Scripting News

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 03:01:35 GMT

Don Park posted a note about big binary objects as RSS items. I suggested he look into enclosures in RSS. If you have Radio running, there's a page of prefs for enclosures. The feature was introduced in RSS 0.92. Enclosures are powerful but brain-dead simple. Read up on them, there's a new distribution model, one that gets rid of the click-wait for large media objects. Adam Curry turned me on to the idea over deli food in NYC. It's brilliantly simple. Virtual bandwidth. (BTW, I got a note a few days ago that ESPN is using RSS enclosures in a new app. So the feature didn't go completely unnoticed. ";->")

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 02:37:48 GMT

The NY Times posits that an All-California World Series is good for the stock market as long as it's North-South. "In 1989, the two Northern teams squared off, with the Giants losing to the Athletics. So intense was that competition that the ground shook, and the series was delayed by a severe earthquake."

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 02:39:47 GMT

4/24/95: "I'm a mystic when it comes to baseball. Living in California, I'm also a mystic when it comes to earthquakes."

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 01:08:54 GMT

What is Ridiculously Easy Group Forming?

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 23:19:58 GMT

Kasia is a software engineer at tickets.com, where World Series tickets were supposedly on sale today. "The pipe to the net just couldn't stand the traffic," she says. "It wasn't the servers, it was somewhere before that."

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 02:14:19 GMT

News.Com: "Tickets.com spokeswoman Melissa Zukerman acknowledged the problems."

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 23:12:51 GMT

Don Park: "I hate XML Namespaces."

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 20:51:14 GMT

Bing! Jake got two bleacher tickets for Thurs and offered me one. Excellent. So I'm going to at least one game (unless someone sweeps, it's game 5). There's also a possibility of a seat for Saturday in Anaheim. I'll do that too.

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 20:46:07 GMT

Bret Fausett: "In preparation for the Shanghai meeting, Thomas Roessler is aggregating all of the icann-related weblogs."

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 18:20:27 GMT

Scoble: "All tickets for the World Series are now sold out."

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 17:37:28 GMT

John VanDyk: "I'd be interested in talking privately with anyone who is using RSS successfully within a knowledge domain. I'm putting together a session for a national symposium in April on RSS."

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 16:45:22 GMT

Douglas Bowman: "One user wants one thing, another user wants it the exact opposite." I've noticed that too. ";->"

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 16:36:28 GMT

Mark Pilgrim: "Seamless inline editing (like WYSIWYG HTML mode in IE/Win) is apparently being held up by an internal flame war among the Mozilla developers."

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 15:29:15 GMT

Okay I gotta say it. I'm looking for four tickets to any World Series game at Pac Bell Park. Failing that, I'll take one ticket to any game. I really want to go the Series this year. I'd like to take three friends. We can't afford the scalper prices. We can probably go as high as $250 per seat. So if you appreciate Scripting News, and want to help out an old baseball fan, send me an email. Thanks!

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 13:58:25 GMT

Wired: "A controversial portion of digital copyright law will get a public airing next month."

It's the software, dummy!

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 13:35:09 GMT

Markoff: "At this year's Agenda conference, traditionally an upbeat gathering of the computer and Internet industries' elite, attendance was low and the mood even lower. Executives engaged in a hunt for the bottom of the decline with few seeing even a hint of new growth on the horizon."

Here's my pledge to growth in the Valley. I'm refinancing my house and taking out a bit of extra money, and I'm going to use $2,000 of that to buy a new multi-gigahertz laptop to run some software that Bill Gates has never even heard of. It's mission-critical for me, and it would love more gigahertz.

In Andy Grove's Valley of Death they only buy software from Bill, and he ran out of new ideas when he drove Lotus out of business. Or was it Novell? What our industry needs more than anything is software to soak up those cycles productively and not just for games. But there have to be features that drive adoption. Markoff's story concludes that it may have been the music industry that sparked the doldrums in computers. That, and Microsoft's software monopoly. Moore's Law continues to rage on, but there's no software to soak up the cycles. Or is there?

Kevin Werbach and Dan Shafer said it so well yesterday. It's so recursive. It's staring you in the face. Get a weblog and do your readers a favor, let them know where the next round of growth is going to come from. Andy Grove, it must be great to have so many accomplishments. Encourage the young people at Intel to get out more and stop looking to Microsoft for all the new software. Fund the resurrection of software in the Valley. You need us to sell more hertz, and that's what you sell. Right? Let's pop the stack back to the 70's when we did technology in Silicon Valley. Software, software, software, that should be our mantra.