News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
	Mail Starting 6/5/97

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From: steve_benson@mailgate.abare.gov.au (Steve Benson);
Sent at 6/6/97; 9:15:44 AM;
Re:Where the Okies Went

you might want to have a read of three sf novels by Kim Stanley Robinson set around Orange County: The Wild Shore, Pacific Edge, The Gold Coast. Gold Coast has some quite good chunks on the history of the County including some mentions of the Okies settli ng in the County. The three books are "linked" by being set in alternate futures of the County. Wild Shore is a post nuclear war hell, Pacific Edge is an environmentally robust heaven, and Gold Coast is a sort of technological purgatory.

You can read the books as individual works, but they have a much deeper resonance and synthesis if read together. I've just finished them and found them fascinating. My favourite being Pacific Edge. It's very optimistic about what the future could be like , but isn't utopian in that it assumes there will allways be a snake in Eden.

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From: phood@aimnet.com (Phil Hood);
Sent at 6/5/97; 1:07:40 PM;
Re:Think Seybold, Dave

I think the message is clear that Microsoft's vision is magalomaniacal. Many of the opportunities in the Windows software arena are niche opportunities at best. In any market that is important, they want 90 percent. They may be willing to leave you alone to make money in the remaining ten percent. But as users start buying your UserLand interface and applications, you will begin to show up on Microsoft's radar screen.

One way to analyze opportunity in the software business is to look at where venture capital money in the software business is going.It's not going into new Windows tools ventures.It's not going into CD-ROM development. It's not going into web browsers. Those were yesterday's markets. In the last 24 months tremendous amounts of money have flowed to Java and to anything else that touches on the open systems/network computing paradigm. That is where the smart guys on Sand Hill Road are putting significant ducats. They're doing this partly because network computing makes more sense than the traditional client-server paradigm for many applications. And, they're doing it because Microsoft is such a big elephant that they want to stay out of its path.

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From: bfrankel@ix.netcom.com (Barry Frankel);
Sent at 6/5/97; 3:41:48 PM;
Oracle's NewTheme Search Technology

After watching Larry Ellison's Comdex presentation where he talked about a new form of information searching called "theme searches", that looks for more than just word matches.

I went to the Oracle site and then found my way to the search engine:

http://customnews.cnn.com/cnews/pna_srch.search_handler

I gave it the theme, "bill gates" and it gave me articles including one on India and Bangladesh and another on a police raid in Cape Town.

When I searched on "Windows NT", I got, "Window Blind Cords Strangle Hundreds of Children."

Maybe theme searches are not ready for prime time or maybe Larry is trying to tell us something about Bill Gates and Windows NT.

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From: cressler@hpeapsvr.cup.hp.com (Scott Cressler);
Sent at 6/5/97; 10:35:54 AM;
Re:Where the Okies Went

You say that your Scripting Site is getting bigger and you are using email sparingly. If I know where you're going with that, this is a little disappointing to me and sort of related to a concept you could call "push."

If where you're going with this is that you're more likely to put things on your web site and less likely to send out DaveNets, I think my life will become a little less enriched. I enjoy getting DaveNet in my email and have many times used it to adjust my opinions and have quoted it to others. I would miss it (and do, when you only send out one a week or so :-).

This is sort of like a "push" situation in that I get it in my email and, since I live and work via email, I always see it, pick it up, and either read it or print if for the "reading room." ;-) Since I'm usually very busy doing other things besides surfing the web (or I'm doing it for pretty specific purposes, like getting technical info from Netscape's or Microsoft's site or playing Scrabble with a friend in Seoul), I don't find myself becoming a "regular reader" at any site, no matter how good it is. I read all the news I have sent to me via email, like from SJ Merc's NewsHound and Mercury Mail's NEWSpot and the NY Times' Cybertimes, but I don't tend to go to the Web to sit down and read.

If you do start putting more stuff on your web site or even cease DaveNet, maybe you could still send out a reminder via email that there's new stuff and the URL's (which are clickable in Netscape's Mail handler) so I can easily get your stuff.

Of course, if you don't, I can always use something like the URL-Minder from netmind.com to send me alerts that your page has changed, but that doens't always work, and, since it's free, isn't always that prompt.

Hope I'm overreacting, but I also think this might be another perspective on the value of email, Web sites, and "push" (even though I'm not referring to anything directly related to things like Marimba or Netsite or whatever).

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From: kcompton@attmail.com (Kevin F Compton);
Sent at 6/5/97; 1:01:48 PM;
Re:Where the Okies Went

Thanks, Dave. As a New Jerseyan transplanted to the Valley, I've always enjoyed being cited for my "accent" (we drink cawfee there, not koffy) while many here think there's no such thing as a California accent. Others tell me the things that tickle my ear here ("getting" pronounced "git-een", me asking people if they want safety or straight when they ask for a "pin", when they want either fountain or ballpoint) may well have come from Okie accents. "Anyways", too. Hope this doesn't offend; Robin McNeil's The Story of English is one of my favorite books, and lauds the value of linguistic diversity...

-- KC (as a famous Californian once said, can't we all just get along?)

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From: mac@wpi.com (Michael McCarthy);
Sent at 6/5/97; 9:59:46 AM;
Re:Where the Okies Went

Thanks to Arun Gupta for expressing what I understood to be the message of Atlas Shrugged, rather than David's rather unfair slam. Arun was far more eloquent, and considerably more diplomatic, than I would have been.

Atlas Shrugged was about the politics and morality of parasitism. To say it was about gods and goddesses -- because Rand portrayed her heroes as annoyingly superior - is like saying Grapes of Wrath was about the nobility of the poor. It wasn't; it was about the impact of a set of changes on a helpless group of people -- though Steinbeck portrayed them as noble, worthy people to gain the reader's sympathy, his point would have been apt had the people been no better or more interesting than, say, me.

To allow the novelist's art to distract you from the novelist's point leads one astray.