP on the W3Cs Technicial Architecture list, see this thread: SOAP breaks HTTP?.

Nice list, just watch out for Winer and his fan-boys & girls who will take any opportunity to sing the (non-existent) praises of Manila.

This is Dave, the CEO of an alleged CMS company who doesn't think a CMS ought to have workflow..., probably because he doesn't understand it.

Hey Dave! If you don't want workflow on your site, that's fine. Other people might just need it... ever worked on a site in a regulated industry like banking?

Nice list, just watch out for Winer and his fan-boys & girls who will take any opportunity to sing the (non-existent) praises of Manila.

This is Dave, the CEO of an alleged CMS company who doesn't think a CMS ought to have workflow..., probably because he doesn't understand it.

Hey Dave! If you don't want workflow on your site, that's fine. Other people might just need it... ever worked on a site in a regulated industry like banking?