Tuesday, March 07, 2000

Salon: Who Owns Your DNA? "Genetic research that can save lives is often stymied by biotech companies' greedy patent claims."

Some people may consider this bug a feature. I have not been able to post to the XML-DEV list today, I've tried twice, but haven't gotten through. Here's what I wanted to say.

Nick Sweeney raised the issue of Amazon's patents with Amazon's president on CNBC today.

The UK now has a free Manila hosting service.

XML Magazine interviews Microsoft's John Montgomery on SOAP. "There's nothing hidden here; there are no tricks. But judging by that reaction, Sun was scared. They're realizing that once you have standard XML on the wire, their lock-in that they're trying to get with Java goes away."

I just realized something about Microsoft. To most people, including people at Microsoft, you're either anti-Microsoft or pro-Microsoft. Then thinking about it some more, this isn't just true of Microsoft. It's also true of Apple. And it's also true of Linux. And Open Source. And it's not just about computers either. It's pretty much everywhere. And it's total bullshit.

I re-ran the log analyzer on yesterday's traffic on Subhonker1. 95550 page reads, of which 74320 were non-members.

blackholebrain says about people watching this site, "We are all like greasy mechanics standing around a humming, hot-rodded v-8 engine: hood up and breathing in the fumes saying WOW! YEAH! COOL! And hey, that is cool! But to the non-mechanic we are engine geeks! Crazed and emphatic engine geeks."

This is so true. I've been trying to figure out what the Scripting News for Manila users will be. I'm not the author of that site. Already running at 80,000 miles per hour. If possible, I want to slow down. The real rumbling engine is over on EditThisPage.Com. I figure the next step is teamwork, mergers between logs, or new logs that are edited by groups of authors. We want to make the technology to support this activity, and that's what Scripting News must stay focused on, the technology.

There's now a Scripting News Drinking Game for people going to SXSW. I wonder if Dan Gillmor is going? Did you know that Dan has a Manila site? Hey check this out. Yesterday I heard that Mitch Kapor is on the board of Eazel, the company started by Mike Boich and Andy Hertzfeld. They're doing Open Source software. Excellent!

Evan Williams: "If you or anyone you know has office space in SF you'd like to rent/share with a few Pyradicals, even short term, please let me know. Thanks"

News.Com: Researchers work to eradicate broken hyperlinks. "If a document's URL changes, a search engine could be employed to automatically locate the missing page."

MSNBC: Bradley, McCain hope for upsets. "Voters from Maine to California are casting their ballots in a decisive day for presidential campaigns. More than half the delegates needed to win the Republican and Democratic nominations will be decided, and polls show Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush far ahead in nearly every race."

My.UserLand.Com: The FreeBSD Diary.

Beef, pork, seafood, poultry, rice or spicy noodles?

There are now four sites in the Dogma 2000 category on Weblogs.Com. Even so, there are ten sites in the General category.

Reuters: VeriSign to Buy Network Solutions for $21 Billion.

Network Solutions, or NSI, is the company that operates the master directory for the Internet. When a piece of software, like your web browser, wants to find out where given machine is, it sends over a string like "www.news.com" and it returns back an address, like "204.162.80.142". VeriSign makes software that authenticates documents, making sure you know who created it and when it was last modified. This is an important bit of technology if you want to do legal transactions using the Internet. I want to be able to prove that you signed a contract, and exactly what the contract said when you signed it, without having to print it on paper.

Jacob Levy is having a problem with NSI.

PC Week: AMD first to ship 1GHz processor.

Circle of Learning is a "free, online, open-source university, a center of story-telling, a community of people over the age of 50 learning, communicating, writing about their passions and sharing their opinions with an equal passion."

Montana News Daily reports on a cat wreaking havoc with dogs and birds in downtown Bozeman, including a picture of the cat.

Jon Udell: The Future Of The Programmable Browser. "In principle, XUL looks like a good approach to enabling regular HTML-literate folks (rather than GUI programmers) to create more powerful Web-top interfaces."