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News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community
 
Welcome to Scripting News!
 

Tuesday, September 30, 1997

DaveNet: Ideas for Privacy.

Chuck Shotton Summarizes tonight's DaveNet Live at Moscone.

Simson Garfinkel's Pretty Good Privacy, published by O'Reilly Associates.

New ad photography from Apple.

Notes from a beer-and-food event with Steve Jobs.

Wired News: Could Bill Gates Really Be a Hero?

A request to stop the responses to the PS to today's DaveNet. We got to the bottom of it. You can cache passphrases, there's a timeout (clever!), and using Eudora stationery I can sign each piece. So with any luck, every emailed DaveNet will be signed from now on. Thanks!

Mail Starting 9/30/97.

Bernie DeKoven: New Year Offerings.

Todd Lappin: Big Brother Goes Digital.

Preston Holmes: Comparing AppleScript to UserTalk.

DaveNet Live: 7:30PM tonight in San Francisco.

News.com: MSIE 4.0/Win ships today.

InfoWorld: Netscape's Aurora challenges Microsoft's Active Desktop.

Garrison Boyd urges you to avoid Amstel beer. Correct and acceptable sensory sounds and images!

Microsoft FAQ on scriptlets.

Monday, September 29, 1997

DaveNet: Bill Gates on Privacy.

MacWEEK: Monday Seybold Keynotes. Check out John Gage's comments about scripting and its role re Java.

MacWEEK: Freehand users can produce Flash content. No big surprise here, MacroMedia owns Freehand. I wish they would open the file format for Flash.

Susan A. Kitchens On Clinton and Privacy.

Denise Caruso on Bill Gates (on Privacy).

Mail Starting 9/29/97.

Reuters: Marimba raises $14.5 million.

Cameron Barrett's math puzzle.

NetObjects Team Fusion claims to be "the first Web site building solution to recognize -- and capitalize on -- the roles different people play in developing large and complex business Web sites." Hmmm. The NetObjects people have gotten demos of Frontier, from me personally. Their claim is BS.

5/15/96: Watch This! explains the website framework we had built in Frontier 4. Even though Clay Basket had many of these features, and was available well before Frontier 4, it seems conservative to claim that we had the features NetObjects is boasting about well over a year ago. We didn't stop there, of course. That's what "still diggin!" means.

Cooool! According to ZDNet, Gateway is going to make Amiga machines.

How do I remove a key from the keyserver? Help! I didn't know what I was doing and I created two IDs, one for each of two email addresses. I did this before I knew that I could associate two mail addresses with one key. I don't understand this FAQ. Is there a simple way to get rid of the extra key?

Chuck Shotton wrote a utility app that converts a Eudora mailbox into a format that can be imported by FileMaker.

Former Apple ad exec Michael Markman comments on the ad.

Got Quicktime? Apple posted their TV ad to their website. "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things, they push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

A higher quality and smaller version of the ad, thanks to a Scripting News reader.

ABC News: Java's Real Agenda.

6/30/95: Java is a Brand.

Sunday, September 28, 1997

Steve Jobs on Brands.

I wish I had thought of this sooner... It would be great if someone recorded the Apple commercial and produced a QuickTime movie of it. The commercial is on Toy Story, in the first 20 minutes, tonight at 7PM on ABC. It's 7PM Eastern right now.

Geeks Rule the World narrates a great Apple TV ad from 1995. "A man giving a presentation to 300 people. Sorry. I just installed a new OS. It isn't working. Someone shouts try config.sys! Someone else says autoexec.bat! A few more taunts. A tired voice, clearly disgusted says Get a Mac."

October 7 is the three-year anniversary of DaveNet. I'm going to do a special piece for that day. Suggestions? Ducking!

CyberTimes discussion on encryption.

TeamWave Workplace combines real-time groupware technologies such as shared whiteboards, chat rooms, and customizable groupware applets with a persistent work environment.

Trouble downloading the 5.0a1 upgrader?

Frontier 5: The storyList macro generates an HTML table listing all the stories in a given table.

Frontier 5: A new version of the standard pageHeader macro that's smarter about the "generator" meta tag.

Frontier 5: Lists, regex, wptext, Clay, pictures.

Saturday, September 27, 1997

Milestone. Frontier 5.0a1 upgrader is released. Mac only.

New service: The Frontier-Work list.

New service: Bug reporting database. Nice!

Here's a random bugbase query.

Mail Starting 9/27/97.

Thanks for your interest in Frontier 5!

From the Digital Storytelling Festival: Jim Leeke built a great website of lost family pictures and stories from ancient America.

SF Chronicle: Giants clinch the NL West.

A Scripting News graphic from Cameron Barrett.

Friday, September 26, 1997

I got an email from Bill Gates yesterday.

If you're outside the US you can download the source code for PGP from a site in Norway.

Somehow PGP leaked outside the US via the Internet.

Wired News: Are You Sure 40-Bit Encryption Is Enough for You?.

Mail Starting 9/26/97.

Yes, it's true, there are still people who use System 6.

InfoWorld: Scan down to the middle of this piece for some interesting quotes from Woz.

PC WEEK: Sun's NC running Java OS is under pressure from Microsoft's Hydra.

A three-line script that Brent will run later today or tomorrow.

StarNine: ListStar 1.2.

TechWeb: Canadian Supreme Court Justice speaks on privacy.

I got the PGP package for Eudora from MIT.

Here's the public key for dwiner@well.com.

News.com: Apple narrows CEO search, finalizes NC product plan.

Of the four people mentioned, two of them have a personal page. If you can find others, please send me a pointer.

Let's come up with a standard format for an executive web resume? This should be easy by now. It's late 1997!

Email programs that support encryption: Outlook Express in Win98, Outlook 97 for Windows 95. The standard email program supplied with Win95 (Windows Messaging) does not have encryption.

AppleTalk tunneling from Digital Forest. It's one-point-oh!

Another puzzle that's not so difficult: During the Cold War, a Russian plane crashes at the border of Poland and Germany. Where will the survivors be buried?

Salon: An ex-Microsoft contractor moves to Iowa.

Thursday, September 25, 1997

I'm psyched! Using 5.0 to manage Scripting News. We're going to look at privacy more closely. Seybold is next week. Expect the first public release of 5.0a1/Mac in the next couple of days. The odb outliner is totally one-point-oh!

Salon: Veteran Mac software developers are working for Microsoft .

Pretty Good Privacy: Encryption Primer. It's pretty good!

MSNBC: House panel rejects encryption bill.

News.com and MacInTouch have reports on yesterday's Rhapsody demo at Apple.

From a German Scripting News reader: Anybody ever mentioned to you that Don's Amazing Puzzle is NOT working for non or bad English speakers? You have to be very fluent in English to fall for it!

James Jewell remembers the last dramatic Seybold keynote in 1989.

Cary Lu is remembered on tidbits.com.

PowerAgent, founded by my friend Dave Carlick, was unable to obtain financing and is shutting down. www.poweragent.com appears to be off the air.

Advertising Age: Women want relationships from websites. Hmmm. This is the same things men want, IMHO.

Chris Nolan is building relationships with Silicon Valley readers, but writes about men, in today's SJ Merc. Is she writing for men or women? I wonder.

The relationship with the millenniumCounter script continues. 2000 is a leap year. At least I'm learning how to spell millennium!

Surf the web, on a floppy, with QNX.

What animal would you be if you could be an animal?

One more time: Things we can learn from dogs.

Wednesday, September 24, 1997

DaveNet: Winning At Seybold.

Mail Starting 9/24/97.

Got Acrobat? The OMG is looking for a proposal for CORBA Scripting.

Mars Global Navigator update. All is well, orbiting and braking.

Developer.com: Microsoft pulls plug on ActiveX.

From MacInTouch comes news that Cary Lu has died. He was a widely respected member of the Macintosh community, having written one of the earliest books about the Mac. He was thorough and passionate and was a clear thinker. What a sad event!

Get a demo of Rhapsody at tonight's BANG meeting in Cupertino.

ObjectSpace Voyager -- a ORB database written in Java.

Carl Steadman wrote a suicide note, but his agent couldn't sell it, and then he couldn't write it.

Jakob Nielsen's AlertBox column continues in excellence.

Tuesday, September 23, 1997

Welcome to WebSTAR Day on Scripting News!

If Apple hadn't killed the clones, we'd be singing a different tune right now...

Apple-sponsored study shows Mac OS web servers:

They compared Macs to servers running on Unix, NT, Windows 95. BTW, Apple used WebSTAR in this comparison, not Apache.

Check out this SF Chronicle news story. The Apple/Oracle net computer strategy starts to roll out. Rhapsody is the server OS, Mac OS for the clients.

Trevor Bauknight perfectly presents the Unix view of the Mac web server market.

This page should give you a feel for the depth, diversity and standardization in the Mac Internet software market.

As a Mac OS server manager, to use the new stuff that Apple is starting to hype, you're going to have to walk away from your infrastructure. See Don's Amazing Puzzle, once again, for a clue on how to parse this situation. How many F's do you see?

Plug-ins, add-ons, databases, native PowerPC scripting, lots of users and deployed apps. Every day, lots of new Mac sites. None of these systems run Rhapsody. Oooops.

New fat page: Flushing WebSTAR's Cache.

News.com: Dataquest report says "We do not believe Apple will survive its next downturn, which will presage the company spiraling into insignificance as it loses any advantage of scale."

Other Stufffff

Responses to I Do on Mail Starting 9/23/97.

In Crested Butte I met Derek Powazek, who does Fray. It's a literary site. Here's a recent Fray piece about alchoholism. Beautiful story!


To Be

Robert Woodhead wrote an HTML pretty-printer using WebSiphon.

News.com: Study finds that demand for NetPC's is underwhelming.

Fix for the millenniumCounter script. 2000 is not a leap year.

Oooops! 2000 *is* a leap year. I'll re-fix the milleniumCounter script tomorrow.

Things we can learn from dogs.

WML is a Unix scripted-website framework.

Wired News: Barksdale envisions free hardware.

Salamander Paddle Gear is a Frontier website.

Newlyweds Sheila and Brent Simmons share their favorite books.

Unitarian Universalist Church child dedication service.

Two new Australian Frontier sites: #1 and #2.

Monday, September 22, 1997

DaveNet: A Gorgeous Butte!

Mail Starting 9/22/97.

Tim Rueger has a LEGO site and (get this!) it's a Frontier site too! Totally one-point-oh!

CM Central is a Frontier site.

Test your browser with the LLNL viewer test page.

News.com: Rockwell announces a Java chip for embedded systems.

People using Frontier on a new "fast" Mac, need the 9600 fix.

LEGO tools for Unix.

Dave Polaschek's Frontier-based website.

CNN: IBM revolutionizes chip design.

An open letter from Rick Ross of the Java Lobby to Microsoft's Bill Gates.

Great site! Moab Police Blotter.

PC WEEK: Sun exec calls Microsoft's Java letter a 'publicity stunt'.

Are you one of the millions of children who love LEGO products?

An app modeled after virtual Lego in Microserfs: Gryphon Bricks.

MSNBC: Women will change Internet culture.

This was the hot product in Crested Butte this year.

Reuters: Embalmers To Preserve Kim For Posterity.

Biography.com: Vladimir Ilich Lenin.

Crested Butte's community website.

A Microserfs-like DaveNet piece from 1996.

Niehaus-Ryan is Apple's new PR firm.

A new fat page... workspace.millenniumCounter.

I guess this is the next book I'll read.

Sunday, September 21, 1997

Have you read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland? Best part -- a new application for Lenin. It's totally one-point-oh. Lots of new ideas. Ye-hi! It's not just about Microsoft.

Wednesday, September 17, 1997

DaveNet: I Do.

Mail Starting 9/17/97.

Microsoft FAQ on Java.

Jesse Berst blames Apple and IBM for the delay in Windows 98.

Apple VP-Marketing, Guerrino De Luca, resigns.

Scripting News will resume publication on 9/22/97.

Tuesday, September 16, 1997

Special Evening Edition

Microsoft's Cornelius Willis has confirmed for DaveNet Live at Seybold, Sept 30 in SF. Mark your calendars!

From Tom Campbell at Microsoft: The bottom of your 9/15/97 posting said 'Now, more than ever, I want vector graphics in the web browser.' IE4 now has a sensational component called the Structured Graphics control with an extremely rich set of graphics primitives, allowing you to create way dynamic graphics with rotating text, filters, transitions, dissolves, etc., at a very low cost in download time. The most complex pages I've seen were only 2 or 4K.

Jean-Louis Gassée wants to build a dedicated PhotoShop system running on CHRP hardware and the BeOS. I bet PhotoShop users would dig this!

SJ Merc on WebTV Plus. Three gigabytes of content delivered overnight via television broadcast signals. Stunning!

Check it out -- Marc Canter likes WebTV Plus.

Got Shockwave?

The RIPView Plug-In does vector graphics like LineTo MoveTo.

Earlier News

DaveNet: Judgment.

Mail Starting 9/16/97.

Apologies to subscribers to the davenetworld mailing list. Our list server is having problems. You're not the only one. Some software went crazy. We're working on it.

MicroCenter is selling a PC w/o monitor for $499.

News.com: Vignette StoryServer 3.

I'm glad Ric Ford watches Yahoo.

WebMonkey interviews Mark Hurst, who runs the Creative Good site, managed with Frontier.

MacWorld: Web publishing made easy.

Adam Engst in today's TidBITS: "The only public information from Apple has been a telephone conversation Jobs had with Ric Ford of MacInTouch."

Hey Adam -- use the web! I interviewed Jobs on Sept 3. Want more clues? See Doc Searls's analysis. And then read what Steve Wozniak said about Steve Jobs's vision (it wasn't negative).

Another clue, from the archives of DaveNet. In April, I wrote:

It's interesting to note that Larry Ellison has a different idea for Apple than Steve Jobs. A new set of public quotes from Ellison say that Rhapsody is a loser, that Apple's only valuable asset is the current Macintosh OS, and that all of Apple's remaining energy should be focused on that. The quotes have appeared in print, and are being confirmed by reporters who have interviewed him.

If this is his true intention, I support it. Rhapsody is a total Hail Mary play. Apple has never supported System 7. It's their only product. Focusing on that is the only way for Apple to remain a viable platform vendor.

Another clue, thanks to Scott McKenzie, comes from the boilerplate at the bottom of Apple's recent press releases. The old story:

Apple Computer, Inc., a recognized innovator in the information industry and leader in multimedia technologies, creates powerful solutions based on easy-to-use personal computers, servers, peripherals, software, handheld computers and Internet content. Headquartered in Cupertino, California, Apple develops, manufactures, licenses and markets solutions, products technologies and services for business, education, consumer, entertainment, scientific and engineering and government customers in more than 140 countries.
The new story:

Apple Computer, Inc. ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II, and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Apple is now recommitted to its original mission -- to bring the best personal computing products and support to students, educators, designers, scientists, engineers, businesspersons and consumers in over 140 countries around the world.

Even if Apple hasn't directly said what its strategy is, the tea leaves are lining up. And Scripting News gets the story.

And no flames... Whew!

Monday, September 15, 1997

Welcome to Microsoft Day on Scripting News!

DaveNet: Scriptlets.

Mail Starting 9/15/97.

NewsTracker query for scriptlet.

Microsoft press release.

Wired News: Like Java? Try Scriptlets.

News.com: Microsoft.com just said no to Java.

Does anyone know how to get around microsoft.com? I've been looking for a press release announcing their withdrawal from using Java on their website, but I can't find it. Is there anything like the Scripting News page on their website? Would someone like to start one? microsoftwatcher.com? If something like this already exists, please send me a pointer. dave@scripting.com.

From Microsoft's PR firm, a pointer to the Press Pass site. But I want bad news too!

SJ Merc: The future of MSN is in question. "They have this heads-down, grind-it-out, make-a-profit mentality. That doesn't lend itself to entertainment or creating fun stuff to read. As a result, they've had some fairly big disasters -- like the shows on MSN."

Non-Microsoft Stufff

Webintosh: Is the sky falling yet?

Question: Did Apple shut down the semper.fi list, and if so, why?
Answer: Yes. Here's why.

Prefab Software: TextMachine is a scriptable pattern matcher for people who aren't into wierd programmerish syntax.

WebMonkey: Bookmark this table of ISO-8859 Entities.

Got Flash?

InfoWorld: MacroMedia DreamWeaver.

Sunday, September 14, 1997

DaveNet: Fractional Horsepower HTTP Servers.

Steve Wozniak on Mail Starting 9/14/97.

Why Scott McNealy frosts Jesse Berst's shorts.

Cisco's Micro Webserver. It's not a scanner, but it is a FHPHTTPS.

Trouble at mail.well.com. Send mail to dave@scripting.com.

NASA: Mars Global Surveyor is orbiting.

A little bird whispered in my ear: In addition to John Warnock and Bill Gates, Steve Jobs will also keynote the Seybold conference in SF later this month. Boy kills boy? Sparks should fly! I'll be there for sure.

We switch directions; backing off special processing for Windows file path strings and focus on URL strings as the cross-platform way of pointing to files. More info on the Gimme5 site.

A new utility script does a file system search/replace. Great for global tweaks to website folders. Plugs in nicely with the scriptable Finder from Apple.

Here's the Frontier source code for the file search replace script.

New search engine: Northern Light.

Saturday, September 13, 1997

Marc Canter on DSS.

New Media's Tony Bove on location-based entertainment.

CNN: Web publisher sentenced for stock price manipulation. He praised a company in an online newsletter in exchange for 250,000 shares of stock.

Friday, September 12, 1997

DaveNet: Commercialize System 7.

Frontier 5 has a new top-level user interface.

A teaser! The new About window in Frontier 5.

Frontier 5's about window has a neat feature that I didn't mention in today's narrative. If you click on the Zoom box it gets small, like the main window in Frontier 4.

Jai Singh on News.com wants to dump Steve Jobs

Washington Post: Mac users are losing.

Intel, Microsoft, Compaq and DEC ask Sun to free Java.

I explained why Java wants to be free in Hail Mary!, 4/4/97.

New Austrian Frontier site.

Mail Starting 9/12/97.

Mark Murphy asks "Where's the voice of the developer who's not leaving the platform?" Get a clue, Mark.

New smarts needed: File paths in Frontier 5.

Dori Smith reported a deal-stopper with a new Apple CPU, the 9600/350. We think we have the fix.

Thursday, September 11, 1997

Press release: Motorola to Phase Out its Mac-Compatible Business.

Mail Starting 9/11/97.

Jorg Brown on Platforms.

As if in response to Jorg, Jean-Louis Gassée asks if there's an opportunity for Be in the chaos. His answer: "For [Be], the situation is simple. If Motorola or IBM -- preferably both -- build and market a CHRP platform, with or without a Mac OS license to boot, we'll be happy to make sure the BeOS shines their hardware."

QuickestMirror.

SJ Merc: Apple relationship with IBM and Motorola is in disarray.

News.com: Motorola to scale back on Macs.

SF Chron: Apple narrows CEO search. "The only person who's qualified to run this company was crucified 2,000 years ago."

PC Mag: Pushing the Envelope with Push Technology.

Phil Suh is coming from Japan on Sept 30 in SF!

Reuters: Mars Global Surveyor is doing grrrreat! "We're ready to say 'Hello, Mars, we're here for a very long visit, we're here to stay.'" Right on!

From Cameron Barrett, a picture of his sexy grandpa.

Chuck's wife Linda, son Chase and dog Kerby in Houston.

Wednesday, September 10, 1997

A neat perception puzzle... What's the trick?

DaveNet: A Request for Respect.

4/9/96: The Perfect Parent.

Mail Starting 9/10/97. To those who say they can tell the difference between good and evil, try Don's Amazing Puzzle one more time.

SJ Merc: Push features in MSIE 4.0 freak out users. Webmasters too!

Inline Skaters flame each other too.

If you can find a copy, check out Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing by Randall Stross. It sheds light on NeXT, Jobs, and what Silicon Valley startups are like. I read this book in early 1994 when I was trying to understand General Magic, and it really helped.

We had a net outage here between 3:44AM and 6:30AM Pacific.

Tuesday, September 9, 1997

DaveNet: Competing with Bill.

Reuters: Private Firm to Send Spacecraft to Asteroid.

NASA: Global Surveyor, a satellite that will orbit Mars, will arrive there on Thursday and start mapping the planet.

US vice-president Al Gore says "We are changing from an analog to a digital world, but the basic rights of the American people have not changed. Many of the basic protections of people are missing in cyberspace."

Actually many of the basic forms of censorship are missing in cyberspace. It wouldn't surprise me if Al Gore wanted to try again with the Communication Decency Act, or something like it.

Another vice-president, Apple VP of Developer Relations, David Krathwohl, wrote a letter to developers about the cancellation of cloning. "We know that expanding the platform is essential to ensure the success of Apple and our developers; however, in order for everyone -- Apple, developers, licensees, and Mac customers -- to attain their long-term goals, Apple must return to profitibility as soon as possible."

He speaks for developers, but he doesn't speak for me. My long-term goal is to build a base of users and then build a profitable business. All my users are Mac people now. So I have an interest in the viability of the Mac platform. I think competition in hardware would make the Mac viable. Better products at lower prices. More advancements, more diversity. That's what would have kept customers interested in the Mac platform.

This new Mac platform, with Apple as the sole arbiter of hardware innovation, is much less interesting.

Dori Smith put up a web page explaining the problem with Frontier on the new 9600 machines. Basically it doesn't boot. Oooops. Well, we got a crash log and the problem is obvious. A fix is coming soooon. It has nothing to do with the motherboard. It *is* a timing issue.

NY Times: Motorola, IBM to expand market for PowerPC chip.

Wired News: Buckminster Fuller gets his corner of the web.

Reuters: More flowers for Diana's beautiful gravesite.

SJ Merc: More Apple tea leaf reading.

Steve Bogart says it's a market not an ecosystem.

October 13-15 in New Orleans: I'm leading the Town Hall sessions at c|net's Web Builder Conference in New Orleans. We'll have fun! Especially if lots of Scripting News web geeks are there. Frontier 5 should be in public testing by then. Fingers crossed.

Next week in Crested Butte Colorado, I'm leading the opening "Who are we?" session at the Digital Storytelling Festival. I love Colorado in the fall!

On September 30 in San Francisco, I'll go opposite Bill Gates! Microsoft is having a party to celebrate the shipment of MSIE 4.0/Win at the same time as the DaveNet Live session at Moscone. Seybold will be an industry venue this year. You know where the cooool people will be!

Matt Deatherage in TidBITS: Apple doesn't want to compete.

8/23/97: Apple Avoids Competition.

Monday, September 8, 1997

What do you think of bylines?

Got ASCII?

Apple Labs: SharedInfoServer provides a simple object database model designed to contain dynamic, emphemeral information.

PC WEEK's Spencer F. Katt has a 10-step recovery plan for Apple.

NY Times: Infoseek gets a patent on searching technology.

BusinessWeek's Steve Wildstrom responds to Mac zealots.

ZDNet: Is Be on the PowerPC another casualty?

InteleNet is a Frontier site.

From today's MacInTouch. Dori Smith notes a compatibility issue with Apple's latest Power Macs: "I recently bought two 9600/350's to upgrade my web servers. Unfortunately, Userland's Frontier hangs every time it is launched. According to the Frontier support list, I'm the first person to try it on a Mach 5 machine. According to Apple, the hang is due an incompatibility between Frontier and Mach 5 Macs."

If anyone from Apple is tuned in, can you help us get to the bottom of this? We don't have a 9600/350 here to test with. Can you reproduce the problem? What is Frontier doing when it hangs? Help would be much appreciated.

More on Mach 5, from Steve Riggins, geek@geeksrus.com: "There may be a bug but I can run Frontier 4.1 on my 8600/300 (A Mach 5 machine) with no visible problems so far. I am running 8.0, not many extensions. I am not using the OSA Menu extension."

A stirring open letter from Robert J Moriarty of MacCPU to Apple's board of directors.

Sunday, September 7, 1997

DaveNet: What's Up Doc?

Mail Starting 9/7/97.

Ric Ford wrote an open letter to Steve Jobs and Jobs replied (but didn't respond). I think Ric's been doing a great job.

We had a 15-minute power outage this morning.

Saturday, September 6, 1997

Doc Searls on Scripting News: I think he really nailed it. He explained Steve Jobs and Apple, put it totally in perspective, said it better than I ever have. Some thoughts in response to Searls' piece...

I was charmed by the Mac in 1983. If Steve still has the same charm, the same power to draw that kind of creation out of talented engineers, then his next creation will be wonderful.

But, it's not a good force field to be too close to right now. There will be more rips and tears thru the user community before the next big thing ships. It's best to sit on the sidelines for now, both as users and developers. Every investment is likely to be blown up in the massive changes Jobs is implementing at Apple.

It'll be a great show for sure. An ad to rival 1984. A box with the charm of the first Mac. If Jobs still has what it takes.

George F. Will in the Washington Post: A Precarious Princess. "However, she also wanted the sort of privacy often claimed by the privileged, meaning publicity on her terms. She wanted to be listened to concerning various social causes (the latest being a ban on antipersonnel land mines). But she had a claim -- make that a hold -- on public attention only because she was a celebrity, as Daniel Boorstin has defined that term. That is, she was known for her well-knownness."

This happens in the software business too. See White Boy Welfare, 12/24/95, a piece that rambles thru Java, OpenDoc, the heroes of the Internet revolution, and closes with a remembrance of John Lennon, a well-known man who, like Diana, died too young.

Joey Anuff on Wired News: Problems with Push. "Subscribe once, and the software downloads everything, every day, while you're idling - ready to be accessed rapidly off your hard drive instead of sluggishly from halfway across the world. Ingeniously simple? Sure, if accurate stats on who's reading what and how much no longer matter."

Anuff asks the right question. In the old pre-push model I could monitor usage of the content on my server. If this mindless approach to surfing catches on, what then?

Friday, September 5, 1997

CNN: The Queen of England on Princess Diana. A beautiful message.

DaveNet: The Nine Lives of Jean-Louis.

From Steve Wozniak, steve@woz.org:

Dave, I feel the same way. We should think for ourselves and decide what's right and wrong for ourselves and not follow leaders with blind faith.

We associate the Mac with freedoms suggested by the "1984" ad. CHRP machines are representative of this freedom. A tightly controlled monopoly, not in tune with its customer's desires, is not free.

PC WEEK: Power Computing's first PC.

News.com: Apple and UMAX reach agreement on Mac OS 8.

Kevin Kelly on WebMonkey: MSIE 4.0/Win requires some courage.

A great new Frontier site at the University of Wisconsin.

Mail Starting 9/5/97.

Keith Calder, a student at Carnegie-Mellon, wants to Be.

Thursday, September 4, 1997

Doc Searls on Steve Jobs.

1/26/97: Quorum and Altura.

10/7/95: Welcome Back Jean-Louis.

According to sources close to Motorola, they had agreed, in June, to license fees with Apple between 3 and 8 times what they were paying previously; and in portables, 12 times higher. They're still willing to work with Apple.

According to Jake Hamby, jehamby@be.com, at Be, Metrowerks is moving Latitude to BeOS. This means that Mac OS software will be able to easily be moved to their OS.

MacWEEK: The next release of FileMaker sounds juicy.

Mail Starting 9/4/97.

Wednesday, September 3, 1997

DaveNet: Is it time to quit?

Steve Jobs interview.

Dan Gillmor in the SJ Merc: Apple cannot abide competition in the Mac marketplace.

Henry Norr in MacWEEK: It's the Big Lie.

Mail Starting 9/3/97.

Ric Ford editorial on Apple's cloning reversal.

Adair Lara in the SF Chronicle: "Really, all we want -- aside from an instantaneous cure, of course -- is to be acknowledged. As Shaw said, 'Discouragement is the only illness. The antidote is being heard.'"

Webintosh: The fastest computer you'll never see. Imagine how a scripting system, such as Frontier, would run on such a machine.

Tuesday, September 2, 1997

DaveNet: It's So Confusing.

Lots more stuff on Mail Starting 9/2/97.

Yo! We got 'nother Berst link.

Hey! AnchorDesk is running a poll.

Did you know that ZDNet has a website for BeOS? I didn't.

Got Java?

Chicago Tribune: The future of Internet programming.

Adobe discontinues Persuasion.

If you get NPR, listen to Marketplace with David Brancaccio. I'm interviewed on today's show.

Jodi gets the scooooop... Steve Jobs on Licensing.

SJ Merc: End of cloning is here.

News.com: Apple acquires PowerComputing assets.

Apple's press release.

From MacResource, a cartoon in Power Computing style, with a vision of the Apple-Power deal. According to MacResource this ad was created by the Power marketing people.

Jobs says: "Power Computing has pioneered direct marketing and sales in the Macintosh market. We look forward to learning from their experience and welcoming their customers back into the Apple family." Hmmm. What if they didn't want to be in the Apple family?

So Apple, tell us, what happens to licensing?

Monday, September 1, 1997

Philippe Kahn on Princess Di.

On the other hand, the photographers acted shamelessly, shooing away people who came to help the dying princess, and according to one account, a zig-zagging motorcycle cut in front of the Mercedes just before the accident.

Back issues...

Check out Scripting News -- August 1997.


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