WebWord and Winterspeak have both linked me for my earlier ramblings about Red Hat’s installer. Thanks, John and Zimran!
XML For Mummies [via Slashdot] Some academic types are hard at work encoding the world’s cuneiform tablets into XML. That’s just so cool, I got goosebumps just typing it. (Oh, and I apologize profusely for the Mummies pun; I got it from the Slashdot discussion.)
The Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding is an international group of cuneiformists, Unicode experts, software engineers, linguists, and font architects organized for the purpose of developing a standard computer encoding for Sumero/Akkadian cuneiform, the world’s oldest attested writing system.
Google Alchemy: Word into HTML [via Tomalak's Realm] I mentioned this the other day, but this article has more details, and this interesting thought:
Where these files would be invisible until now, suddenly they could emerge as the top match for a given search query and be exposed to the world. Potential embarassment there. This happened a bit when Google opened up its Usenet news archives to searching back to the mid-90s and people’s old, forgotten posts surfaced like an old pet burial in a heavy rain.
Zimran Ahmed rips into Hilary Rosen, spokeswoman for the RIAA, who recently spoke at the O’Reilly P2P conference. Basically, all that stuff about file sharing depriving artists of royalties is crap; the record companies go out of their way to deprive the artists for us. The RIAA’s concerns are less about artists being
rewarded and more about their role as gatekeepers to distribution
channels. The abusive licensing practices they’re cooking up through
PressPlay and Duet, as well as codec licensing policies make that
pretty clear.
Wes Felter also blogged Hilary’s speech.
PC Magazine Reviews Apple iPod [via MacNN] 4 stars, out of a possible 5. The Apple iPod’s hefty price has people talking as much as the array
of phenomenal features. The pricing is at the extreme high end for an
MP3 player, but this is a tremendously good product and the first
digital music player to incorporate FireWire.
Daily Sucker page of Web Pages That Suck.com is always an amusing read, in a quiet, desperate, pathetic, I-can’t-believe-companies-are-still-doing-this-stuff kind of way. Vincent relishes in highlighting poorly designed web sites. One of his favorite design mistakes is something he calls “mystery meat navigation”, where important links (such as a toolbar) are represented by generic or meaningless graphics (like balls or arty icons), and in order to figure out where any particular link will take you, you have to roll your mouse over the graphic to reveal a description of the link. Here’s what Amazon.com would look like if it used this navigation technique. Imagine if automated phone systems did this:
“Welcome to ABC Corporation. Please listen carefully, as our menu options have recently changed. To hear what option 1 is, press 1. To hear what option 2 is, press 2. To hear how technology has improved your quality of life, press 3.” And so forth.
I’m feeling fiesty today, so I’m looking for all the ways I can talk about Groove without violating any lingering NDAs that I signed while working for my previous employer. (And “linger” is entirely the right word here. NDAs are worse than traffic tickets and one-night stands. They follow you everywhere, forever.) Below are a few I found on my lunch hour; if you have any others, please let me know.
Scott Kirsner thinks that Microsoft’s recent $50 million investment in Groove is the kiss of death.
“The deal makes Ray a contract programmer to Microsoft,” says someone who knows Ozzie. “Microsoft gets to take 80 percent of what he’s got and put it in their operating system, and Ray can try and sell the 20 percent that’s left over.”
I’m watching for two indicators that Groove isn’t going to get sucked into the Black Hole of Redmond: evidence that Groove’s software will work with non-Microsoft instant messengers, media players, and operating systems, and more announcements that high-profile corporate customers have adopted (and are paying for) Groove’s software.
Jim Roepcke was frustrated last fall that Groove was Windows-only. Now that Microsoft has a minority stake, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for a Mac version. This is especially a problem since Groove’s entire reason for being is to make it easier for people to collaborate, which requires a lowest-common-denominator approach. Jim writes:
I’d love to start a family space — but my Dad uses a Mac and couldn’t participate.
I’d love to start a project workspace — but my customer’s project manager uses a Mac and couldn’t participate.
I’d love to start a discussion forum — but so many of my friends use Macs and wouldn’t be able to participate.
I’d love to start a file collection space, but then I couldn’t get to the files from my PowerBook.
Evan Williams is also bummed out by Groove’s Windows-only nature, and points to their original press release from last fall which hinted at an upcoming Linux version. Uh, I wouldn’t hold your breath for that either.
Evan also points to this thread in Groove’s support forums where people are begging for a Mac version and some Groove flak recommends using Virtual PC. Wow, I remember when VPC was brand new and a few companies were dumb enough to try to pass that off as a viable solution. I didn’t know anybody was still that clueless. There’s no faster way to piss off a Mac user than to suggest that they have to use an emulator because your program only runs on an inferior operating system.
Craig Burton recently complained about Groove’s closed architecture, and Ray Ozzie responded the very next day. That’s power, baby. Ray Ozzie claims that Groove is sorely misunderstood and is, in fact, quite open. And “regarding Groove, we’re pedaling as fast as we can.” Yes, yes, we all believe you, but you’re dodging the more fundamental question of whether you’re pedaling in the right direction.
Hugh Pyle (one of the few people in the world outside of Groove Networks, Inc. who is doing any real Groove development — if Groove is ever going to take off, it’ll be because of Hugh) also responded to Craig’s rant with a hand-wave about how easy it is to connect to Groove through COM. I wonder if my NDA prohibits me from telling you that I’m laughing maniacally now at the thought of the words “easy”, “connect”, and “COM” appearing in the same sentence.
Scott Loftesness had problems from the get-go trying to get data out of Groove. Hey Scott, just use COM! It’s so easy, everybody’s doing it. Except, apparently, Dave Winer, who already knows more about COM than he wants to.
John Robb has this to say to Ray Ozzie’s plea of openness: Do a little dance and raise $50 m bucks.
“We’re dancing as fast as we can,” Ozzie did not reply.
Dave Winer thinks that using “Groove” and “web services” in the same sentence is a joke: [the] product is a total closed box.
“I kept a Mac user in a box once,” Ozzie did not reply. “I kept telling him to breathe normally, that lots of Windows users live in closed boxes every day and they survive just fine, but then I kind of lost track of him and I heard later that he died. Damn Mac users,” he did not add.
Update It appears that Dave has since removed that quote from his page today. But earlier today, he did say that. Really. Wow, that’s not even linkrot. I don’t know what to call it. It’s contentrot.
Joel Spolsky doesn’t care about any of that; he simply doesn’t think that Groove solves any problems that people actually have:
Let’s talk about features. The applets you ship with are all spiffy but not ultra-compelling, because you can often get the same functionality elsewhere. And it’s the applets that are going to sell Groove, not the architecture. If you don’t believe me look at NeXT and Be … you can build the best dang computer in the world with a killer architecture, but if it doesn’t run Microsoft Excel, nobody wants one. When you say “it’s a platform, third parties will build things,” you have to explain what KIND of things and why THEY will be killer apps that sell the architecture. If you keep hearing the same examples, you’re in deep trouble — like the idiot WAP people who talk endlessly about how “you’ll walk by a starbucks and the GPS in your phone will coordinate to beam you a coupon for that starbucks.” I’ve heard this same example a zillion times from “location based wireless” architecture astronauts and it amuses me, because it solves the one problem that coffee shops DON’T have, namely, advertising to people who are standing right in front of the store!
