1. My understanding is that everybody in the world who is on the same RCS and has bought the tool can change the outline. Is this correct?

Yes, at the moment this is correct.

2. Are there any plans to enhance this tool so that I can define which members can edit and read the shared outline (similar to the "Editors Only" concept in Manila)? It would be cool if I could for example specify that sharedoutline "deal1" is only editable and readable by users 1 and 2 but not 3 and 4. I could sell a lot of Radio and SharedOutline licenses if it had such a capability.

Security/access control is the next big thing with SharedOutline and we are working on it. With version 1.0 (or maybe with 1.1) of the tool you will be able define passwords for each outline, so you will be able to define who will be able to read/edit what. Another possibility will be defining which users users registered on the RCS server will be allowed to edit the outline.

Microsoft Tries to Explain What Its .Net Plans Are About. Two years into its quest to create a new kind of Internet-enabled computing it describes as .Net, Microsoft found it necessary to pause Wednesday and try to explain what it meant. By John Markoff. [New York Times: Business]

Ok, to recap: Microsoft has been pushing .Net for two years (we've seen TV commercials also here in Italy), and now, after two years, they think they need to pause and explain what they meant?.

(Mr. Gates) said that the idea of the .Net infrastructure was clear, but acknowledged that the company had not created a clear view of what it intended for its customers.

Uh, yeah, sure. I think that all they are hoping to do is trying to keep their largest customers waiting while they're figuring out their next buzz word. Oh, sorry, they aready have it: Palladium.

I would probably have to publish somewhere this weblog editorial policy. It would actually be a good idea for all weblogs. Do what you want with your contents, but say it before you do it.

Weblogs are a great tool for an people to express ideas and opinions. The very concept of a rule preventing them from changing the way they express themselves or also changing their very ideas is simply ridiculous.

Talking (writing?) about disclaimers, there's a kind of disclaimers that I find particulary stupid: the ones at the bottom of email messages (usually coming from consulting firms) claiming that all you are reading doesn not belong to you and that if the message was not addressed to you, you should destroy your computer.

Some time ago I found on the web the following disclaimer, which I have added to my signatures set and I use from time to time with these people:

IMPORTANT: This email is intended for the use of the individual addressee(s) named above and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, distribution or copying of this email is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas.

Unless the word absquatulation has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or no grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the transmission of this email, although the kelpie next door is living on borrowed time, let me tell you. Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards, so just ignore that Alert Notice from Microsoft.

However, by pouring a complete circle of salt around yourself and your computer you can ensure that no harm befalls you and your pets. If you have received this email in error, please add some nutmeg and egg whites, whisk and place in a warm oven for 40 minutes.

About yesterday's story, Rudy Rugebregt sent this email width a slightly different POV.

re: Apple immigrants and refugees

Some of us weren't immigrants so much as we were refugees. I was one of many who, seeing the Michael Spindler "We must crush Microsoft" speech, decided to take refuge at Sun in the early 90's. We watched the homeland burn and spin out of control but kept our faith.

Unlike immigrants, refugees yearn to return and bring the language, customs and practices we've learned back to a land we still love. With OSX, we can leverage what we learned at Sun, Cisco, Oracle, Netscape and other refugee camps. It really is that good and deserves a careful look.

You don't find indifferent refugees, they are passionate. Immigrants settled. Refugees still want to change the world.

Yes whatever my friend,
as we start to bend,
our minds around this issue,
as we're starting to mend

the differences between us,
as we conquer the world,
but it's a funky punky chicken
that about to unfurl

so take this as advice,
as we add some new fresh spice
to our lives of rhyme and reason
that explodes onto the ice

it's very slippery out there
as we breath in fresh new air
and steal as many ideas and features
as we make our product fair

There might be several different models: charge for the client, charge for the server, charge for both, not to charge at all. If anybody has some good ideas, they are definetly welcomed.

As far as compatibility with 3rd party RCS, no, at the moment it won't be compatible with other Radio Community Servers, but, of course, it can be done.

...Yesterday I was interviewed about weblogs, maybe for the 800th time, and I said again that the diff betw weblogs and mail lists and Usenet is that anyone can have the last word any day on a weblog. The stop energy is much lower.

...

But the question is, will Dave, at age 47, with a heart that's already shown serious signs of wear and tear, risk going back into the fray.

[Scripting News]

A few days ago, discussing with somebody (I can't remember who) I said that probably one of the most important days in weblogs history is when Dave Winer closed the scripting.com discussion group and told everybody "If you want to comment on something I write here, do it on your own site" (at the same time offering free Manila weblogs). It's not only about the stop energy, it's the feeling of ownership that a weblog (your weblog) offers and that discussion groups simply don't.

PS: about the final question... I think that you should, and probably you will, both at 47 and at 74. .

This is definely a very important piece for the future of Radio news aggregator.

Walter suggested in a comment below to move the line after the post time + comments line for all posts of this page's template. He was right, it was a design flaw and a few times readers ended up posting comments to the wrong item.

All it takes is move the HR in the #itemTemplate file and publish again all pages of the blog.

But "all pages" for me means a lot of pages in 14 different categories, while this template only applies to 2 sites/categoreis: none of the default Radio > Publish commands applied to what I needed. So, if you need to publish all daily pages of specific Radio category, open your terminal, cd to your Radio UserLand/categories/* folder and then type:

touch 2002/*/*

After a few seconds Radio will upload all daily pages of that specific category.

Now: does anybody remember how we fixed these kind of problems before the Internet era??

In this moment. Besides the huge implications for European and US economies, the first thing that comes to my mind is how easy it is to understand how much stuff costs here and there.

Pfizer Said to Buy Large Drug Rival in $60 Billion Deal. The drug giant Pfizer has agreed to acquire the Pharmacia Corporation for $60 billion in stock, making it by far the most dominant drug maker in the world. By Andrew Ross Sorkin. [New York Times: Business]

Pharmacia Italy is a client, Pfizer is not. Do I have a larger client or have I lost one? We'll see...

Recently we have been working a lot on k-logs, or knowledge (web) logs, or anyway on the concept of using weblogs as a company internal communication tool. We use k-logs ourselves at evectors and so far everything works perfectly but, of course, I miss google on my intranet.

No problem, as you probably know, if you are based in the US you can get it in the form of the Google Search Appliance (there also are ASP based services offered by google).

The reason I would like google on my Intranet, is becuse the whole weblogs architecture works perfectly with google (just check your weblog's referer traffic). The real value of google is in their page ranking system, which is based on the fact that users are linking pages from their pages. Now: in a regular intranet site, let alone on file server, there are usually very few or no links. So, on a regular intranet, the Google Search Appliance would be just yet another search engine. But with internal weblogs, everything would start to make sense again.

And I have not even told you what we are up to with centralized rss aggregators and dynamic file servers!

Anyway, to my enquires google replied saying that they are not distributing it in Europe yet, so I guess I will have to wait some more...

Are Mac users smarter?. A new study compares Mac-using Web surfers with their PC-wielding counterparts. If you're reading this on Windows, feel free to take your time on the big words. [CNET News.com]

Finally somebody noticed!

With evectors IdeaTools we took yet another approach: besides serving all pages live from Frontier (this is how most of our sites are served), we recently implemented a new feature called "Dynamic Rendering" where sites are served from a regular http server (Apache or IIS), but pages are composed on the fly from static pieces using some standard (and fast) server side includes (php or asp).

This allow all the performance, reliability and scalability of the baked approach, but also some degree of contents personalization. On e-commerce web sites, for example, each user is seeing his own shopping basket in every page, but the shopping basket graphics is only generated once (when anything is added to the shopping basket), then saved as a piece of text and dynamically included in every page, meaning that no query is sent to any database to serve the single page.

For complex sites with a lot of navigation links, this approach is also faster since, for example, adding a new story causes the generation of a new version of the table of contents, but not of all pages where the table of contents appear.

Gene Kan:The philosopher George Santayana famously quipped that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but he said nothing of those who can. We repeatedly prove that even careful students of past mistakes optimistically rush to be first to repeat them.

Italy's Parliament Votes to End Royals' 56-Year Exile. Italy's parliament voted today to allow the male heirs to the throne to return to the country. By Reuters. [New York Times: International]

Great, this is just exactly what we were missing: a king!

BBC News | HEALTH | White IVF couple 'have black twins' [Daypop Top 40]

As we wrote recently, doctors save lives while we just write software. But our errors create much less problems than theirs .

With plenty of Ram available, I'm actually running both, but I found myself clicking on the "M" icon much more frequently that the "E" one. I got used to tabbed browsing, to the multiple links bookmarks, to the direct link to google in the address field and to a somehow faster rendering of pages. Very soon I could swicth the default browser settings of my system, and for the second time of my life I will have changed my default browser (I switched from Netscape 4 to Explorer 4 sometime at the end of the last century).

The main reason for my switch will be a bunch of very simple new features, something that has been totally missing from IE for a long time.

NY Times: What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? A must-read article for people controlling their weight or cholesterol through diet. The advice doctors have been giving since the 70s may have been totally wrong. [via Scripting News]

Suddenly I badly need a bacon hamburger....

Download activeRenderer Version 1.0. It's been 2 days since the last bug report from the beta test team. Either I've managed to bore them to death, or activeRenderer is now glitch free. Even if the former is far more likely, Independence Day seems as good a day as any to launch activeRenderer Release Candidate 1. [read more] [s l a m]

Just in case you've just landed after a long trip in outer space, ActiveRendere is an incredibly cool tool that let's you render outlines in a browser. You can also turn your whole home page into a collapsable outline. It's what I had always dreamed of since I saw an outline, but was never able to get. Now I can, thanks Marc .

PS: ActiveRenderer is also the first non-evectors tool to use the new xml-rpc.it registration architecture. So, if you won't be able to regitser it... it's our fault.

Anyway, in the case anybody needed it, this is one more example of the power of small companies connected by great tools.

We are thinking to start selling these tools on a new e-commerce site, also if for a very low price, but the idea that somebody decided to pay without being asked... well, it just feels great!

Thanks!