Archive for December, 2001
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Jon Udell: Can IM Graduate to Business. He makes the interesting point that things like Groove are clever because they make no specific demands on the type of interaction you have. You can move from informal IM to formal spaces seamlessly. 11:02:13 AM
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Microsoft issues patch for “serious” XP hole. The hole could let hackers take control of a PC running XP, says the manager of Microsoft’s Security Response Center. “They might as well be sitting in front of the keyboard.” Lucky I turned the services off, no? Better install it anyhow. 10:55:59 AM
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Reasonable analysis of the new Earthlink wireless hotspot announcement. It suggests they may well not work, although the cost comparisons can’t be right, as they won’t own the infrastructure like Metricom did. 5:34:14 PM
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Amazon Access: How Accessible?. Amazon.com recently launched a separate shopping site for the visually impaired. But critics say the site isn’t really more accessible, but only a ’second-best alternative’ to its main site. I agree with one of the commentators - this is a PDA site, not a designed for accesiblity site. 1:50:51 PM
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Hackers Show Light in a New Art. Chaos Computer Club has been dazzling, if not completely surprising, Berlin with a lights display that Internet users can program and even play Pong on. Brilliant. 12:07:41 PM
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Public Space Wi-Fi’s Transforming Event. Interesting idea: a virtual wireless connectivity provider. Basically, they handle all the nasty cross-authentication and billing and let you connect. It might just work. 12:04:26 PM
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FBI raids cripple software pirates. Law enforcement’s war on warez causes chaos among online file sharers, with top-level “rippers” laying low and a major piece of the underground network disrupted. It will be interesting to see how this plays out - the warez scene never seems to go away. Remember the days of floppy disks - still warezed up. 12:02:26 PM
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There’s trouble at the mill. Aaron Feuerstein owns and runs Malden Mills, the makers of Polartec fleece. In December 1995, right before Christmas, a massive fire nearly destroyed the whole place. But Feuerstein continued to pay all of his workers their full wages, refusing to lay any of them off, while the mill was being rebuilt. He felt he owed it to his employees since they had always done their best for him and for the mill and for this, he became a case study in how to treat employees. Any other corporation would have just shut the place down and moved to Indonesia or China. Feuerstein stayed, rebuilt and reopened. But now Malden Mills is in trouble. Reminds me of a book - Blind Assassin, I think. 11:59:53 AM
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The making of Windows XP by S. Somasegar, who has worked on Windows since inception, and is currently Vice President Windows Engineering Services Group at Microsoft. 11:43:18 AM
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IBM Builds A Limited Quantum Computer. They’ve factored 15, which doesn’t seem that significant, but only two years ago people believed that this was all a theoretical curiosity rather than a valid approach. 11:28:46 AM
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From 100 million to 1 trillion transistors per inch using nanowire technology. As always, the singularity effect takes over again. The horizon is always closer than you think for long-term effects, always further than you think for short-term ones. 11:13:05 AM
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We might be close to significantly blocking / curing the common cold. Cool. 5:03:52 PM
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Selecting IA components. Interesting article and discussion around how to decide on what should go into the mix. 4:52:54 PM
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Excellent summary of yea/nays for HTML forms. 4:52:10 PM
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With This Ring, I Thee Web. If you can dream it, you can design it, and you might even buy it. That’s the strategy of a diamond retailer that created a website where people can design their own engagement rings. By Katie Dean. I need to send this to Caroline, I think. 3:15:06 PM
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Universal copy-protected CD shuns players. The record label is distributing its first copy-protected CDs in the United States, throwing a few new twists on the controversial idea. I wonder if the buy-then-return to make a complaint approach will work. 2:50:01 PM
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Compaq wasted no time making Microsoft live up to one of the agreements in its proposed settlement, announcing this week that it will replace Media Player for Windows XP as the default media player in its systems and go with rival RealNetworks RealOne… [more]. Interesting, especially as RealOne has a browser built in. 6:06:37 PM
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SearchDay: Google Fires New Salvo in Search Engine Size Wars. News links, when they are found, are returned at the top of a result page. Not all queries cause news links to be displayed. “We’re trying to make the coverage better while at the same time not decreasing relevance,” said Holzle. “We’re also shortening time between when news happens and we have it.” [Tomalak's Realm] 5:59:38 PM
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Lawrence: “Google has added a ‘Fresh!’ label with the date the page was indexed.” Another Google cracker. 5:56:43 PM
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Independence Day for Indie Bands. Finally, the Internet is starting to pay real dividends to musicians who haven’t signed deals with major labels. Big subscriptions are here, but out-of-the-way bands have made it, too. [Wired News] I hope it works. 5:44:41 PM
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Real Networks is now in the Browser business… . Using IE, of course. 5:32:28 PM
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Casual PKI and making e-mail encryption easy. E-mail encryption seems to be hard enough, or annoying enough,
that even many technically sophisticated people don’t do it
regularly. Non-technical people rarely seem to be able to
figure it out at all. Thank god we don’t have to do this. 5:20:37 PM
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This is an interesting idea. Click to pay by paybox then your phone rings, you enter a PIN and the payment goes through. It’s that little bit more secure, I guess, as you have to have the phone and the PIN at the time of purchase. 1:47:46 PM
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Information Week: Communication Aids Design. The engineers would communicate via fax, phone, mail, and E-mail, which was costly because of the time it added to the design phase. Darryl Toni, lead structural engineer at Sikorsky, estimates that improved collaboration strategies have decreased time to market by roughly 40%. [Tomalak's Realm] 2:52:18 PM
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AOL, others swell Net music chorus. Yet more people looking to music-based subscription services. Does anyone on Sky subscribe to non-TV-based services as well? 2:48:10 PM
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Body Scanner Sees Like Superman. A new body scanner that lets doctors look inside patient’s bodies is being developed by medical researchers. The magical device resembles Superman’s X-Ray vision: Scan it over your hand and it reveals the bones inside. I want a portable one. 12:07:42 PM
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Dave Winer on a Segway. Is being fun enough. I should think so if they get the price down to £1,000. Seeing as the software was the only expensive part, roll on the consumer version. One of these inventions that will take on new and unexpected uses. 12:02:22 PM
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XP’s Gotchas. Useful now I’m a) running XP and b) CD burning. 11:54:01 AM
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I’d completely forgotten about Dr Fun. It’s great. 10:57:10 AM
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Wired: “At the heart of Segway’s detection system are solid-state, silicon gyroscopes that are about the size of the tip of a pencil.” 1:53:27 PM
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Semantic Studios: In Defense of Search. Peter Morville. There’s no doubt that the implementation of search on many sites actually does stink. But to draw the general conclusion that search is an ineffective tool from these specific observations of existing e-commerce web sites is like eating a frozen egg roll and declaring that all Chinese food is bad. [Tomalak's Realm] 1:50:28 PM
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WBUR: Al Jazeera headlines in English. “We do not verify the accuracy of these stories; this is merely what Al Jazeera is reporting; reports updated approximately 8PM.” 8pm what? 11:28:01 AM
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Charles Leadbeater: “Participation websites will be part of the next stage of the internet’s evolution. Destination websites are in danger of becoming the seaside piers of the information age: vast, beautiful and elaborate constructions, condemned to a brief life.” I started off thinking this must be rubbish, but there is a good point in there: remember that communication is what has driven the use of the internet, not just content. 11:26:07 AM
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NY Times: Interface Design Is Trickier Than It Seems. In 10 minutes, Phil had talked me into designing a horror of an interface, something that nobody would ever understand or use. He also gave me a lesson in the difficulty of good interface design that I’d never forget — and a lasting respect for the people who know how to do it right. [Tomalak's Realm] 11:22:44 AM
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BBC News: Quality leap for e-paper developers. This five-centimetre-square electronic display represents a leap in quality and brings affordable electronic paper a step closer, say its developers, Philips Research. The tiny display uses active matrix technology, the kind used in good quality laptop computer displays. [Tomalak's Realm] 11:21:02 AM
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The Guardian: How to stay above the rest. For the past year, British Telecom has been offering consumers broadband net access using ADSL, with a download speed of 512 kbps - enough to smoothly download music and play games online. By the end of next year, it expects to offer Very high bit-rate DSL with download speeds of up to 14 megabits per second… I want, I want. Too poor.. 11:10:53 AM
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Here’s a tool for Microsoft Outlook that lets you strip all HTML emails coming in and turn them to plain text. Useful for making sure that spam-style marketing emails can’t track you. Useful, but I like the preview pane too much. Bye bye privacy. 10:43:29 AM
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Taking Curl for a Whirl. Some of the best minds at MIT, including Tim Berners-Lee, are working on a new Web-building technology called Curl. This finally explains something more about what it does and why it’s useful. It is basically Java applets but leaner and therefore better? 3:18:20 PM
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Editors: Xopus and Lime. Xopus is a generic in-browser XML editor that takes any combination of XML, Schema (XSD) and XSL and makes it directly editable. It works in any XML/XSL-enabled browser. Lime (Less Is More Editor) makes web page content directly editable. Edit text properties in a way similar to Microsoft Word. Very clever, but still not as good as Word. 10:23:00 AM
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Viva IMAP!. All’s I got to say is — IMAP is the way to go. I’ve got to do this at some stage - have to work on some way of archiving that I have semi-permanent access to, though. 11:04:36 AM
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IBM DeveloperWorks: An interface only a mother could love. Nor is the issue exclusive to WAP, although that sorry excuse for a standard has plenty of problems of its own. Instead, I think it’s more a product of ivory tower planning and a general inattention to real-world user acceptance testing. And the problem is ubiquitous. [Tomalak's Realm] 10:43:56 AM
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IBM DeveloperWorks: Physician, heal thyself. Ahh, the Web page. A large blank blue field. The source code included a JavaScript hack that redirected me to a different page, as well as an image I could click on to get into their home page — but the image file didn’t exist, so all I saw was a blank blue page. [Tomalak's Realm] 10:41:42 AM
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CIO: People Who Need People. Instead of generating value in the form of increased revenues or even customer loyalty, they just sucked up the resources of employees who could be deployed on other Web projects and used money that could be spent on other applications. [Tomalak's Realm] 10:38:23 AM
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Cringely: Why .NET will fail. MS will use bad publicity from the first few releases plus some poaching to improve .Net. “During their due-diligence visits, the Microsoft team figured out who at Intuit were the brains Microsoft wanted, and they recruited them.” 10:36:36 AM
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Microsoft aims for its next target: CRM. This could get nasty, and the competition has a five- to ten-year head start. 10:32:07 AM
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