Following the lead of others (including Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim), I’ve added a feed of the new syndication format without a name to Signifying Nothing. This should also give Jeff a new test case for his Straw patch.

For the moment, it’s here (since it’s currently generated by the LSblog RSS module); it will probably move to a separate URL once the format (and name!) have been finalized.

Speaking of RSS, it must be very, very sad to live in the place Dave Winer does.

Mark Pilgrim has removed all the namespaced elements from his RSS feeds. Presumably this makes them non-funky, although the funkiness of the now-elided (but valuable) content:encoded seems debatable—which, I guess, is the whole problem with the “funkiness” issue. One man’s duplication is another man’s way of expressing alternative representations of the same data. (Mark, to his credit, does write up separate excerpts, so they are generally more valuable than your run-of-the-mill “chopped off plaintext representation of the HTML” excerpt feed, like mine.)

He explains:

I want to do all sorts of fancy things that RSS doesn’t allow for. Sure, I could shoehorn a bunch of stuff into namespaces and call it RSS, and it would be, technically; I’ve been doing that for months now. But that’s fundamentally the wrong approach; I see that now. I need a format that is geared for power users like me. It will still have a relatively simple core (probably not as simple as RSS, I mean, how could it be?) but it will have a wide array of well-defined extensions, well-documented, well-maintained, well-organized, and (I hope, someday) well-supported.

Now, I’m not sure where the “power user” line is at; I’m not much of a power user in the grand scheme of things, and even I’d like to see straightforward support for things like geographic and hierarchical aggregation, a unified content model (so my syndication feed, posting API, and TrackBack metadata would share the same code), and sensible treatment of multiple content payloads. I’m not even sure RSS works well for much of anything beyond the “My Netscape” design it started out as. But with RSS and “Echo” soon to be available, people can use the latter when they need to go beyond RSS’s capabilities—without accidentally breaking compatibility with apps that can’t grok advanced features like XML namespaces. And that, my friends, is a Good Thing™.

There’s a big brou-ha-ha going on over the future of syndication on the web, (basically) with a lot of sensible people on one side and Dave Winer (and a few other people) on the other. The way I see it, Dave had the chance to make RSS 2.0 a proper specification by fleshing out all of the corner cases and promulgating a complete spec. Instead, he went off on rants about “funkiness” and namespaces, and decided to flip out and spew paranoid FUD after Tim Bray and a few others suggested he wasn’t the easiest person in the universe to work with (in other words, he basically decided to prove their point).

Anyway, whenever the dust settles (which may be fairly soon), LSblog will support the new specification in addition to the multitude of RSS variants already supported—some “funky,” some not-so-funky. More importantly, we’ll have a specification we can point at that more than one person alive can definitively say is being adhered to (or not).

Kate has more:

Note to Dave: Yes, you created an amazing technology. Now shut up before you alienate anyone who might be interested in using it and appreciating your work for what it is.

Steven Den Beste has a lengthy exposition of why moving the Macintosh user base to an Intel (or AMD) CPU is exceedingly problematic. I think he’s mostly right, but I don’t know if software emulation of the PowerPC instruction set would be as slow as he suspects, at least from the user’s perspective: the most CPU-intensive task most Mac users seem to engage in is moving around their pretty OpenGL-rendered windows, and even my low-end 300 MHz G3 at work keeps up fairly well with OS X 10.2.

I don’t think reasonable-speed software emulation alone would prompt most users to switch; Apple would have to “add value” over a straight x86 box running XP Home. And, IMHO, the best way to add that value for the Mac userbase would be the ability to run Win32 applications natively—that is, to sell Apple’s x86 boxes as the universal end-user platform, able to run Windows, classic Mac OS, OS X, and Linux applications on one desktop.

Could Apple have such a project secretly in the works? I don’t know, but they’re essentially 3/4 of the way there already with the rootless native OS X X11 server (presumably you could run LinuxPPC code under Darwin-PPC/OS X with a thin emulation layer, and likewise for Linux/ia32 under Darwin-x86), and if a few dedicated hackers can produce WineX or CrossOver Office, I’d imagine Apple has the resources to do the same, perhaps building on the work of one of those projects.

Another question is the business model—does Apple stick with semi-proprietary hardware, or go back to licensing the operating system (perhaps with a boutique branded hardware line for the Alienware set and hardcore Mac fans, returning to the NeXTstep model)? I think the latter plan is more viable (mainly because I can’t see much value in building a semi-proprietary x86 box when you can get off-the-shelf hardware much cheaper), but the former avoids the very real problem of trying to directly compete with Microsoft on the desktop and losing the native Office port, although its value might be overrated with good binary emulation of Win32.

Sean Jordan has responded by email, noting that Apple is probably more likely to move to the new IBM PowerPC 970 CPU; despite Den Beste’s cynicism about the viability of the PPC 970, I do think that's the more likely option (although that may be the closet Motorola fanboy in me talking). However, it’s still fun to (continue to) speculate about the viability of an Intel (or, more likely, AMD) move, especially considering that OS X’s core (OpenStep) ran on Intel chips before it ran on the PowerPC. He also points to the consistently-excellent Ars Technica as a good source for watching what’s going on on the Apple CPU scene.

Eugene Volokh looks at the possibility that a DARPA contract with OpenBSD was cancelled due to anti-war activism by OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt. Another possible explanation is that much of the work was farmed out to non-US citizens, including de Raadt, apparently in violation of the grant’s terms. A third possibility is that another aspect of de Raadt’s notoriously abrasive personality was involved. (More on this story is at Slashdot, of course.)

Mark Pilgrim links to his latest Dive into XML column on XHTML at XML.com. I’m still not sold on the value of this spec, and the prospect of a non-user-writable HTML is bothersome to say the least as a html-helper-mode junkie, but at least some of it, including the <l> and <nl> elements, seem to be useful ideas.

However, I’d personally prefer more focus on getting CSS3 finished and implemented—at least Mozilla, Opera and Safari (and by extension Konqueror, since it’s also based on KHTML) are going in the right direction, although I’ve had to back out a few of my CSS hacks because Safari seems to have regressed in its handling of them (since text-transform: lowercase now works while font-variant: small-caps doesn’t, even though the latter can legally be implemented simply by mapping the content back to uppercase—even IE does that much).

David Janes, of Janes' Blogosphere fame, is working on some specifications for weblog metadata to improve the life of aggregators and others who are trying to get useful information out of weblogs' content.

Dave Hyatt is asking for more feedback on the GUI for Safari, Apple's new Mac OS X web browser based on KHTML. Here's what I'd find most useful:

• A “Page Info” dialog like that in Mozilla and Phoenix; I'd like to be able to see the Modified and Expired times for the page, at least. Bonus points if you show the last time the page was locally cached (which Mozilla doesn't do).

• Import for Mozilla/Phoenix bookmarks. One thing that keeps me on Phoenix under OS X is that I can use the same bookmarks file on every platform I use (Windows, Linux, OS X).

• There's no way to accept SSL certificates that aren't signed by a trusted registry. (I've reported this as a bug already.)

• I'm not a huge fan of tabbed browsing, but I think a large chunk of people think it's needed.

I'm not sure these things would get me to convert to Safari completely — cross-platform capabilities are a big plus in my book, which is why I'm very enamored with Phoenix (which manages to be cross-platform without being too bloated, thanks to the unofficial OS X build) — but they'd probably be enough to make it the autostart browser on the very low-end (Beige G3) OS X box I use as my work desktop.

I don't have anything to add to the general discussion; go forth and read InstaPundit for the factual roundup and Rand Simberg's site for what this means for America's future exploring space. For a wider roundup, use Janes' Blogosphere's search feature.

Timothy Appnel discusses some ideas for extending the TrackBack specification. There's good stuff there, but backwards-compatibility is a concern; for example, in my trackback implementation for LSblog, the “do I send a trackback ping as a GET or POST” question is basically handled through a hack (does the ping URL use a query string or not). Adding more incompatible changes will increase the complexity of implementations, even if well-intentioned — in particular, moving from RDF to RSS. On the other hand, using the HTTP error handing mechanisms is greatly preferable to the XML-based system that is used now (and which I haven't bothered to implement a SAX parser for yet, because I'm fundamentally lazy).

I also second EngageBrain: if TrackBack is going to be widely adopted, it ought to be written up as an RFC.

If you're in the market for a wireless base station, check out this deal from Amazon.com: a Netgear MR814 for $99 with $50 in mail-in rebates.

Nothing like finding out your 1.1GHz laptop actually is speed-capped at 550 MHz. Apparently Toshiba is giving full refunds, so we'll see how that goes...

Slashdot, everyone's favorite paragon of journalism, is claiming that the 85% profit margin that Microsoft makes on Windows is a "monopoly rent."

I'm not entirely sure I buy that, although my fuzzily-remembered economics isn't helping me figure this out. My recollection is that being a monopoly allows you to shift the supply curve to the right, thus increasing the market-clearing price where S and D intersect. However, calling the difference in price levels a "monopoly rent" assumes that this supply curve shift has actually taken place (obviously we can't determine this empirically). My gut feeling is that it hasn't; Microsoft's OS pricing is comparable to, or lower than, that of other proprietary operating systems (Linux doesn't really count, as R&D costs are lower).

Ars Technica reports on perishable DVDs. To paraphrase David Spade, it sucked the first time, when it was called Divx.

On the upside, at least all six people who don't own CD burners can now enjoy free coasters like the rest of us.