July 2000
Monday, 31 July 2000
Big fish gobble up Net dollars: “Larger companies have entrenched infrastructure to change, but soon, e-business will become business.”
Before the Body’s Cold: “At the very least, the Mozilla Project has given the world a pretty good picture of what caffeine poisoning looks like. Only people who never sleep could possibly justify adding any of these toys to a mass-market consumer product before it ships its first version.”
Why the music industry has nothing to celebrate: “Millions of people … want the services Napster provides”
Friday, 28 July 2000
Napster Wins Stay in Appeals Court: “The recording industry is a mafia”
NSA exec calls for better security tools: “In contrast to yesterday’s keynote speech, in which a security researcher blamed full disclosure of security vulnerabilities for creating ‘armies of script kiddies,’ Snow laid the blame for bad security squarely on vendors whose products ‘crumple’ in the presence of malicious attacks. ‘I want you to grow up,’ Snow said to the Black Hat audience. ‘I want functions and assurances in security devices. We do not beta-test on customers. If my product fails, someone might die.’”
It’s the Communication, Stupid:: “It seems strange to point this out to the Nokias and Sprints of the world, but what users want in a communications device is to communicate with each other, not with Procter & Gamble or the NBA. Stranger still, the killer wireless app is already out there. The killer app is email…”
Obituaries in the News: “John W. Tukey, a Princeton University statistician credited with coining the word ‘software,’ died here Wednesday. He was 85.”
The Toughest Virus of All: “Against this too-good-to-be-true backdrop, though, is the reality: Viral marketing only works when the user is in control and actually endorses the viral message”
Thursday, 27 July 2000
Apple’s Power Failure: “The PowerPC semiconductor partners, Motorola in particular, has written off hundreds of millions of dollars in losses caused directly by the erratic actions of Apple Computer, such as encouraging and later crushing a nascent market for Macintosh clones. The mercurial nature of its primary customer, combined with its minuscule and generally diminishing share of the desktop computer market, have meant that at least the last two generations of PowerPC processors have been designed primarily with embedded control, and more recently, digital signal processing applications in mind. This has left Apple in the position of only being able to differentiate itself on the basis of curved system form factors and translucent plastic.”
Russian gasoline-powered shoes put spark in your step: “wearers can achieve speeds of up to 25 mph”
New Vaccines May Drug-Proof Kids: “Unlike methadone, which is used to fight debilitating withdrawal symptoms, or Anabuse, which causes an alcoholic to become violently ill upon drinking, some vaccines can last a lifetime. There’s no turning back. And if the choice of a child is in the hands of a parent, or that of a prisoner in the hands of the government, then involuntary vaccinations become the result.”
Archived Memepool Post: Jul 27, 2000
If you’re a mail admin and you really hate spam mail, you’re probably familiar with the RBL list of spam tolerant mail relays. However, if you’re the average user and you hate spam, there’s only one way to go: msgto.com - the email service that stops all spam mail by requiring people who mail you to ‘prove’ that they are not software. (Posted to Internet)
Wednesday, 26 July 2000
Tog: If They Don’t Test, Don’t Hire Them - “Iterative design, with its repeating cycle of design and testing, is the only validated methodology in existence that will consistently produce successful results.”
Judge shuts down Napster: “a temporary injunction barring Napster Inc. from trading music online pending a trial”
Judge issues injunction against Napster: “A federal judge today ordered music-swapping service Napster to essentially shut down, barring the embattled company from assisting in trading copyrighted works. ‘Napster is enjoined from copying or assisting or enabling or contributing to the copy or duplication of all copyrighted songs and musical compostions of which the plaintiffs hold rights’”
Reports of a Dead Mars Are Greatly Exaggerated
America Online, Japan’s NTT eye mobile Internet access pact
Archived Memepool Post: Jul 26, 2000
The thought screen helmet blocks telepathic communication between aliens and humans. Aliens cannot immobilize people wearing thought screens nor can they control their minds or communicate with them. (Posted to Wearables)
Tuesday, 25 July 2000
AdCritic.com: This trailer is NOT a real trailer for the new Star Wars: Episode II movie coming out in 2002.
It’s Only Checkers, but the Computer Taught Itself: “After hundreds of generations, blind evolution produced an expert checkers player, but not an infallible one.”
Lizard’s tale: 1 caught, another still at large: “There may, in fact, be another one, a really big one, still on the loose.”
Joel Spolsky: Microsoft Goes Bonkers - “.NET is worse than vaporware. In their blase loftiness, Microsoft isn’t even bothering to provide the vapor itself.”
End the G7 Now: “…there are very few large companies whose self-centered profligacy can match the extravagance of the G7 summit. Its Japanese hosts last week celebrated the existence of this increasingly peculiar club by spending nearly $750 million on staging a meeting between eight middle-aged men, the most important of whom showed up for only a few hours, the rest of whom signed a few banal communiques and went home.”
Britney Spears Dresses to Deal with Sweat, Not Sex: “…pop sensation Britney Spears says she cannot understand what men find sexy about the skimpy outfits she wears…”
Archived Memepool Post: Jul 25, 2000
“Hey, sometimes you’ve just gotta go,” and for those moments when you just can’t wait urinal.net provides a photographic directory of urinals around the world. (Posted to Reference)
Monday, 24 July 2000
Jim Clark wants to take your Kodachrome away: “On June 26, Kodak unveiled Print@kodak as a direct competitor to the digital startups. At the same time, Kodak is attempting to retard the startups’ growth by trying to keep old consumer habits in place.”
Jakob Nielsen on the End of Web Design - “Websites must tone down their individual appearance and distinct design in all ways”
Saturday, 22 July 2000
Possible owner joins lizard watch: “This bit of news lends credence to fears in the neighborhood that there may be two lizards on the loose.”
Friday, 21 July 2000
Subatomic breakthrough: Physicists find tau neutrino evidence
Four-foot lizard on loose in San Jose neighborhood
Carnivorous Train-Like Robot Is ‘Born’
Wednesday, 19 July 2000
Was Freud a Minivan or S.U.V. Kind of Guy?: “Detroit advertising agencies have looked at buying the rights to make television commercials from the “Mad Max” series of movies, and inserting footage of sport utilities into movie scenes showing combat in the Australian desert by bloodthirsty, leather-clad biker gangs in masks, Dr. Rapaille said.”
The Hot Seat: “The New Economy is fundamentally about sitting on your ass. The Digital Revolution means sitting with a devout intensity that has never been equaled by sitters before.”
Just Like Old Times in Berkeley: “‘We will either have a world where people will speak freely through songs and films or we will have a world where very few industry powers will own it and control it,’ Grateful Dead lyricist and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow told the standing-room only crowd.”
IAM Sues Razorfish for Poor Design: “IAM.com is informed that virtually every aspect of the site developed by Razorfish fails to meet IAM.com’s needs, or basic levels of workmanship in the (W)eb development industry.”
Tuesday, 18 July 2000
Women’s firms yet to enjoy funding: “the biggest obstacle for women business owners is that venture capitalists move in a different networking circle”
Friday, 14 July 2000
Spice Girls Back Together with New Album: “Asked if the feisty ‘Girl Power’ quartet were stronger after being apart to concentrate on their solo careers, she said ‘Yes, hopefully.’”
Changing lanes: “the majority of the country could care less about the new economy and have no desire to leave their secure jobs for a shot at Internet stock options”
Thursday, 13 July 2000
The usability of on-line banking: how not to do it: “these services flout even the most basic usability principles, effectively making the service impossible for novices to use”
Jon Katz: Is Technology Killing Leisure Time? - “More than a third of adults under the age of 25 say they don’t get enough sleep most or all of the time.”
Economic concerns as ISPs flee snooping bill: “A day after the e-envoy assured Britain that the RIP Bill would not have a negative impact on e-commerce in the UK, ClaraNet has announced plans to move services abroad to escape the proposed legislation.”
Sprint, WorldCom boards agree to call off merger: “the merger of the second- and third-largest U.S. long-distance carriers would leave millions of Americans paying more for less service”
Wednesday, 12 July 2000
Hatch Warns Labels, Don’t Make Me Come Over There and Spank You: “Then, dropping the first of several warnings to the industry, Hatch argued that ‘a policy of merely cross-licensing among major-label related entities might raise some competition concerns that this committee would have to consider’ – in other words, an antitrust inquiry.”
Does Your Website Sing?: “If you want to check how good your own site is, use the following test. This is a take-home test; trying it on your souped-up office PC is cheating.”
Tuesday, 11 July 2000
A trip to the Tate Modern: “Energy was once power, in economic terms: The Industrial Revolution tells that folktale best. Now technology has become a kind of empty sign, a place where commerce happens, where ‘power’ has been refit. And here, at least this once, art is the coin of the realm.”
The persistent rise of performance-based advertising: “However, rather than write to me, they should consider consulting the executives at Encyclopaedia Britannica and asking them how it felt when technology developments completely changed their market. Denial was an ineffective strategy.”
Patents: “a system for sampling each person’s plume to detect the presence of illegal drugs, or chemicals that might be used in weapons or explosives”
Alzheimer’s vaccine appears safe in human testing: “One year ago Elan researchers reported remarkable results of the vaccine in mice. Mice immunized at a young age were protected from Alzheimer’s. In animals who already had the disease, the disease was halted and in some cases reversed.”
Grim Reapers Prey On Dot-Com Failures: “Meanwhile, some companies are profiting from the failures. In fact, online auction sites for excess inventory and bankruptcy assets are, ironically, one of the fastest growing B2B plays on the Web.”
Study: Poor Customer Service Costing E-tailers Dearly: “The average company could have improved its online sales figures by almost 35 percent last year if it had provided better online customer service for potential customers”
Monday, 10 July 2000
i-modest success: “The network should be open, because that is the best way to create the services that give the system its value. […] for the same reason, providers should price and position services to maximise consumer take-up – for consumers, not businesses, have caused the exponential growth of the web. In short, the wireless Internet will not be so different from the Internet we already know. Operators who seek to own and control it take note.”
Little Blue Folders: “Information retrieval is inherently messy.”
Mobile phones | Danger signals–Now it’s official: avionics and mobile phones don’t mix - “In tests aboard two airliners, Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority has confirmed that cellphone radiation interferes with flight-critical electronics.”
Saturday, 8 July 2000
E-mail snooping will create police state, guru warns: “Esther Dyson, who advises President Clinton and heads an international agency charged with setting policy for the Internet, urged ministers to abandon the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill.”
Business-Exchange Sites Raise Questions for Regulators: “To address the concerns – and avoid regulatory run-ins – the companies setting up the exchanges are including antitrust lawyers at almost every stage of the planning, executives say. The lawyer for MetalSite has attended all of the site’s board meetings, and MetalSite executives avoid giving specific data to its board members, who work for the steel companies that own the site, said David B. Bordo, the site’s chief operating officer.”
Friday, 7 July 2000
Yahoo shares drop after analyst downgrade: “Now that venture capital and private equity funding has quickly dried up, burgeoning dot-coms looking for widespread brand exposure will have less cash to spend on advertising. The result could be lower revenue growth for Yahoo over the coming months.”
Tight job market turns tables on interview process: “Many job seekers say that the low unemployment rate, combined with an emphasis on filling engineering roles before ‘soft’ positions in human resources, has caused a drop in the skill level of interviewers and a deterioration of the interview process.”
The Zen of Palm (PDF)
The Ugly Secret Behind Top Media Sites: “These programs are huge, expensive and about as useless and clumsy as you can imagine. Never again, I promise you.”
Archived Memepool Post: Jul 7, 2000
“The Large Hot Pipe Organ is the world’s only MIDI controlled, propane powered explosion organ. The LHPO’s pyro-acoustic explodo-rhythmations will throbbatize your earholes and dance-ify your booty and make you realize what ‘Industrial Music’ REALLY means!” (Posted to Music)
Thursday, 6 July 2000
The New Economy’s ‘Network Society’ Plays by Old-Economy Rules: “But how new is all this? Has the Treasury secretary ever heard of telephones? Or television? Or A.& P., for that matter, which was started in the late 1800’s?”
Wednesday, 5 July 2000
Chuck D & Lars go head to head on PBS: “In essence it’s about control. It’s about controlling what you own. We clearly own songs, we own the master recording to those, and we want to be the ones’ to control the use of those on the Internet.”
Sili Valley: Unfriendly to Women?: “bonding is an important issue for most women, who need to feel connected to the people they work with. When competitive games and toys are the only available means of connecting, women often feel left out.”
Inside the Love Lab: “Can even the best numerical analysis reveal the formula for the bond that the essayist Lynn Darling once called ‘an intricate pattern of consideration and savagery that only two human beings moving together through time can produce’? Is committed love in fact a set of skills, like whipping up a tangy risotto–something that can be learned by mimicking the gestures of highly skilled chefs?”
Walter Mosley: For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving - “The act of writing is a kind of guerrilla warfare; there is no vacation, no leave, no relief. In actuality there is very little chance of victory. You are, you fear, like that homeless man, likely to be defeated by your fondest dreams.”
Monday, 3 July 2000
Judgment Day for the GPL?: “the copyleft agreement is an unusual license; at the most basic level consider the problem of determining damages when the licensee frustrates the licensor’s expectation of zero profits under the contract”
Online and Unidentifiable?: “People are so used to thinking of the Net as ephemeral, anonymous and unchanging that they forget the one thing computers are really good at is remembering things and searching for them”
Sunday, 2 July 2000
Failed dot-coms may be selling your private information: “At least three companies that have recently failed, Boo.com, Toysmart and CraftShop.com, have either sold or are trying to sell highly sought-after customer data that could include information such as phone and credit card numbers, home addresses, and even statistics on shopping habits.”
Preserving our history for future: “we are doing a terrible job of it today – and from all signs, the situation is getting worse, not better, in the digital age. That may seem counter-intuitive, given the growing scope of the Web and digital media, and the ease of copying and storing information. Actually, says Michael Keller, ‘the likelihood is that even more will be lost now than in the past.’”