Microsoft bashes open source. All the news wires today are abuzz with the recent speech by Craig Mundie of Microsoft. In it, he proposes Microsoft's vision of “shared source”, which attempts to combine many of the advantages of open source with the advantages of proprietary development. [Advogato]

Wired News: Out of Print, But Into Digital. The digital antiquarian began his collection of rarities when he first purchased a first printing of Euclid's Elements. Ten years later, he founded Octavo, a company that uses digital technology to capture images of rare books, manuscripts and other materials on CD-ROMs. [Tomalak's Realm]

Why The New iBook is Right For You : The new iBook is simply the best consumer laptop on the market today. Dell, Compaq and the others should be ashamed they haven't come close to building a laptop this cool and this price. Yet, Apple seems to do the amazing–there's that word–as a matter of… Continue reading Why The New iBook is Right For You

Configuring Your iBook : If you don't need to watch DVDs or burn CDs in the field, the CD-ROM iBook for $1,299 is an impressive bargain. (Low End Mac) [Applesurf]

Postscript: As I put back together all my favorites and settings for the 18th time in the last three years, maybe now the value of HailStorm or something like it is sinking in. Suppose all that information was up in the cloud. So my hard disk crashes. Not a problem. Every time my computer boots… Continue reading Scripting News

XML.com: Building a Semantic Web Site “In this article, I will discuss how RSS 1.0 and its taxonomy module can be used as a central format to carry metadata collected in a classical news format, such as XMLNews-Story, to RDF or relational databases and XML Topic Maps. Readers should have basic familiarity with RSS and… Continue reading Building a Semantic Web Site

O'Reilly: The Component Registry System (CRS) “The core idea in this system is to create a uniform address space for software components, and to combine this with a distributed network of DNS-like servers that process name/address resolution requests. I first wrote about this approach in Dr. Dobbs Journal (“Concept Oriented Programming”, June 1999). Since then,… Continue reading The Component Registry System (CRS)

FedEx Knows Brand Equity. FedEx knows you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Failing dot-coms should look and learn. [The Motley Fool]

Absurdity and Rationality in Omaha. Why does the coverage of the Berkshire meeting focus on the wrong stuff? Bill Mann's got the right idea. [The Motley Fool]

Adam Bosworth via email: “One thing that is starting to concern me quite profoundly is that SOAP, as built/supported by VB.NET is going to encourage very tightly coupled systems across the web. This doesn't seem robust to me. I started driving the XML work in 1997 because I believed that we need a loosely coupled… Continue reading Adam Bosworth