When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · January
· · · · 28 (7 entries)
Business · I've been in the business world pretty well continuously since 1981. I've founded two companies, been the CEO of three, helped do five rounds of VC financing, and been on a lot of sales calls ...
Crocuses! · Those who have been following along here since I launched almost two years ago know that in the spring, There Will Be Pictures of Crocuses. Those who haven’t lived lived above 49°N latitude may have trouble understanding how much these little violet flashes mean to the winter-weary Canadian eye.
FSS: Japanese Garden Bridge · Friday Slide Scan #2 is from the late Eighties; a reflected bridge in Vancouver’s Nitobe Memorial Garden ...
One-Click Subscription · Recently, Dave Winer pointed out that there’s a problem in how people go about subscribing to to RSS feeds, and made a proposal to address it. Dave’s idea—essentially One Great Big subscription dispatcher—should work, near as I can tell, so any problems would be around business and politics, not technology. John Robb does some more thinking, as does Phil Windley. If we can’t find the business creativity, Atom has another solution that RSS could maybe borrow ...
On Being Open · I was in a meeting today and the discussion turned to Open Source vs. Open Standards; the relationship is complicated and people who care about one or both of these things have to be careful and clear in what they say. Except for Office Suites. There, you have one choice that is neither open-source nor built around open standards (Microsoft Office), and several other choices that are both (StarOffice or OpenOffice or KOffice, all built on the OASIS Open Document format). For documents that are high-value, or long-lived, or you hold in stewardship for your stakeholders, the choice seems like a no-brainer to me. Also, I observe that the community of hackers (I mean that in the good sense) has started to notice that you can do interesting things with office documents; assuming they’re in an open format, of course.
Regulate ISPs Now · I keep thinking about our experience at Christmas, when we set up my Mom for broadband, and the local ISP thought it was just fine to send her home with a DSL modem to plug into her Win98 box; no warnings, no education, no firewalls. This is just not OK. We have all sorts of regulation in place to ensure that drivers are equipped with reasonably safe gear and have some basic education on how to proceed safely. Similarly, we regulate residential construction and investment dealers and employers and manufacturers, and this is a good thing. So I think we need some legislation in place that says if someone’s computer gets hacked through no fault of their own and inflicts damage on some Internet user somewhere, the ISP is liable for that damage unless they can show they took some minimal effort to explain to their customers that the Internet is a dangerous place, but that you can be safe if you follow a few simple precautions.
Dangerous HTML · Via Rob Sayre (who’s co-editing the Atom Internet-Drafts), the disturbing realization that there doesn’t seem to be anywhere you can go read about all the things that can (and will) go wrong if you embed an HTML processor in your software. This is bad, because such embedding is getting very easy and common.
