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Random ridiculousness By: Mark Morgan on 1/26/2001; 1:45 PM Surfing the web today I find all kinds of foolishness going on. Yahoo! (wherein liveth my mail) is reaching the final stages of its takeover of eGroups. In a wonderful little announcement they have informed all eGroups list administrators that they have to get a Yahoo! ID and convert over. What a pain in the butt. Thank the gods Conversant comes with an e-mail interface built-in. Blech. Meanwhile, showing the genius of their .Net strategy (which I honestly still don't understand, 'cause they suck at explaining it), Microsoft's web presence died lock, stock and barrel. Why, yes, let's move more of computing onto platforms controlled by these people. The most annoying thing is that while early stories blamed it on a configuration error, later stories claim they were attacked. Nice vulnerability you've got there, folks. Which brings me back to Dave Winer's Desktop Web philosophy. The server controlling EditThisPage barfed and died yesterday (all hard drives will die eventually) and for some sites, the backups were corrupted as well. It's a free service so you wouldn't hear me whining about it, especially since the Manila software that runs ETP allows users to backup their data locally. But Dave has gotten it into his head that the long term solution is to move Userland-hosted Manila service itself to the desktop. Yo, Dave, I don't have a persistent high-speed net connection and neither does most of the world. How the heck is that going to work? I didn't get off EditThisPage too soon, it seems. (He also says it isn't rational for Userland to host free sites indefinitely, which is probably true--does a software company really want to scale up to Geocities, or sell software?) I think some of the directions that Winer is taking his software is interesting, but sometimes I just wonder what the heck he is thinking. And I am becoming more and more convinced that Userland half does things...and then moves on. I understand that the darn product must ship eventually and that you don't always have time to make it perfect the first rev, but throwing software out the door and then focussing on new features at the expense of improving old ones strikes me as annoying at best and intolerable at work. An example is the flexibility of Manila's discussion group. There is still customizing you just can't do with Manila. Cannot. Manila recently rolled out a flat bulletin board system, but it's missing some important features as well--like, pagination. Like, controlling how the topics sort. Why? Why focus all your energy on sexy new things (look! We can share playlists now!) and ignore existing ones that could be improved? I dunno. Userland has been in business and successful for a significantly nonzero amount of time, while the only coding I've done is HTML. But most days, I clearly do not understand Dave Winer.
RE: Random ridiculousness By: Brian Carnell on 1/26/2001; 2:15 PM Now I'm really lost with Manila. What does it mean for the data to reside on the desktop but the HTML pages will be rendered on a Userland-hosted server? I mean I understand that idea in principle but I don't see how it resolves the hosting problem, since then doesn't Userland have to store the latest rendered version?
RE: Random ridiculousness By: ScottN on 1/27/2001; 6:30 PM while early stories blamed it on a configuration error, later stories claim they were attacked Actually, it was both. The outages on Wednesday 1/24 were due to router misconfiguration. Apparently MS didn't follow good design principle (surprise, surprise) when they built their net. DNS servers should be running multiple operating systems and be on different physical nets, and not physically co-located. MS violated all three of these rules. MS blamed the outage on Thursday 1/25 on a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Gee.. do you think that some 31337 5kR1p7 k1dd33z maybe took advantage of the network weakness described to attack MS? And these people want us to trust them with all our data? To quote the Vancome lady, "Shaa, you know what? Unh-unh!"
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