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New user? Monday, December 4, 2000
The revolution needs you!
BBC News: The revolution will be postponed
"The internet was supposed to change everything."
Says who? Everything is such a big word.
"It was supposed to re-write the rules of business and free us from the drudgery of our daily existence."
It is. The revolution is not finished. It has hardly started.
"It was supposed to usher in a brave new world centred around freedom, knowledge and community. Except that it hasn't."
It hasn't? I suggest the BBC hasn't been looking very hard. There's knowledge and community around its own web site, for crying out loud! Not to mention the knowledge of the whole Internet, the millions of communities everywhere on the 'net.
Freedom has yet to be realized. The Internet has helped some gain more freedom, helped some lose it, and for the rest, not much has changed, except that freedom has gotten much more complex. It has never been so important to fight for freedom, because humanity has never had an opportunity to connect like we now can.
"Dot.coms are going bust in large numbers, tech stocks are tanking, no-one is using Wap phones and Stephen King has abandoned his attempt to re-write the rules of publishing."
Sounds like natural selection to me. Survival of the fittest. The ideas had merit but the execution was awful. Sick animals get eaten. Sick ideas get buried.
Opera to fan the browser-war flames
Opera to fan the browser-war flames. via Ed.
It appears Opera is going to go free-but-ad-supported.
I didn't buy (or continue to use) Opera after I tried it because it uses the MDI interface, which I couldn't productively use for a web browser. I have multiple monitors and a virtual desktop utility called Control Center on my Windows machines, and I wasn't about to be restricted to having web pagese on 1 of my 14 desktops (per machine) at a time.
Not this again...
Radio UserLand: How much will Radio UserLand cost?
As I mentioned yesterday, it appears UserLand has pulled the bait-and-switch. They said Radio UserLand would be free (see yesterday's entry for the link), strung everyone along with that belief nearly 3 months until things got close, and now they're saying there will be a "moderate fee".
Things are getting more complex. UserLand deleted this message by Oliver Wrede* (an avid RU supporter) saying charging for RU would be a show-stopper as he's set up his web sites to use outlines, and they did this under the belief RU would be free for his authors.
*the link goes to the archived message on eGroups.
RE: Templates in Conversant
The bit I did about templates in Conversant is about to roll off the bottom of the weblog, so here's a link to just that piece.
Stress is bad, but one expert says it's also fattening
CNN.com: Stress is bad, but one expert says it's also fattening
I'm going to see my doctor for my routine weight-loss checkup today. I'm going to ask him about this and the other articles about fat viruses and genes.
I'm not making excuses for my obesity, but I'd like to know whether these things are plausible, it might help me manage with my situation once I've lost the weight. I don't want to gain it back.
BTW, my diet willpower has been very very low lately. And yes, I've been quite stressed.
The RUst of the story
Over the last couple of days I've mentioned Radio UserLand. I haven't been fair to the people at UserLand Software.
Not because of what I said... (I won't take it back, what I said was what I felt at the time, this is a weblog, real-time and personal) but because of what I didn't say.
What I didn't say was this:
UserLand totally deserves to charge for Radio UserLand. Think of all the money and energy that team has put into it. Gotta be over $500K, if not close to $1M already, and close to 7 man years of effort! If you spent that kind of money and sweat you'd deserve a return too.
If Radio was something like $50 I'd buy a copy of the software for each of my computers. It's great software, it's easily worth that much to me, because I know how to make it sing like few people do. (I've been using Frontier heavily since '96)
But I was only thinking of me. I was upset that my dream of a free Frontier runtime to develop apps for was evaporating in front of my eyes.
Apparently Radio UserLand will be free as it is now, for the final release and for some time after that. That's great! What they intend to say on the home page is they don't promise it'll be that way forever.
So it wasn't a bait and switch. It was unclear communication, and not giving the benefit of the doubt. Humans do both every day.
Back to your regularly scheduled programming... I hope everyone gets this Radio virus. :-)
Sunday, December 3, 2000
Extreme Programming and Open Source Software
Advogato: Extreme Programming and Open Source Software
I like both, but do they work together? This advogato thread dives into this debate.
Radio UserLand: What is Radio UserLand?
Radio UserLand: What is Radio UserLand? -- "Eventually we will put a moderate price on Radio -- to get our new community started, please give it a try and use it for free, with our appreciation."
Oh. For some reason I thought it was going to be free. So did Duncan.
(Update: Here's why I thought it would be free... Dave Winer said it would be free. [screenshot])
Damn. I had been looking forward to making software for RU*, thinking the runtime was going to be freely-available. So much for that idea. Now I have to look at it with different economics... it was a no-brainer, before.
* a real e-mail client. I need one and I can't find anything that meets my needs.
Saturday, December 2, 2000
OmniDiskSweeper for Mac OS X
OmniDiskSweeper. (free download)
I just used this drop-dead-easy-to-use utility and was able to easily find and remove over 450 MB of cruft from my 3.1 GB Mac OS 9 partition. Now I have 529.1 MB available!
If you're using Mac OS X, try out this utility, you'll probably find all sorts of crazy files that were hidden in Mac OS 9 that took up insane amounts of disk. (IE's cache file was 130 MB! There were 100's of MB of useless stuff in the "Temporary Items" folder!)
What's Abstinence Got To Do With It?
What's Abstinence Got To Do With It?
I don't usually link to stories about sexuality, instead I leave it up to Dan over at Flutterby, who you'll notice I got the above link from. I'm not embarassed to link to these kinds of articles, but seeing as I don't go looking for them myself, the only place I find them is Dan's site, so there's no point duplicating his effort. :-)
This is a good article (even if it has some dirty words in it, not that I give a fuck about dirty words!) and it reflects some of my beliefs, that I hope I'll remind myself of sometime in the future when I read through the archives of this site. The most important value this article shares with me is:
Teaching ignorance is not an acceptable solution to social problems.
The Ultimate (expensive!) Video Game Library!
eBay item 507007174 (Ends Nov-28-00 10:00:57 PST) - The Ultimate Video Game Library!
$70,000 was the last bid, and the reserve was not met!
Maybe he needed the money to buy a PS2??
Buddy shot twice during vest test
Buddy shot twice during vest test -- "They're Manitoba's version of Dumb and Dumber."
This is one for the Darwin Files. :-)
Update: Sorry, the link for that article expired. I tried and tried to find the article's new link, but it appears to be gone. The only way you'll get to read it now is to buy a copy of it from Sun Media. Sheesh!
Dried-up sea beds found on Mars
Dried-up sea beds found on Mars -- "NASA scientists have discovered ancient sea or lake beds on the surface of Mars that could once have harboured life"
