Tuesday, December 4, 2001

An exponent of Napster

A friend just introduced me to Limewire, which consists of a .org and a .com, both of which take Gnutella and give it a primo Java program interface. I just downloaded and fired up the OS X version, and it's an amazing piece of software. It doesn't have any of the sloth I've come to expect from Java on Mac. Suddenly I've got Napster back, with a far better UI and a P2P architecture I doubt anybody can throttle because there's no central server to turn off. And it's not just for music. It's for everything. Almost scary.

Take a look. It'll blow your mind.

Living the question

I took Mike Sanders' bait and said a few things about the CNET piece he points to in today's blog. It's called Where the Internet Promise Remains Unfulfilled. Briefly, I think it's ... um, wrong. I say how, at length, in Fulfilling the Promise.

I should add that Mike raises some good questions here (as he often does). I want to make clear I'm pushing back on the CNET writer and her piece, not on Mike.

Judith Unplugged

To the principle of Unexpected Consequences we should add Unacknowledged Dependencies. This came to me while reading Judith's latest, When the Power Goes Off:

Here comes Craig to the rescue! Of course, he can’t get into the garage — it’s electrical. He’s banging on the front door and then I go stumbling down the stairs to get to the door in the dark.

All that after the family got cornered on rough water in high winds against a remote wall of Lake Powell over Thanksgiving. Happy freakin' Holidays, huh?

Sales R Us

Ev quotes something I wrote (at some length) to help sell pyRads. The holy grail of advertising is to work as something readers, listeners and viewers demand, not as something that succeeds as a form of irritation. That's a tall order, and it'll be interesting to her how pyRads work.

Better fun

David Scott Williams: "The more eight year old hackers, the better."

What I was saying was that the fact that...

My friend and neighbor George points us to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, done in PowerPoint. Funny as hell. Don't miss the Making of... page. I wrote my own harrangue about PowerPoint three years ago. I still agree with everything I said there, although we've sold and moved away from the dream house I described in the piece. Still miss it, too.

Back, I guess

Our email is working again. That's cool. Searls.com is still nowhere, though. It's mostly an archive site. Mostly I just want the data to be safe. A lot of it isn't replicated here. Guess I oughta take care of that.

Woops, it's back up again. Good.