David Winer highlighted this Motley Fool featured posting on Scripting.com, and it deserves the attention.

the upshot is that, since Mac OS X plays nice with SOAP and XML-RPC, the trend towards web services means nothing but good news for Apple.

burn-out, cram-down, wash-out. repeat.

thanks to the excellent Good Morning Silicon Valley blog, i saw this story about VCs rethinking the punitive dilution they visited on their portfolio companies in the last year. apparently, screwing management into the ground is a dis-incentive to create value.

you will note that employees holding bucketloads of common stock options are still out of luck.

bOingbOing has a link to a PDF white paper on peer-to-peer content delivery by Doug Kaye. as he notes in the document, much of what he describes resembles the Swarmcast technology that OpenCola was once developing.

as an aside, the lead developer on the Swarmcast project is no longer with OpenCola. Justin has busied himself with a small start-up of his own called Onion Networks. he's got a bee in his bonnet about "upgrading the web's protocols" to allow for ad-hoc p2p content delivery (ad-hocamai?) in a way that's very sympatico with what Doug's describing.

the revolution will not be televised -- it'll be packetized.

it's interesting to watch the two different approaches being taken by Sun and Microsoft as they introduce their web services initiatives.

this week, as Sun rolls out J2EE 1.3, the Register highlighted the difficulties of wrangling a diverse group of technology vendors behind the Java standard. while Microsoft stands accused of exerting an unhealthy control over technology, the loose coalition of Java competitors and collaborators run the risk of eating each other.

when it comes to the hearts-and-minds battle for developers i put my money on the company that offers the most direct path to productivity -- Sun has its work cut out for it.

the Zone's forced march to Passport has run into some snags, according to c|net. users logging into the service were all associated with the same Hotmail account: customer!@hotmail.com. in an earlier incident, players of Asheron's Call had been accidentally locked out of their accounts

i'm changing my name to Edwin van Pronghorns.

Reuters is also reporting that Oracle will be introducing a new flat-rate, per-user license fee for their 11i suite of applications. this could result in savings of 25-75% for some users.

Linux developers will soon be able to wrestle with the idiosyncracies of the PlayStation 2. Reuters says that Sony will be releasing a Linux developer's kit (software, hard disc, keyboard) for the console "in coming months".