Saturday, October 16, 1999

SlashDot discovers SOAP. "Is MS actually doing the market a favour by removing vendors' lock-in strategies to properietary solutions?" Yes, in a sense they are, although from the MS viewpoint they are probably undermining the Java-everywhere wire protocol, RMI. Sun got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Ooops! Why is RMI Java-only? Who does *that* serve?

9/12/99: An End to the Uber-Operating System. "While Sun, IBM and others wanted to turn Java into the über-operating system, UserLand and Microsoft worked to flatten the differences between operating systems. The latter approach is based on an appreciation for diversity, the former, was an attempt to suck the whole world into Java."

Smart Reseller: The world isn't revolving around Redmond anymore. "'They're not going to be the force in the next 10 years that they were in the past 10 years,' an official with a major Windows OEM told me this week."

Web Hosting XML-RPC Spec. "This spec describes the server side of a web hosting service, like GeoCities or Tripod, but open to content managed in environments that support XML-RPC."

We updated the XML-RPC spec to include a new copyright and disclaimer, derived from the standard IETF statement. It allows complete freedom to build on XML-RPC while maintaining the integrity of the spec.

Michael Swaine: "Third Voice goes to a lot of trouble to make the annotations look like a hack on the target machine."

Silly little sample: agents.y2k.

Red Herring: Softnet joins Pacific Century in Asia broadband. "Mr. Li wanted Softnet's experience in delivering broadband service to cable operators to help build the largest Internet-link distribution system in Asia."

MSNBC: Living with ADSL, Revisited. "I received three distinct categories of e-mail. The 'You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About!' mail; the 'It’s A Lot Cheaper Here!' messages and the 'You Think You Had Problems!' stories."

Reuters: 7.0 Earthquake Rocks Southern California. "No serious injuries were immediately reported and damage appeared to be limited by the fact that the epicenter of the earthquake was located just north of the California desert community of Joshua Tree, a sparsely populated region in the Mojave Desert."