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New user? Wednesday, December 6, 2000
ZDNet: News: Apple plots Mac OS X ship date
ZDNet: Apple plots Mac OS X ship date
Februrary 24? That would be EXCELLENT!
The WO group recently said WO5 would be out around the same time as OS X. So many things to look forward too!
Judicial recount confirmed in Saskatchewan riding of Palliser
Decision 2000: Judicial recount confirmed in Saskatchewan riding of Palliser
There ya go, we have recounts too. Happy?
Tuesday, December 5, 2000
Independent
Independent.co.uk: The world according to 'Tog' -- "If you like using your computer, you probably have Bruce Tognazzini to thank. The interface guru talks to Charles Arthur"
Back to the Future for this weblog
It's now possible to post items into the past (to backfill) or future (to seed) of a Conversant weblog page.
I'm going to be using both historical and future entries on the weblog for the Oilogger site, to get it up to date and to set it up for future games. More on this later...
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. :-)
