Author: Vince Kimball

Eric Sink: 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Eric Sink's Marketing for Geeks (pdf), is an excellent commentary on the book 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, from a software developer's perspective. Eric's wisdom is hard earned. He appears to have made every mistake inside and outside the book, and lived to tell about it. When entrepreneurs… Continue reading Eric Sink: 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

Charles Cameron sent me a very cool note on the type of people needed for an intelligence skunk works: My own take is that mental flexibility (the capacity to rapidly reframe a situation through a dozen diverse contexts) would be part of it is the key resource here, and that the opposite of it, whether… Continue reading Charles Cameron

HailStorm training wheels. Many folks wouldn't want to be reminded how easy it is to convert sparse input into a detailed profile that includes a phone number, a street address, a satellite photo, and driving directions. Re-entering the basic facts each time perpetuates an illusion of privacy. Yet the reality, for many of us, is… Continue reading HailStorm training wheels

Internet Week: Verizon Takes On Cable With High-Speed Optical-Fiber Net. In announcing partial pricing for the rollout–already underway in sections of Texas, California, and Florida–Verizon said slower speeds of 5 Mbps uplink and 2 Mbps downlink and 15 Mbps/2 Mbps will have monthly prices of $39.95 and $49.95, respectively. Pricing for the 30 Mbps/5 Mbps… Continue reading Verizon Takes On Cable With High-Speed Optical-Fiber Net

Adaptive Path: ROI Is Not a Silver Bullet. While some large-scale web projects can effectively be quantified in terms of ROI, more often user experience improvements are an ongoing and iterative process. Design competence is an intangible asset that requires more specific valuation techniques. [Tomalak's Realm]

Windows Forensics and Incident Recovery. While checking out a comment on yesterday's post on Windows Forensics: Have I been Hacked? I came a cross a new book on the subject that hasn't been released yet, but looks like it might me an interesting read. Harlan Carvey has written a book to be published next month… Continue reading Windows Forensics and Incident Recovery

Pioneers of UNIX A pointer on Dave Winer's blog took me to an excellent article at The Economist about the UNIX pioneers and their unique development environment at Bell Labs in the early '70's. Here you will read about how the legendary Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie started it all — and what they think… Continue reading Dave Winer's blog

FireWire Transfer. A few people have written me over the past week to point out that I could have saved myself a lot of time when I transferred files over to my new Mac laptop. Standards and accessibility warrior DeWayne Purdy was one of the first, and wrote: …there’s a better way than ethernet to… Continue reading FireWire Transfer

Redmond Idea Factory just ran out of Gas. Dana Blankenhorn raps it out…. Microsoft is out of ideas. (I liked this cartoon of Chairman Bill, from Hawaiian cartoonist John Pritchett.) Microsoft spent the last year exploring lots of big business ideas. I even pitched Always-On to some Microsoft executives. In the end the company decided… Continue reading Redmond Idea Factory just ran out of Gas