31 May 2002

Research Reveals Brain Signal That Roots for Reward [Scientific American] 10:24:15 PM

Middleware?  Which marketing person at Microsoft decided to re-define the meaning of the word 'middleware'. All these news stories refer to Microsoft software applications such as  Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, and Windows Messenger as 'middleware'! eBizQ defines middleware as: Software that facilitates the communication between two applications. It provides an API through which applications invoke services and it controls the transmission of the data exchange over the network. There are three basic types: communications middleware, database middleware and systems middleware Cnet defines middleware as: This software manages the communication between a client program and a database. For example, a Web server connected to a database can be considered middleware--the Web server sits between the client program (a Web browser) and a database. The middleware allows the database to be changed without necessarily affecting the client, and vice versa Repeat after me: Applcations are NOT middleware, middleware is the thing in-between applications.   10:15:01 PM

Statistical model tackles World Cup predictions. On New Scientist [News Is Free: Popular Items] 9:56:16 PM

Salon.com Technology | When 300 baud was the bomb. May 31, 2002 | Back in the day, there were boards. Bulletin Board Systems. BBS's. No Net, no Web, no cyberspace, nothing. Just boards, and their ugly stepchildren, D-Dials. All strung together with phone lines, hand-rolled software, and 8-bit computers. No backbone, no hubs, no routers, no DNS tables. [Daypop Top News Stories] 9:48:03 PM

Announcing: "The RadioPoint Tool turns the outliner into a presentation authoring program." [Dave Winer: Radio UserLand] 9:36:51 PM

Jon Udell's last column for BYTE, Personal RSS Aggregators, is rising through the ranks on Daypop. This is good to see. Unlike weblogs, aggregators don't leave much of a visible trail to follow.   [Scripting News] 5:51:14 PM

Preview screen shot of tomorrow's release. It's the connection between the Radio outliner and presentations, flowing through the lizard-brain content management system in Radio that dates back to 1996. This will make sense only to the most geekish who have been around for six years. As Krusty the Clown says. "Oy." Tomorrow hopefully (praise Murphy) it will make sense to people who merely want to do browser-viewable presentations authored with Radio's outliner.  [Scripting News] 5:51:04 PM

Today's survey: "What are you looking for?"  [Scripting News] 5:50:51 PM

Google Programming Contest Winner [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] 5:50:41 PM

Your Boss May Know Where You Are. A German company releases a Big Brother application. Also: Openwave's two wireless companies ... Vodafone's financial woes ... another hurdle to 3G ... and more.... In this week's Unwired News. By Elisa Batista. [Wired News] 5:50:31 PM

Game Controls Fit Like a Glove. No matter how cool games are, players still need to control them. Companies are offering innovations that make that old joystick look, uh, well, old. By Brad King. [Wired News] 5:50:21 PM

OK, I give up.  I accidently 'discovered' a new smilie symbol in MSN Messenger.  If you have 'emoticons' [sic] enabled, and then type '(?)' [no quotes and nospaces] a strange symbol appears containing ?ASL characters. Just wierd, wonder what it means. 2:07:47 PM

© Copyright 2002 richard.