Sunday, September 12, 1999

The web as a Turing Machine. "Many of today's everyday objects fit the Turing model. A digital cellphone is a Turing Machine -- its input tape is the keypad, and the output tape is its memory. If your refrigerator, car, bicycle, or stereo has a computer in it, it can be modeled as a Turing Machine."

2/27/98: RPC over HTTP via XML. "The Internet is a platform. A platform is made up of tools and runtimes. Internet tools run on all kinds of operating systems, as do the runtimes. The beauty of the net is its simplicity, its ubiquity and its lack of a controlling vendor."

2/4/99: The Politics of Plumbing. "Yesterday in a conference call with Microsoft people I said the biggest win was for them to support the XML-RPC spec without changes."

1/29/99: Microsoft and XML-RPC. "Think of it this way. If I develop a search engine running on NT, it can be replaced by a search engine running on Solaris or Linux with a simple emulation of an open protocol. XML-RPC is far simpler than COM, CORBA or Apple Events. Time to deployment, from scratch, is measured in days, not years. We can move very quickly. And customers get choice."

Linux Journal: Will Linux Conquer the Desktop? "When the script kiddies came calling, they found my front door wide open." Oops!

Dan Gillmor: "Sun Microsystems and IBM recently jumped back into a largely moribund 'network computer' market with a new generation of terminals whose sole purpose is to give users a window into the network. Will they succeed any better than their predecessors? I'm betting they will, complementing the ongoing success of the Palm handhelds and soon-to-be rage for smart cell phones and other devices."

Developer Nation: An RSS Parser in Shockwave. What will they think of next!

Jonathan Eisenzopf takes the RSS categorization discussion in a different direction.

Linux.Com: I Love Man Pages.

NY Times: New Year's of a Lifetime, at the Office. "Jurczyk, director of information services for Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, a law firm in Chicago, will be in the office with 20 co-workers, watching for Year 2000 computer problems while snacking on peanuts, sesame sticks and M&M's and toasting the millennium with bottled water and soda before dozing off on a rented cot."

Here's a truly bizarre screen shot showing MORE 3.1 running on Windows NT, thanks to Tobias Hofman. I encouraged him to post a DG message explaining how he did it.