Friday, May 14, 1999

News.com: MP3.Com Files for IPO. "We believe that large numbers of artists and consumers are drawn to MP3.com because they have historically been under-served by the traditional music industry."

News.com: 550Mhz Pentium IIIs Coming.

MacWEEK: Sherlock is one to Watch.

Two Sherlock screenshots, thanks to David Handy: #1, #2.

Wired asks "Would you want your child to grow up to be Steve Jobs or Bill Gates?"

Kickoff message for our "other" new mail list. An invitation for open source development. A new plan for a distributed portal. Customized content aggregation. Personalization up the yin-yang. Private intranet channels. And dissemination of information thru search engines, pagers and email, printing and of course the Internet.

Jim Byrne would like to get in on the Linux "feeding frenzy". He asks which is the best distribution for PowerPC hardware. Hint to Apple get "Darwin" off your roadmap and jump to Linux.

LinuxPPC transforms your Macintosh into a powerful UNIX workstation

A spiffy new interface for preferences for UserLand.Com. It's just a wizard. Makes it easy for preferences to grow. And it's a framework, we'll release source code when it's done so every Frontier 6 site can have a great preferences sub-site.

The wizard interface is specified in XML, so non-technical people, tutorial writers, for example, can document the preferences system right in the spec for the system. This puts the power in the right place. Also it's scalable, the same spec could be rendered in Flash, DHTML or as a static web page. All from the same source. I still want to do some more work on this. Stay tuned for more new features.

Frontier webmasters needed in Washington DC.

Wired: When Industries Collide. Tech should hang tough. There's no way copy protection will work. MP3 is here to stay.

MP3.Com had a mole in the London meeting. "Seems that all the suspicions of behind-the-scenes manipulation and not so hidden agendas are true. Despite public claims to an open industry conglomeration of cooperative forces set to solve the world's digital problems, an elite, secret group has been meeting to subvert the process."

David Weekly: Why SDMI Will Fail. "When a computer program, say RealPlayer or WinAMP, wants to play some music for the user, they have to send that data in raw form to the sound card. It is a trivial manner to write a piece of software that pretends that it is a sound card!"

News.com: Motley Fool Won't Rush to IPO. "Our time frame as a business is 60 years, not 60 days," Motley Fool chief operating officer Erik Rydholm told CNET News.com. "We consider an IPO to be a financing event and not an exit strategy, and we don't want financing to be confused with our business goals." Right on!