Workbench

> Pope names form a fairly limited set.

Does it? For starters consider that "Francis" was a new name - he's the first pope to use it.

He was also the first pope in a millennium to pick an entirely new name (John Paul I obviously was the first pope John Paul, but he picked two names that has a very long tradition, and that are obviously names with a very special connection to the church; consider also that some disliked that John Paul I broke new ground that way, even though it involved using two very well respected traditional names).

> I bet if you asked 100,000 Catholics to guess the next pope's name, > 0 would get it right. I'm actually surprised there isn't tons of speculation about it. Maybe it's not a "thing" or sacrilegious or this sort of speculation is not on the Internet?

[EDIT: The paper actually mentions that they did find one single mention of Pope Francis, which was then reviewed and found to be overtly speculative, so they did run into this]

Maybe. Maybe not. But there is speculation about pope names. A lot of it. And apparently despite lots and lots of articles that were written about it none of them got it right.

Of course not representative, but here's a poll that was conducted before Bergoglio was elected, with about 5k votes: http://wdtprs.com/blog/2013/02/poll-what-name-will-the-next-pope-choose/

Of those, 694 picked the "???? the First" option, which was the correct answer. But most seems to expect a name with tradition.

Here is another example…

Funnily enough the changes were made based on a bug report by Tim Berners-Lee himself, who noticed link rot and missing links to specifications. Hence the commits by an W3C employee, who cleaned up the markup and apparently took the RSS 2.0 spec from the RSS Board website.

Which in effect is understandable from the employees point of view – an RSS board seems vastly more official and stable than a link on a random subdomain of Harvard’s Berkman Center.

Only if you have been a reader of Winer’s multiple different weblogs 15+ years back, you’ll know the issue. Very quick and abridged recap of the Feed Format Wars:

• Winer’s Userland Software took Netscape’s RSS 0.9x, slightly changed it and promoted it as official RSS.

• The RSS 1.0 Working group wanted an RSS in RDF terms and build a rival RSS 1.0.

• Winer published RSS 2.0 in response.

• People still had problems with the RSS 2.0 spec and some lack of clarity and formed a different effort in response, which later morphed into Atom which found a home at the IETF as an RFC.

• People still had questions about parsing RSS 2.0. In 2003 Winer moved RSS 2.0 to Harvard’s Berkman Center – he was a fellow at that time – transferred copyright and “ownership” of the spec and set up an RSS Advisory Board, which could “clarify” open questions.

http://scripting.com/2003/07.html#rss20News

• In 2004 Winer resigned from the RSS Advisory Board, writing that the “process for clarifying the spec is now…

From [0]:

> By the time Raymond could legally sell his VA Linux shares in June 2000, they had plunged $31 million in value to a still-impressive $5.5 million.

> Thanks to the dot-com bust -- fed in large part by big-hype, no-hope companies like VA Linux, the worth of Raymond's shares had dropped to $195,000, a loss of more than $5 million.

From [1]:

> Back at IPO time I wrote an essay called "Surprised By Wealth" in which I tried to deal with how weird it felt to have a theoretical net worth of $41 million. Am I upset that all that "wealth" is gone, at least until the stock bounces back? Well...yes and no. As a member of VA's Board, it's my job to worry about our stock price, on behalf of all of our stockholders. So I care about that.

> But personally? Nah. I wasn't in this for the bucks then, and I'm not now.

[0] http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3149/eric-s-raymond-bazaar-financial-advisor

[1] http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2001022100120OPBZCY

There may ideally be only 4 versions of RSS, but Winer was responsible for 6 of them :)

Mark may be an asshole, but he's nearly always correct (save for his recent Apple II fixation), and he follows up instead of trying to edit his mistakes from the record. He has a lot of company in hating Winer, basically everyone Dave's ever worked on anything with.

Here's some examples of classic Dave: http://www.metafilter.com/26701/ http://www.metafilter.com/33699/ http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2881/ (note that rcade, the author of the last link, was Dave's sole defender in the earlier ones). Here's some freshly curated ridiculousness: http://eyeonwiner.org/ http://davewinerscrazytrain.tumblr.com/

RSS is no simpler than Atom, not even when used naïvely — it's just easier to break. It was successful because Winer was at one time successful, but after he managed to attack and alienate everyone else in the field, they moved on and started over with a clean slate.