Thursday, March 04, 1999

Early this morning we reached a milestone in our collaboration with Marc Canter and his team at Broadband Mechanics.

Their high fidelity DHTML interface for our Mail to the Future server is now online, with two important limits. 1. It requires MSIE 5.0b2/Windows, and 2. You must change your security settings to allow communication with a remote server. This enables the XML-RPC connection with the server. Details are here.

Now, when you're ready, dive into the wild and hairy (and gorgeous) world of broadband applications.

Other news

The technography thread continues. Today we're talking about the technographer's net connection.

If you don't have Windows or MSIE5.0b2, or don't want to change your security settings, here's a new slide show of the functionality.

News.com exposes issues around the lack of a standard GUI on Linux. They got it right. Mac and Windows each have a standard way of drawing windows and menus and handling mouse and keyboard interactions. Linux leaves that up to the user, which makes it hard to develop interactive software that runs on all flavors of Linux. This is the weak-spot in the Linux strategy, and the reason why, at this time, it can only challenge Microsoft on the server side, not on the desktop. More..

OTOH, as reported in the NY Times and elsewhere, the Linux industry is gravitating to GNOME over the other GUIs. When and if a standard coalesces around one of the contenders, it could be a serious challenge to Microsoft's dominance on the desktop.

According to WordNet, a gnome is a "legendary creature resembling a tiny old man who lives in the depths of the earth and guards buried treasure."

According to rumors flying around on email, Microsoft offered $5 million for the linux.com domain. If true, one has to wonder what they would have done with it. IMHO, the money would be better spent creating bridges to Linux so networked apps running on NT can scale up to running on Linux. As an NT developer I would really like to see this happen.

Apple: Mac OS X Server screen shots. NextStep with a Mac-like UI?

Red Herring: Adobe Fights Quark in Print.

Here's the teaser site we put up for people who wandered into www.mailtothefuture.com, while it was in development.

Newsweek.com: Header-ache.

Yahoo: Real-Time Delivery of Orders to your Secure Web Server.