|
 |
Monday, October 27, 2003 |
AOL kicks off daily sports show. America Online launches a twice-daily sports news show for high-speed Internet subscribers that is anchored by broadcasters from cable network CNN, a sister unit within Time Warner. [CNET News.com - The Net]
This is key news.
AOL has (up until now) had a complete disregard for uniquely produced content. They usually only license their content for 2 weeks and then discard it. In other words - there is no such thing as the AOL Archives - going back to 1992 and even earlier.
So with this announcement (and some earlier music oriented videos) AOL is starting to realize "Oh gee, we're the world's largest copyright holders and leading content producers and maybe....."
Nothing like decimating your mothership, causing all your execs to be fired and then un-ceremoniously having your name taken from the mastehad - to wake you up.
Here's another example at what a lovely company Apple is. As many times as I try and explain this to young developers - they come back and attack me. Oh well. Needless to say - we won't be developing anything for Apple products - ever.
Another Apple Copy/Paste.
I've been a happy customer of Proteron's excellent keyboard utility for OS X, LiteSwitch, a keyboard application switcher. It turns out that Apple has incorporated an almost exact copy of this feature into OS 10.3, aka Panther.
Which has prompted Proteron to post this open letter to Apple, a portion of which notes:
This memo is also written to publicly highlight your behavior and request more of an explanation. What happened with LiteSwitch X is a repeat of recent Apple history, a la Sherlock 3 and Karelia's Watson. You have again absorbed a third-party innovation into the OS without crediting the original authors. Why not give credit to your developers? Does Apple lose anything? Does it hurt Apple or the Mac OS to recognize that someone's ideas are so good they belong in the Mac's core feature set? Is there any harm in hailing the achievements of the "little guy"?
Apple needs to answer these questions. Will it? [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
One sure way to suck up to a conference is to blog it......
pulver.com Wi-Fi Summit: Nov 10-11 in Santa Clara, CA.
I'm hosting our 2nd Wi-Fi Summit in Santa Clara, CA, November
10-11, 2003. Program Chair, Glenn Fleishman, editor in chief Jiwire and
editor Wi-Fi Networking News will lead some of the most prominent people
on the Wi-Fi landscape in discussions about accumulating controversies.
Dewayne Hendricks and Bob Frankston present the case for unlicensed
spectrum. Matt Peterson, BAWUG and Matt Westervelt, Seattle Wireless will
discuss how community driven freenets challenge the paid hotspot model.
Interactive discussion between panels and the audience will address other
controversies complicating deployment and investment decisions:
- Impact of Wi-Fi on 3G
- Role of proprietary protocols
- Long term impact of Wi-Fi
- Voice over Wi-Fi as killer app
- Meeting business versus consumer needs as primary driving force
- Do security concerns limit the long term potential of Wi-Fi
Nokia, Vocera, and SpecraLink will describe new wireless devices. Leading
innovators including Tropos Networks, Wayport, Surf&SIP, Atheros,
ByteMobile, Good Technology, Facetime, Air Magnet, Icefyre, Sputnik,
Airflow and others will outline their current activities.
Reed Hundt and David Isenberg offer their perspectives on what Wi-Fi means
for the larger telecom landscape
I will be in town November 10th and 11th and will have our WiSIP phone with me.
To register for the Wi-Fi summit, please visit: http://pulver.com/wirelesssummit/register.html.
[The Jeff Pulver Blog]
Here's Dave's take on the PDC and Longhorn - so far.
I actually have to admit that I agree with Dave, yet JUST getting all this shit to work together - will take 10,00 people and 5 years - which, if they pull it off, will be worth it. The Indigo view of the world is clean, fair and balanced.
Here's Dave's post.....
Jeremy Allaire is reporting from the PDC. It seems after skimming the various reports, that the innovation in Longhorn is in the plumbing. I'm with Don Park, I haven't seen anything that gets me going. I think it's interesting that Don Box's demos were about posting to his weblog. Note that Microsoft doesn't run videos that make real weblog software look hopelessly out of date, like Apple did with Marc Canter's software (and mine, btw). Ten developer relations points for MS. However, there's got to be something better they can do with all the R&D money they spend. This feels like a reinvention, and wheel-spinning. Can't tell for sure. Scoble, is there a technical summary of what was announced? One that doesn't assume too much depth in Microsoft lingo? [Scripting News]
I remember Gina as the CEO of Larry Ellison's thin client play, but before that she was a leading TV newscaster and journalist in our industry. So it'll be interesting to read her blog - which appears to be focusing on biotech issues.
Here's Dave's post....
Gina Smith, one the regulars in our San Francisco gang now has a weblog and it's gooood. She's had an incredible life. Here's a picture of Gina interviewing Walter Cronkite. And lookin good addressing the Steel Industry in 1999. [Scripting News]
 Don Box is presenting "Indigo: Services and the Future of Distributed Applications" - subtitled "The Object Ecosystem: One metaphor to rule them all".
DCOM and Corba never worked, http will be here forever, but we don't necessarily wanna use that for the distributed web. Watching SOAP and web services spread has convinced us that a new metaphor of services - as a way of connecting programs across platforms and my local net - is the way to go. Service orientation versus object orientation - with strict boundaries between programs - is the way to go.
Respect the boundaries of others..... Services, clients, systems.
Service is a program you communicate with using messages. Clients are another program, that use messages. A system is.... - you don't just deploy and you're done anymore. Systems have to co-exist with other systems. "I am building and maintaining a system." In the service oriented world applications aren't really the interesting outcome, it's all about maintaining a system......
A system of cooperating programs. All programs must share as much as humanly possible: object model, type system, deployment model, programming language.....
Boundaries are explicit. Services are autonomous. Share Schema, not Class. Policy-based compatibility.
Indigo is a system to deploy technology (we respect the environment around us - we don't necessarily assume that the entire world will have Indigo or Longhorn!) It runs on XP, Windows 2003 and Longhorn - ready to use - now.
Lots of cool things in Indigo - too technical or detailed for this blog post........... more later.
The real question is (despite all of Don's hyperbole) will Microsoft let us mesh into their world or put up some sort of stoppage or blockage? They recently stopped Jabber from connecting to MSN Messenger - so there's certainly no guarentee....
But Don certainly raps out the rap - the right way. He's brilliant. 
I’m here in Lala at the Microsoft PDC (courtesy of Robert Scoble.) I’ve just had my mind blown by a new user interface technology, code-named Avalon. The bandwidth here sucks - but needless to say there are about 2,000 folks - all with laptops - all trying to suck on whatever the bandwidth is that's here - which clearly isn't enough.
Meanwhile.....
Avalon briefly summarized:
- Avalon is an entirely new rendering model baked deep into the OS. It's Flash killer, HTML disintermediator. It takes ALL of a videogame platform, baked in video and 3D and everything you'd expect in a smart, modern UI tookit system. Every trick I can think of - they have as well.
- they’ve got (what I call) multimedia personalization built-in. This means that the OS assumes that there are many kinds of end-users, each requiring their own unique layout, set of controls and capabilities. Their demo looked just like the demos we were doing for Kalieda back in 1993. But now it’s being deployed in a mainstream OS – it only took 10 years to get here and another 2-3 to go!
- the whole dam thing is based upon Direct3D and DirectX – so it’s rendering full res, scalable graphics and multi-plane video. This is the Nirvana of user interface systems, providing what we’ve always dreamed of!
- flow rendering is not just provided for documents (think Pagemarker or Quark) but also flow UI, docking support, sidebars, etc. Smart obejcts that do what they're supposed to do, all baked into their attributes and behaviors. They've stolen every Mac OS X trick there is - and then some.
- it all uses this language called XAML, which I'll leave to geeks like John Udell to explain - but it's got everything you wanna have. There's also an oo-file system, gobs of web services stuff, digital ID, security, the list goes on and on. There are 7,000 developers here - each session is mobbed and so are the hallways. What a scene. Symbolic that LA is burning while this is all going on.
- they've future proofed the thing, preparing for future higher res systems, Tablet PCs, Media Center scenarios, cell phones, PDAs - you name it, they support it.
- it'a all working, they're showing demos, Visual Studio tools supporting it, building apps in front of our eyes. Of course - all you need is a Longhorn SDK and.....2 years.
In the ghetto. Marc Canter says that we, Mac users, are stuck in a ghetto. The reason should be that some developers support Mac only features (such Safari 1.1 CSS text-shadow property) or write software for the Mac.
Honestly I don't see myself stuck in a ghetto, or maybe this is a very comfortable one.
If I was in a ghetto I would not be able to communicate with the rest of the world. To the contrary the operating system I choose supports a lot of very open standards and environments right out of the box: from Apache to PHP, from XML-RPC to SOAP. Plus a very nice set of built-in applications allows me to manage my daily activities quite well, in a clean, stable and secure environment.
There are things I cannot do on a Mac (for example, something that bugs me in these days is that I cannot use Skype) and there are things that Windows users cannot do on their PC or cannot do as easily as I can on my Mac.
Maybe we are all stuck in our own ghettos, virtual places where we don't have full control of our environment and our liberties.
I don't use a Mac because I'm a Mac zealot as Marc says (I was a Mac zealot, I admit it, sticking with System 7, 8 and 9 for all those years cannot be explained differently), now I use a Mac because I choose to use MacOS X. Unlike Marc and others I've never had any personal problem with Steve Jobs or Apple and I freely choosed to live in this ghetto.
Maybe sooner or later I will move to another ghetto, who knows? Longorn seems promising and I'm curious about tablet PCs (I've never seen one), but today I think that MacOS X is the best solution for my needs.
The real challange is not letting anybody close us in any of these ghettos and throw away the keys.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
I got lots of hate mail and posts after yesterday's rant about Apple.
:-)
I haven't elucidated that much reaction since I told Scoble I'd have to wear a garlic necklace this week.
:-)
Anyway - I guess none of those Mac zealots have been REAL Mac developers. When I say REAL - I mean you have to have had a) Apple come into your market and steal it, b) Apple directly try and put you out of business, c) Apple directly help your competitor and not you, d) have Apple five years later - declare that the market you helped build, was a great new idea they JUST came up with (mainly 'cause they hired lots of your ex-employees.)
The most criminal thing about Apple not licensing their technology - is how much great software is NOT available to 97% of the market. The second most criminal action - is discontinuing perfectly fine products that run on the PC - once they buy a company or technology base. It's comical and criminal at the same time. Especially since they've recently had to admit they need the PC market - by releasing iTunes for the PC.
But I agree with Paolo. It's not about politics, ghettos or zealotness. It's about doing what you want to do. And me - even though my intitials are Marc Aaron Canter - don't do Macs. Even though we were the 10th Mac developer (dating back to 1984.) So take it from someone who's been there and done that - make Robert Scoble happy and develop for Longhorn - AS WELL.
DEAR READER: Notice I didn't say JUST develop for Longhorn. The only way to deal with these folks (unfortunately) is develop for BOTH (and LAMP too!)
 I just love Phil Pearson - to death! Not only are we using his TopicExchange for storing blogrolls (which gives our nascent PeopleAggregator some basic DLA (digital lifestyle aggregation) capabilities) but now he's provided us with OPML output of subscriptions (RSS feeds) as well.
RIGHT ON PHIL!
Now we just need to get Nick Chalko to funnel those subscriptions through a Laszlo object onto everyone's personal PeepAgg page. THEN the end-user gets to decide how much of that stuff is shown to the public - via their public PeepAg page.
Here's Phil's announcement....
More OPML in the Topic Exchange. You can now get a list of your RSS subscriptions in OPML format from the Topic Exchange, if you're using its subscription harmonizer service. The link is off the user subs page.
You need to be logged in (with a cookie) to see it, which means that can't just pass the URL (http://topicexchange.com/user/subs/opml) into an aggregator to import everything, unfortunately. If you save the XML somewhere first, it should work fine, though. Suggestions are welcome for how to suitably protect a (possibly private) subscription list but still make it easy for people to hook everything together! [ Second p0st]
I'm updating the "MyMSEvents/PDC" site. Drew is updating PDC Bloggers. We're up all night. Anyone have any requests?
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
Yes - I want the low down on this Microsoft Community site. I haven't created my account yet and......
|
|
