LawMeme has an article titled “One Coder’s Opinion of the Microsoft Opinion”
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
APNews has an article on the continuing erosion of the freedom of the PC in “New PCs Likely to Cede Some Control”
I’ve been looking for development platforms for Linux. While it seems to have some pretty good tools for server-based applications, software development still all seems to be text-based. So I went looking for GUI IDEs. There are lots of them, of varied maturity and features.
Kylix is promising: C++ and Delphi/Pascal.
“Komodo is optimized for Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl, and XSLT, and runs on Windows and Linux. ” according to http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/index.plex. [URL updated, 16 years later, to a very different IDE]
Metroworks has ported their popular CodeWarrior to Linux: C++ and Java.
And there are some home-grown categories, too, such as Code Crusader.
Joe Barr had an interesting column about IDEs in June 1999 Linux Journal:
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-06/lw-06-vcontrol_1.html
I’d really like to see VB/Access/VFP type GUIs, with toolbars, palettes, drag-drop and snippets, but that may still be a ways off.
Just in case you thought they were just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck, here’s Microsoft’s Roadmap for the next three releases of Visual Studio. Let’s see how well they can stick to plan…
The Advisor Folks have their album here: http://www.advisor.com/AdvAlbum.nsf/vEventID?Open&RestrictToCategory=CMX0209
Alex Feldstein’s are here: http://www.feldstein.net/VFP_Devcon2002/Page.html
The end of a year of mourning. It’s been a tough year. Tough for a lot of New Yorkers. Tough for the friends, relatives and loved ones of those lost in NYC, Washington and Pennsylvania. Tough for the Afghans. Tough for al-Qaida, but not nearly tough enough. A year of major governmental changes, changes I hope do not appear too severe in the long run. Impositions on civil and personal rights that worry me. A war on terrorism that threatens personal liberties, intellectual property and the true freedom to innovate.
The web site for http://www.zeoslib.org Zeoslib is an add-on for Delphi and Kylix that adds data handling capabilities to the low-end versions that ship without it. Instructions for packages like this are scary, as they tell you to download packages, ignore the attached installation instructions, and extract and compile stuff by hand. They don’t seem to consider that those instructions are a brick wall for a new user.
SlashDot did a nice remembrance page here and turned off banner ads for the day.
Profox list members insist that Torry’s List is a great source for information on Delphi and Kylix.
In this article, David K. Every explains what he thinks went on with Apple and NeXT?. I found it interesting reading. http://www.igeek.com/browse.php?id=1078
“Open Link in New Tab” was the option I hadn’t seen in Mozilla before. This allows Moz to have an MDI interface where you can toggle between multiple documents (like clicking a link to download while continuing to read a page). This is the feature I love about Opera, where I often have a dozen windows open – articles I want to go back and read, standard search engine pages, news pages, etc.
Jeffrey Zeldman gets great respect in some corners. His feature article, an excerpt from his book, was featured on Slashdot, where he was promptly stoned to death for claiming that the entire web is “obsolete” and that the One True Way is to use CSS to render all web features. I think he’s a little heavy-handed, and the response more so.
“Tyranny, Terror and Technology” are the theme’s of Ray Ozzie’s Weblog entry. The Netwars references sound interesting. Is the network a new form of cooperation?
Dan Bricklin, Mr. Spreadsheet, looks at the numbers the RIAA is claiming, and says they just don’t make sense in “The Recording Industry is Trying to Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Egg.” His conclusion: shutting down napster is hurting CD sales.
Peter Coffee hits the nail on the head with this column that says that we are not using the power of the computer to it’s advantage, but rather to bury ourselves in e-mail.
Wasn’t it Three D Graphics that created FoxGraph?? They still seem to be around and thriving.
— TWikiGuest – 11 Sep 2002
Already got a couple of replies. Let’s see what it does for my sales rank. Probably nothing — that requires people to actually buy the book. All those folks already owned it.
Dan Barclay writes about Language Stability, the bane of the VB story for the past few versions. Interesting reading.
Microsoft explains their Desktop Product Lifecycle here.
Google’s Zeitgeist web page is always fascinating reading.
SourceGear, manufacturers of SourceOffSite, may be going into competition with Microsoft with the imminent release of their product, Vault. Interesting!
The VC has a great set ot strips mocking the foolishness that was. The foolishness that ate my 401k. Grrr.
Larry McElvoy, author of BitKeeper, is interviewed here.
Bill Gates emailed all his friends, except me. Reaction was not all positive.
James Gleick, author of What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier, spoke on New Hampshire Public Radio this morning. Gleick’s books “Chaos” and “Genius” are among my favorites.
This article on window repair gets added to the HoneyDew list.
Rasterman says “Windows has won. Face it.” in this article[Updated link to an archived version.]
Spent the day cleaning out the cellar. An ugly job, but rewarding is the outcome.
SlashDot sent me off on an interesting trail through the web starting at http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=227. Worthy of more study. Short form: Lessig good, MPAA/RIAA/Adkinson bad. But, we knew that. Many. many very worthwhile links from this page, though, including http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Rants/piracy.html. Fascinating commentary, with some really interesting conclusions, like:
cost in a market with piracy will always be less than in a market without piracy
Lessig’s links are surely impressive as well: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/future/. His thesis in The Future of Ideas, ISBN:0375505784, is that there is a coming Dark Ages of the Information Era, as AOL Time-Warner, Sony-Paramount, Microsoft and the other big media conglomerates take over the web is a pretty chilling conclusion.