Category: Uncategorized

Jeffrey Veen teaches us about user experience. Jeffrey Veen: User experience is more than design. Jeffrey nailed where product planners/marketers go wrong. Having a great list of features doesn't matter if you don't nail the one “killer feature.” In the iPod's case it's getting music onto the iPod in the first place, since it ships… Continue reading Jeffrey Veen teaches us about user experience

Colonoscopies tax health industry. Since medical specialists recommended widespread testing of healthy adults for colon cancer, hundreds of thousands have queued up for colonoscopies. [Boston Globe — Front Page]

Optimizing for Broadband. LPS 2.0 can freeze-dry an application for rapid startup, saving whatever initialization state doesn't depend on the environment. [Oliver Steele]

Cyberattacks Increase. A Deloitte & Touche study found that cyberattacks on large financial institutions have doubled in the past year. Though 43% of the survey respondents who had been attacked suffered financial losses, over 25% of respondents said their security budgets remained  flat this year. Almost 10% said their budgets were cut from the previous… Continue reading Cyberattacks Increase

observations about house design. PhilG has some interesting observations about house design. As someone who has lived in various apartments and keeps getting urged to buy a house, I've noticed some of the same things. A one-room apartment/house isn't attractive to me since I like the idea of a separate bedroom, but I don't want… Continue reading observations about house design

The Economist: Faster, cheaper, better. Interest in these high-powered beasts waned in the 1990s, as computing talent was drawn to the internet. This has been changing in recent years. The ability to build powerful computers cheaply, combined with growing commercial demand for high-end computing power, is creating a renaissance in the field of supercomputing. [Tomalak's… Continue reading Faster, cheaper, better

FCC: Why No a La Carte Cable?. The cable industry tells the FCC that a la carte cable subscriptions would hurt advertising and cost too much. But FCC staffers ask tough questions in return, and hear from others who say the industry is full of it. Michael Grebb reports from Washington. [Wired News]

Robert Kaye on LiveJournal's backend. Brad Fitzpatrick wrote an excellent explanation of LiveJournal's backend in the #124 issue of LinuxJournal. Now Robert Kaye has an excellent article – on his impressions of that backend and where MusicBrainz fits into the cycle. [O'Reilly Network: OSCON] Highly recommended reading for geeks. Marketing guys and gals stay away.… Continue reading Robert Kaye on LiveJournal's backend

Amazon advertising money. Amazon advertising money: There isn't any. They plough it back into user experience improvement instead. Mark Hurst compares that with a client who spent $30 million on advertising to lure people to the site, then only $20 thousand on how they reacted when they actually used the site. I think Amazon has… Continue reading Amazon advertising money

InfoWorld – NIST says DES encryption 'inadequate'. Massively parallel computing has rendered DES breakable, standards institute claims The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is proposing that the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a popular encryption algorithm, lose its certification for use in software products sold to the government. The advent of massively parallel computing… Continue reading InfoWorld