perhaps ben trott’s why we need echo took dave over the edge. it looks like he’s taking scripting news off the air for awhile:
“Scripting News is taking a break.
The lack of support, even name-calling, from people who think of themselves as my friend, has got me thinking that maybe this isn’t worth it.
I’m thinking about all the services I provide and UserLand provides, for free, after years of pouring money and energy into community building, and the lack of appreciation for any of that in the community.
So I’m shutting down Scripting News now, to give me some time to think, and to give you all a demo of what it would be like if it weren’t here. These last few days have been really awful. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have so many people screaming at you. It’s inhuman, especially considering that my health isn’t that good. The only conclusion I can come to is that I shouldn’t be doing this.
Give it some thought. This is what it would look like if there were no Scripting News. What would it be worth to you, not in monetary terms, but in support terms, to keep this going.
“This means that, for a while, humanity was in a
perilous state, vulnerable to disease, environmental disasters and
conflict. If any of these factors had turned against us, we would
not be here.”
“Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently,
even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped $250 on mine). You
need T-Mobile’s permission to install software on their device.
T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from
your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service,
T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any
mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the
ability to design a tool that would let you do this).
I apologize, then, to all the people I’ve recommended Sidekicks
to.”
“The usual plot is this: Guy walks into restaurant. Guy is huge. Guy played football in college. Guy is hungry. Guy is boastful. (Or Guy is nervous — it depends.) Guy starts strong. Guy starts to tire. Guy’s friends chant “Chew! Chew! Chew!” Guy fails. Guy throws up.”
“Even if Longhorn is a big improvement over Windows, it
still won’t ignite a revolution. Why? Because–and believe me, I
never thought I’d say this in a million years–Microsoft’s software
is good enough. We all bitch and moan about one shortcoming or
another, as I’ve often done in these pages over the years. But
there’s not a whole lot Microsoft can do to make its programs so
much better that they justify the suffering we have to endure any
time we upgrade to something new. Longhorn might get geeks all
sweaty with desire, but to the rest of us, it’s still just an
operating system.”
doesn’t go into much technical detail, but annodex
seems like an interesting new open source kid on the media
annotation scene:
“”Within five years it’ll be on everybody’s desktop,”
predicts Silvia Pfeiffer of CSIRO Mathematical and Information
Sciences in Sydney, Australia. Her team is releasing the code as
open source for others to use and modify.”
ha. so, i had a rather official looking email presumably from paypal sitting in my inbox for a day, asking for me to verify my account information. when i clicked on the the link, much to my surprise, i found the link was dead. it was only at this point that i realized that the email was a very well-designed hoax. this is a very special hoax, because it’s the first email hoax that has ever coerced me to click on anything. luckily for me the site was already taken down.