Tuesday, July 13, 1999

Brian Wilson: "I've been having a conversation with a coworker about XML and its applicability when it comes to feeding transactions to an enterprise middleware service layer for high volume systems. My associate says that since the volume of network traffic is doubled or tripled by XML because of the embedded tags that it will never perform and that anyone who tries to build a transactional system with it as the transport protocol will fail."

TechWeb: "Janus, the code name ascribed to Microsoft's Windows 2000 Data Center Server under development, will feature advanced clustering services such as robust fail-over and load balancing features as well as support for 16 processors out of the box."

Dr Dobbs: A brief history of Unix and the Internet.

Jeff Walsh's Manila article is now on PC World! BTW, we're getting lots of email. Seems like we hit a nerve.

AppleInsider: Apple/Palm Deal Nears.

SiteExperts: Building a Story Server with XML and ASP.

Random.Org: The CORBA Random Number Server.

It took less than five minutes to write a random number XML-RPC handler, install it on Betty, and test it with the RPC Debugger page, take a screen shot and upload it to a server.

Michael Lawley had similar results with CORBA and Python.

News.Com: Internet advertising firm DoubleClick today announced it was acquiring rival online advertiser NetGravity in a stock transaction valued at about $530 million.

BBC: Back Orifice is easy to disable say anti-virus makers.

News.Com: Amazon Expands Again. "Despite the many new offerings, the Seattle, Washington, company is facing intense competition in all of its markets and continues to lose money."

Wired: Ask Jeeves for Cash. They're being sued for infringing on a natural language patent. Easy defense! They don't do natural language queries (although they say they do).

Salon: Don't you know it's different for girls? "There is a demographic that doesn't respond to this theme, and that's 40-year-old men with teenage daughters. It makes them very uncomfortable, and that was most saliently represented by a production designer who went up to my editor and said, "this movie really gets to me, it's as if these girls think that they have the right to have an orgasm." I think what is scaring them is just what is attracting teenage girls to the movie."

The Economist: "Some men wish they were as feared or respected as they imagine their grandfathers once were. But how many would willingly trade places with women?"

Jakob Nielsen: Affiliates Programs. "An affiliates program is a way for sites to pay for incoming traffic: when site A links to site B, there is some mechanism for site B to pay a referral fee to site A, depending on who follows the link and how valuable they are to site B. Site A is called an 'affiliate' of site B, because it is associated with site B and uses it to provide a service to its users."

Wired: Third Voice Patches Holes.

--- Hardware trouble. The Superhonker has "thermal detectors" that keep tripping. We're having a heat wave in the Bay Area. My high-end Dell workstation doesn't like it. All my other computers are fine! Go figure.