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DaveNet: The Mind of Google. "I started to feel like I was interacting with something with a mind. Of course Google doesn't have one, but it does a fantastic job of tapping into our collective minds."  NY Times: "If Bertelsmann buys Napster, it will have two of its divisions on opposite sides of a serious legal divide, with billions of dollars in damages at stake." Ernie the Attorney: "If all I do is point someone to a location on the web, then what have I done that triggers the copyright laws? I haven't made a 'copy' of anything." ResearchBuzz found a semi-documented Google feature, searching by date. Sam Gentile ran a great rant about C programmers trying to understand programming with a runtime. "This is not Windows. This is not COM." True. Hey it would be interesting to see a feature-comparison of runtimes. Microsoft has some features we don't, and vice versa. Hal Plotkin: "Targeting a handful of specific lawmakers for defeat makes a lot more sense than putting a bunch of geeks on planes." Wired: "Joining Hollings as co-sponsors of the CBDTPA are one Republican and four Democrats: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisana) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California)." Paul Snively: "Rather than defending our future, they are selling it out from beneath us."  Adam Bosworth: "RPC suggests that it is okay to automatically map the parameters or return type into or from XML messages. It isn't. That is a private implementation detail. Everyone's implementations will vary and all implementations will vary over time. RPC also implies that the caller knows the signature and classes of the receiver. In fact, it is a miracle if the one application's classes and parameter order happen to match another's. In the real world, every implementation will have its own classes." Finally it's clear what we've been debating and why we disagree. In my model of loosely-coupled apps, there is no variability allowed in the places Bosworth says he must allow it. If you want to implement the Google API, you must implement the same method names, and they must take the same parameters and return equivalent results (the search databases are different in different search engines). We went through this with the Blogger API, and it worked fine. I don't see the value in allowing variability, because you trade that off against complexity, too high a cost, too little gain. I think the world of Adam, but I think he's advocating the wrong approach. And it's good to get the issues aired and clear. Steve Zellers: "I'm definitely in Dave's camp on this." Paul Snively: "Adam and Dave are talking about two different things that are often used to accomplish the same result." Last year on this day: "The subjects of the press are now doing their own press. Does this strike you, as it does me, as a loop? Why is it necessary? Haven't we been here before? Isn't this what happened with mainframes when personal computers came along? How secure were the mainframe people when faced with a horde of Apple developers with nothing to lose. They were dismissive, for sure, I was there (so was Bricklin) but it didn't matter. The users could do it for themselves. And then that's what happened." Scottish Lass: "With the dawning of the age of the Google Outline Browser all three predictions are now given earthly form and the wise shall heed the goodness unleashed on all mankind by the guardians of the 'G'. Those whose arms sit at right angles to a body that neither sleeps nor eats shall be the bringers of a new age of knowledge sharing and enlightenment." Hehe. 2/15/98: Meet an Outliner. "I had to experience the usefulness of an outliner before I could envision using one, to advantage, myself."  Edward Cone: "The Think! flag was created by the writer and software developer Dave Winer in the days after 9/11. 'It's the combination of love, strength and thought, which is the best of the USA,' Winer wrote at the time on his Internet journal, Scripting News. The image is unabashedly pro-American, and the challenge to exercise our brains and our freedom to use them is bracing. It ought to become the symbol of our national commitment to complexity."  Fortune's David Kirkpatrick interviews Microsoft's Jeff Raikes. "There's no single competitor that matches the breadth and depth of investment we're making in knowledge work," he replied. 'Sun Microsystems is trying to pick off pieces of what we've done in the authoring area with Star Office. I wouldn't think of Siebel as a competitor, but they might see us that way as we try to get the front end connected to the back end.'" It's the old sleight-of-hand thing again, but this time they're SOH'ing themselves. They like to look at Sun and Oracle, IBM, even Siebel, as if that's what they're competing against. Instead they should kick back and be a good husband to independent developers, and instead of loving closed boxes like Ray Ozzie's product, they should embrace the messy confusion and cacaphony of truly independent developers. There's another insurrection already in process. They're setting themselves up for a replay of history, and if it goes like it always seems to, they're going to be scrambling to be relevant once again; and again, with history as a guide, they won't make it the second time through that loop. Wired News revisits the issue of deep linking. Tony Bowden did a G.O.B. in Perl. |
 
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