July 2001
Tuesday, 31 July 2001
Interview > The Usability of Usability: “We’ve never seen a site that succeeds more than 50% of the time, let alone 60% or 70% of the time. We don’t know what one looks like. We certainly don’t know what it takes to build one. Oh, we can pretend we do. But we really don’t, because we never have seen one.”
Monday, 30 July 2001
Marcus Buckingham Thinks Your Boss Has an Attitude Problem: “You can divide any working population into three categories: people who are engaged (loyal and productive), those who are not engaged (just putting in time), and those who are actively disengaged (unhappy and spreading their discontent). The U.S. working population is 26% engaged, 55% not engaged, and 19% actively disengaged.”
Jail Time in the Digital Age: “Making it a crime to crack that technology, whether or not the use of that ability would be a copyright violation, is to delegate lawmaking to code writers. Yet that is precisely what the D.M.C.A. does. The relevant protection for copyrighted material becomes as the technology says, not as copyright law requires.”
Sunday, 29 July 2001
The case for legalisation: “Drugs policy in the United States is thus breeding a generation of men and women from disadvantaged backgrounds whose main training for life has been in the violence of prison.”
Saturday, 28 July 2001
Digital Defense: “But the Internet isn’t just about tulips, and if you think it is, well, let’s talk in five years.”
Moose Sales Strategy: “Trivia: what’s a salesperson’s favorite answer? Answer: no.”
America the fearful: “This manic scheme owes its origins, never let it be forgotten, to the apparently seriously held belief in the Pentagon and on the republican right that North Korea, a land incapable of maintaining a regular electricity supply even in its capital city, could be planning a plainly suicidal missile attack on the United States. It’s a scenario that could come straight out of Hollywood, and quite possibly did. But it is just one example among many.”
Scientists Say Mars Viking Mission Found Life
Ubiquitous X10.com ‘Pop-Under’ Ads A Failure - Report
Thursday, 26 July 2001
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments: “Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information.”
Whose hand is that in your pocket?: “Real markets are public places. You can’t privatize what only works because it’s public.”
Wednesday, 25 July 2001
A poor view of poverty: “We should also honestly debate the problems and opportunities of economic development. The opponents of globalisation cannot be defeated by steel fences or by lectures on the theme that you cannot buck the market.”
Tuesday, 24 July 2001
Miniature Supernova Created in Lab: “‘We have gotten down to the nitty-gritty science and have been able to study the behavior of a new material by manipulating it in new and different ways,’ Wieman said. But he added that several effects of the explosion were inexplicable.”
Archived Memepool Post: Jul 24, 2001
Wish you knew the first aid treatment steps for sarin? Be sure to check out the EPA’s Extremely Hazardous Substances Chemical Profiles and Emergency First Aid Guides. (Posted to Health)
Wednesday, 18 July 2001
User Agreements and a ‘Timeless Issue’: “It applies an ancient and fundamental principle in a novel context. That is, you can’t be bound to that which you don’t agree to”
Tuesday, 17 July 2001
Russian crypto expert arrested at Def Con: “Sklyarov is an employee of ElcomSoft, a Moscow-based company”
The jobs challenge: “They found a clear difference between job cuts implemented as part of a strategic restructuring and those done to cut costs in response to stockmarket disappointment at falling profits. The first sort resulted in above-average short- and long-term share performance, the second in prolonged under-performance.”
Monday, 16 July 2001
Top VC Doerr apologizes for helping fuel dot-com frenzy “He projected a slide on a screen that described the Internet as ‘the largest legal creation (and evaporation) of wealth in the history of the planet.’ Despite his apology, Doerr stressed he wasn’t backing away from another notable statement he made about the Internet’s potential as an engine of innovation. ‘I stand by my statement that the Internet was – and is – under-hyped’”
Men without wives cause wars: study: “Mesquida is particularly dismissive of the idea that individual leaders can provoke a country to start a war by themselves. Had Adolf Hitler never been born, Mesquida says, the Second World War would have happened anyway. ‘There would have been somebody else. There are always little Hitlers around, but they don’t have much influence until there is a demographic situation that puts them there.’”
Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq: “For instance, the Internet was rock ‘n’ roll all over again. Not rock ‘n’ roll now, but rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when it actually terrified grown-ups.”
Saturday, 14 July 2001
Is the click-through history?: “Advertisers were so used to click-throughs that they continued to monitor the statistic, even when their objectives involved increasing awareness or improving a brand’s image, said Robin Webster, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. ‘What does the click have to do with any of those situations?’”
Thursday, 12 July 2001
World land database charts a troubling course: “Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have risen by nearly a third since the industrial revolution.”
Second sight: “They think there must be a catch. Why would a successful author bother to distribute his work online for free when he could get real money for it in print? Even Stephen King charged money for his online works (and then quit before he was done). It’s precisely because I’m a successful author that I can release a book for free.”
MS Attacks Open Source: “The license for Microsoft’s Mobile Internet Toolkit, which is in its second beta release to developers, says that it may not be used with any software under the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License…”
Monday, 9 July 2001
Tide Seems to Be Turning Against UCITA Measure: “Uniform laws that whack customers aren’t pro-commerce. Other prominent opponents now include every major consumer-protection and library group, and federal and state consumer protection officials hate the act.”
Saturday, 7 July 2001
Reality check for video-on-demand: “Users are less than enthusiastic about mopping up the new Internet capacity because the only service they could use it for - video-on-demand - would cost them more to provide than they could collect in payments.”
Britain’s sad decline of liberty a warning for U.S.
Kodak tangles with Microsoft over Win XP: “The message was heard on Capitol Hill. It was one thing for Microsoft to attack another software firm, says a Senate staffer, but muscling a household name such as Kodak ‘could change the debate.’”
Roger Ebert: Now & Then - “The Web has become internalized. It is our primary information source. We are not inside cyberspace, but we are inside the news. The shakeout is pretty much over. The gold rush didn?t pan out. The latest search for El Dorado has ended like the others, with conquistadores belly-up on rafts filled with chattering monkeys.”
Science researchers report ‘extremely unstable’ gene expression in cloned mice
The People’s Net: “Maybe this kind of optimism requires us to look at the Internet less as an investment opportunity and more as a new life form. That?s the way we used to see it in ancient times, anyway. Back in the 2,400-baud, ASCII text era of 10 long years ago, the Internet had nothing to do with the Nasdaq Index.”
Thursday, 5 July 2001
Copyrights and copywrongs: “The general rule of law is, that noblest of human productions - knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions and ideas - become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”
Tuesday, 3 July 2001
Who is “viral” now?: “Are you prepared to bet your career, or your company’s existence, that Microsoft will never sue if you write code…”
Sunday, 1 July 2001
Scientist Says Mind Continues After Brain Dies