Wednesday, September 08, 1999

Now you can exclude channels on My.UserLand.Com.

Coming sooon. We have to update NewsSearch so it indexes more channels. It predates the registration process, RSS, and My.UserLand.Com.

I added links to Frontier News and NewsSearch to the left-navigation links on the Scripting News home page.

I changed the Top 25 list on the DG to the Top 50, and 25 popular messages were revealed. Surprise!

We're having a very unusual late summer thunder/lightning storm here in Silicon Valley tonight. 9-9-99.

Jakob Nielsen: "A reputation manager is an independent service that keeps track of the rated quality, credibility, or some other desirable metric for each element in a set. The things being rated will typically be websites, companies, products, or people, but in theory anything can have a reputation that users may want to look up before taking action or doing business."

Radio Shack bit by Y2K? And they're in denial?

Red Herring: How Amazon Kept Alexa Founder. "Aside from satisfying investors and rewarding key employees, Mr. Kahle had another big idea: he saw ways in which Alexa's knowledge of the Internet and user behavior could significantly improve electronic commerce."

Yesterday's question seems even more timely now.

Detroit Free Press: "What can corporations such as Ford Motor Co. do to take control of rogue Internet sites that publish confidential information?"

You heard it here first! It's 9AM on 9-9-99 in New Zealand and all is well. Whew!

The Evangelist is In: "Let's move the heavy machinery, the stuff that's hard to set up and maintain, off the user's desktops and put it on the servers."

Wired: Sun Introduces Sun Ray. "It follows the vision of co-founder and visionary Bill Joy, who says 'complexity should be absorbed in the network, not thrust on the user.'"

Jeff Alami on Linux.Com: Why the Battle is so Important. "Linux is primarily fueled by the work of thousands of developers worldwide who are coding away with no interest in money or conflict. The goal is to create good-quality, useful software and to share it with other users. But without knowing (or caring), they are essentially becoming the arms providers for the the Linux and Open Source side of the operating system wars. For the people who fight these wars, the battle is oh so very important."

To Jeff and others, don't feed the war! It'll backfire. Linux itself is quite good at working on Windows and Macs networks. The community, however, has a long way to go. Let's wire Linux up to Windows and Mac over the Internet and erase the barriers to the adoption of Linux.

11/4/98: How a Windows Developer Thinks. "To the Unix folks, please stop focusing all your attention on Microsoft and look to possible friendships with people who work inside Windows, but who don't work for Microsoft. We can help each other because our interests are aligned."

Fredrik Lundh compares CORBA to XML-RPC. "From a scripting perspective, CORBA is stone-age technology."

Eric Kidd compares XML-RPC to CORBA. "XML-RPC shouldn't turn into CORBA. The best thing about XML-RPC is its simplicity. CORBA has some good attributes, but simplicity is not one of them."

Meanwhile Apple is making news in a struggle with some vocal users. Couldn't they find something more interesting to put on page one?