Scripting News -- May 1998
Friday, May 29, 1998
Neat service: You can get Scripting News delivered via email every night at midnight. Thanks to Josh Lucas.Dead web radio stations: deadshow.com, metaverse.com.
SF web radio (not The Dead): Beta Lounge, X-radio.
Netscape's CEO, Jim Barksdale, is a class act.
A ScriptMeridian project to unify Frontier and Tk.
Developer.com: What happens when the Dow crosses 10,000? We should be so lucky!
PC WEEK: Microsoft to extend object olive branch.
News.com: Compaq PCs may not handle Y2K properly.
Phil Hartman, who was murdered yestrerday, played actor Troy McLure on The Simpsons.
News.com: Novell hires former Java team member.
Upside: Dr Stress in Silicon Valley.
Dino Morelli wrote a script that displays survey results graphically.
Thursday, May 28, 1998
Press release: Autodesk, HP, Macromedia, Microsoft and Visio Submit Vector Markup Language Specification to W3C.W3C: Vector Markup Language submission.
Does anyone operate a public domain name server that, in addition to the normal DNS lookups, also implements an AOL-like keyword system? Send pointers via email.
These two services are half-way there: bounce.to and centraal.
US News: The real threat to Microsoft is the marketplace. I'm quoted twice in this piece.
Interesting ideas in mozilla.org's Blue Sky section.
CNN: Pakistan tests nuclear weapons.
XML.COM: Tim Bray and Larry Wall discuss Perl and XML.
PC WEEK on web caching software.
SJ Merc: FTC moving ahead against Intel.
NY Times: Web addresses that won't twist your tongue.
Wednesday, May 27, 1998
DaveNet: An Afterlife for The Dead?Scripting News reader survey: Did you pay for Navigator?
News.com: Sun's McNealy accuses Microsoft of predatory pricing.
Red Herring: Broadcast.com IPO waiting for bandwidth.
Music Blvd: Liquid Audio music available for sale.
Live recordings of Bob Dylan via RealAudio.
www.netflix.com rents 1000 DVDs by mail.
www.reel.com has 35,000 movies for rent by mail, anywhere in the US.
facets.org has 15,000 movies that can be rented by mail.
www.kozmo.com does video rental delivery of 22,000 movies in NYC. Coming to Seattle, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
www.deadradio.com is part of broadcast.com.
Another Dead channel, SugarMegs Audio at Terrabyte Station. It's funkier!
Here's an HTML editor that positions itself as a word processor. Right on!
Tuesday, May 26, 1998
DaveNet: Healing the Netscape Wound.Aha! David Rodriguez has an idea for a simple inexpensive wizzy word processor that would use less memory and cost less than Word. Note: Cascading Style Sheets probably provide the features he asks for, if they are supported by the HTML editor.
HotWired: Grab your loved ones and run.
Harvard Conference on Internet & Society, going on now.
PC World: Hackers tell Congress how they operate.
CNN: Microsoft a good buy?
A new look for www.cnn.com.
InfoWorld on MHTML. This is cool!
InfoWorld: Sun walls off Java.
NY Times op-ed piece by Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus on high-tech hypocrisy about government.
On ABC tonight: Sex, Drugs & Consenting Adults.
Monday, May 25, 1998
Thea's Galleria goes to college!Seattle Times: Has Gates met his Waterloo?
InfoWorld: Why the software industry creates monopolies.
The Economist: At war with Microsoft.
The Economist: Play nicely, or not at all.
Sunday, May 24, 1998
DaveNet: Hey Pocky Way!CNN: Java Reality. "When Java first emerged, some combination of its creators, its marketers, and the high-tech industry's software developers, analysts, and press conspired to hail it as the do-everything tool that would give Microsoft its long-awaited comeuppance and usher in a truly egalitarian, open, nonproprietary era of computing." We had that story in 1997.
Saturday, May 23, 1998
News.com: Jai Singh says Windows was a platform and Netscape was an app. Fine revisionist thinking!Another theory on why Netscape got into trouble.
Friday, May 22, 1998
DaveNet: Netscape's Internet OS. (Clarification)Pretend it's summer 1996. You're Bill Gates. You're reading this PC WEEK article. Be honest. Would you decide to bake a browser into Windows?
News.com interview with Marc Andreessen, 9/96.
The New Republic: Silicon Smoothies.
Simson Garfinkle in the Boston Globe: Rolling over for Microsoft.
Time: Quotes from Microsoft emails.
Bill Gates: Defending Microsoft's right to innovate.
Apple releases the Carbon Dater app.
Forbes: Is Apple Really Back?
MacWEEK: Apple cuts 1/3 of its retailers and VARs.
MSNBC: Couple claims $104 million jackpot.
CNN: US Sends Helicopters to fight Guatemala fires. Smoke pollutes air as far away as Dallas
BIAP Chat 2.0/Mac ships.
Thursday, May 21, 1998
DaveNet: The Next HotMail?More mail.
Remind-U-Mail is a web-based calendar.
David Biedny and friends sign PhotoShop books and do demos this evening in San Jose.
IBM: The Personal Area Network.
News.com: Zapata makes bid for Excite. Totally bizarre.
News.com: AOL to buy Israeli chat developer?
Wired: AOL's international strategy.
MSNBC: Intel, others to deliver wireless net.
Sun: Happy 3rd Birthday to Java!
Wednesday, May 20, 1998
Mail Starting 5/20/98. Great stuff today!How deep can you go? From Be, a screen shot of the BeOS running the Mac OS in SheepShaver, the Mac OS in turn is running Windows 3.1 using a Windows emulator, which is in turn running an Apple IIe emulator to run the old classic game Dig Dug.
Capitalism Magazine essay on Microsoft and browsers.
SJ Merc: Is it about Netscape? Yes it is. If Netscape wants to get out of the line of fire, disassociate with the lawsuit, say that even if Microsoft loses, Netscape doesn't want its browser bundled with Windows. I think this is the weakest possible government anti-trust case. It's so full of holes. All Microsoft has to do is read excerpts from PC WEEK while those memos were being written.
Wired: Amiga never left.
News.com: Microsoft woes benefit Apple, Oracle, Sun.
Wired: How not to profit at Microsoft's expense.
Power was out between 8AM and 3PM. We're back now.
Tuesday, May 19, 1998
DaveNet: Gates, Netscape and the Governments.Two clarifications for today's piece.
There will be a scheduled power outage here tomorrow, possibly all day. They're beefing up the local power grid, this should make the net more reliable next rainy season.
CNN: Duff beer becomes a collector's item. They picked this story for me in their Custom News section. They thought I would enjoy it. They were right!
Microsoft SiteBuilder Network interviews the Microsoft program manager for XML, Adam Denning.
Evidence of solid platform management at Apple.
Washington Post: Fight might prove costly for Microsoft.
Time: Microsoft's case against itself.
Fortune: 1998 hasn't been a great year for Gates.
Bill Gates' letter to shareholders, customers and partners.
Full text of the government suit.
MacWEEK: AppleScript's future.
August 1995: Apple & Netscape Should Merge. After visiting with Ben Slivka at Microsoft, it was clear that the browser was going to become part of Windows. Netscape was hyping the demise of Windows. Microsoft's response was pretty good. Apple was in total disarray, but there was still a vibrant web development community on the Mac OS. For me, this piece was pivotal.
Here was my reaction to Microsoft's drive to control the Internet in February 1996. It left me feeling worried. It also left a puddle at my feet. A foul-smelling puddle!
Then read this Suck piece from December 1996. Netscape was shooting for the moon. Greed ruled the day. The low road all the way.
Monday, May 18, 1998
DaveNet: Maine, US, States File Microsoft Anti-trust Suit.CNN: States, DOJ file sue Microsoft. Microsoft may bundle MSIE with Windows 98, and bundle Netscape, or bundle neither. They are not trying to stop the shipment of Windows 98, but want to change what Microsoft ships. They will seek a preliminary injunction. They are looking into Windows NT and Office for future litigation.
SJ Merc: Microsoft begins shipping Windows 98.
Thea's Galleria highlights an XML pioneer from Australia.
The Standard: Louis gets Un-wired.
An amazing coincidence. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft may invest $400 million in Time-Warner's RoadRunner broadband cable service, which I wrote about in today's DaveNet piece! Oracle and Intel are also considering an investment.
NY Times: DOJ expected to sue Microsoft.
SJ Merc: 20 states to file suit today.
WebMonkey shows us how to avoid making steaming piles of crap with PhotoShop.
Red Herring: A repositioned Pointcast plans IPO.
Wired: What if 2001 were remade three years from now? An intriguing idea! It would be like making a movie called 1948 in 1984.
SJ Merc: India detonated an H-bomb.
Sunday, May 17, 1998
Frank Sinatra, on mending a broken heart: "I think being jilted is one of life's most painful experiences. It takes a long time to heal a broken heart. It's happened to all of us and never gets any easier. I understand, however, that playing one of my albums can help." 
A site with dozens of Sinatra MIDIs. Schmaltzy and sweet. Bar mitzvah music!
CBS: Sinatra on the web.
Irish Times Sinatra memorial site.
NY Post: Sinatra's $200 Million Estate sure to cause a battle. Includes the story of the Sinatra family website. "Nancy explained her stepmother's site had been 'under construction' for some time but had been delayed because of her inability to get access to a number of 'needed files.'"
MSNBC: Microsoft/government talks collapse, lawsuit is certain, Office unbundling also at issue.
Reuters: Clinton backs DOJ.
Builder.com covers Perl.
News.com: Amiga to move to Intel.
Thursday, May 14, 1998
Behave yourselves while I'm traveling!See you Monday...
Dave
Wednesday, May 13, 1998
DaveNet: B.O.G.U.An elegant rebuttal to today's piece, not from Microsoft.
Windows Magazine chose Frontier 5 as Best of Class in HTML Authoring. This is the first honor bestowed on our Windows software. It feels great!
Red Herring: The Geek's-Eye View on Java.
InfoWorld: States, US to file suit against Microsoft tomorrow.
This is hot! 22,000-employee company seeking Frontier consultant (or consultant team) to train production staff in Frontier for massive e-commerce specialty-retail website. Interested parties may email Jeff for more details.
News.com: Next antitrust battleground -- Windows NT.
Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX. It's funny!
InfoWorld's Jeff Walsh on Apple zealotry.
According to News.com, former Apple CEO Gil Amelio wanted a "hardware-agnostic operating system". This is so clearly counter to Apple's interests. Jobs correctly understands that Apple is a computer company, not a software company. The opportunity to synchronize hardware and system software is a strategic opportunity that only Apple has. Compaq, Dell, IBM, etc are stuck selling Windows machines. Microsoft has an uncomfortable relationship with the Windows hardware vendors.
Jorg Brown explains Mac OS X on MacInTouch.
Updated: Linux Advocacy Mini-HOWTO.
Dan Fylstra: The Politicization of the PC industry.
Next challenge: Convince Jobs that Macs make great servers. They do!
Scripting News will be off the air Thursday, Friday and Saturday, as I head to Maine, of all places!
Tuesday, May 12, 1998
Texas Attorney General Dan Morales is going to talk to Texas computer execs before deciding on an anti-trust action against Microsoft.CNN: Court rules that Microsoft can include web browser in Windows 98. One week ago Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, in a "rally" n New York, reiterated his message that any delay in the shipment of Windows 98 would have a grave effect on the American economy. Well it looks like our economy is going to be OK. But we'd better take a look at this situation. Our reliance on a single company for the health of our economy, if true, says that our economy actually isn't very healthy.
Live coverage of Microsoft press conference.
DaveNet: Rhapsody Cancelled.
Perhaps Rhapsody hasn't been cancelled? Although it's pretty clear in the NY Times interview with Jobs, another report from WWDC contradicts the Times story.
mwatson@apple.com: "We should have just announced that we were taking the product that was code-named Rhapsody and officially calling it Mac OS X, shipping in 1999 with the Carbon APIs to ease porting efforts, and the Blue Box for existing binaries."
NY Times: Rhapsody's out, according to Jobs. An observation, the OS X strategy is Copland. A much better approach for developers and users. Will we support it? Let's see some execution first. To the people who felt we should jump on Rhapsody, learn the lesson. It isn't really software until you can use it. Imagine all the money and time we could have wasted on Rhapsody. Net-net, Jobs is playing it right. It's a rough road he's on. That's OK because that's reality.
A random observation, when I write about Apple the rudeness factor in the email I receive goes up several orders of magnitude.
Prepress AutoTools is a Frontier application that automates batch processing of Quark XPress files.
In early 1996 I outlined a plan for the revival of Apple. Jobs is pretty much executing that plan, with one exception. There's still no money available from investors for Mac-based development.
Henry Norr on MacInTouch: It Makes Sense.
MSNBC spins the poll that overwhelmingly said that Microsoft should be split up.
Michael Pease, a HyperCard user, prefers English-like scripting syntax.
Salon: The dumbing-down of programming.
W3C: DataChannel-authored note on distributed object communication.
Monday, May 11, 1998
Frontier and AppleScript compared in a chart. This a work in progress. Please send suggestions. Thanks!A brief piece explaining why the comparison of Frontier to AppleScript is so important right now.
Alan Baer's AppleScript story.
Maurice Rickard's AppleScript story.
A new list for people working in AppleScript in Frontier.
Another gee-whiz-XML-is-the-next-content-thing article with no examples. I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of this article!
I totally want one of these! More interesting than XML!
MSNBC: India tests nuclear weapons.
CNN: US considers sanctions.
MacWEEK report on Apple keynote at WWDC.
Time reviews Apple's new iMac.
InteractiveWeek: Microsoft casts a big shadow over VCs.
PC WEEK on XML namespaces.
InfoWorld: Microsoft rallies developers around COM.
Hmmm. Computer Associates announces something that sounds like our product, not as elegant of course, and they're using our name as their code name. A possible trademark issue here.
Elliotte Rusty Harold's XML site.
Last September, Doc Searls put a stake in the ground re Steve Jobs, and he appears to have gotten it exactly right.
Sunday, May 10, 1998
Results from MSNBC web poll look quite a bit different from the results in the Microsoft-sponsored poll. The questions were one-sided, the other way.Welcome to the Bernie DeKoven School of Funiatry. Bernie is one of my best friends, he moved to LA. I miss him, but am glad that he's getting back into his websites. I wrote about my friendship with Bernie in Spider Web, 7/12/96.
A note from Charlie Wood at Vignette on the need for more real-world examples of XML-based publishing.
Charlie wants to know if there are any stock-quote services in XML. I'd love to play with one of those too.
PC World is using XML. Let's help more pubs do this, managed content thru XML is the way we get realistic press coverage of the benefits of XML. Doh!
Seattle Times: Is Microsoft a victim of politics?
NY Times: Labyrinths revival. A path to inner peace.
Saturday, May 09, 1998
Updated: AppleScript and Frontier website.The next release of Frontier will have a built-in performance profiler.
Red Herring: Vignette raises $14 million, acquires RandomNoise.
On pbs.org, Cringely talks about Microsoft and Digital TV and on infoworld.com, the other Cringely speculates that Apple is going to announce something about Linux on Monday, possibly the porting of the Mac look and feel. Steve Jobs says that's not it and the slashdot.org folks think it's not a great idea.
Friday, May 08, 1998
InfoWorld reports on settlement discussions between Microsoft and US government.UserLand's Brent Simmons was interviewed by a Microsoft pollster today. Here's his report.
A former Microsoft employee comes closest, I think, to a plausible explanation of why Gates works so hard. I've been hearing from a lot of people in and out of Microsoft, but want to keep the speculation down. Most of us haven't got a clue what it means to be someone else. I want to keep the space open for getting the real story.
How to get current with Frontier 5. We're reaching the end of the beta process for Frontier 5.0.2. In the meantime, it's not that hard to get in the loop, but you have to assemble the parts yourself.
Dan Gillmor in the SJ Merc: On Apple's iMac.
News.com: Corel joins Linux fest.
Apple's Technical Info Library and the St Louis Post are also running Domino.
www.scriptbuilder.com is running Lotus Domino. This is the first time I've seen a public Domino server.
Wired: Wired Magazine sold.
Thursday, May 07, 1998
DaveNet: Time Changes Everything.Henry Norr finds a couple of possible fatal flaws in the design of Apple's new iMac. It doesn't have writeable removeable storage (no floppy) and no printing. Weird!
MacWEEK on WebDAV.
WebMonkey looks into Netscape's new browser. Here's what the XMLization of HTML looks like.
News.com: HTTP is spreading out. This is good!
Check out scriptbuilder.com.
XML and Legacies. Should we plan for the replacement of HTML by XML?
Wednesday, May 06, 1998
DaveNet: Yo Quiero Scripting News?News.com: Microsoft-sponsored survey says Americans side with Microsoft. Another stunt like yesterday's New York rally. The questions were ridiculous. Do they think we're stupid?
Apple's new iMac. Looks great!
SJ Merc, News.com, Wired, ZDNN, MacInTouch, InfoWorld, MacCentral on iMac.
Wired: More Portal Partnering.
Look at all the press that Intuit and Apple got as Quicken comes back to the Mac. Doh!
Tish is exhausted by Gates's latest pitch too.
More proof that Jobs is the master orchestrator.
Simon St Laurent's essay on XML and SGML.
Chihuahuas in Fairbanks Alaska.
Dallas-Fort Worth Frontier User's Group meets on 5/29.
More great TV commercials: Seattle Mariners. Thanks to Geoff Allen.
From Fiddler on the Roof, If I Were A Rich Man: MIDI version and the lyrics.
InfoWorld: Microsoft orchestrates NY rally.
SJ Merc: Gates meets with Klein.
Tuesday, May 05, 1998
The Taco Bell Dog is almost as coool as the Macarena was.Video clips of the Yo Quiero dog!
MacWEEK: Details trickle out on Macromedia-Apple deal.
Josh Lucas is offering a Scripting News-via-email service.
Wired: The hot new medium is email.
InfoWorld: IBM outlines web server plans.
Dan Gillmor in the SJ Merc: Microsoft hires Roizen. Dan says "From my perspective, Microsoft sees feedback as honest only when it comes from unalloyed admirers. Other views are worthy only of dismissal." With all due respect, my experience has been quite different. I'm often surprised at what they pick up and how resillient they are. At times I have been their most harsh critic, yet they always listen and respond.
This limerick from lymond@peaknet.net:
There once was a lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger,
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.Monday, May 04, 1998
Thea's Galleria goes out to eat with CuisineNet.BareBones ships MailSmith. And by the way, on their fact sheet they mention Frontier compatibility. I notice these things!
Chuck Shotton has doubts that XML will deliver the standardization that many proponents say it will.
Jakob Nielsen: Cost of User Testing a Website.
From Stephen Waters: "Scripting.com returned to view this morning. I was pleasantly surprised to see Fragile Internet from Thursday. Thanks for drawing the community's and DIGEX's attention to the problem."
Boardwatch covers peering, the underlying technology of the piece Waters refers to.
Friday, May 01, 1998
DaveNet: Geek Boyfriends.InfoWorld: Web designers eye XML data compression.
SJ Merc: Does Microsoft hinder innovation?
News.com: Microsoft to XMLize Office. This is the first official notice that XML is to play a big role in Microsoft's app suite. But the info was available by reading tea leaves. Microsoft's involvement in the XML standardization process is visible, as is their interest in simple XML-based RPC, and they are very active in WebDAV.
Back issues...
Check out Scripting News -- April 1998.
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