it seems that i may be beating this netscape thing to death, but at least i’m in good company. in the discussion on yet another great educational bit by joel called netscape goes bonkers, cam unloads a great list of links on managing open source projects:
“Many of the issues Joel raises are more related to the usability of Netscape 6 than they are to the way it was developed. These usability issues can be easily solved, if Netscape took the time to build them in. Unfortunately, Netscape pushed the product out the door too early based on marketing deadlines (Comdex) instead of deadlines based on software quality. So, many of the things that should have been solved during the normal quality assurance process were neglected. Open source software development is a very intriguing concept, and Netscape has almost made it work by using the Mozilla codebase. Unfortunately, because Mozilla is a true open source project, the kinds of project management you find in commercial software development are almost non-existant. This problem is being addressed by many people in the open source software developmeny community:
Anyway, I agree that Netscape 6 is a fine example of poor or non-existant software project management, but am a strong believer in what open source can do for the software industry. The innovations in Mozilla alone are enough to provide a solid application framework to compete against Microsoft’s upcoming .NET services framework. But that’s another discussion altogether.
“An aphorism from some twenty years ago, Brooks’ Law, holds that adding more programmers to a project only delays it. But if this is so, what accounts for Linux? Paul Jones gathers perspectives on the open source development method and whether it defies conventional wisdom.”
“Meerkat, O’Reilly Network’s Open Wire Service, extends its open API with XML-RPC, affording a more standardized XML-based interface to its aggregated RSS database.”
“RDF Site Summary (RSS) is catching on as one of the most widely used XML formats on the Web. Find out how to create and use RSS files and learn what they can do for you. See why companies like Netscape, Userland, and Moreover use RSS to distribute and syndicate article summaries and headlines. This article includes sample code that demonstrates elements of an RSS file, plus a Perl example using the module XML::RSS.”
“10.am aggregates links to the latest technology based content on the web. This includes links to News stories, articles, Usenet announcements, software updates and much more, all from a huge number of continually indexed sources .
Once ‘harvested’ these links are categorized by their subject into a familiar browsable and searchable directory structure. This allows you to quickly get at the up to the minute information you want, track down that elusive article or just find something interesting to read.
Think of 10.am like a fine tuned ‘realtime’ search engine. Rather than randomly trawling the web 10.am knows what to get and where to get it, constantly updating its content.”
i think the saddest thing about barbera walters pimping her integrity [sic] is how many people actually don’t recognize the fact that ‘the view’ isn’t news – it’s entertainment.
“You wouldn’t think modern TV would go this far, says Robert Thompson, a professor of TV, film and pop culture at Syracuse University. The shocking thing about this is that nobody is trying to disguise it. There’s always a sneaky way to do product placement. But there’s usually a little shame associated with it. Here, it’s absolutely shameless.”
“Netscape 6. What an abortion. What a visual scar on my desktop. So many things on it screaming for my attention. The really horrible ´just register, no, go on, it´s easy, please, no, really, I insist, no, REGISTER, why? BECAUSE no one knows how to make money in this ´free sofware model´ and we´re going to sell your demographics by changing our privacy policy when you´re not looking´ approach is messed up.
It´s not so much that Microsoft won the browser war through any of its normal ´cross-platform anticompetitive leveraging´ tricks (as one judge described it), but simply because, like Apple, Netscape has proven themselves completely inadequate for the task.
You know, imagine if Microsoft wasn´t around! We´d be STUCK with this miserable aberration called Netscape Navigator 6. Strategically, it doesn´t bode well with this´concession of defeat´ by Netscape, but well, Microsoft must be really laughing now.”
thanks to wesley for putting together a view of the nascent music web.
hopefully – in a few years this will look like one of those ancient maps of the “new” world.
we’ll laugh at its incompleteness and naive rendering, but we’ll recognize it as one of the first cartographic representations of the new audible world.
“Please excuse the angry tone of this lecture. My hands still hurt from hours of debugging reams of HTML and JavaScript that supposedly works cross-browser. If you believe everything you read, especially if everything you read nowadays comes in some sort of punditry from the Web, you already know the cry: Netscape is dead. Microsoft rules.
I’m here to tell you a little something. If you’re a web developer, listen close: It’s YOUR fault.”
two great pieces of writing that are all the more interesting when juxtoposed. first, lance arthur lets loose a piece on being a blogging elitist:
” All his power, which he deigns to share with only those on a level with him, those few, those happy few on the battlements looking down, far far down on the rabble and scum below, circling and illuminating him like the rings of Saturn. ‘ah,’ he thinks to himself, sharing not this consummate clarity of cerebral enlightenment with those too dull or ignorant to understand even a tenth of its vast and inwieldy wisdom, ‘what must it be like to be one of them.”
“For seven nights they’ve stayed on separate coasts. She watches her brother’s baby in a sleepy seaside town. He clicks and curses in New York. Every night they phone each other. But tonight was different. Tonight they talked. They talked for hours. Like they used to talk when they were falling in love. Before they lived together.
They’ve decided to buy a string and two cans.
For when she gets back.”
two great examples of using the medium for entirely different – but equally outstanding – purposes.
