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Welcome to the last day of July, another incredible month! No fear Omar Vasquez points to an Internet radio station with no fear. We have more fear than this. Perhaps we should work out a way to connect to one of these servers from Radio UserLand. Oh the fear about pointing to things these days. Pointing at things is expressive, you know, like free speech and the First Amendment. Is this a total police state yet? Can I even say this? What happened to the US? (If you're a lawyer, call a judge and tell them how crazy things are getting on the Web.) PS: Tonight we learned that George W's wife can't pronounce the word poignant. (The "g" is silent.) That is, in itself, for some reason, poignant. PPS: Sam Devore has the playlist working on the Mac. Bonk! Audio CD to MP3 Thanks to someone named Dalai Lama for the pointer, I am now able to convert audio CDs to MP3 using CDEX. I'm taking a break and ripping a brand new CD. One of the CDs I bought yesterday was Frank Zappa's Strictly Commercial, a greatest hits album. I thought this was appropriate, since Zappa, if he were alive, would probably be one of the biggest boosters of music on PCs. I don't know that for sure, obviously, just a guess. OK, next step. Here's what a folder produced by CDEX looks like. If you use MP3 software to convert audio CDs, does your folder structure look like this or does it look different? Survey: What does your folder look like? If yours looks different it would be great if you posted a screen shot to the Radio UserLand discussion group. Andy Goldstein recommends MPEG Suite. (Crashed on launch.) Today's song Little Feat: Strawberry Flats. "Knocked on my friend's door in Moody Texas, and asked if he had a place for me. His hair was cut off and he was wearing a suit, and he said not in my house, not in my house. You look like you're part of a conspiracy." Suck on Mozilla This Suck piece is a must-read. I've said many of the same things about Mozilla. If there's to be an alternative to Microsoft's browser, it must behave exactly like it, the pain to transition to it must be absolutely at a minimum. Software and the First Amendment Dennis Wickham: "In 1999, Microsoft won a lawsuit here in San Diego because the Federal District Judge agreed with you that the First Amendment extends to choices made by developers in writing software. The case involved an inadvertent string of events that caused a user of Publisher 98 looking to images of 'monkeys' to pull up an African-American couple sitting on 'monkey bars.' The judge dismissed the lawsuit filed by a consumer ruling that the programing, even if it lead to unintended associations of ideas, were speech." A time capsule In Web Techniques, Dale Dougherty reports on the WWW9 conference in Amsterdam in May. "Given that publishing was in the title, and the fact that there were five other tracks available for the 500-plus developers, I wasn't expecting much interest. So I was really surprised to see that our room was packed, even overflowing at times." The room was overflowing and the session was great. Thanks to Dale for continuing to carry the message. Let's get our Web apps connected to each other and to desktop apps. Let's make it easy to create for the Web. Separated at birth? Have you ever noticed that Michael Jackson's Billie Jean has exactly the same beginning as Falco's Der Kommissar? Or is it the other way around? Napoli on Napster Lisa Napoli: "If you’re crying in your beer about the impending death of Napster, let me ask you this: If you were a musician, would you want to get paid for your work? In fact, chances are that you’re not a musician, so I’ll ask a different question: Do you expect to get paid for whatever work it is you do? Pardon me for presuming all of you aren’t socialists, but surely the answer must be yes." Considering that she already answered the question, let's back up and look at the assumptions she's made, and see where she took a wrong turn. If I was a musician I would want to get paid for my work. And she's right, I am not a musician. She's doing great so far. Now on to the next question. Do I expect to get paid for the work I do? The answer, sadly, is no. That's because I choose to be creative and honest, and writing software is even less appreciated an art than being a musician. I could take a job as the CEO or CTO of a slimy dot-com startup and promote non-existent software and bribe reporters for good press coverage. I've had a few offers, but I turn them down with such gusto, the offers have stopped, which is OK with me. I choose to have integrity in the work I do. I also choose to write software. So money has to take a back seat. (She didn't ask if I'd like to get paid, the answer is an enthusiastic yes!) Most rock stars don't get paid very much, if anything, for the work they do, under the old system. That point has been made by quite a few artists, and hasn't been refuted by the music industry. Until they refute it, with facts that stand up to reasonable scrutiny, I'm going to believe the artists that have spoken publicly. So forget the bs about artists getting paid, when a reporter asks the question that way I wonder whose payroll they're on. Where are the fact-checkers when you need one? Talk about music company execs getting paid, then the story has some basis in fact, afaik. Further, as I've said countless times but no one seems to hear, I pay for music. The stuff I download from Napster is stuff I've already paid for. How many times do I have to pay for it? (That's the question for Ms. Napoli.) For Scripting News readers It's time to lift the hood in a new way.. I am personally net-negative on UserLand, to the tune of a few million dollars. During the flame war that resulted when Frontier went commercial in 1998, we computed that I had personally paid $3000 for every copy of Frontier in use. I paid for the priviledge of people using my software. (Which made the selfish flames all the more ridiculous.) The software distribution system forces developers to work for large companies, where there is diminished opportunity for artistic integrity. We learned in the early 90s that there was no way for a small company, even with a hot product, to net-out any money from software distribution. It was bad in the 80s, in the 90s it became impossible. It was cheaper to just give the software away, which is what we did in 1995. Privately, I urged Apple to revise the distribution system, since they were getting beat-up for having no software, and they were making good money in the early 90s. The pleas fell on deaf ears. I proposed a pool of five percent of revenue for the Macintosh, to be distributed to software developers based on usage ratings. The more your software got used, the more money you'd get. I still think this is a reasonable way to do it. Users want the software for free, so did the platform vendor, but it costs money to develop. Somehow this has to be resolved. No one has had the guts yet to do it. (This would be the equivalent of the artists having an equity stake in the studio.) Anyway, in twelve years I have never drawn a salary from UserLand. That's not true for the people who work here, who earn salaries and get stock options and benefits. In the above I carefully talk about me, not the company. We're not profitable, it would not make any sense for me to draw a salary. I'm not complaining, because since 1998 I haven't had to write any checks to UserLand. A lot of people assume we're rolling in dough, and we're not. That's one of the reasons I like that the music industry is bringing money into the discussion. Like the musicians, I want to be paid for giving people good stuff that does cool things, but only from honest people who like it. Like good music, good software is expensive to make. When you see something cool-but-free coming from UserLand, think about money, and the gift you're getting. You're not paying for it, but you're getting something that cost money to make. Since it's disclosure time One more thing. At various times, we've had offers to sell Frontier. Each time, on investigation, we learned that the product would be dismembered, and pieces would be integrated with other products from the acquiring company. I always got angry at this point. "The beauty of Frontier is its integration. If you dismember it all its value goes away." If we had done any of these deals we would have sold out our users. They'd be left holding a piece of software that would never be updated, bugs never fixed, no new features released, new platforms not supported. I did that once, in the late 80s, the product died, and I hear from its users to this day, and it makes me angry and sad that the beautiful product died, for no good reason I could find. I decided that the art I do is far more important than money, and I resolved never to do it again. PS: This is why I do it.
Our friend, The First Amendment DaveNet: Software and the First Amendment. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Excellent! American Library Association's First Amendment page. Cornell: "The most basic component of freedom of expression is the right of freedom of speech. The right of freedom of speech allows an individual to express themselves without interference or constraint by the government. The Supreme Court requires the government to provide substantial justification for the interference with the right of free speech if it attempts to regulate the content of the speech. A less stringent test is applied for content-neutral legislation. The Supreme Court has also recognized that the government may prohibit some speech that may cause a breach of the peace or cause violence. The right of free speech includes other mediums of expression that communicates a message." Mac app-only download It will be a few weeks before UserLand has an official release for the Mac that plays MP3s as the Windows version does. However, there are many applications of the app that do not depend on playing MP3s, and there are many inventive developers in our Mac user community. That's why we pushed this app-only release so soon after the release of the Windows software. No-installer downoad Some people have reported trouble with the InstallShield installer, for those people we've created a no-installer download, it's just a zip file, it won't add items to your Start menu, but it's more foolproof. Feedback and support Progress on Radio UserLand. Some people have successfully installed it and are making feature requests. Paul Nakada gets the vision, I expanded on it. There have been numerous problems with the installation process. This is the first time we've done a Windows installer so this is not surprising. If you got a bad install, please please check back in a few days. We'll get it to install properly. OK, so much feedback coming, it's very overwhelming! But keep it coming, I love drinking from a firehose. Brent posted a Bugs and Issues page on the Radio UserLand site. We're going to do this openly. The Radio UserLand backend outlineDocument is the central file format for Radio UserLand, and it's XML-based of course. I updated the spec this morning. We have more examples now so I linked them in. The backend is crucial to this product. For the last few days we've been focusing on the user interface. Now it's necessary to swing back. I revised the Backend page on the Radio UserLand site. As we developed the beta 1 release, things changed and the document became inaccurate. I added an idea that's not been talked about yet, the role of outline tools in building a distributed Internet directory, the next step after DMOZ and Yahoo. There's another way of looking at what we're doing. There's a media type that, until now, no one had bothered to define or create tools for. Outlines are very useful, and tools for creating and browsing them are mature. Look under a rock, find a gold nugget. I've felt strongly since I first saw the Web that there's a hierarchy in there. It didn't take long for Yahoo to become the main portal. But it's limited by the capacity of their editors, same with DMOZ. Now, six years later, the Web has matured and there are millions of people who have mastered the medium. Why not turn over the directory to them? It took a long time to get my team to ship an Internet-aware outliner. I wanted one in 1996. They didn't get it. When Doug Baron was just about to work with me on it, he quit. My guys are good, but they didn't want to do this one. I snuck it in there by showing them how music could work better. We have a musician on the team, and he has no fear. So it happened. Now we can really jump out of the plane! Derek Odegard wrote a COM component that "reads a Radio UserLand songlist file (locally or remotely) and makes it available to ASP scripts as simple collections of objects." Credits I've not yet pointed to our credits page. Note that I thank Napster and the music industry. And then I thank the musicians. I think that's the right order. It's Oscar-style. The last is the most important. Today's Song Credence Clearwater: Born on the Bayou. Such a rich song, fantastic dancing music. And it's funny that I should re-discover it today. For some reason as I was writing the Radio UserLand docs, esp the mainframes page, I was thinking of Wes Felter. Just a dream, of course. As I was talking with Woz, I thought "Wes is a very young Woz." Now looping back to Credence, Wes was actually born on the bayou. I went to school there but Wes is from there. Looping and looping I had a flash of insight into why the W3C focuses so on namespaces. The idea is that no one should have the power to launch new file formats. All our file formats meld into one format that no one understands, or could possibly understand, by design. That's the puzzle of namespaces. And RDF abstracts it one more level, making it even more impossible to comprehend. The W3C wants us to be prepared for anything, but it's human nature to wait for someone to go first. Wait wait wait, we do. But I've never grokked this, it goes against all history in software. Proprietary standards have more juice, iff the product takes off. Look at Napster. The WSJ gives them shit for being indecisive about openness. Cheap shot. At least they went first and didn't wait for a standards body to give the green light. And when pushed, they opened it up. If I were their teacher they'd get an A+ with extra credit. They did the right thing and did it the right way. It's a revolutionary act to ship a new file format. Standards-bodies-be-damned. It has to be that way. The best standard is the one with the most users. Like HTML. The W3C should get this, the leader of W3C is Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTML. Why didn't he wait for the SGML people to validate him? He had an idea that really excited him. When that happens, the standards process is far too slow. That's my philosophy, you may not agree, and I could change my mind, but that's how I call it. Howtos and comments Jerome Camus: Digi-Tunes and Micro-Dollars. About.Com: How to make MP3 files from your CDs. Separated at birth? Jeffrey Zeldman's glamorous life. Believe it or not this story makes me miss NY! David Singer had a similar experience at Fry's, all the way across the country. Amazon NY Times: "After the close of trading on Wednesday, Amazon reported its second-quarter results. With remarkable synchronicity, 6 of the 35 analysts who follow Amazon cut their ratings on the stock the next morning." AP: Amazon's Bezos Remains Confident.
Radio UserLand beta 8:12PM: Radio UserLand 7.0b1/Win is ready to download. It's a free public beta. Please read the license. Also read the home page of the site, esp the stuff about how the server can be used, and the privacy policy. All this stuff is in beta, your informed feedback is welcome. We shipped with known problems. We'll address many of them in the coming days. Please use the mail list or the discussion group to comment. Unless you hit a deal-stopper, it works best if you accumulate a list of problems, and report them all in a single post, if possible. We'll review all the lists. BTW, this was Jake Savin's first project on the UserLand team. He did very well, he's a great guy to work with, doesn't get rattled and he seems to do the right thing, and we already knew he was smart. Good job. Today's song Grateful Dead: Box of Rain. "And it's just a box of rain or a ribbon for your hair; such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there." Today's sad question Paul Krugman: "The truth is that this story is much bigger than music, or even intellectual property. Something serious, and troubling, is happening -- and I haven't heard any good ideas about what to do about it." Answer: "Over and over we learn the lesson that we're just little pups with grand visions, waiting to lead a revolution, wanting to be heard by someone, anyone, lest we die in anonymity. In the end we die, and who cares? Probably no one. It happens every day." Next question! Narrative Good morning! Come hell or high water we're going to release the first public beta of Radio UserLand today. Thanks for your patience. Things got pretty heavy yesterday, we got a lot of work done, but when it came time to pull the trigger, my eyes were so blurry, even so I was seeing mistakes all over the website. I wanted to get it cleaner and more supportable. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to use this software. First impressions count a lot. We'd like to iterate over the weekend. The first release will be called 7.0b1 (the version number tracks Frontier's, it's built from the same code base, of course). Radio UserLand also has a Frontier-style updates process, so non-kernel changes can be done painlessly. Now when hundreds of thousands of people are using the software we're going to have to charge for updates, or figure out another way to distribute them. We expect to hit more scaling walls with this product, that's one of the reasons we hosted the mail list at eGroups. Let's offload as much as we can.
Then I wrote a short piece about Napster, linking it to the stories about mainframes and personal computers. In the last week we've had two main slogans internally. The first one is Keep It Simple. We've already got the most powerful playlist software. Now how can we make the whole thing come together so it's really simple to use and get started with? We hope to get feedback on this over the weekend. The second slogan is Let's Win! I've had gusher products, and I love the feeling of hitting the spot so well that everyone says "Wow that's great!" Since this is a community thing, I want you all to have the same idea, we can win, we can create something that's new and fun and very powerful, we can all win. (By winning I don't mean others have to lose, except perhaps insidious bloatware playlist products.) After all this time, I'm still listening to Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues. "Girl by the whirlpool's looking for a new fool." It's addictive. At about this time, Frontier and Manila users are probably wondering if we're leaving them behind. We are not. How can you tell? The website documenting Radio UserLand is a Manila site. And the server-side is Frontier. It all fits together. Radio UserLand is the deployment of our organizing and writing tool (and HTTP, XML-RPC and SOAP web services platform). Music is a wonderful and timely catalyst. Our vision, the Two-Way Web is still very much what we're doing. ePrairie: Napster Balks, Users Talk, Court Walks. June 10 was Jesus Day in Texas. Officially.
WE GET TO KEEP NAPSTER!!!
The Dead are so happy they just broke out in spontaneous music-making. I'm happy too. I'm going to have some cheesecake now to celebrate!
Reports News.Com, Reuters, AP, MSNBC, Inside.Com, Wired. Other stuff DaveNet: A "buycott" for Napster. Grateful Dead statement on MP3s: "No commercial gain may be sought by websites offering digital files of our music, whether through advertising, exploiting databases compiled from their traffic, or any other means. All participants in such digital exchange acknowledge and respect the copyrights of the performers, writers and publishers of the music. This notice should be clearly posted on all sites engaged in this activity. We reserve the ability to withdraw our sanction of noncommercial digital music should circumstances arise that compromise our ability to protect and steward the integrity of our work." Finally, a newspaper correctly explains that Napster is an "Internet search engine that enables users to find and trade songs between computers." There's been so much incorrect reporting in the last few days. They should make the reporters take a freshman Computer Science class. They. Who are they? I don't know. Good night. One more thing. AOL subsidiary WinAmp operates a search engine that does the same thing. AOL is merging with Time-Warner, which is part of the RIAA. So if they shut down Napster, we don't have to go to Gnutella to get the music, we can go to Time-Warner. How can they sue Napster for what they do themselves? Someone is ethically impaired here. This seems newsworthy. (I just checked, the search engine is still there, and I searched for Metallica, and got lots of MP3s, which I didn't download, but I could have.) MacCentral: Apple could be sued over Cube design. It's great to see Cobalt take an interest in the Qube, which is a milestone product, heavily influenced our work at UserLand. We're having fun with Radio UserLand. I wrote this page, entitled Mainframes are Computers Too, in case any mainframe people check it out. For more fun, does anyone have a similar picture of an old style radio station? Kevin Werbach: "What made Napster a threat to the record labels was its remarkable growth. That growth resulted from two things: Napster's user experience and its focus on music. The court decision strikes at the heart of the first of these reasons. It leaves the second intact, which is why, thanks to its massive user base, Napster has a bright future after all." If you doubted the commercialization of music, read this account by a musician named Thundergod, of the Rockfest in Chicago, July 22. Jason Levine gives Joel some passport trouble. Public Citizen did a study of threats to radio stations. Ready to ship? Shipping is hard work! The Radio UserLand software is worth the work. The early demos are going great. People really like it. We're going to open it up for an early beta round, Murphy-willing, later today, early tomorrow at the latest. It's time to jump out the door, no parachute, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go! Radio UserLand mail list at eGroups We started a mail list for Radio UserLand at eGroups. They do such a good job of running mail lists, they provide all the services we want, so what the heck, let's save some trouble and use their service. Jim Armstrong is cool! A few days ago he posted a review of Radio UserLand, only to discover that it hadn't shipped yet. Enthusiasm is good! I've known Jim for almost twenty years. So many people our age get cynical, thinking they've seen it all, but then bonk, something comes along, and all they see is bad news, but Jim sees something powerful, and power is exciting. As they used to say when we were young and they were old, "That's what keeps you young." Can you parse that sentence? "Buycotting" the music industry Napster's buycott page. Excellent. One of my bands, the Grateful Dead, is on the list of Napster supporters. I already have every CD they've come out with, but I think I'll buy $100 worth of Grateful Dead CDs this weekend, at Tower Records. I will tell the clerk that I'm doing it to support Napster.
Will Cate has a suggestion. Unwanted bloatware When I clicked on Jerry's picture, after the song downloaded, this weird piece of software came up and flashed a bunch of messages about it saving my music somewhere, and then it popped up this screen. Nowhere does it say who made the software or how it got on my hard drive. I don't like this very much. Hello, how did it get there? (Is this part of W2K?) Bob Crosley: "MusicMatch is pre-installed on all Dell's. It's a hideous piece of bloatware that takes over your associations for MP3, Windows Media and QuickTime."
Dan Gillmor: Do the Media Want to be Free? News.Com interview with Napster CEO Hank Barry. Keola Donaghy found an interesting poll at Billboard. When asked if they were willing to pay for downloaded music from Sony and EMI, 65.3 percent said "No, because you can find most of this music elsewhere online for free." Thanks to Lawrence Lee for pointing to this excellent Clay Shirky analysis of Napster and the RIAA from April of this year. "The RIAA-Napster suit feels like nothing so much as the fight over the national speed limit in the seventies and eighties. The people arguing in favor of keeping the 55-MPH limit had almost everything on their side -- facts and figures, commonsense concerns about safety and fuel efficiency, even the force of federal law. The only thing they lacked was the willingness of the people to go along." Dave Rogers found a Doug Engelbart article from 1966 where he described an outliner. It was a bit more crude than the one we implemented in 1980, but fourteen years is a long time. Today's Radio UserLand screen shot shows new symbology (is that a word?) for headlines that link to music on the local file system. The note symbol is a double-entendre, designed in the mid 90s for Clay Basket, where the note symbol indicated that there was a word processing "note" attached. One thing's for sure, the backend of Radio UserLand, which hasn't yet shipped, is wide open. Here's the first draft of the spec. There are two XML formats, and an XML-RPC call to register with the aggregator.
A loop-close and flip-flop. In May 1999, I wrote a piece called Edit This Page, which talked about Manila and what was then called Corazon, which became Pike and is now Radio UserLand. In that piece I said "Meet your new file menu," postulating that an Internet-aware writing tool would need a different File menu. Well, I changed my mind. Radio UserLand has a standard File menu. It still works with Manila as Pike did, without having to change the File menu. Sometimes it pays to change your mind, instead of changing a standard. Today's song: Come On Eileen. Andrew Wooldridge, who works on Mozilla, is doing an outliner for that scripting environment. (That's how I think of Mozilla.) I like it because it reads and writes the same files that Radio UserLand does. (Poetry in motion!) Phil Suh and Cameron Barrett started a content management mail list, which I joined. Phil also started a content management weblog. SF Chronicle: "Rodney O'Neal Austin, a statuesque gender blending artist included in the exhibition, greeted me with an air kiss and handed me an envelope. 'It arrived today,' he said with a melodramatic flourish. Not surprisingly, it was a letter from his landlord announcing the house he'd lived in for many years was up for sale." News.Com: "Deploying new software developed in the past six months, BrightPlanet estimates there are now about 550 billion documents stored on the Web." There's talk about boycotting the music industry, personally I think that rather than a boycott, it would be more appropriate to swamp them with money, in a public way. That would destroy the idea that the net is filled with pirates. There's a lot of buying power here. I don't think the Napster folks can ask people to do this, but I can. Shall we all meet at Tower Records on Saturday at 3PM, coast to coast, with our Visa cards out? (Maybe we should deliver the cash in trash bags?) Yesterday's survey heavily favored Napster. Only 9 percent said they would shut down Napster if they were the judge, a whopping 84 percent said "Keep it up." I'm getting lots of mail from people, some artists, about yesterday's DaveNet piece. I'm asking them all to post their thoughts on the discussion group on the Napster Weblog. Some people are venting, that's OK, but it's not OK to put words in my mouth, things I didn't say and don't believe. Listen first, please, it's a waste of time to argue with things I don't believe. Last night's Napster webcast is archived here: Windows Media - 56K, Windows Media - 28K, Real Audio - 56K.
Napster ordered to shut down DaveNet: The Thrill is Gone? Will Cate: "Just came over the news, at 4:55 pm PDT. Rest in peace, Napster. Let a thousand little Napster seedlings grow." Reports: News.Com, AP, Reuters. Dan Gillmor: "And I hold no particular brief for Napster, the company. It has been quick to assert remarkably heavy-handed protection of its own intellectual property, as the Wall Street Journal noted today." Dan, this is important, the WSJ got the story wrong. Napster did not hold onto the protocol. It's openly documented and they've helped the cloners. This is central to the Journal piece, it reeks of a smear, and they got the facts wrong. Scott Rosenberg: "Instead of going to court, of course, the music industry could be figuring out ways to use Napster to sell more music. After all, here's a piece of software that cultivates people's taste for new music and that appeals to the most dedicated fans. What a sales opportunity! " "Patel said the injunction will go into effect at 4PM Friday." At 7PM there will be a live webcast from Napster. (Did anyone listen to the webcast? Do you have a URL of the archive? I just get a recording saying it's over. Is it archived anywhere?) Peter Lubin: "For twenty years I had been an Artist & Repertoire executive at the major labels." In San Francisco today, Napster is in court, defending against a suit by the RIAA. I sent a good luck card to the people at Napster and Hummer-Winblad thanking them for believing in music on the Internet. If you love music, think good thoughts today, for the judge, and for the RIAA. It's still not too late for them to embrace music on the Internet. Napster.Com now has a service status page. WSJ: "The company may, through its rap anthem, appear to encourage a disdain for 'trade laws' where music is concerned, but it readily invokes those same laws when its own property is at stake." The Journal article also says: "Some have tried to figure out the workings of Napster’s internal protocols on their own. One of them, David Weekly, a Stanford University student, put a version of them on his personal Web site. Soon, he received an electronic message from Napster demanding that he take it down." This demands clarification. Whatever differences they may have had in the past, the Weekly site currently has the Napster spec. The spec is widely distributed around the Net. I asked Fanning and Kessler about this when I met with them last month and they said it's OK with them, and that they give advice on mail lists to Napster cloners. AP: Court showdown for Napster. News.Com: Napster trial won't end music industry headaches. If you were the judge? Survey: Shut down Napster? Joel on Passport Joel Spolsky: "Am I the only one who is terrified about Microsoft Passport? It seems to me like a fairly blatant attempt to build the world's largest, richest consumer database, and then make fabulous profits mining it." New.Com interview Kim Polese: "Our vision, putting it bluntly, is to be the Cisco of Internet infrastructure management. If you want to turn the Internet into a utility like water and electricity, you have to have a whole range of infrastructure and management processes." Is it perfect? I may have just written the perfect Web page. But it won't be this perfect for long. The marketing hype section will get filled in. Sorry sports fans! We've got our name Thanks for all the great product name suggestions! The best name was on the tip of our collective tongue. Too close to even see it. For some reason the word Radio has always had a magic ring to it. I knew that someday Scripting News would be a radio station. (So will your site, if you want it to be.) Radio radio radio. What's the root of the word? Radiate? Probably. A 1920s modernism. "Come on honey let's go make some noise!" "I'm going to be your number one, number one." Anyway, the name of the product is here. Yahoo! ImageReady I've got ImageReady running. It's a new version so it totally sucks, almost everything I learned is out the window. I'm a graphics-impaired user. Oy I hate Adobe. Whatever. But I'm using it. Now I can show you a screen shot of the new software. Note the queue is on the left. Those are the songs that are in my rotation right now. To take a song out just cut it. Copy-paste works too. On the right is my master playlist. It's got all the songs in it, categorized by artist. To add a song to the queue, just double-click. The next song to play is The Tide is High. I could change that by re-positioning the cursor. But I'm going to leave it right there because Blondie is so cooool. Morning playlists Observation. I like to start my mornings with female vocalists singing about love. But as the morning goes on, I like to listen to black male vocalists. Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Jimmy Cliff, BB King, Gil Scott-Heron. They mostly aren't singing about love (or maybe it's love of self). It's still great stuff. Is it cross-platform? Steve Ivy asks if Radio UserLand is cross-platform. Yes it is, but we're shipping for Windows first. It's impossible to explain why, before the software is released, but I try anyway in this DG message. Why does commercial radio suck so? Steven Spencer: "The first time I used Napster was something of a lightning strike, an epiphany; something that shattered my notions and created new thoughts. The world's biggest radio station. Only you're the program director." Brad Neuburg: "Oh yeah, if the scheduling programs traditional radio uses are so great, then why does commercial radio suck so much? There are millions of settings to help 'modulate the mood', but commercial radio has managed to flatten out music into nothing!" Today's song Chuck Berry: My Ding A Ling.
A new product in the pipe We're in the last stages of preparing a new product for market. It's the next step in the development of Pike, which we released as a free public beta in March of this year. The software works. I'm using it now. It does all the things that Pike did, but it does something new too. Now, we can't call the software Pike, because there is already a scripting language with that name, and scripting, while hidden from the end-user, plays a big role in the product. I also think it's good to re-think the name, because it forces me to think about what this product is today and what it's likely to be in the future. A good name will make sense now and in the future. So what does this unnamed product do? It's a personal radio station. Our software makes it easy for you to program music the way a DJ programs music (it's probably easier and more powerful than professional radio station software). Scroll through your music list, double-click on songs to add them to the queue. In the background, your servant, our software, is choosing songs from the queue and playing them. You can also add a list of songs to the queue with a single menu command. (The user interface is outlining.) You can have as many lists as you want, but there is only one queue. The software is also an HTTP server. You designate a folder that you want to share. Any playlists you put in that folder are available over the Web. Not the songs, we're not enabling MP3 sharing as Napster and others do. Just the playlists. Think about this as an Intranet application. Music in business. An untapped market, but a huge one imho. (Hint to the music industry, businesses generally pay for copyrighted material.) And this is also a www application, because there's interesting information in your playlist, especially when it's aggregated. The aggregator is not online yet. When it opens you'll see our favorite songs, literally, the songs that are most loved by people at UserLand. But then we'll open it for everyone to register their favorite songs, it will recalc once a day. The format it reads is a simple XML format, easily produced by any scripting language on any platform. We want to know what other people are listening to. So you can share more than your playlists, you can contribute to a new rating system for music. Let's find out what Internet users like to listen to. (BTW, all the playlists are XML too. Registration is handled through XML-RPC. Everywhere we've had a choice to be open or closed, we've chosen open. Our software is subject to competition. The user's data is not locked up in a proprietary format, quite the opposite.) And of course it gets deeper, but let's not go there now. I'm still trying to figure out how to name this thing! Here's why that's such a problem. Because all that I described is just an application of the product. A powerful application, for sure, and developed in record time because the platform is so rich. The key innovation is that all the power is hidden unless you want to see it. The software is as easy to use as a Web browser or Napster. To an end-user it's a simple way to edit a radio station, but to a developer, it can be much more, just lift the hood. It is a platform, and somehow the product positioning, if not its name, must reflect that. And dare I say it, it's a platform for P2P applications, which is the rage in Silicon Valley. We took a long-term view in 1997, and made a bet that the market would swing to distributed applications. We invested where the venture capitalists didn't want to invest. While they were selling e-commerce apps to Wall Street, we were developing a powerful platform for P2P. Now that won't mean too much to end-users, and it's risky because the financial community is so flaky, and even though distributed apps are the way to go, I may not want to latch onto the bandwagon. Anyway, I have to come up with a name soon. The software is almost ready to ship! Bravo! Rob Glaser, CEO of Real: "What Napster has done is create a benchmark on how easy the legitimate music experience has to be. It's gotta be pretty darn close to that easy." Apple Business Week's cover story is about Apple. Steven Levy: "They went berserk. The tech press seconded their enthusiasm, and even some of the technosnobs at Slashdot.org, a Web site catering to aficionados of the Linux system, expressed outright lust for the newest new thing. It looks like the coolest-looking computer ever just might keep Steve Jobs and Apple sailing along—until the next product launch." It's amazing that Levy can still get it up for 16-year old computer. News Salon: Eazel Does It. "The plan is to make money by getting Nautilus users to subscribe to add-on Eazel services -- things like software update notifications and Web-based data backups and storage."
NY Times: Amazon COO Splits for VerticalNet. On Stating the Obvious, Michael Sippey rebuts a recent Jakob Nielsen piece that says the end of Web design is at hand. News.Com: "We're all two or three clicks away from something illegal or from something someone doesn't like." What if? Barry Frankel asks What if Bill Gates had been a music executive? I think Barry is an optimist about Gates. My own opinion, of course, ymmv. (Your mileage may vary.) And there are some people who think that Gates already runs the music business. Jim Burger pointed out yesterday that the IT industry is an order of magnitude larger than the music industry. If it had been the other way around, we probably wouldn't have writeable CD drives. Spawn of the Devil? Gary Robinson asks "Instead of arguing that Jeff Bezos is the spawn of the Devil, maybe it would make sense to see whether he'd be willing to license the affiliate patent or one-click patent for a nominal charge?" There are a lot of frivolous patents, if we had to negotiate with each one, we'd spend all our time negotiating, lawyer to lawyer, and not spend time writing software. Bezos and his brethren probably don't care because they don't practice any art, other than getting in the middle and stopping competitive businesses. There's no honor in that, imho. Spawn of the Devil? Maybe. Greedy? Yes, this is what greed means to me.
DaveNet: Do you know Stephen King? News.Com: "We have a generation of computer jockeys that we've raised on Napster and MP3 who have gotten the idea, the mistaken idea, that everything in the store is free," King said. "And I'd like to see if we can't reeducate these people to the idea that the fruits of talent cost you money." Grrrr. NY Times: King Novel Falls Short. "William Thornton, president of Radiant Ideas, which maintains www.stephenking.com, said that some visitors to the Web site objected to the intallment plan. He said that about a quarter of visitors to the Web site declined to download the chapter." Steve Wozniak's comments on the King piece. Beverly Hills Weekly: Should Napster be shut down? Jim Burger: A Lawyer's Musings on Napster. Jim is a friend, an attorney who has been at the center of the issues around music, law and technology, as Apple's lawyer in Washington and later as part of the Secure Digital Music Initiative. He and I have been emailing, and I asked him to post his thoughts publicly. Thanks Jim! Jimmy Guterman: Why Labels Should Love Napster. "Should the recording industry stop its attack, it will realize that Napster is giving the music business media attention and something it has desperately needed for years: a purpose on the Net." Motley Fool: Does Napster Herald the Dark Ages? News.Com: "'The music industry will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, oppose any foe to protect the integrity of their copyrights and the copyrights of their artists,' he said, borrowing excerpts from a speech by President John F. Kennedy." Too bad. LA Times: Tech Talent Turns Tables on Labels. "In the biggest cultural and economic battle the entertainment industry has faced, record labels have managed to transform themselves into a creaky, fuddy-duddy playground that young techies view as the Lawrence Welk of today's music employers." Todd Spangler: The Napster Mirage. Susan Kitchens is struggling with the Manila docs to figure out how News Items work. I wish it were easier too. Ralph Hempel reports on imaging tools he uses. Go.Com open sourced their content management tools. Barry Frankel: "What if the monks who had spent their lives hand-copying bibles had tried to stop Gutenberg from printing bibles?" I'm researching product names again, and my travels lead me to Purina's Cat Chow site, which is excellent, very respectful and clued-in. They start from a position that's supportable. We love cats. If you have one, here's the information you need to have good relationship with your cat. We like to complain about sites that suck, here's one that doesn't. I'm looking for one or two people with Manila experience to help with the Napster weblog. I spoke with Chuck Shotton yesterday, it had been a long time. His team is not working in Java now, they're using C++. Why? Java is not WORA anymore says Chuck. When did that change? I asked. A couple of weeks ago when Microsoft pulled it out of Visual Studio. I guess Chuck saw it coming? Truckin: "What a long strange trip it's been." Another moment of serendipity. Looking for "Where did the love go?" by Roberta Flack, I found "Where did our love go?" by the Supremes. Never heard of it. Downloaded it. And wow, it's an old Supremes favorite. "Baby baby ooh baby baby." Inspiration is never far away A couple of weeks ago, clicking on Bowie songs, I must have also decided to download his Little Drummer Boy duet with Bing Crosby. I'm listening to it in the middle of summer in California, far away from the time of this piece. "It's a pretty thing," Bing says. So true! Close but no cigar AP: Stephen King offers online novel. "It could be a scary venture for publishers, who were eliminated from the process in this latest cyberspace venture." It almost goes without saying that I like this a lot. It's a route-around of the first order. Nuke the middlemen, like this one.. Wired interviews Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. "Patents are not intended for defensive purposes only. The intent of the system is to give innovators a window to recoup their research and development costs, 20 years from the date of filing or 17 years from the date of issue, whichever is longer." Oh my god, there's a bug in King's process. He wants me to go to Amazon to pay for it. No way. 2/28/00: No More Pesos for Senor Bezos. The last King book I read, Hearts in Atlantis, a remembrance of the 60s, with the usual King supernatural twist. Getting real I could skip a Stephen King novel. If this is Hollywood's answer to Napster, try again. One more thing. "Ask not what the Internet can do for you.."
DaveNet: The Last Napster Sunday? An addendum to today's piece, about Macster. If you run Microsoft Outlook Express, download and install this patch. It protects your computer, it's very important. NY Times: "Since the exit of John McCain, who managed to make campaign finance reform seem romantic, it's been hard to find real human passion anywhere but on a fictional TV drama. It's impossible to tell what George W. Bush and Al Gore really care about, besides not making mistakes." AP: Website posts secret CIA papers. Susan Kitchens found, to her chagrin, that one of the pages on her site was the top hit in the Google search for Lake George. Brad Pettit: The Issue is Honesty. Keola Donaghy: Why haven't we heard from more artists? WaSP: Open Letter to Netscape. If AOL wanted to be in the browser business wouldn't it be evident by now? Another cooool Bryan Bell theme. Kate Adams reports: "Hooray! The unofficial Iron Chef website is back after a month of dealing with lawyers." The curse of Adobe I finally got a new copy of ImageReady, it's bundled with PhotoShop. OK, stick the CD into the computer. It shows up on the desktop. Launch the app, click on PhotoShop. "Prove that you have a valid copy," says the software. (I have a serial number ready, but that's not one of the options.) They want me to find an installation on my hard drive. It's on the other computer, the one I'm going to erase and turn into a server. I show it to it. It's not happy. No ImageReady. Call customer support for help. Oh sure. Like I have time for that. Hey, I paid for the software. I just want to do some friggin screen shots. Against my better judgment Josh Allen sent me a .reg file, and says if I 2click it, Microsoft Paint will save GIFs and JPEGs. I held my breath, cursed Adobe three times, and 2clicked. Launch Paint. And voila, they're there. Now can they save? Yes, in a manner of speaking, esp if you like a green tint randomly smattered on everything. AFAIK, neither Microsoft or Adobe have caught up with the Web. Sorry guys. You get 0 points each, and a negative 100 points for lack of teamwork. How could it be that a developer such as myself can't save a stinking GIF to a file on my local hard drive. It's 2000, not 1995. According to these companies, the Web likes green tints, or I didn't really pay for the software I paid for. It's very late.
Saturday with Blondie Blondie is singing to me tonight. "Dave, Dave, Dave, let's have some fun, I'm going to be your number one. The tide is high but I'm holding on, I'm going to be your number one." New feature in our still unnamed playlist editor. Put the cursor on a song. Choose Google Search from the Playlist menu. A browser window opens with the results of the search. It almost always gives you the song lyrics as the first item. I've yet to stump Google. (Here's an example of a query.) When the music industry comes to its senses, and decides to like their users again, they can make it up to us by shipping CDs with MP3s on them. Help the hardware industry transition to the new format. Sales will double. What a relief, we're not at war anymore. Doc Searls: "Hold it right there. Don't move. Now put down the customer and step away from the marketplace." BTW, we bought a sexy name for a new site we're working on. It'll live up to its name for sure. First we're going to tell it what our favorite songs are. Then we're going to make it easy for you to do the same. And your friends, and so on. Is it viral? Do people read charts? What's number one on Napster? No one knows, not even Napster. Let's find out! Today's Other Song Harry Chapin: "We both got what we asked for such a long long time ago." A beautiful song about lost love. Explanation: When I say "beautiful" it means it reached something inside me, resonated, and opened space for an emotional release. A fairly technical description for tears running down my face and a feeling of truth, resolution, relaxation, happiness. A memory of young love, there's nothing more sweet, except perhaps the young love itself. Someone else had a similar experience, and at an emotional (ie real) level, it calls my own procedure, and I'm young again, in love with a fresh young woman (one my own age) and we're dancing, dreaming and loving; happy beyond anything I could imagine. I think of the young people with Napster, what an incredible gift for them. I wonder if any of them are exploring the music of their parents' generation. If so, perhaps you can give us older folk pointers to music your generation creates that you think we'd like. But wait a few months, we're still exploring our youth, next I'll want to explore yours. The generational connect It's obvious. Napster was created by a young man, only 19 years old. What a privilege to have lived long enough to relish a revolution whose courage came from such a young man! Speaking of young men I just got an email from Joel Spolsky who has a new essay entitled Microsoft Goes Bonkers. I can't wait to read it. "If you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all." After reading all the way through, thanks for the kind words Joel. I forwarded a URL to a friend at Microsoft who does understand what you're saying. Now if they would listen to him. There's no time like now Next Wednesday there's a good chance that Napster's servers will be shut down, or their service curtailed. If so, then that's what was meant to be. Of course the IP issues are murky. But the application is so compelling, speaking for my generation, which controls the money in the music business, can't we find some way for everyone to be happy? Music is about so much more than money. It provides context for humans to be loving and to share. Without music to write about, I'd have to inch up to the core questions, one slow step at a time,. What's common about our life patterns, how are we all alike? Every generation has to figure this out for itself, many times through our lifetimes. A vote for romance and glory. Music opens the door so wide. No matter what happens Everything changed, again. We're working on a new server, this morning I wrote about its privacy policy. "The purpose of uploading your information is to share it with others. There will be a privacy policy clearly stated in many places so you can't miss it. The information you flow out this way is public, one hundred percent, no privacy." That's the Web philosophy, as concisely stated as I've ever seen it. Could the statement have been so concise if it had not been for Napster?
Napster users buy more music News.Com: "People who use Napster and other file-swapping networks to trade MP3 files are more likely to boost their music spending than those who don't use such services, according to a new study from Internet research firm Jupiter Communications." Pointers du jour Frontier 6.2.1 released. Change notes. A free upgrade to all with current subscriptions. David Simms: Tales of Woz's Genius. Jake Savin: "Most artists never make money from touring." Just for fun I put a comment on Macromedia on this News.Com page. They now have a place for reader comments. Good idea. I just was interviewed by Wired magazine, they're doing a story on Philippe Kahn. I explained to the reporter what Turbo Pascal and Sidekick were. At one point I said, with a avuncular chuckle, "I feel as if you should be sitting on my knee as I tell the story." We both had a good laugh. Dan Gillmor: "No one should have been surprised that Napster moved so quickly from the fringe to the middle, not in retrospect. Yet most of us didn't see it coming until it was already over, at least those of us over 25." Bryan Bell's Basic Blog Theme is now available on UserLand-hosted Manila sites. I asked for this theme on Sunday, requesting a "basic black dress" for a news-oriented Blog. Linux.Com interviews Zope's Ethan Freeman. "We're an integrated environment, which has a lot of advantages if you work within the environment. It's strongly object-oriented, which means that it has a better chance at longevity than almost anything else out there, because if it's HTML objects today and SOAP objects tomorrow, it's still the same underlying platform." Red Herring: Pop goes the Eazel. "I'd say we're quite a lot different than the latest online leather exchange." A conference in October? I'm playing around with ideas for my own conference. We have a hotel in Palo Alto reserved for a full day in early October. We can have as many as 500 people, I think; perhaps more. It'll cost money, and it won't be cheap (I want everyone to eat well, and have great audio visual stuff, lots of giveaways). My working title for the conference is "Visionaries". People who really have a vision, something that they want everyone else to do, for fun, not to control them. If you speak at the conference you have to agree to a simple statement like that. If you can't well, maybe we can talk about that, on stage, in front of an audience. Then I thought maybe it makes more sense to call it "Dave's Competitors 2000". Then in 2001 I'd have a conference with my competitors that year. This would encourage people to compete with me. It's tricky because it gives me what I really want, movement, progress, parachute-less plane jumping. People are sending me ideas for people they'd like to have speak. Some really good ideas, like Phil Greenspun, Steve Wozniak, even Bill Gates. Your suggestions are welcome, self-nomination is OK too. Telegraphy For me, today is one of the most exciting days in my software career. As I said yesterday, we're working on software that plays music. All you need is a folder with MP3s in it. From there, we make it possible to build playlists by pointing and clicking, drag and drop. Where Napster's playlist is single-dimensional, ours is multi-dimensional. Now get this, I'm using it. And.. It's fantastic! George Harrison Crackerbox Palace: "We've been expecting you." Three domain names I wish I had grabbed fantastic.com, fan-tastic.com, fan-tas-tic.com. Complaint of the day Why doesn't Microsoft's Paint accessory save as GIF or JPEG? I see a big hole, Microsoft has a sub-menu of the Start menu called Microsoft Web Publishing. Why aren't there all kinds of goodies that real Web publishers use? Someone isn't paying attention here. I'd give you a screen shot, but since Imageready doesn't work on W2K, can't do it today. Workin on it. (Microsoft missed an oppty to get me hooked on their tools, again.) Microsoft shoots itself in foot? Wired: Applause for IE's Cookie Catcher. "The additions for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser will describe cookies to the user and differentiate between first- and third-party cookies, Microsoft said. The browser will then let the user refuse third-party cookies." Since my sites don't use any third-party cookies, and since I'd prefer if advertisers didn't know all my personal preferences, I applaud this move. However, Microsoft has a split mind on this, as an email from an unnamed source within Microsoft indicates. "Brad Chase and his team gave them an earful." Fantastic insight into the innards of an 800-pound gorilla. Screen shot of the Microsoft cookie feature. Bryant Durrell started a thread on this topic. Heather's mirror Heather Champ has a neat page of mirror shots. She started with pictures of herself taken in a mirror. If I had a face as beautiful as hers, I would do the same. She sent an email asking if I would submit my own picture for her collection; I had never thought of doing that! Of course. Always happy to oblige. God bless them filters Cam: "If Microsoft wants to evangelize the .NET concept to the OSS community, then why didn't they have a booth? Why were there virtually no Microsoft representatives at the conference? I didn't see any at all." Dave: "Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft. It's like reducing Europe to Heathrow. It is the biggest airport, for sure. So what." We talk over each others' heads. This happened in the Mac community in the late 80s and early 90s. All the developers wanted to do deals with Apple. I had a different idea. Let's do deals with each other. It didn't work. I can't tell you how many times deals were killed just because some random Apple person called the other developer and said we'd prefer if you didn't work with each other. Deal over. In an instant. A mirror into the past Here's a Stanford website that describes the early history of the Macintosh. Epiphany I was searching for a symphony by Charles Ives, and instead I found folk songs by Burl Ives. My father used to have an album of Burl Ives folk songs when I was a very young child. So I 'm listening to Big Rock Candy Mountain right now, and it begins, "Oh the buzzing of the bees and the cigarette trees, the soda water fountain. Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings in that big rock candy mountain." Now anyone who's worked with me knows I always type "Oh the buzzing of the bees, and the sycamore trees, a soda water fountain" where most developers type "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country." When you're working on writing tools, that's how you test them. You always need a phrase to test with. Now I knew they were the lyrics to an old song from my deep past, but I honestly never thought I'd hear it again. Next song, Goober Peas! Peas peas peas peas peas, nothing so delicious, eating Goober Peas! I think it was my favorite song when I was three years old, if you can believe that. Moral of the story. Kids are silly, therefore they like silly songs. Good news, my three year old is still in there and he's still silly. He's laughing right now. A happy kid. That's cool.
Outlines in XML New Frontier verbs, op.outlineToXml and op.xmlToOutline. ("op" stands for "outline processor".) These verbs serialize and de-serialize outlines, in a new format called outlineDocument. It's also the format we're using to serialize Scripting News. We also started an archive of the outlines. Starting today, there's a place to get back issues of Scripting News in outlineDocument format. Also, if you have comments on the spec, please reply to this discussion group message. 933 Mhz My new machine arrived. I'm running it now. So far so good. I haven't yet experienced its fastness. I expect that to happen when I run some scripts. Now it just seems like a new empty machine, I have to get all my software set up. As we installed the new machine, I said to Bierman, pointing to stacks of CDs that cost thousands of dollars, "I wish I could just throw these in the trash." Not yet, but sooon, I hope. I also switched to DSL, the T1 is now dangling in space, a safety net in case the DSL is too flaky to use. DSL is slower, but a lot cheaper. It now takes approx 20 seconds for me to save my outline on the server, where it used to take about two. Another difference, I'm running Windows 2000 on my desktop. Unfortunately ImageReady doesn't work on this OS, there's a new release I still have to get. So don't expect new images on Scripting News until that outage clears. BTW, it's a Dell. We eventually made contact with them at a professional level. We had been buying from the "wrong part" of Dell, they said. Now we buy from the right part. I still have no idea what that means, except that when there are problems they fix them. That's all I can ask for I guess, except I wanted the same for Scripting News readers, but they had no idea what I was talking about A very crude benchmark of the performance of the machine, probably only meaningful to Frontier people. As if that wasn't silly enough, here's another crude test. Today's song Mountain: Mississippi Queen. A gritty down-home Louisiana hard rocker. Today's idea CD ROM burners at Internet cafes around the world. Napster. Fast net connection. Per-hour fee. Tunes to go. (Now that I'm on DSL I'm coming up with ideas on how to rent bandwidth. I think there may be such a thing as virtual bandwidth. If the net result is I don't wait for something to happen, I can make DSL work for me. I think this is an important point. For this reason I'm glad I have a slower net connection. It'll make my software better. Yeah I already totally hate it. I'm just saying this to try to make me like it more.) Today's bug Just so you know, we're working on a music player program. It's got a really neat bug. It's possible to play two songs at once. Right now I'm listening to Hey Jude overlayed on 10CC's I'm Not In Love. I've never heard anything like it. I think I like it. It's even worse than I thought. I had two copies of 10CC running, out of synch with each other. So there were echoes that were hard to pick up. I found this out when I shut down one of the players. There was still a copy playing. Paul Nakada sent a pointer to The Tactile12000, a "3-D, interactive simulation of a DJ setup - two turntables and a mixer. You can crossfade, backspin, and speed up and slow down music, including full-length WAVE and MP3 songs, on your computer." Top-Level Tech Links o' the Day Edd Dumbill released a new beta of XML-RPC for PHP. Wes traces the history of Unix with an ironic twist. Why not take PythonWorks 1.0.1 for a test drive? Or you could poison their drinking water In tomorrow's NY Times, a letter to the editor with an idea that I've heard from a (nameless) former music industry exec. "Recording companies and publishers could produce virus-laden versions of their copyrighted material for less-than-legitimate distribution sources on the Internet." It's a good thing it's technically impossible; I believe they would do it if they could. Napster news News.Com: Movie studios sue Scour. "The lawsuit is sure to send waves through Hollywood. High-profile agent Michael Ovitz, who has represented many of the movie industry's top stars and has helped shift the balance of power between actors and studios, is one of the leading investors in Scour." Christoph Pingel says Rapster really works. Mac only. NY Times: "Tens of thousands of aspiring rock stars are happily using the technology to give their music away -- and more than a few are beginning to see some payoff." News.Com interviews RIAA chief Hilary Rosen. "Innovation is certainly here to stay. Peer-to-peer is here to stay. There are lots of interesting uses for it. But I do think that the people who want to commercialize it have an obligation to help develop those business models. I don't think it should always be our obligation to come and hit someone on the head and say, 'Hi, remember us? We're making the stuff that your people want to use your great technology for.'" TechWeb: Software industry feels threatened by Napster. "Jack Krumholtz, Microsoft's director of federal government affairs and associate general counsel, told a congressional panel that the threat of software piracy and revenue losses as a result of software being swapped via technology like Napster is real and is a concern for Microsoft and the industry at large." AP: Bertelsmann buys CDNow for $117 Million. "For CDNow, the deal ends a search for a merger partner that began in March when a deal with the direct-sales music club Columbia House fell apart. CDNow has suffered the fate of many Internet companies this spring, seeing its stock tumble to a fraction of its offering price as investor enthusiasm dwindled." More links on The Napster Weblog. Is P2P just hype? On the decentralization mail list, Lucas Gonze asked if P2P was just hype, or is there any substance to the idea of running a server on your desktop? I believe there is substance, and explained as follows. It's the joy of running a server. (Without the pain.) The first joy is watching the hits come in and wondering who all those people are. In Napster the hits don't come very fast, it takes a long time for most people to download a song. It's cool because you can really ponder who the person is. And even better, you can ask them! (Napster has integrated chat, most web servers don't, a shame.) I recognize this as a meditation I used to do with WebSTAR. I'd sit down in front of the server (it was in a different room) and watch the log scroll, wondering who these people are, coming from so far away, or from powerful companies, reading some obscure howto on the Frontier site, or whatever. It's the other side of writing, watching people surf your site. A very small percentage of us have had the oppty to do this, but what a useful meditation it is. The other cool thing about running a server, that Napster does not address, is the convenience of editing content. On my old Mac server (now long gone) I used to entertain my friends by opening the home page of my site in BBEdit. I'd change a word, press Cmd-S, and then refresh the web browser. "That's easy!" my friend would say, yes, it's almost magical. Instead of 18 steps to update your site, or even 3, it's 1. There's no more convenient way to edit for the Web than to have a server on your machine. Then it's a small matter to have the changes percolate up when you want to disconnect. We're adapting Pike to that model now. Open Source sheltered? CamWorld reports from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey CA. "Surprisingly there is very little extended discussion about Microsoft and their .NET initiative. Part of me chalks this up to it being a very open source kind of crowd who learned a long time ago how to live without Microsoft and their products. Another part of me thinks it's because Microsoft is purposely being very vague about the whole concept and people aren't willing to make any bets on it yet." Cam, I have a different theory. I offered to come talk about Dot-Net. Never got a response. Something else is going on there. My theory is that Open Source is a world unto itself, like the Mac, or Windows, or CORBA; and not open to ideas that come from outside their community. (See Tim Bray's comment, below.) There are some great minds behind that firewall, and if it were truly open to new ideas there would be a mission that would tie all the work together in ways with great meaning for users. I had hoped that by now we'd all be working together on such a mission. Cam, please keep the reports coming, try to go a little deeper if you can, ask questions about the larger world, see if there's an idea for what Open Source will mean to users, not just to developers. And if you don't hear it there, my best advice, based on a lot of years in this business, is to broaden your horizons beyond the limits of the Open Source community. PS: I'm sure my friends at Microsoft are having a good chuckle about this. All the time we were developing SOAP I was telling them that I hoped to get the Open Source world to come eat their lunch. Ha ha! PPS: More thoughts in the DG. Tim Bray's comment on Open Source "Open Source may be great but it's not imaginative. "All OSSers do is take ideas that have already proven to be useful and workable (Unix, Web servers, programmable text editors, SOAP) and re-implement them with a different (arguably better) engineering process. "For the OSS community, ignoring .NET is a sensible approach because: (a) it's too hard to understand what .NET is, and (b) OSS only reacts to actual software, not vaporous statements of direction, and (c) if it turns out that parts of it work, then someone will get around to rebuilding those parts on OSS lines." Vive la difference The Open Source world seems so far away from the Mac world, where the color of your CPU is a fashion statement. BTW, there must not be many Mac developers at the Open Source Convention, since MacWorld Expo is going on right now in New York.
Today's *really* big news
5/6/98: "The dog is cool, and Taco Bell owns him, for a while. Then some ad guy at some agency realizes that he could get a dog too and that dog could eat dog food and like all dogs that we love, the dog farts. Yay!" I'll miss you, my little Mexican friend! Thanks for the credit! But.. Upside: "Companies like UserLand Software, which develops content management software for Web publishers, have perfected systems for easy upgrades: with UserLand's Frontier, the user simply clicks on 'Update' in a menu." This reminds me of a story. In 1983, I got a call from a fact-checker for NY Times' columnist William Safire. He was doing a column on words the computer industry had introduced into the English language. I found out later that Safire is considered authoritative on these matters. They wanted to verify that I had coined the term "laptop", since I had the first usage of the term in an article I co-authored with my brother in Byte. I said no, I didn't invent the term, I had heard it used by Esther Dyson. I still got a mention in the column, but what if I had just said yes? So many other people would have, I learned later in my career. Anyway, in that spirit, I decided we should have one-click updates after seeing a demo of Windows 98, which had the feature. So credit for inventing this, as far as I'm concerned, goes to Microsoft. On the other hand, we're doing more of this kind of stuff in future products, as you can see people really like easy updating. (Me too!) BTW, the feature is implemented with XML-RPC. Another BTW, it got even easier in 6.1. You just click a checkbox in the Control Panel, and updates happen automatically around midnight local time. What about P2P? Yesterday I threw in the towel, and decided to go crazy with everyone else. P2P all the way! However, it's not about P2P, specifically, that people should be getting excited. It's the realization that there's a lot more than a dumb terminal and a dumb human at the end of the net connection.
It's quite possible to use the Internet to store user-authored stuff, with no compromise to anyone's intellectual property, and for those applications, having a central server is kinder to the Internet. Don't misunderstand, I *love* the idea of a distributed Internet, but you still have to have common resources. Servers are still important. Evhead is blissing out on AppleSoup P2P crap. "Supposedly, they're going to take the concept of Napster and incorporate payment schemes so people can do legitimate copying. But then what is the point of the peer-to-peer thing? If I'm going to pay for content, I want to download it from a server with a high speed connection -- not from some random person's PC, who might go offline at any moment." Oh the bliss of enlightenment. The problem is two-fold. Evan has a brain, and integrity. Hard to get excited over this deal CNET buys ZDNet. As far as I know, neither publication has an editorial page, so there's no place to turn for an internal comment, perspective or point of view on this deal. What was ZDNet? I was confused. It's a remnant of Ziff-Davis, one of the pioneers of the PC era, however some of the magazines are not part of ZDNet. Tucker Goodrich: "CNET is buying all of Ziff-Davis, except for the tradeshow business, which will be spun-off to ZD shareholders. CNET is also buying ZDNet, which is the Internet businesses of ZD, and is 83.9% owned by ZD. the remainder of ZDNet is publicly traded." Tim Bray: "Looks to me like the interesting part of that story is that Seybold is independent again, if I read it correctly." As far as I'm concerned, neither publication broke out of the mold of the computer industry press. Their articles are often quotable, and helpful for breaking news, but they usually get just soundbites, and rarely go deeper than the surface. Wired: Why CNET bought ZDNet. MacInTouch is here Earlier today I ran a survey here asking if people could get through to MacInTouch. I couldn't get through, but most other people could. Even so, Apple's hardball tactics with independent journalists are not welcome. In the big picture a company's supposed right to keep its products secret is not a publicly guaranteed right comparable with the right to free speech. Given a choice, I'd prefer to know what MacInTouch thinks; I have little regard for company press releases. BTW, Apple enthusiasts can be really tough. They get so personal so quickly. Their efforts to keep people intimidated backfire, they drive us away. FYI, there is foundation for believing Apple plays hardball with independent journalists. Imho, this is a much bigger story than more megahertz, or a new mouse or keyboard or form factor. OK, just to show that I'm a reasonable person, let me argue this from an Apple point of view. And a rebuttal, from my own pov. For Apple news I recommend AppleSurf. Speaking of Macs Emailing with Woz today about Napster, I said "The Mac is behind in this area. We must help Napster get their Mac version working. Think of all the musicians that use Macs. They don't know how cool it is." He said: "There is Macster. My son uses it but I had horrible problems one night. I'd create an account and the password I created would be declared incorrect when I tried to log on, except for two times. I haven't tried it this week, but I'll give them another chance soon." Reading his site, I learned that the big banner on the side of Apple, facing 280, is not Woz. He says: "It's Francis Ford Coppola, whom I resemble." Wow! I was fooled too. Open Source Convention Right now the O'Reilly Open Source Convention is going on in Monterey, CA. Are you there? It's been very quiet, haven't seen any reports. If you're there, please post a report on the discussion group and I'll link to it tomorrow. What's going on? Tell us more. Tell us something. Or don't. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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