Archive for November, 2001
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Brent has some problems with Jakob Nielsen’s site. Agreed. 5:16:25 PM
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The Economist. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). The idea revolves around the belief that it is possible to hire a specialist firm to handle specific business processes better than an internally run department can (e.g. HR). Recent experience shows that this can save 20-50% of the costs of managing an internal department to do the same thing. While this isn’t new, the arrival of pure plays that focus on specific processes is. Further, it’s clear that these pure plays are using computer automation more effectively than their client companies to cut costs. [jrobb] 5:08:14 PM
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Wired. Prepare for the .Nano bubble. VCs are on the prowl for the next big thing. But “we have a lot of nanoscience, but almost no nanotechnology”. 4:57:25 PM
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New Scientist. Gene doping of Olympic athletes expected in 2008. Individual Augmentation (IA) will be unstoppable once it gets going. 4:55:28 PM
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A useful set of utilities. I won’t be replacing V and UltraEdit just yet. 11:34:45 AM
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Internet Week: Macy’s Doubles Conversion Rate. Rather than try to match shoppers’ search requests against a text catalog of goods, IntuiFind 4 runs keywords through “linguistic module” software that corrects spelling mistakes or translates phonetically similar keywords to the terminology in the product database. [Tomalak's Realm] 1:32:06 PM
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Economist. “Perhaps there is no solid theoretical justification for the recent rally in share prices. The one explanation of recent movements that may explain why markets have risen so fast is the “wall of money” argument. This does not claim that equities are cheap on any fundamental assessment of what is happening to the economy or to corporate profits. Instead, it looks at supply and demand. There is a lot of cash available for investment. This is partly because investors sold equities as the markets fell and, with interest rates so low, are now anxious to invest again.” 1:28:17 PM
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Book Excerpt: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. JavaScript from A to Z, including a full language reference and syntax tutorials. The excerpt discusses the W3C’s Document Object Model, how it is applied to HTML documents, and browser specific implications. 6:18:56 PM
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Web Designers Should Stop Searching. Web-site designers should understand their users’ way of thinking, introduce them to content they didn’t know they were looking for, and–most of all–keep them from using the search function. Given that people misunderstand search, and don’t often use it, this is probably fair. 1:27:27 PM
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Google may let surfers rank search results. Two weeks ago, Google began quietly testing a Web page voting system that, for the first time on a large scale, could eventually let Web surfers help determine the popularity of sites ranked by the company’s search engine. Interesting - looks like Google could become a significant portal before too long. 1:25:46 PM
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Routes of Least Surveillance. New York privacy activists have made an online map that allows Manhattanites to traverse the city without being spotted by security cameras. Get used to being seen wherever you are… 12:34:35 PM
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Firewall-1 FAQ. Very useful: I think I might have nearly sorted out my VPN problems. 10:02:34 AM
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Great paper on banner blindness. Essentially, we focus less on banners when we are searching for something than when we are aimlessly browsing. 9:03:29 AM
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Why Copyright Laws Hurt Culture. Lessig and Barlow on the immense hole in our cultural record left by copyright. 140 years of hole, in some cases. 1:17:30 PM
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Firebird. Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-92 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names since 1981. Firebird is an opensource community development effort based originally on the code sources of InterBase(r). [frogware weblog] 9:03:30 AM
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Dave finds the final link on why the DoJ summarily settled the Microsoft anti-trust case. Here is the government program (that Ashcroft is sponsoring) that will insert spyware on our computers. In order to make this program work, the DoJ needs Microsoft’s suppport. Only Microsoft has the power to automatically insert spyware on millions of computers.
[John Robb's Radio Weblog] 8:54:30 AM
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News.Com: “With Google’s new file-type search tool, a wide array of files formerly overlooked by basic search engine queries are now just a few clicks from the average surfer — or the novice hacker.” Demo. [Scripting News] 8:39:14 AM
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The Weekly Standard: “Anyone with an average IQ and an Internet connection can perform the kind of legal research necessary to reach a minimally creditable judgment about the constitutional character of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism campaign. But a job like this takes more time and mental effort than most of us prefer to expend. So we have come to depend on professional journalists and politicians to do the bulk of it for us. Which is fine — as long as they’re actually doing it.” 8:38:45 AM
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Why is it that people write URLs assuming they’re only going to have one of a certain type of article / section, etc? Here’s MojoFat’s only tutorial on functional specs. In fact, their only tutorial ever! 5:27:53 PM
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The Internet Under Siege. Lawrence Lessig. Old ways of thinking are reasserting themselves within the United States to modify this design. Changes to the Internet’s original core will in turn threaten the network’s potential everywhere–staunching the opportunity for innovation and creativity. [Tomalak's Realm] 2:54:09 PM
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What constitutes “fair use”? Marc Canter. “I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve spent a lot of money on them over the years, and as far as I understand the battles over copyright law, the one thing consumers have is their right to “use” their purchase of someone’s copyrighted materials “in a fair way.” [Tomalak's Realm] 2:53:41 PM
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SVG: The Art is in the Code. The ability to describe images using an XML-based syntax provides multiple advantages to Web developers. Read on to discover the basic elements of the W3C’s Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) recommendation, including its support for shapes, filters, and gradients. 2:53:11 PM
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Web Review: The Return of Micropayments. Despite the potential benefits, there is a debate about whether micropayments are feasible. Whereas prominent figures like Jakob Nielsen and Nicholas Negroponte point out the potential in micropayments, others argue that consumers don’t want them. 2:52:10 PM
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“Here are a couple of things to turn off in your Microsoft media player on XP. Select tools > options: 1) uncheck “allow Internet sites to uniquely identify your player” and 2) “acquire licenses automatically” Thanks jrobb 2:51:43 PM
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News.com Wouldn’t this be a twist: What if the settlement Microsoft is proposing for the private class action suit be that it spend ~$1.1 b on new Macs for classrooms? That would be 250 k new machines and the rest in training. California should make that the key to its acceptance of the settlement. 2:49:11 PM
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Good article on PayPaland why it works well. 2:34:25 PM
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Over 50% of internet users surveyed dislike pop-ups and banner ads. This seems both high and low, somehow. High in that it suggests that significantly more than 50% of people met pop-ups while purchasing; I don’t see this many. It also seems low in that people (save marketing types) universally dislike the pop-ups, as far as I can tell. 12:51:02 PM
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Some strange numbers, but around 75% of surfers regularly abandon shopping carts. The numbers are massively overlapping, but the high cost of shipping is a factor for many. 2:57:59 PM
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The Case for Personal Web Publishing. “A smart company wants to have an employee who’s immersed in the rest of the world. The worst thing you can have from the point of view of the management of a company is people who are basically churning your dollars on their own political infighting or whatever’s going on inside your culture — they’re not making you any money by doing that.” 11:48:37 AM
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Paying for content “It’s surprising how many executives don’t understand the economics of their own businesses. Earlier this year, the publisher of a large, successful magazine told me he can’t wait to “charge for information the way God intended” now that giving away content in exchange for advertising dollars has failed.” 11:29:15 AM
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John Robb sticks his neck out. “I hope I am wrong. If I am not, you heard it here first.” The markets are back up on sentiment, not reality. We could be headed for a serious downturn. 11:17:02 AM
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Can You Really Just Forget?. The message: encrypt everything using public key cryptography. You can then claim that any encrypted files you have are encrypted with someone else’s public key, and that you can’t decrypt them. No need to disclose passwords, etc. 11:15:57 AM
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Good piece if continentally-philosophical, dealing with the fact that hyperlinks are essentially horizontal. 5:27:39 PM
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The tech boom: Valuation inflation. Everyone agrees that the 1990s technology boom was a bubble. But two years ago, that would have been unusually hard to predict. 3:48:15 PM
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Hey, remember when I said that ClearType is one of the coolest things about Windows XP? Well, that’s true, but now you can add the same feature to Linux. Justin Mason wrote up this guide on how to do it. Very cool! Getting seriously close to being an option for home use, if only it ran games properly. Hmmm WINE? 3:47:56 PM
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Techreview. More on the death of the desktop, and still nothing that quite feels right. Don’t get me wrong: I like the timecard type approach, but if you work in/on ten applications and twenty different projects a day, the complexity rapidly becomes too high, unless your projects are only one-two days long. 3:46:01 PM
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Lighthouse: Of Google, Amazon and Weblogs: reputation management evolves . Yahoo, LookSmart and others used paid editors to build lists of the Web’s best sites. But that model could’t deliver quality and still remain economically viable. Reputation management is one of the best internet “good ideas”, especially when done transparently (as on Google, weblogs.com) or directly (as on eBay). 3:45:10 PM
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Microsoft and the government get cozy. Frightenting thoughts from jrobb about what might happen now MS appears to have FUD operating at the level of the US Federal Government. 3:42:21 PM
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Online ads take a cue from TV. The New York Times launches an online ad format that follows readers from page to page, drawing comparisons with broadcast formats that charge advertisers by the minute. Interesting, ut still going to be annoying. 3:40:13 PM
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Professional XML Web Services: Data. To properly read your SOAP messages, Web processes must understand what types of information you’ve included within them. All too complicated. Use XML-RPC for preference… 3:39:20 PM
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Terrorists and Reporters Dumber than Rocks. Rotten.com, of all places, scooped the story, but it was later picked up by the Village Voice and then the New York Times. Those scary “nuclear secrets” found in the rubble of Kabul and waved before the camera by BBC reporter John Simpson were actually a parody written for the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Class 3:38:42 PM
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Web Techniques: Inside Salon Premium. Scott Rosenberg. Obviously, ours isn’t the only way to build a for-pay site. But our experiences–the strategic decisions we made, the operational choices required to carry them out, and the technical solutions we adopted to make it all happen–should benefit anyone thinking of taking this path. 12:27:18 PM
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Computerworld: Vinton Cerf on the future of e-mail. I think people are beginning to realize that privacy is of real value and that it would be helpful if encrypted e-mail were as easy to generate as the encrypted link we all use on the World Wide Web when filling out e-commerce forms. Good article and useful links section at the end. 12:15:03 PM
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Column | Digital IDs, Privacy, and Freedom. The rules for a “certificate-rich” world aren’t yet written. As new identification regimes emerge, let’s build a general-purpose platform that supports many options. 2:51:34 PM
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Cooper Interaction Design: Whole lotta thwarting going on. In essence, nobody wants to automate the misery. But they can’t help themselves. In fact, they pile it on. That is why it is particularly important for new content-management systems to understand and appreciate the often bewilderingly heterogeneous practices people use to manage content. 2:49:12 PM
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Semantic Studios: The Speed of Information Architecture. Whatever the justification, someone commits to a take-no-prisoners redesign that obliterates all elements of the prior site. In the worst cases, an entirely new team is assigned to “do the job right this time,” assuring no organizational learning whatsoever. Good discussion of facets and the speed of change of various technological items. 1:58:16 PM
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Andre Durand: “Any identity management system or protocol should first allow me to create and host my own identity. Other peers or web services would then have an ability to discover my identity by first querying my node, and secondarily querying my trusted identity host.” Right in some respects, but how do you distinguish between two nodes that say they’re the same person? 1:52:08 PM
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Patrick Berry: “Larry, you just don’t get it, do you?” Spot on. 1:51:20 PM
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Fast Company: Disrupter - Akira Ishikawa. So here is Ishikawa’s barrier: Nearly everything we know about the delicate, exacting process of building microscopic transistors on silicon is geared to making flat computer chips. Until Ishikawa, no one had tried to etch a semiconductor’s tiny circuitry onto a curved surface, much less onto a sphere. Extraordinary idea, and the manufacturing process is madness. It might just work. 12:35:10 PM
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“We need to get lucky”. Michael Ignatieff, author of “Virtual War,” talks about the politics of bombing Afghanistan, the viability of U.S. military strategy and why morality has nothing to do with either. He also sounds undecided as to the course the US is taking, until the last sentence. 12:33:59 PM
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Gretchen Morgenson: “The last of the Internet imposters ? overheated stocks posing as growth companies ? has at last been unmasked.” 2:10:01 PM
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It’s All Arabic-English to Him. A Wired News Q & A with Fahad Al Sharekh, whose company, Ajeeb.com, just rolled out what he claims is the Internet’s first free Arabic-to-English translation service. All we need is a Chinese to English and Japanese to English version and we’re away. 2:09:32 PM
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Irish Know Where You’ve Been. The leading Irish mobile phone companies, thinking they were adhering to the law, admit they’ve been keeping records of where their customers have been for years. Karlin Lillington reports from Dublin. Interesting to see what the patterns look like. This could be fascinating urban planning information, but probably impossible to use given privacy concerns. 3:52:14 PM
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Hack your bank for $995. Cambridge boffins post gory details on Web. This should say hack your ATM, I think, but even so. 3:50:10 PM
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Jobs Likes Gates’ New Office. Apple CEO Steve Jobs calls Microsoft’s Office X ‘possibly the most important application for Mac OS X.’ So now Macs are a) the prettiest computers (Titanium), b) have compatibility with Office / Exchange and c) have a gazillion programs available for them OS X, will it be a true option for all of us? 12:23:54 PM
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Google Alchemy: Word into HTML. Google quietly updated all of its distributed indexes this weekend with a major change: the company now extracts and indexes the text from many file formats, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PostScript, RTF, Lotus files, WordStar 2000, RFT, MacWrite, and on and on. Very smart indeed. 11:43:18 AM
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Salon: Internet liberation theology. In “The Future of Ideas,” Lessig, who is perhaps most famous for his brief tenure as a court-appointed “special master” in the Microsoft antitrust trial, also sees dominant players exercising control through the law, technical standards and political might to resist the change that might otherwise take place. 11:42:43 AM
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Darwin Magazine: Why do Intranets Fail? The fact that many internal corporate websites go unused–or worse, waste employees’ time–is vexing, given the alluring promise of intranets. The same technology that made the Internet a revolutionary communications tool was supposed to revolutionize the corporation as well. 11:39:25 AM
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The notion of enforced bundling takes another hit with the reappearance of MathWorld. However, the extensive and ridiculous future rights negotiated as part of the settlement make this something of a pyrrhic victory. 11:35:59 AM
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Extraordinary piece from Cryptome. “Al-Qaida has successfully laid a trap for the United States, retains the initiative, and the U.S. is operating ‘inside the intentions and plans’ of Al-Qaida”. The intentions: to destabilise the region and gain control of or destroy the petroleum production industry in the region.
11:24:51 AM
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The new “superstitial” ads are bugging me. Even the Onion has them: little boxes that randomly pop up with messages. This doesn’t mean I won’t have ads on the net: I’m just about OK with interstitials or background pop-ups. The problem is that the superstitials interrupt my browsing / buying / reading process enough to cause me to go away. 10:43:23 AM
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Jrobb’s theory. “Microsoft was just signalling to the government that if it wanted this deal, it would have to put pressure on the states in a ’special’ closed door briefing where the anti-terrorist details of the deal were discussed. Everyone will have to sign NDAs out the wazoo on pain of death. They went after the fence sitters first. The rest will cave soon.” It’s a little bit conspiracy, but that don’t mean it’s wrong… 10:41:27 AM
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Web Services, Part I: Introduction. The first step is to explain the basic concepts and terms involved in the procedure. This is still all far too complicated for man on street. 5:35:44 PM
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Fingerprinting Port 80 Attacks. Nothing new, but useful to see how these attacks work. Unbelievable that people could code stuff that works this way… 12:56:23 PM
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