Thursday, September 16, 1999

Dori Smith: "This is a common complaint of women geeks. They ask complex questions, but only get back 2+2=4 type answers."

Jesse Berst: "The Web demands a new approach. An approach based not on the mindset of engineers, but on simplicity. Perhaps the best model right now is the Palm OS, which does a few jobs but does them well. But I'm not convinced Microsoft will ever get simplicity."

5/24/99: "Writing for the web is too damned hard. It turns you into a bookkeeper. I've got files all over my hard disk and their counterparts on the server. I can't keep track of them! When I'm reading a web page that I wrote, if I spot a mistake, I have to execute 23 complicated error-prone steps to make the change."

Carl Malamud: The Importance of Being EDGAR. "We foresee an Internet that is much smarter about organizing itself. As powerful as the Internet is today, tomorrow it will be far more valuable as invisible worlds of information become visible."

ZDNet: "LinuxChix isn't gender biased, though. Men are welcome at meetings and, by Richardson's count, about 20 percent of the 200 members of the LinuxChix list are male." Excellent. Finally a women's group that Gets It.

I got a fair amount of (respectful) email from women who use Linux, in response to this quote: "I pitch the Linux community, my brothers, to work with us", from this DaveNet piece. There's nothing exclusive in that quote. We can work with women too, as LinuxChix accepts men. When we accept the power of men to work with other men, we take an important step forward.

BTW, I've raised this issue with two longtime friends who run women-in-technology groups, Sylvia Paull and Christine Comaford. They didn't change their policy, unlike LinuxChix, they still exclude men from their groups. Too bad!

News.Com: Motley Fool closes $26.5 million venture round. "'We are not a company that has 23 employees and was founded five months ago and plans on going public within a year, no matter what the business looks like,' he added in a less-than-flattering reference to the crop of Internet IPOs this year."

Macrobyte has openings for two full-time Frontier developers.

10 points to the first person who finds Red Herring's RSS file.