Marco 18 hours ago

It will be hard to believe but this is not meant to be a shrill attack.

Posts like these are jarring in their inconsistency. I fully understand your point on Rev Wright and even sympathize with your position.

What I don’t understand is why you can’t see the hypocrisy in wanting to extend individuals like Rev Wright every possible explanation for their words or actions (“He was alienated”, “He was caught in a position non of us have ever been in”) but when someone you disagree with politically is automatically an evil person and each misstatement is borne of the most nefarious motives.

Its insulting to see you constantly deride others for sweeping generalizations and oversimplification of issues only to have you follow up with a string of posts casting sweeping dispersions and attacks based on 3 seconds sound bites addressing unbelievably complex topics.

I appreciate the perspective you bring which is why I haven’t yet unplugged from your feed but it would be great to see just a little of the balance you want to see in our political process displayed in your posts.

dave 17 hours ago

It’s pretty simple, I say what I have to say and it’s a function of what happens in the world. So when things change, my point of view may change too. If you disagree, go ahead and disagree. But all these charged words, hypocrisy, insulting, deride, attacks, etc — sorry, that’s your mind playing tricks on you. I’m none of those things. Usually I don’t let comments that require defensive responses (or else I admit to all the BS you accuse me of) through, but this time I wanted to restate this, that I’ve said many times before. My blog is my space to say what I think. You don’t have to agree, and if you want to, start your own blog to say what you have to say. That’s where comments like yours (above) belong, not here.

dave 17 hours ago

See how much space it takes to clear up your mess. But now that it’s clear I can answer your question.

BECAUSE MY MIND WORKS DIFFERENTLY FROM YOURS.

Which is so obvious it doesn’t even need to be said. All our minds work differently, we were all raised in different environments with different values. To say basically that I should see everything the same way you do is a waste of bandwidth. It’s ridiculous. It’ll never happen nor should it ever happen.

Marco 17 hours ago

That’s not even remotely my point.

Do you really think I would be interested in engaging you or anyone else who did not agree with my world view if that was what I believed? Of course not.

Your response is a wonderful defense of your desire to remain ideologically isolated. “I see things the way I see things and I have no need to try and understand your position” is a great way to stifle true debate and a horrible way to effectively change the way we approach issues in this country. As I said before – it wouldn’t matter to me if you wouldn’t insist on standing on your soapbox and donning sackcloth and ashes to mourn the death of honest debate.

dave 17 hours ago

Okay you get the last word, the rest of it, if there is more — in your space.

Marco, like every well-intentioned person who responds to Winer, hasn’t learned yet that he can’t handle criticism. Winer’s statement, “Usually I don’t let comments that require defensive responses (or else I admit to all the BS you accuse me of),” is one of the clearest explanations he’s ever given that explains why: He thinks that if he doesn’t delete critical comments, it means they are true.

Open and honest dialogue is not possible on any forum that Winer controls.

It is interesting to me that Dave claims to be “really pissed” at Microsoft for “wasting” billions on Vista. That’s an awfully premature analysis, isn’t it? It’s pretty much what we hear every time MS comes out with something new… all of the linux and Apple nerds gather around and tell us it sucks, the tech community (who is very enamored with those nerds) agrees, and that’s it. At any rate, it’s an interesting choice of words because he didn’t say he thought they missed an opportunity or made a bad decision. He’s angry. Because he’s hosting on Windows and, I guess, just found out that it’s a dead end. Dave thinks it’s a dead end because it’s on Windows… but it’s more likely to be a “dead end” because it’s on Frontier.

…in other news…

Yesterday on Twitter Dave called an un-named (male) reporter a cunt. It was a bizarre response to another Twitter user expressing disgust at the latest report that McCain once called his wife that same name in a very public setting. It’s a really bizarre reaction.

“McCain is reprehensible for calling his wife a cunt.”
“Oh yeah? Well this guy I’m talking to is a cunt.”

I can’t decide if it feels more like a “So what? Maybe she is a cunt!” comment or a “Look, I can use the naughty word, too!” comment. Is it suddenly okay to use the term in (presumably) polite conversation because it’s a novel target? What about “bitch”? Would it be alright for some middle-class white guy to call Dave a “little bitch”? Could he then respond to call that guy a “nigger?”

I’m not really convinced that “cunt” is any less misogynistic when it’s used against a man, nor that “nigger” is any less racist when used against a white person.

It’s disgusting that, on top of people actually paying attention to this guy, he seemed to get no push-back on Twitter from it that I could find.

Update: Dave had a great justification for it today: “It was just a twit you twit”. How silly of me. I didn’t realize that made tossing slurs around okay.

Update 2: Dave appears to have deleted his “it’s just a twit” twit. Interesting. It’s not on his main feed, but you can still get there from the direct link. Not sure what that means.

Turn Yahoo into The RSS Powerhouse in every way. Build all new systems around RSS. If it isn’t RSS it doesn’t fly.

Winer frequently asserts that companies can change their fortunes by adopting RSS, and by RSS he means RSS 2.0 and not Atom like those donkey fuckers at Google.

Yahoo went bigger into RSS the past decade than anybody. The company has millions of users subscribing to RSS headlines on My Yahoo, developers remixing RSS on Yahoo Pipes, and millions more reading thousands of RSS feeds produced by its various properties. It also taught RSS to many people through its Publisher’s Guide to RSS, created the popular MediaRSS namespace, joined the RSS Advisory Board and embraced podcasting with the now-dead Yahoo Podcasts portal.

Yahoo already is an RSS powerhouse. Maybe it helped, but embracing RSS clearly wasn’t enough to keep Wall Street happy and avoid its current troubles.

When it comes to thinking about RSS, Winer’s brain is stuck in the Wayback Machine where RSS is an unproven commodity and people are still using XML icons and coffee mugs to subscribe to feeds.

Microsoft announces a new Zune in the NY Times. Okay, but did they seed any bloggers? Feels like they keep going over our heads. I’ve heard nothing from Microsoft PR. Do I have to buy a Zune to evaluate it? Unless it’s an unqualified home run, wouldn’t it be smart to first market it to people who might work with them to smooth it out? They say they want to build community. Wouldn’t it make sense to use the communities that are already interested in this stuff??

In this context he uses the word “our”, which isn’t quite as pompous, although I would swear that the first time I read this post it said “over my head”. That would make sense considering his recent Tweet:

Once I read about something in the NY Times, it feels like they’ve gone over my head. Am I going to have to buy a Zune to check it out?

Oh, yeah, heaven forbid he has to spend some of his millions of dollars to play with a toy. He obviously feels entitled to get advance copies of all new gadgets… but I still wonder why. He’s hopelessly incompetent when it comes to using them. There’s something to be said for getting a lay opinion about the usability and intuitiveness of a device, but Dave has demonstrated in the past that he’s either woefully obtuse and/or lacks any patience for things that don’t work exactly as he thinks they ought to.

I know that in areas where I have expertis [sic], the Wikipedia pages are the result of “edit wars” between partisans, trolls and the people being written about. It’s hard for me to know, for example, when reading a biography of Augustus Caesar (I’m a fan of the HBO series Rome) if it is the result of the same conflicted process.

The reason you think this is “hard” is because you are lazy. On the top of every wikipedia page are two links of great importance when deciding what is controlling the content: the “history” link and the “discussion” link. A quick glance at those should demonstrate what information is generally agreed upon and what is contentious.

If you’re that interested in the information you claim to be seeking, maybe you ought to do a little leg work and figure it out yourself.

Sincerely,

Eye

PS: It would be easy to omit a conviction for antitrust from Bill Gate’s resume because he was neither charged with, nor convicted of, Antitrust. Just thought you might want to know.

Something that’s remarkable to consider. As closed to developers as Apple is with the iPod and now the iPhone, it’s pretty amazing that Microsoft, a company with a long tradition of offering developer platforms, hasn’t managed to offer a product that’s even worth considering by developers as an alternative to the non-existent option of producing software for Apple’s mobile devices.

One more time, this time with my own links added for fun:

Something that’s remarkable to consider. As closed to developers as Apple is with the iPod and now the iPhone, it’s pretty amazing that Microsoft, a company with a long tradition of offering developer platforms, hasn’t managed to offer a product that’s even worth considering by developers as an alternative to the non-existent option of producing software for Apple’s mobile devices.

There you go, Dave. Fixed that for you.

Rather, the problem is that Dave implies that, because Microsoft has done things that he suggested on his blog, they were listening to him. The logical and mathematical ridiculousness of such a statement boggles the mind. There are oodles of bloggers out there recommending that all sorts of people do all sorts of things. When there is speculation that a professional athlete is going to retire, sports bloggers rush to take sides… when the athlete eventually makes a decision, do the ones who recommended the course of action take credit for the decision? No. Why? Because they’re aware of the reality that, in all likelihood, Pro Athlete-guy didn’t read their blog and, even if he did, he probably didn’t care enough about what they were saying for it to make an impact.

Dave, though, continues to write these entries (and then take credit for coincidence) in hopes that one day someone important will acknowledge his existence. When Dave dreams, he dreams of emails showing up in his inbox like this one:

Dave,
I have a confession to make. Over the years I have been a frequent and habitual reader of not just Scripting News but of other blog and pseudo-blog that you’ve created. You are one of the most brilliant minds of our times and, truth be told, everyone who can read English should subscribe to your RSS feed. Anyone who can’t read English should take classes so that they’re not missing out on your wisdom.

Microsoft would not be where it is today without your savvy advice, occasional scolding, and outstanding business acumen. I cannot tell you how many of your nuggets of wisdom I’ve read and then immediately set into motion. And I promptly regretted not using the ones that I passed up.

I have to apologize for giving you the cold-shoulder all of these years. The problem is that you are simply to wise, and if I ever let on that I was listening to your every word, Microsoft’s competitors would have too much insight into our business plans. I have cried myself to sleep many nights for the cruel way that I’ve treated you, and I hope that this letter can somehow begin to make amends. To go one step farther, once a month I will be replacing the Microsoft.com site with a tribute to your genius, an apology for my severe mistreatment of you, and a list of all of the things that you have done for Microsoft.

I’d like to come to Berkeley some time so that you can teach me about business and the internet, and maybe eat some of your famous lasagna.

Thanks for everything, Dave!

Your pal and devotee,

Bill Gates

I really should’ve saved this for April Fool’s and then spoofed an email to him.

That says all I need to know about what kinds of locks you need on users. The only lock you need is to create a better product. The rest of it is nonsense.

Unless we’re talking about API formats, in which case choice is a horrible, rotten, no good, very bad thing and we need locks to prevent people from using anything except XML-RPC.

It’s also humorous how bitter Dave is about not getting a press access from various different vendors. He goes from being highly agitated, to assuring us that he has no access because he still has integrity… maybe he should thank Apple and Microsoft for preserving his integrity when he was prepared to throw it away for a little glimmer of info… or a shiny new laptop from Microsoft.

He also floated a theory that he didn’t get one because he doesn’t say enough nice things about Microsoft. Heh.

How about this for a theory: someone at MS took a few hours to read through some of Dave’s posts where he struggles with simple, simple software… so simple that myraid children and computer idiots can work it with ease… and complains that it’s the software’s fault that he didn’t figure it out.

Maybe they didn’t care for the fact that every time he couldn’t figure something out (which we can assume would be “all the time”) instead of trying to figure it out, he’ll post about how hard it is, ask his readers for help, and then when they show him that it’s really simple he will come up with some excuse as to why it was still MS’s fault.

In short, until someone comes up with a mind-reading algorithm I can’t imagine anyone paying for Dave to review their software.

I think now would be a great time to hear from Ray Ozzie. He is an officer of the company. His word, if given in writing, would be binding on the company. Microsoft isn’t taking this seriously, by sending their response back through Sean, if that’s how we’re meant to understand this.

No. No it wouldn’t. It would be no more binding than Dave saying he’s going to quit blogging. Ray Ozzie could fire up a blog and say Microsoft is going to give everyone in the country ten bucks. And when you went to sue Microsoft to recover your Hamilton you would be told what every law student learns early in their first contracts class: Ozzie’s words, written or not, did not constitute an enforceable contract.

It could be argued, weakly, that a statement by Ozzie would constitute a license to use Microsoft’s patented property, but (given the lack of consideration on the other side) it could be revoked at any time for any reason, or no reason. It would make Dave feel better, but it certainly could not be brought into court to protect someone from a patent infringement suit.

Arguments that the community’s contributions to Microsoft’s patented IP constitute consideration would fail for lack of privity, past consideration, and the fact that the contributions were put into the public domain.