Category: Uncategorized

Linkrot followup. Because I have archives of this weblog going back to 1997, and DaveNets going back to 1994, I have a pretty good idea which pubs take linkrot seriously and which don't. The NY Times, even though they have a gate that keeps the search engines out, has a perfect record. My pointers to… Continue reading Untitled

InfoWorld – Check the fine print. Bill Gates says security is Microsoft's top priority, but just whose security does he have in mind? Consider some of Microsoft's recent boilerplate legalese — language you or your company might already have unknowingly accepted — and then decide for yourself. You can be forgiven if you feel like… Continue reading InfoWorld

NY Times: “To make its case against severe sanctions, Microsoft, shifting its previous strategy, has named both Bill Gates, its cofounder and chairman, and Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive, as witnesses in a trial on remedies in the antitrust case it lost.”  [Scripting News]

Lighthouse: Trust: it's about good experience over time. Web sites are software too. Anyone conducting transactions or gathering user information on a commercial Web site should treat the task of trust-building with some of the urgency that Gates has brought to the task. So what makes a user trust a Web site? [Tomalak's Realm]

InfoWorld: IBM Research shows off modular hardware device. Code-named MetaPad, the device, which is three-quarters of an inch thick and measures 3 inches by 5 inches, is capable of holding all of a user's applications and data with a bare-bones hardware configuration. [Tomalak's Realm]

Enron's last-minute bonus orgy. Days before filing for bankruptcy, the scandal-ridden company rewarded some executives with million-dollar bonuses as laid-off workers were denied severance packages. [Salon.com]

“Can Love Last?” by Stephen Mitchell. A philosophically inclined psychoanalyst's daring final work explains that the ecstasy of romantic love doesn't fade away over time — we kill it. [Salon.com]

The 2001 Turing Award goes to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of Norway “for their role in the invention of object-oriented programming.”  [Scripting News]

Eroding academic integrity. Greg Ritter : 'In Kansas, a teacher has resigned over a plagiarism dispute. She discovered nearly 20% of her students had plagiarized their projects from the Internet…so she failed them. But the school board overrode her (and her principal and the district superintendent) and ordered her to give the students partial credit… Continue reading Eroding academic integrity

What is Six Degrees? When software companies say that “their capital assets go home every night,” they are serious. Dead serious. And when Quark goes down in flames because the bean-counters pushed out the experienced developers and hired new, cheaper ones 10 time zones away, there will be a great case study in Harvard Business Review to… Continue reading What is Six Degrees?

When software companies say that “their capital assets go home every night,” they are serious. Dead serious. And when Quark goes down in flames because the bean-counters pushed out the experienced developers and hired new, cheaper ones 10 time zones away, there will be a great case study in Harvard Business Review to prove it.

There are not a lot of software companies to work for in Denver. So when the key designers of QuarkXPress 5.0 got sick of being treated like interchangable code slaves, they started their own shop and quickly sold it to a smart Vancouver-based company that wrote them a blank check and let them stay in their hometown.

What they came up with is nothing short of a breakthrough in the field of personal knowledge management, an effervescent field that has not quite made it onto the radar of the buzzword maniacs. Six Degrees