Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Enter Key Deletes in Radio News Aggregator. Argh!. I just found out the hard way that the news aggregator page of my Radio Web log site responds to the Enter key (which I struck accidentall while reaching for a pretzel) by deleting all checked items on the page. Bad move. I think this is browser behavior because there's a form with no text entry field, so the Enter key is doing what it's expected to do. But it just cost me about five items I had planned to write blog entries about. Gotta find a way around that one. 6:10:34 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Gates Giveth, Gates Taketh Away. This morning's San Jose Mercury-News carried a front-page story on Bill Gates' private foundation plans to pour $100 million into India to curtail and elimiante AIDS and HIV in that country. Then today, CNET reports that Gates' fiefdom, Micro$oft, will spend four times that much essentially trying to kill off Open Source in an economy that could greatly benefit from the success of open platforms. 2:14:39 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

A Penetrating Piece on M$ and the Future. The Economist.    ...Microsoft's failure can also be attributed in part to the antitrust trial. Its rivals in other industries have been alerted to its tactics: having seen PC makers reduced to mere box-shifters while Microsoft makes a fortune, they do not want the same to happen to them. Microsoft has thus been unable to make much progress....Microsoft's ability to adapt and prosper hinges on meeting a third main challenge: creating trust. Even more than IBM in the 1980s, the firm must rebuild its reputation. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] My good friend Laurence Rozier, one of the smartest guys I know, has been saying similar things for a couple of years at least. The Internet, P2P networks, informal communities of leaders such as blogging has created, all pose potential threats to the M$ monopoly. Clearly we can't beat them at their own game. Equally clearly, the game and the arena are shifting. 2:04:10 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

W3C XForms Standard Edges Toward Finalization. W3C recommends online forms standard. The Web's leading standards organization reaches a critical stage in a new standard that governs how developers use forms on the Internet. [CNET News.com] XForms sets up another standards clash between M$ and the rest of the world. Microsoft recently announced XDocs, designed to deal with some, but not all, of the same issues. I'm not sure the two are entirely mutually exclusive, but my guess is they'll be perceived that way, which is 90% of the problem as a rule. Why can't we just all get along? 1:58:56 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

News.com Says Supremes Will Hear Key Censorship Case. Supreme Court to hear filtering case. The U.S. Supreme Court said on Tuesday that it would hear a challenge to a controversial law placing filtering software in public libraries. In May, a three-judge panel in Philadelphia ruled that a federal law designed to encourage the use of filtering software violated library patrons' rights to access legitimate, non-pornographic Web sites. [Tomalak's Realm] 12:09:40 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

© Copyright 2002 Dan Shafer.