Morningstar.com: The best designed information-heavy site on the web. For years I’ve been impressed with the design of Morningstar’s site. Beautiful data tables, clean charts, crisp text, tasteful icons. They use font sizes and shades of grey wisely. The leading on their longer articles is spot on too. It’s really the gold standard in information-heavy [...]

Bush: I'll obey the law if I feel like it. I wonder what it’s like to be in President Bush’s world, a world unconstrained by checks and balances or, apparently, reality. That’s where it seems our president spends his days, anyway, based on this Boston Globe analysis of the President’s “signing statement” for the Patriot [...]

Airport Passenger Screening. It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently (see also this), testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in [...]

The backbone. This information aesthetics post has an “extremely detailed map of the North American Internet backbone including 134,855 routers.The colors represent who each router is registered to:red is Verizon,blue AT&T,yellow Qwest,green is major backbone players like Level 3 & Sprint Nextel,black is the entire cable industry put together,& gray is everyone else,from small telecommunications [...]

Essex Image Vault. Prints of rare, historical photos and maps of Essex County and particularly Salem, Mass. Visit site [SimpleBits]

Eating Away From Below. A few months ago, Peter Merholz wrote a post on his blog called “Eating away from below, which was a smart and interesting take on how nimbler, easier, more social software is going to start succeeding in large businesses. Peter is partially responsible (well, actually, it’s all his fault) for coining [...]

Your Micro-ISV web site: get the basics right..  It has to be one of the most asked micro-ISV questions: How do I build my web site right? There’s no one right answer, but there are a number of things that if not done mean you don’t get the prize. Here are my top three to [...]

The Software License Question. It's a question we've asked before, but we still haven't heard any good answers. Why do software products come with licenses, when most other types of copyrighted works don't? So where does the idea that software must be licensed come from? The easy answer of course is the software publishers. But [...]

Ever wonder why Windows File Protection doesn't use ACLs to protect files?. Over the years I have cringed at the thought that rogue elements could overwrite system binaries, bypassing Windows File Protection with use of tools like SysInternal's handle.exe. I always wondered WHY they didn't have tighter ACLs on the files, and today Raymond explains [...]

Understanding Windows Vista's Delay (Yes, Another). It's true. This afternoon, Microsoft delayed Windows Vista. I won't play semantics. Microsoft can technically argue that the operating system will ship in 2006, because it will be ready for some businesses (assuming there are no more delays). But the Windows Vista consumer launch won't be until 2007. No [...]