Author: Vince Kimball

Sony Pulls Plug on e Villa. After only two months on the retail market, Sony has withdrawn its “network entertainment center” from the market and says it will offer customers a full refund. [internetnews.com: Product News]

MS releases IIS 'lockdown' utility. Apparently, not all sysadmins appreciate having to disable 10 different auxiliary services and set up secure file permissions manually on each and every new IIS installation. I'd say “better late than never,” but that would still give Microsoft too much credit. [diveintomark]

AMA Criticized for Letting Drugs Firms Pay for Ethics Campaign. They're spearheading a campaign to educate doctors about the evils of taking money from drug companies. Of the one million dollars they've raised for this campaign, 2/3 of it came from… drug companies. [diveintomark]

And You Thought You Had Source Control Problems Ray Ozzie sent me a link to a presentation given by Mark Lucovsky, a developer at Microsoft, about the Windows NT development process. 29 million lines of code. Source code takes up 50 gigabytes. Build takes 8 hours on a 4 CPU machine. 1000 machines in the “stress… Continue reading

And You Thought You Had Source Control Problems

Ray Ozzie sent me a link to a presentation given by Mark Lucovsky

News.Com: Lawyer Lessig raps new copyright laws. The DMCA is being used “to scare you away from innovating without permission” of entrenched companies, Lessig said. But the precedent is foolish; a more reasonable approach would be to prosecute those who misuse technology rather than those who create it, he said. [Tomalak's Realm]

Editor & Publisher: Stopping Unauthorized Alterations Of Web Sites. Steve Outing. And while unauthorized alterations would clearly be illegal in the print world, in the online world it may or may not be within the bounds of the law. Online publishers should be aware of this trend, for it's beginning to affect them. It may… Continue reading Stopping Unauthorized Alterations Of Web Sites

NY Times: In Capitol, AT&T and Bells Fight to Control Web Access. The battle is over the two main technologies that give consumers high-speed, or broadband, Internet access: cable modem service offered by companies like AT&T and digital subscriber lines, or D.S.L., provided by phone companies. Both sides say they have consumers' interests at heart.… Continue reading In Capitol, AT&T and Bells Fight to Control Web Access

I love taking the train to work. It's been a while since I've been on the train, since I used to have to take my son to school. Now I ride from Santa Clara to Millbrae every day. It's one hour each way. You know, the train ride is my most creative and productive two… Continue reading I love taking the train to work.

It's been a while since I've been on the train, since I used to have to take my son to school. Now I ride from Santa Clara to Millbrae every day. It's one hour each way.

You know, the train ride is my most creative and productive two hours of the day. Why?

Cause you freaking people can't bother me! Oh, sorry. Heheh. Seriously, it's the one place in my life where I'm not connected to the Internet. That means no email, no meetings, no nothing for an hour.

Just me and my Thinkpad.

Which, is why I'm on the train instead of working at home. UserLand lets me work wherever I'd like, as long as I do what I'm paid to do.

So, I'm playing around with working various places. At home. At Starbucks (I just paid for their WiFi wireless service today, cool!) On the train. At UserLand's office.

I realized the work world is sure changing. Now we're getting decentralized. And we need great knowledge sharing tools. But, I won't go into marketing here. Just wanted to tell you, I love the train. [Scobleizer

Bjorn Sundstrom: “On software for librarians: they have amazingly high standards for response time and usability. They want free-text searches of the Library of Congress in three seconds round-trip. From anywhere in the world. And they really mean it. It's amazingly fun to build software for them.” [Scripting News]

Interactive Week: The Internet Puzzle. Don't give up on the Internet or the carriers jockeying for a piece of its traffic just yet. The Internet is growing faster now than it did in the halcyon days of 1998 and 1999, and the race to decide which company will carry the traffic is much closer and… Continue reading The Internet Puzzle