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AP: "Opinion polls predicted his party could win sufficient votes in the May 15 parliamentary election to have a deciding voice in building the next coalition government. He was seen as an outside contender for prime minister."   John and I talked earlier today, about a bunch of things, including the Pim Fortuyn assassination, and Adam Curry's role in the reporting. John said that Adam had nailed it. Fortuyn was not a clone of France's Le Pen, although that's how it's being reported in the US. He was against immigration, but had a solid reason for being against it. The Netherlands is the most densely populated country in Europe and is singular in its liberal philosophy. Fortuyn was openly gay. Many of the immigrants are Moslem. Holland is a democracy. If the electorate gets more conservative due to immigration, there goes what makes it so special. John points out that in some Moslem cultures they kill homosexuals. Other things to consider. Adam was a supporter of Fortuyn, and in the Netherlands, I understand that Adam's support means something. I think of him as a friend, not so much a celebrity. I can't say what it means to the Netherlands, it sure sounds scary, and I bet it's got Adam pretty freaked, is he next, and that gets me freaked, as his friend. Anyway, I'm trying to figure out how to approach this. I sent Adam an email earlier (it's 3AM in Europe as I write this), offering to run his essay through DaveNet. We'll see where this goes. Edd Dumbill reports on Tim Berners-Lee's keynote at the WWW conf in Hawaii. Scoble: "Berners-Lee is hard to quote. He starts a thought, then goes off into another thought, and melds that into another thought." Jon Udell: "In the long run, the problem is not with Google, but with a world that hasn't yet caught up with the web. I'm certain that in 10 years, US Senators and Inspectors General will leave web footprints commensurate with their power and influence. I hope that future web will, however, continue to even the odds and level the playing field." It's a two-Udell-quote day. "If the REST folks want to call the SOAP people architecture astronauts who don't appreciate the simple things that made the Web great, then they probably ought to play that RDF pedal a little more softly." Joe Jenett has a new Radio 8 theme. Brent Simmons: "I propose, to all the icon makers out there, a website for open source icons."  Jonathon Delacour: "What makes the photo booth pictures (formally) interesting is that they are framed as mirror images, except that the women have changed places so that each appears in the foreground of one photo and the background of another. The real interest is, however, in the pair rather than the single images; in the juxtaposition of two portraits of two women, happily mugging for a camera without an operator, as it records a tiny sliver of 'the endless variety of the objective female world.'" Adam Curry shares what he learned in the Netherlands in the aftermath of the Pim Fortuyn assassination. AP: FAA OKs Boeing Internet System. Sean Gallagher: "Lowering the average quality of Web content daily." A lightning bolt  Is business the purpose of our civilization, or does civilization have some other purpose that business supports? Do our lives have any meaning beyond that which we produce for sale, and that which we purchase for consumption? It's not a visionary question, I'm asking about the world we live in right now. In one model, developers create products and convince us to want them. In the other model, they figure out what people want and compete to sell it to them.  The entertainment industry wants the first model. In fact, for much of my life, they've had their way. With other industries it's not so clear. Software went through this, and came out devastated. Perhaps the only way to rebuild is to adopt the other model. Learn what people want to do, and create products that satisfy the wants.If the entertainment industry followed that model (these need names), they wouldn't have hesitated over Napster. It was clear the people wanted it. Now figure out how to give it to them. Two fundamentally different approaches. Long-term only one works, imho. SOAP interop notes On this day in Y2K we handed SOAP off to the W3C. John Burkhardt: "Is it just me or does the dream of interop seem very tenuous?" In March 2000 there was a BOF meeting at the XTech conference in San Jose. I gave a keynote at the conference, where I urged the W3C to adopt XML-RPC whole hog, just endorse it and support it. During the day people from Microsoft told me they wanted to move SOAP into the W3C. I thought that was a bad idea, because SOAP wasn't fully baked and I had no faith that the W3C process would be able to do the baking. Today, SOAP and the W3C are uncomfortable with each other. The baking process was a total failure. Adopting XML-RPC as-is is still the best idea, imho. Interop debates over how to do attachments are raging. Geez, what's so complicated. Use MIME, and don't bother with attachments, send them as parameters, or send a URL to the attachment and read it, and decode it, and please just use MIME because it works and it interops and that's why we do this stuff. Of course Microsoft is pushing the theory that interop means Works With Microsoft. The rest of us should just reject that without discussion. I'm perfectly happy to get interop with Everyone But Microsoft. They have an uphill battle to get developers to adopt their tools. Sure some developers will go anywhere Microsoft wants them to go today. More power to them. But for the rest of us, the more Microsoft isolates itself, the more appeal our technologies have to developers who value independence. Tuesday night TV  On Tuesday nights I watch Fox's 24 starring Kiefer Sutherland. It's an episodic show, each Tuesday another hour in a very long day for a group of people trying to save the lives of Mr Sutherland and his TV family. It's getting really stale. Only two more episodes, and Fox is promising that we'll really be surprised by the ending. Heh. I doubt it. Anyway, the show starts at 9PM, but I don't start watching until 9:30, because I want to be sure I don't have to watch a single commercial. No bathroom breaks for Dave. Anyway, while doing this, I thought of the Turner CEO who did that fantastic interview and thought of a solution to his problem. Run commercials that aren't even increments of 30 seconds long. Or run commercials that fit in the bottom third of the screen while the program drones on above in the upper 2/3. Just some friendly ideas, not that I care, because almost everything on TV is dumbed down to such a low level as to be completely useless to a person who has a mind. |
 
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