![[Pudgy, balding]](img4/zdjn.jpg)
(Here's a don't miss direct link to an 8min RealVideo of JN explaining (among other things) why he thinks people shouldn't use long scrolling pages (he's too busy to read them!).
Sun, Nov 7, 1999 (New Moon)
If you're interested, the deal with this branded-coffee-mugs place is that they set a base price (mostly $9.99 or $10.99) for mugs, mousepads, and t-shirts, and you add whatever profit you want to that base, and supply the graphic to be printed. I hope competition drives that price way down: http://www.cafepress.com/ [Larkfarm] ß
I wrote a mini-review of the Britannica site:
http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001gTK (They were smart enough to buy brittanica.com as well!)
Here are my fave quotes from the Salon piece on prayer: http://www.salon.com/health/feature/1999/11/03/prayer/print.html
"This study is a well-designed waste of time," says Barrett, board chairman of the health fraud watchdog organization Quackwatch. "You can't generate magical forces with magical thinking. It's absurd.""What if you pray against somebody?" Barrett says. "Can that do harm? Is health determined by who prays harder?"
"I would be appalled if the government or any research foundation funded this. I wouldn't want my tax dollars going to support it," he says. "You're much better off spending research time and money on activities that might yield practical results."
A 1996 USA Today poll of 1,000 adults found that 79 percent believed that spiritual faith can help people recover from an illness. ...Koenig draws a sharp distinction between the mystical healing effects of intercessory prayer -- other people praying for your well-being -- and the practical health benefits of personal faith. He says that having a strong set of religious beliefs of your own can, through organic effects, make you healthier.
The poll results so far (with idiotic spamming for choice one trimmed):
How do you feel about the power of prayer? (~175 good votes)
12%? No possible effect/ Opiate of the masses. 45% Might make you feel better/ Placebo effect. 17% Can't hurt to will positive outcomes, might have some effect. 14% Might work by exerting a real, physical/emotional force on the interpersonal psychic web. 12% Might work by catching the attention of a personal God.
(Nobody admitted to reading the question the way Dan Hartung suggested it might be misread, as asking about the content of the Salon article rather than your own beliefs.)
I put my thoughts in a new BBS topic: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001iZF
These mostly share a sense of psychic pressures, that one exerts via one's thoughts. Articulating goodwill in prayer should have a positive effect within this matrix, but negative prayer will also be effective, and it's the negatives that strongly predominate in today's culture, where positive prayer is loudly and widely rejected as ridiculous.
Poll:
Jakob Nielsen maintains very useful 'sidebar' pages with users' comments for his AlertBox columns... but you have to go back and look for them, he doesn't announce these additions in his weblog or anywhere else I can find: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530_comments.html
Even More New Web Design Problems: Readers pointed out several new design mistakes that should also be avoided.
(Here's a don't miss direct link to an 8min RealVideo of JN explaining (among other things) why he thinks people shouldn't use long scrolling pages (he's too busy to read them!).
I'd bet he doesn't read the news or anything else on the Web at all, unless he's forced to.)
Keeper headlines:
John Cowan's Home Page (powerful resources)
Brilliant info-design at this bad-movies site (via TVUltra)
(Why hasn't this what's-new page been updating?) (PCMag)
Witty brainy one-liners about languages (via Sabren- don't miss)
For Mac only, a promising replacement for LinkPad, for stashing temporary URLs and other scraps: http://www.sigsoftware.com/dropdrawers/index.html
Drop Drawers is a revolutionary user-interface enhancement which provides floating pull-out, snap-shut drawers on the sides of your screen to store text, URLs, aliases, pictures, sounds, movies and anything else.
(Unlike LinkPad it lets you rename and rearrange links, and it seems to save them automatically.)
Where has Nerve gone? (2 days awol)
http://www.nervemag.com/highlights/
(Thanks to Tony Herr for pointing me to http://www.nerve.com/highlights/ instead.)
Neologism: [source]
Vampireware; n, a project capable of sucking the lifeblood out of anyone unfortunate enough to be assigned to it which never actually sees the light of day, but nonetheless refuses to die.
Sally [qnv] writes:
why is it everything you praise as 'brilliant info-design' looks just as boring and not-all-that-brilliantly designed as RW?Info-design refers to way ideas are classified and arranged on the page, ignoring the font styles, etc. So the bad-movies page [qv] is brilliant because they picked many categories of fun things they could offer (quotes, images, etc) and grouped each one conveniently, and put them all on a single page. (I hated their fontstyling, in fact.)
Lee Bumgarner returns to Usenet: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/profile.xp?author=nurd%40mindspring.com
On a brighter note, my life has changed a great deal since I was in Blackstone and I am now on the OTHER side of the user/IT equation. While I am closer to understanding Bev, I still am smarting from the Great A.R.K Flame War of which Bev was anti-matter to my matter.
Don't miss: Extremely excellent issue of Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.64.html
At the time Excel disappeared, I had been entering the text// cannot be tested in test harnessin a cell.This is what happened as I typed that text:
- Evidently, Excel 97 treats a forward slash as an ALT press (highlighting the File menu button), if a cell is selected but not being edited.
- the second forward slash was ignored
- the space key caused the application window menu to drop down.
- the "c" selected the "close" option from that menu, which brought up a dialog box saying "Do you want to save? Yes / No / Cancel".
- the "a" was ignored
- the "n" activated the "No" option on the dialog box.
- poof! Excel closed without saving.
Fun with Babelfish: http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~copeland/work/babel.html [LarkFarm]
And here's its outputmy hovercraft is full of eels
my hovercraft is full with eels
mine hovercraft is full with conger-eels
Hovercraft of the mine is full with the gronghi
Air cushion vehicle of the pit is full with gronghi
The vehicle of pneumatic shock absorber of the hollow is full with gronghiOut of sight, out of mind.
Out of the sight, spirit.
Understand over the sight from out.
From sight, the mind.
Except of the sight, it is of the mind.
Outside Vista, the mind.
Don't miss: Awesome Jakob-Nielsen bashing: (annoying font) http://www.shirky.com/articles/nielsen.html [Haddock]
This is the most serious objection to your suggestion that standards of usability should be enforced. A web site is an implicit contract between two and only two parties - designer and user. No one - not you, not Don Norman, not anyone, has any right to enter into that contract without being invited in, no matter how valuable you think your contribution might be.There is no Commisar of Web Design here, no International Bureau of Markup Standards, just an implicit and ongoing compact between users and designers that improvement will be rewarded.
As anyone who has seen "Hamster Dance" or an emailed list of office jokes can tell you, the net is the most efficent medium the world has ever known for turning user preference into widespread awareness.
When I queried the site's owner about his design process, he said "I didn't know anything when I started out, so I just put up a site with an email link on every page, and my customers would mail me suggestions."
There is a dream dreamed by engineers and designers everywhere that they will someday be put in charge, and that their rigorous vision for the world will finally overcome the mediocrity around them once and for all. Resist this idea - the world does not work that way...
Overdue: Harper's Index, AlertBox
Did the Founding Fathers oppose Big Government? (wordy) http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/11/03/wills/print.html
The second half of Garry Wills' new book, much weaker than the first, is a rather cursory survey of various movements, events and individuals that rejected government in a variety of ways. It's a worthwhile historical roundup, but inevitably superficial; and the subjects he looks at are so wildly disparate -- from "withdrawers" like Thoreau to "vigilantes" like the Ku Klux Klan to "insurrectionists" like John Brown -- that it becomes difficult to see what they have in common.
anti-governmental values governmental values provincial cosmopolitan amateur expert authentic authoritative spontaneous efficient candid confidential homogenous articulated traditional progressive popular elite organic mechanical rights-oriented duties-oriented religious secular voluntary regulatory participatory delegative rotational division of laborWorst of all for those who appeal to the militias as evidence of the power of armed citizen resistance, the militias were bad soldiers, undisciplined and disorganized; their main contribution (a painful reality check for the black-helicopter crowd) was as an internal police force, a kind of original FBI.
The Founders were clearly conflicted, as Wills' fascinating discussion of what he calls the constant "dos a dos reversing of positions" makes clear.
"The arbitrary and petty acts of government are enough to make anyone grumble. But all human relationships grate or gall at times -- which does not make us call the parent-child relationship, or the husband-wife bond, or friendship, mere necessary evils."
Heh:
Guess which one I favor:1. xxxxxxxxx
2. xxxxxxxxxxx
3. xxxxxxxxx
4. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
5. xxxxxxxxx
I just heard a version of 'Satin Doll' by Nancy Wilson (c1963) that knocked my socks off. This RealAudio sample is actually effective, for a bit. (That song must be one of the most-covered ever-- the CDU search-by-song-title turned up many dozens of versions.)
Ex-Police do Monk: http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,500053052-500087077-500299036-0,00.html
"I didn't want to use an obvious jazz singer. Sting, like me, comes from a jazz background and ... I thought it would be much fresher sounding because he sings without vibrato. ... We had a great time doing it together. It was one track, no pressure." [RealAudio bits-- I recommend 3 and 5]
(I've been checking out CDNow and Tunes.com to see if they do better than CDUniverse for this RealAudio-samples function, but neither have samples for this one yet... and Tunes.com's homepage took multiple minutes of locked-up Mac before it rendered.)
Poll:
I commented somewhere that I expect weblog readership to increase a hundredfold in the next few years, but this assumes that average surfers would read current weblogs if they knew about them. So: What percentage of surfers do you think would follow at least one current weblog if they were aware of it?
Keeper headlines:
Cottage industry videotaping TV news (Scripps-Howard)
BrainLog new weblog (via Bird/wire)
Four historical levels of sex-differentiation? (BBC)
First detailed review of Broadway's James Joyce's The Dead (BrazenHead)
Overview of Alan Kay's Smalltalk-successor, 'Squeak' (OSNews)
I've finally resolved my conflict between not wanting to cash in on Amazon royalties, and not wanting them all to go to Jeff Bezos: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/dickinson.html
Amazon royalties from these pages go to Sam Smith's Progressive Review
Guerrilla theater for surveillance cams: (multipage w/pix) http://www.panix.com/~notbored/the-scp.html [Hadddock?]
The basic concept of guerilla programming is simple: a group of individuals create a scenario and act it out using surveillance cameras as if they were their own, as if they were producing their own program, and as if the audience consisted of security personnel, police, school principals, residents of upper-class high security neighborhoods, and the producers and salespeople of the security systems themselves.
Dvorak practices topical-index-omancy: http://www.zdnet.com/filters/printerfriendly/0,6061,2386323-2,00.html [RBuzz]
Okay. Try to find any of the following sought-after items from those categories: auto repair, party planning, fabric, kids clothes, cosmetics, drill bits, home furnishings, or major appliances. Try to find a vacuum cleaner! It's obvious that an unmarried male coder put this list together.
Long Garry Trudeau profile includes a very useful summary of the characters' various changes: http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/11/02/trudeau/print.html
...And Zonker's drug-addled, gun-crazed Uncle Duke, modeled on gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, has been involved in adventures ranging from being ambassador to China to turning up as the 53rd Iran hostage to cocaine smuggling to working for David Duke, Oliver North and Donald Trump to running an orphanage to becoming a zombie who gets sold into slavery in Haiti. "He could use the discipline," one of his friends says.
New Onion appears a bit early:
Pudding-Factory Disaster Brings Slow, Creamy Death To Town Below
I finally got to the latest le Carre, and then went back and read all the reviews I'd cached on my fanpage, before writing my own epinion: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/lecarre.html
Positive reviews: UK Times "master of the psychological novel", UK Times w/plot summary and spoilers "credible and compelling hero", Telegraph "well written", Christian Science Monitor "exciting, thoughtful story", Irish Times "beautifully written, impeccably researched and suffused with humanity", APB "deftly plotted", Booklist "the reader marvels"Somewhat negative: Houston "one is reminded of James Bond"
Epinions page: Kiersten "a page-turner", Harriet "a well-done tale", Jorn "familiar territory"
Mostly-familiar rehash of the sociobiology wars: http://www.linguafranca.com/9911/darwin.html
Already, as a graduate student, E.O. Wilson had sensed he had a special destiny, as another Wilson tale suggests: He and a fellow graduate student are driving back to Harvard after attending a meeting at which all the greatest minds in evolutionary biology had gathered. Wilson's friend is awestruck at having been in the presence of such greatness. After driving along in silence for a while, Wilson turns to him and says, "It shouldn't be very hard to get to the top of that heap."
First chapter of Jim Clark bio is a readable sea drama: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/fc/newthing.htm
He had seen a yacht Wolter had just finished building, he said, and wanted one like it. Only bigger. And faster. And newer. He wanted his mast to be the biggest mast ever built. And he wanted to control the whole boat with his computers. Specifically, he wanted to be able to dial into his boat over the Internet from his desk in Silicon Valley and sail it across the San Francisco Bay.
Other new first chapters: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/chapter.htm
- "River Horse" William Least Heat-Moon: Best-selling author chronicles journey through America's waterways. (Non-Fiction)
- "Wonders of the African World" Henry Louis Gates. The author travels through 12 countries to bring us Africa's past. (Non-Fiction)
- "Thumbsucker" Walter Kirm. A comic telling of the Midwestern coming-of-age story. (Fiction)
Michael Stutz opens up the IMDb question: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001ghj
I was able to download and archive a copy of the entire db, but I think a clean-room reimplementation may be required because of copyright restrictions.
Another query:
Before the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was bought by Amazon, it was the showpiece of Net.cooperation. Does anyone know how its volunteers reacted to the purchase? It seems a pale shadow of its old energy, these days.
Query:
The problem with most web-based article-rating schemes (eg Epinions' rate-this-epinion feature) is that you have to click a link that transmits your rating, and loads a new page. Is there no HTML function that could transmit the rating without loading a new page? If not, why not?
Highly incendiary claims about MS stock fraud!?? http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html [Slashdot]
4) Prohibit Microsoft from offering employee stock options or any employee based ownership program for 10 years. The truth is most people go to Microsoft for stock options. This will require paying more real wages and more accurate financial results and therefore deflate the pyramid and increase competition.
Poll:
This is to gauge how much of a Web.stud you think you are. Say you were abducted by aliens but as a reward when they returned you they gave you a list of the 100 Web sites you'd find most useful (based on their omniscient insight). How many of those sites do you think you're already familiar with?
Curious:
Early poll results show a spike at 75%... which is what I chose, too! But it's taken me two years of dedicated searching to raise my level there, starting from way under 10% in 1997.
New NY Review of Books:
Hans A. Bethe: The Treaty Betrayed [nuke test-ban]
Amos Elon: Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said
Timothy Garton Ash: Ten Years After {Central Europe]
Alan Ryan: The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann
Mark Lilla: Briefe 1925 bis 1975 und andere Zeugnisse by Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger
Anne Barton: On a Voiceless Shore: Byron in Greece by Stephen Minta
Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame by Benita Eisler
Promising thread on alt.internet.search-engines: [Deja thread]
It has come to my attention that many editors in Dmoz have a vested or financial interest in being an editor in a specific category. Has anyone else seen this same abuse. If anyone is interested I can tell you how an editor in a specific category keep competitors out, changed titles and descriptions to suit his need...
Hunger Site clickthru stat: (see below) http://www.thehungersite.com/sponsoring.html
Our sponsors have consistently received click-through rates of many times that percentage, often 3% and above. The reason, we believe, is that the people who donate here are grateful to the sponsors and are willing to learn more about them.
Musing:
The Hunger Site model of banner-adding implies that each charity could create a similar page, and each surfer could visit daily all her fave charities, and each advertiser could raise their visibility enormously over random banner ads by placing an ad there, even for a limited period. I think this is quite reasonable-- I absolutely view the Hunger Site ads with much, much greater sympathy than others.In other words-- I'd bet their clickthru rate, instead of being 0.5% like average, is more like 10%, so in theory they could be charging ten cents per impression!
(And the ads I'm likeliest to click are the quietest ones, just a word or three on a plain background...)
Another new BBS topic: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001gTK
When Britannica.com announced last week that they were switching from a subscription model to a free-with-banner-ads model, the reaction was so swift and overwhelming that they've been down ever since. What does this say about ecommerce? What lessons can we learn? Why didn't Slate have the same reaction?
Keeper headlines:
Tracklist for Joni's imminent album of standards (Billboard)
Superb Peter Ackroyd review of new Rembrandt bio (UK Times)
Entangled-photon microscopy explained (NewSci)
The UK Sun's infamous Page3 girls (PG) (via Drudge)
Open-source game-code library, Allegro (Gamasutra-5pg)
Very cool article about building 'alternative' wheelchairs (SFBG)
Website-index using META-keywords only!?? (Aeiwi)
Free registration for Barron's lit study guides (via TracerLock)
New Slashdot-spinoff bbs topic-- your favorite hacks? http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001g7Z
Some of my faves:- MacHack a few years back delivered an extension that displayed everything as ascii-art, and even worked with Doom.
- Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set accomplished miracles on a 48k (or 64?) Apple ][+ in 1983 (inspired by a preview of the Mac, iirc).
Kibo's having a topnotch day today... General context: ark was devastated this week by a troll about M Otis Beard committing suicide: [Deja pattern]
Hey! That had a point! Go back and take all the meaning out, you big potzrebie! Also, in the future, waffles should be spherical and filled with maple vapor!
Funny overwritten praise of nineties bubblegum pop: http://www.nypress.com/col1.cfm?content_id=534&now=10/30/99&content_section=2
Now let's remember the most fundamental fact of life: Everything good is the Beatles, everything awful and bogus and pretentious and gross and condescending is the Rolling Stones. Okay?...Who knew the mousekatakeover of everything we do, see and experience would be so groovy?
Are weblogs 'journalism with a strong voice'? http://www.feedmag.com:80/re/re263.2.html
FEED: We see him through your eyes. And we relate to him and what's going on generally through your sensibility. So while on one level it seems like Gatsby or Jim Clark is the protagonist of the book, I think on another level, Nick, or Michael Lewis is the protagonist.
MICHAEL LEWIS: Well, there's no getting around that. It's true. It's the nature of the device. I mean it's the nature of the genre, which is non-fiction with a very strong voice.LEWIS: ...Silicon Valley's all about patricide. You start the company that destroys that other company.
FEED: What about Jim Clark doesn't represent the Valley?
LEWIS: Overt greed. Other people say it's not about the money; he's just overt about it, about everything. He's atypical in that he lacks the mechanism that most people have between their brains and their mouths to make themselves seem okay to other people.
(Interesting use of multi-colored text, but not successful imho.)
Interesting, moderately technical Slashdot interview on crypto: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/29/0832246&mode=flat
Pinhole cameras -- now being sold over the Internet -- can hide in the smallest cracks; satellite cameras can read the time on your watch from orbit... Van Eck devices can read what's on your computer monitor from halfway down the street. (I heard that the CIA demonstrated this for Scott McNealy at Sun; they captured his password from a van in the company's parking lot.)...AES will have to work on DSPs. Sooner or later, your cell phone will have proper encryption built in. So will your digital camera and your digital video recorder.
Quantum cryptography is a means of using quantum mechanics for key exchange. Basically, because it is impossible to measure the state of a quantum system without disturbing it, the physics of the key-exchange protocol allows you to detect eavesdroppers.
Quantum computing reduces the complexity of arbitrary calculations by a factor of a square root. This means that key lengths are effectively halved.
Archeology undermines Zionism: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991029/aponline013030_000.htm
Herzog is "feeding propaganda to Israel's enemies who want to negate our right to be here," Lapid said.
The cited article itself: http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/htmls/kat34_1.htm
It turns out that part of Israeli society is ready to recognize the injustice that was done to the Arab inhabitants of the country and is willing to accept the principle of equal rights for women - but is not up to adopting the archaeological facts that shatter the biblical myth.
Profile of alife-game designer ('Evolva'): http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/10/28/latham/print.html
"Television is like prison," he says. "The television director probably went to, you know, Oxford University -- twit. And every idea he wants to put in this damn program -- you're on the receiving end." [impressive 600k pic] [Evolva homepage w/pix]
If you sort your weblog's archives by topic, I highly recommend you include a 'universal timeline' section for articles on science and history, sorted chronologically: http://www.robotwisdom.com/netlit/history.html
12,000,000,000 BP: Big bang? 2,500,000,000 BP: cyanobacteria begin producing oxygen 1,600,000,000 BP: Animals, plants, and fungi diverge 760,000,000 BP: Rhodinia splits, starting the Pacific 543,000,000 BP: Cambrian period begins 340,000,000 BP: First land vertebrate 310,000,000 BP: Birds and mammals diverge 280,000,000 BP: X and Y chromosomes differentiate...
Don't miss: Great, long David Lynch interview (many Straight Story spoilers): http://www.salon.com/ent/col/srag/1999/10/28/lynch/print.html
I think the film really affects men. There's a thing about grandfathers and fathers alive in it -- and brothers, too -- and it gets you. It gets me.My granddad wore cowboy boots and was a wheat rancher and to me was just the coolest guy. Very cool. He would wear these really beautiful Western suits -- and string ties and cowboy boots, really polished. He always drove Buicks. And he wore these special gloves, real thin leather gloves, when he drove. And he drove really slow -- which I really loved. I hate riding fast.
Yes, the character of the machine is gone. I don't know when it happened, but it probably goes back to computers -- when manufacturers started to design everything to be aerodynamically correct, and to use vacuum-formed models and everything like that. You can see why they did it -- it makes perfect sense, and in some ways it's safer, and it could be really good. But then you see a 1958 Corvette Sting Ray, and you almost die to see what it was and what it's come to.
I love sitting in chairs!
The portrait of Rose -- it's like in music, where you're going along, and a theme comes in. But it's only the introduction; the theme is beautiful but the rest of the music goes away from it. Then the music builds, and that theme comes back, almost in the same way, but joins with something else. And now it can destroy you.
Poll results:
How many weblogs do you read consistently (normally catching up on missed days), taking weblogs in a rather narrow sense (not Slashdot or Drudge or Obscure Store)?
8% None. 32% One or two. 29% Three to five. 20% Six thru ten. 7% 11-20 3% 21-30 2% More than 30.
Yay! Animation-compaction mastered! (see new GIF below). I just have to create one image for each small change, rather than doing many changes at once (because the change-area is a rectangle, not a region). 116k is down to 17k!
![[map]](jaj/wrocks/wrocks.gif)
Animated Ulysses-map project: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/wrocks/index.html
This sequence [will be] 32 frames spaced at two-minute intervals. If you go all the way thru, there [will be] a rather hefty animation of the full sequence, but I don't want people linking directly to the animation because of the bandwidth it consumes, and it's just a meaningless 'ant farm' if you haven't read thru the explanations.
(Are there better gif-animation compressors than Mac GifBuilder? Sixteen almost identical 10k frames shouldn't be costing 116k!??)
Keeper headlines:
Detailed survey of new-generation gamebox wars (Salon- don't miss)
Church Halloween show re-enacts Columbine (via Drudge, don't miss)
Cheaper, DIY robotic pets (GettingIt)
Interesting analysis of the 150-year rise of corporate power (30min RealAudio) (Making Contact)
Don't miss Java applet for facial expressions (via Vacuum)
New first chapters: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/chapter.htm
- "Waiting" Ha Jin. Story of doctor who waits 30 years to marry his true love. (Fiction)
- "Plainsong" Ken Haruf. Lives intertwine in a small town, sharing universal yearnings of the heart. (Fiction)
- "Walkin' the Dog" Walter Mosley. The tale of ex-con Socrates and his post-prison life. (Fiction)
- "Dark Lady" Neil Simon. The continuation of "Rewrites," the playwright's bio. (Non-Fiction)
Most popular programming languages for writing business software: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cn/19991026/tc/19991026004.html [Slashdot]
Preferred:35% Visual Basic
20% C and C++
9% JavaSecondary choice:
22% Visual Basic
22% C and C++
10% Java
Wondering how much money Dogma-95 movies cost to make, I plugged "dogma.95 budget" into Google and turned up this: http://www.iffrotterdam.nl/festival99/eng/daily_29.htm
All the productions have budgets between $1-3 million
(A lot higher than I hoped, actually.)
Due tonight: New Onion:
Stretch Of Highway Learns It Was AdoptedNation Healed By Awesome Sports Highlight
Bill Gates Grants Self 18 Dexterity, 20 Charisma
Family Dog Suspected Cause Of Miniature Chuck-Wagon Disaster
(These are from a paper edition not on the Web.. apparently last week's?)
Michal Wallace's Linkwatcher MetaLog is not only a good log in itself, it also offers a side-panel that detects which other logs have updated recently: http://www.linkwatcher.com/metalog/
Don't miss Slashdot report on a very real hidden danger of cookies: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/22/0249212&mode=flat
The first banner ad that your browser requested from a banner-ad company got a user ID cookie sent back with it. And - here's the key - since so many banner GIFs all come from the same company's domain name, your browser sends back the same user ID no matter which website you're viewing the banner on. Your user ID is being tracked all over the web.
From a local newsgroup, an inventory of Usenet religious wars:
1. Windows NT vs. Linux 2. MAC vs. WinTel vs. Amiga 3. FTP vs. E-Mail Attachments 4. Outlook vs. Anything But Outlook 5. staroffice vs word vs wordperfect 6. Linux vs. BSD 7. Red Hat vs. Debian 8. Red Hat vs. SuSE 9. Red Hat vs. Slackware 10. Red Hat vs. BeOS 11. Linux vs. AIX 12. Linux vs. SCO 13. Linux vs. DOS 14. Perl vs. Python vs. Tcl 15. Spam vs. Legitimate Posting/mailing 16. Filtered News vs. Unfiltered News 17. Accepting vs. Refusing Cancels 18. VI vs. EMACS 19. tin vs. trn 20. tin vs. slrn 21. tin vs. pine 22. pico vs. A Real Editor :) 23. MSIE vs. NETSCAPE 24. Front Page vs Gravity etc... 25. Front Page vs. Anything But Front Page 26. Frames vs. No Frames 27. lynx friendly vs. not lynx friendly 28. hand coded html vs wysiwyg html editors 29. sega dreamcast vs. playstation 2 30. Distributed.net vs. Seti@home 31. cable vs dsl 32. Seagate vs. Western Digital Uncategorized VHS vs Beta Boot vs. Tow Truck Beatles vs. Elvis Oreos vs. Hydrox Mad vs. Cracked Burroughs vs. Kerouac vs. Ginsberg Justice department vs Microsoft Bewitched vs. I Dream of Jeannie Munsters vs. Addams Family Ginger vs. Mary Anne
Don't miss: Deep Michael Wolff on Jason Epstein on the dramatic decline of book publishing: http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=1299
Indeed, a leitmotif of the lectures is that the lectures themselves were lost in his new computer. Here is a take-away image: Epstein, last in the line of the great Jewish book publishers beginning with Liveright in the twenties and including Cerf, Klopfer, Schuster, Simon, and Knopf, who transformed twentieth-century literature and whose firms became the basis of the modern book industry, on the phone with the Compaq help line (on hold, listening to the music).It was out of this world that The New York Review of Books sprang during the 1962-3 New York newspaper strike (to smite, says Epstein, the "ill-informed, bland, slapdash" New York Times Book Review) and came to stand for a sort of cult of books and bookish people, aristocratic in their disdain for markets and marketing and the popular culture that was a by-product of such marketing.
Epstein's plan puts the Internet together with book-business consolidation in an effort to reconnect seller to buyer, publisher to reader, in a way that alters, in favor of publisher and reader, the economics of the transaction. The plan would challenge (and perhaps eradicate) not just Amazon but Barnes & Noble and Borders too. It's extraordinarily simple and wildly unlikely. And it is entirely obvious that the plan is the only way to preserve the book-publishing business in anything like the form it's in now.
Don't-miss issue of Progressive Review:
Linking poor black males to drugs and violence and poor white males to hate and violence makes living in a gated economy seem much more palatable.[And:] ...we checked out the US Joint Forces Command's public information web site. Here is what we found: "Warning! USE OF THIS OR ANY OTHER DEPT. OF DEFENSE INTEREST COMPUTER SYSTEM (DODICS) CONSTITUTES AN EXPRESS CONSENT TO MONITORING AT ALL TIMES..."
[And:] NAPHP estimates 31 percent of Americans have used an illicit drug at least once, but only six percent can be considered drug abusers or addicts. "It is clear that most persons who take illicit drugs are experimental or socio-recreational users," according to the report. "The typical drug user is scarcely distinguishable from the typical citizen, and most were introduced to illicit drugs by a close friend, not a pusher...
[And:] New York's financial community is now convinced that successful protests from consumers and environmental groups in Europe have hurt Monsanto's growth prospects and its stock market rating so badly that the only option to realize some value for investors would be some kind of sell-off.
[And:] ...bearish market strategists are getting the heave-ho. "In the spring and summer, if you were a bear you were doo-doo," says one strategist who's seen his job go bye-bye because he tried to offer his unvarnished opinion of the market's high risks.
Keeper headlines:
Noise Between Stations weblog (via eatonweb)
Interesting Net-AI projects from NWU scum (via RBuzz)
I've decided I approve whole-heartedly of the Hunger Site (now up to seven sponsors!). I get good vibes, and I even check out the advertisers when I have even a slight interest in their products: http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/donate.pl
Musing:
Theoretically, it should be possible to create a 404-free search-engine by limiting it to sites that have a track-record of maintaining their URLs (eg Salon). Then even if they should do an overhaul that breaks links, the search-site could just go thru the database and fix (or delete) that site's listings.
XML-CIA: http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1999/1018/fcw-agdia-10-18-99.html [Vacuum]
Through a simple, easy-to-use browser interface, analysts can drag and drop intelligence imagery and other reference documents from repositories throughout the community into their own documents, producing dynamic database references that ensure that they are working with the most up-to-date information. [JIVA homepage]
(F___ing pie-in-the-sky, if you ask me.)
Very odd results testing the new, improved AltaVista's wordcounts against various Elvis Index archives:
FAST AV FAST
(Aug) (Oct) (Oct)
text: 10.3 12.7 8.8
image: 10.2 19.2 9.4
math: 2.1 1.8 1.8
hp: 1.9 2.5 1.7
apple: 1.9 2.4 1.6
macintosh: 1.8 2.2 1.6
The FAST engine seemed to have 200M pages in early August, but its numbers have declined about 10% since then, while the new AV has jumped to 250M pages, by extrapolation.
The usually-insultingly-condescending spelling checks (and syntax checks) returned by various search engines are sometimes good for a laugh: [AV pattern]
Find this: 'elvis presley'
Spell check: did you mean elvish parsley?
The new, improved AltaVista claims to find 375k pages with 'elvis' compared to only 307k at AllTheWeb.com. If the latter really has 200M then AV may be up to 250M or so. (via RBuzz)
(Don't trust the main AV searchpage's numbers-- use the 'advanced search' form. The main form claimed 750k pages for elvis.)