Scripting News

Is Leopard-on-Vaio real or just a stupid pet trick?

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 04:31:32 GMT

I've heard that people have been able to run Leopard on non-Apple hardware. When I travel it feels silly to lug a 20-pound laptop with me. If Apple sold something in a Sony Vaio form, I probably would buy it within minutes. Why wait? So here's the question. Is Leopard on non-Apple hardware a serious enough idea to make it worth: 1. Buying a Vaio for this purpose. 2. Risking taking it to Europe and leaving the MacBook Pro home.

Making a happy developer house

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:36:43 GMT

My first essays were mostly about development platforms, the Internet, and how its open and easy protocols were routing around the messes created by alliances between the various tech leaders of the day. One of those pieces, Platform is Chinese Household, drew the analogy between platforms and ancient Chinese families. A successful platform, I theorized, was like a plural marriage. One husband, many wives. One platform vendor, many developers.

If you look at the successful platforms, most of them were completely open to anyone who wanted to make products for them. The best platforms were so open that people used the products to develop other products. You could do that on the Apple II, the IBM PC. Then came the Internet, where the duality was incredible. The Internet was an essential development tool, already, before any users came along. On the other hand, the most unsuccessful platforms have been the ones that were exclusive clubs, where only some people could develop. Sometimes they start exclusive and then become open, I'm thinking of the Macintosh, where I was lucky enough to be one of the insiders in 1983 who were seeded with development units. It was very good for recruiting, and it created a lot of buzz for us when it shipped, but the Mac didn't really blossom until 1986, after it had been openly available as a dev platform for two years. So I still don't know of a single example of an exclusive platform that worked. Yet companies still try to launch them, ignoring history, and hoping that they can control who gets to make their platform a winner.

Some examples of spectacular losers that were closed at birth: General Magic's MagicCap and Steve Jobs's NeXT. And today we have the iPhone, which is totally a closed box, with a very exclusive developer proposition. I had hoped that Google's phone platform, which was announced last week, would be the antidote for iPhone, but they are being exclusive about who they will let develop for it. I had hoped they would zig to Apple's zag, and would be completely open. Yet there are rumors that there are 50,000 gPhones out there with developers. I promise you, I don't have one. If I get one a year from now, I'm going to be less enthusiastic about trying to prove my ideas on their platform than I would be if I were among the first to get my hands on one.

In 1994 I suggested that developer relations is a mating ritual, if so, giving flowers to 50,000 developers and leaving the rest of us to wonder why we don't get a chance, is not good love-making. Same with OpenSocial. Their campfires and marshmallows show that they understand that love is an important part of making a platform happen, but who was invited to their slumber party, and who wasn't? I think at this point in the evolution of their platform business, they would do better to if they were more open and inclusive -- save the parties for celebrating the birth of the babies, the products the developers create. Spread the seed far and wide, or don't spread it at all. I think that's the lesson of the Internet, of Apple and IBM, and General Magic and NeXT.

Happy 11/11/07

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 17:43:58 GMT

Today is eleven eleven oh seven.

A date of alliteration. (Or is it assonance? Consonance?)

Just say it out loud. It's fun!

Yo Valleywag

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 06:04:41 GMT

Kind of amazing this pic hasn't shown up on Valleywag, given their obsession with Scoble.

Creative Commons -- attribution, share-alike license.

Sore Wii arm

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 01:20:38 GMT

I love Wii bowling.

My arm and shoulder are sore.

There must be good exercise games for the Wii.

Got any recommendations?

Davos Envy

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 01:18:55 GMT

I noted that Mike Arrington is going to Davos this year. I know another blogger who got an invite (not sure if he wants me to say). Now I wish I was a little less fame-averse. I had a great time in Davos in 2000. I'd love to go again. Oh well.

The official answer: I wouldn't go if they invited me. If you believe that, I have a nice bridge to sell you. Cheap!

Fandom on Facebook

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 01:10:58 GMT

I became a fan of the NY Times on Facebook.

This is very interesting!

I should have a fan page for Scripting News.

Wonder how to do?

I took their news quiz, got all the answers right. They said I guessed, but I didn't, I knew all the answers.

Truth be told you don't have to read the Times to know these things. I got the answers from watching Countdown a couple of nights this week.

Another great picture of Marc Canter, sleeping

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 03:24:07 GMT

Taken in the summer of 1998, in Trieste.

Here's another, a classic, also in Italy.

My Wii is back

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 23:24:14 GMT

And it works!

I've played tennis, baseball and bowling.

It's great.

My favorite so far is bowling.

Something broke in FlickrLand?

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:03:21 GMT

The docs are scarce and the community is scattered, so it's hard to tell what may have changed or why. With that caveat...

This API call used to return a variety of sizes for each picture in my account, including the only one I wanted (for backup purposes) the "original" size.

But all of a sudden, yesterday or the day before, it stopped returning it. I swear I didn't change anything in my code. Hunting through Google I see various bug reports, but nothing that quite looks like this one.

Update: The consensus is that the user has to be authenticated to get the Original size picture. This must be a new policy. I'll be able to test it a little later. In the meantime, my Wii arrived.

Good morning campers!

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:41:19 GMT

I'm your Uncle Ernie and

I welcome you to Tommy's Holiday Camp. Puh.

The camp wif the difference.

Never mind the weather.

When you gum to Tommy's.

The holiday's fo'evuh!

Haha!

NakedJen says goodbye to Santa Cruz

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 05:07:49 GMT

This is what blogging is all about.

A platform for a person to tell their story.

NJ (NakedJen) is a NBB (Natural Born Blogger).

Why most conferences suck

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:54:47 GMT

I had lunch yesterday with Steve Gillmor. It had been too long. We talked about many things, including the fact that neither of us were going to many conferences this year. I think I've only been to three so far, maybe four. I've had the opportunity to go to dozens. But they're all the same, you spend the first half-day saying hello, then have a couple of good conversations, then you run out of things to do.

This morning after a bit of processing, it struck me -- don't know why I didn't see this before, but the problem with most conferences is that except for the people putting it on, we don't have enough to do.

So once the first hellos are over we settle in with our laptops and do what we do when we have nothing to do at home or the office -- we browse around the web, answer emails and IMs, and otherwise look for something interesting or new.

Therefore the challenge, if you want to have a truly useful conference that everyone gets something out of, structure it so that everyone has something to do at all times. Hopefully things that involve other people or the venue, if not, what's the point of going somewhere to do this stuff?

PS: Paolo describes an alternative to conferences.

What to do at LeWeb3?

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:24:52 GMT

Another thing that led me to the conclusion about conferences is that I'm going to do something interesting at LeWeb3 in Paris, with the permission and support of Loic, who runs the conference (and who is interviewing me on stage).

In the past Loic has projected an IRC backchannel, and from time to time pictures taken at the show (most famously a picture of Marc Canter sleeping), but this time Loic has given me something to do that I find truly inspiring. My job is to help get a flow of interesting pictures from the community to appear on the big screen on stage, and (if I can convince him to do this) a few screens scattered around the venue.

The first thought is to include pictures that were taken at the event itself, and of course we should use many of those, but I'd like to make it broader, to include people and places that are on the network defined by the conference. If it's like last year, there will be people tuned in from all around the world, and wouldn't it be great if we had a way to not only pull in their ideas (and we could do this better, btw) but also their imagery? It would give it a much richer world-wide feel.

One of the exciting opportunities for tech industry conferences is to find new ways to use networking on a world-wide level.

If you want, you can start uploading to Flickr pictures you think belong on stage.

Please use this tag: PreLeWeb3.

We might as well start talking about it now!

How to subscribe to Scripting News comments

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:13:04 GMT

Point your RSS app to this feed.

http://www.scripting.com/commentsRss.xml

To subscribe to comments posted here.

When the time is right...

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:05:49 GMT

I've been saying the same thing about advertising for nearly a decade, but this time it really resonated.

"Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information."

There's little point in saying something until the time is right, then you just have to say it once, and the idea takes over and does all the work.

Movies I'd like?

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:29:48 GMT

Sad to say, my queue at Netflix is empty.

Okay, so you've been reading this blog for years, you know what movies I liked, probably don't have much insight into movies I don't (hint: I like most movies).

And now that we have easy comments (thanks to Disqus), it's easy for you all to tell me what your favorite movies are.

The Clinton Years

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:45:18 GMT

I just watched The Clinton Years, a Frontline documentary produced in conjunction with ABC News Nightline in 2001. It's good time to review the eight years of Clinton's presidency, because the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, was very much a part of that bit of history.

If find after having watched it that my impression of Mrs Clinton is quite different. How so? Hasn't really settled in yet.

The show is very well produced, with interviews of many Clinton staffers, and it shows the repeating cycle of Clinton's political and personal life. How would it be different with Hillary as President? That's a question we're clearly going to be deciding, very soon.

The PBS website for the program.

Twitter's business model

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:11:11 GMT

Dan Farber: "It's not hard to imagine a contextual ad showing up every time you Twitter something. Twitter 'I am drinking beer with friends' and a Budweiser ad shows up. Now imagine the Twitter revolt."

Oh yes there would be quite a revolt, a powerless one, unless there was an alternate service we could all switch to and then assuming we could get off our asses and actually switch. Yeah, we're good at screaming, but not too great at acting, here.

I'm a bit of a Twit, myself, and I'd find it revolt-worthy if they tried to interrupt or punctuate discourse with product placements, but then Twitter's destiny is, imho, to be acquired by a phone company and sold as a feature that gives users a reason to use one brand of phone over another. Not as a way for advertisers to hitch their "messages" on our discourse. We've seen how well that has (not) worked with advertising on email. Not likely to work much better on Twits.

Imagine if Nokia offered a cell phone with Twitter built-in, a checkbox for SMS users (default on?) -- "Do you want to send SMS messages to your buddy list?"

Don't you think the kids would go for that? (Maybe they can already do it, it's likely that I'm that cluelss.)

Good advice?

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:03:16 GMT

Paul Boutin: "Never try to win a fight with Dave Winer."

Heh. I wonder why?