It's even worse than it appears.
Twitter's market cap is approx $26 billion, so one could buy a controlling interest for $13 billion.#
Prior art search: I'm writing a command line tool to talk with PagePark, a web server running on the same machine. The question is what should the URLs look like. #
I get this cryptic dialog when I try to update my iPhone XS/Max using iTunes. I've tried all the things the recommend, to no avail. Do you know what it means? I really don't want to reformat the phone. #
I picked a good time to leave the city for the country -- March 2019. Just enough time to get established. I don't think I would have done very well in a 1-bedroom apartment in the middle of Manhattan. #
I think it's going to turn out the virus isn't as infectious in the summer than in the cold months because it doesn't transmit well outdoors, and people spend more time outdoors in summer than winter.#
Old TV shows had a laugh track that simulated audience applause and laughter. This was before they started recorded sitcoms in front of a live audience. As a little kid, I thought they must have little microphones in the TVs, maybe only some of them (not mine of course) and they could pick up the sounds made by people at home. The laugh track and other audience sounds were real, little Dave imagined. So you gotta wonder why they don't do actually that for live sports events in the upcoming seasons for basketball, baseball, hockey, football, etc -- when there won't be any fans in the stadiums and arenas. You could even pipe the audience sounds into the venue so the players can experience them. The technology is totally up to it. Why not have some fun with it?#
BTW, what do you think the odds are that one of the sports players contracts Covid-19 during these new experimental seasons. I figure it's a near-certainty. And what happens then? Do they keep playing? #
  • On Twitter, Joe Pezillo says he's pretty sure Dave Winer (me) got the idea for RSS from Newton. He's also pretty sure I won't admit it. He's wrong on the first count, and right on the second. 😄 #
  • I wrote a tweet that was too long to fit in 280 chars that lists the steps that led to what we think of as RSS today. It wasn't an invention as most people think of invention, it was more of a synthesis, one idea leading to another and then another. #
    • It started with seeing Pointcast, being blown away by the idea. #
    • Then a guy from Microsoft wanted me to do something with XML, so I turned my blog into a feed.#
    • Then Netscape reinvented what I did.#
    • Then I said OK let's do it your way. #
    • Then someone leaked the XML feeds for the NYT to me.#
    • Then I repurposed them and published them so people could use them from Radio UserLand. #
    • Then they shut me down (they were nice about it). #
    • Then they let me have them for free.#
    • Then we turned them into RSS feeds. #
    • Then RSS took off like a bat out of hell! 💥#
  • And thus was born what we now think of as RSS. #
  • Main development platforms over time.#
    • 1974: Fortran#
    • 1976: BASIC#
    • 1977: Simula#
    • 1978: C/Unix#
    • 1979: UCSD Pascal#
    • 1981: Microsoft Pascal#
    • 1987: Lightspeed C#
    • 1989: UserTalk/Frontier#
    • 2013: JavaScript#
  • Anyone who lives in Manhattan and has made it through the last few months without going completely crazy deserves a prize.#
  • The Karen story with the off-leash dog in the Ramble, an area I am familiar with, imho deserves a second chance. Wouldn't that be great if out of the virus we learned to forgive. Give her the dog and the job back and accept her apology. #
  • As someone who used Central Park when I lived in the city, the rules are broken a lot, my peeves were no smoking and no bike riding on the walking paths. Two rules I felt strongly about, as the man did about off-leash dogs interfering with birding in the Brambles. #
  • A lot of NYers, even when they aren't stressed by isolation, act in a way that might look insane to someone not from NY, when you say they've violated the rules governing use of space. #
  • And NYers are sensitive to those rules being broken because there is so little space. It's kind of a powder keg that way, even in normal times. #
  • She did something awful, but it doesn't rise to the level that requires her life to be destroyed. I think it would be good for all of us if we perhaps just this once practiced forgiveness.#

© 1994-2020 Dave Winer.

Last update: Thursday May 28, 2020; 8:50 AM EDT.

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