Log
 stuff that drifts by...

ARE MESSAGE BOARDS GOING THE WAY OF THE DODO?
Unruly Posters May Lead To Nixing Of Community Forums
---------------------------------------------------------------------- by Jason Williams

Online newspapers began using message boards to give their readers a place to sound off on community current events. But it seems a few bad apples may have newspapers throwing out bushels of forum comments.

Unable to deal with "outrageous violations of its guidelines, including foul language and threats by users against users," LATimes.com, the online site of the Los Angeles Times, shut down its message boards.

Remember in the seventies when inflation got out of control? All of a sudden, it was tough to tell a bargain from a rip-off. The standards changed. A twenty-five cent cup of coffee became a bargain. Was $125 a good price for a three-piece suit? Quick - would you pay a million lire to rent an Alfa Romeo for a week? Or a thousand pesetas? Three hundred quid? What's $10 buy these days? Alice, those hooka-smoking rabbits are measuring things with rubber rulers.

This leads people to make the bad choices when trading off time versus quality. How much time does a given project warrant? Do it now! Timeliness outweighs getting things done right!

Role, A people-centric technical leadership role with strong participation in product market phrasing, revenue models, and product design and development. I emphasize rapid development practices, creating productive energized teams and encouraging iterative development on smaller time frames - creating better focus than is done in traditional development practices. Strong participation in company required. Online/Internet enabled only product is my focus. I am presently occupied and won't be available for the forseeable future.

Now you can learn EVERYTHING about your friends, neighbors, enemies,
employees, co-workers, your boss, even yourself!

Is there someone online that you want to find out more about?

Are they exploring areas of the internet that they shouldn't be?

It's time for you to see for yourself and find out what they are really doing
online!

Don't let suspicions become paranoia, uncover the truth now before it's too
late!

Many people hire a private investigator to observe, track and record what
their husband, wife, boyfriend/girlfriend and children are doing.  Be your
own private investigator. Get the full details of the hidden truth. Now you
can  investigate anyone secretly, and in the privacy of your own home!

Get your hands on the most powerful spy software available today! With it,
you can find out who they are talking to and more importantly what they are
talking about!

See and record every word typed in:

               EMails
                 Private Messages
                 Chat Rooms
                 Message Boards
                 ICQ & IRC

Find out who they are talking to and what they are saying.  Find out what type
of chatrooms they are going in.  Record and check out all the web sites they
are visiting or searching for!  Best of all, they don't have to be using the same
computer as you!  Spy-Soft can find all this out by using just their IP Address!
And with all the easy to use tools, finding out an IP is one of the easiest features!

Need to find out about someone who's not online?  With Spy-Soft, you can locate anyone
by their name, phone number, state license plate number, social security number, even
e-mail address.  You can even find unlisted phone numbers!

Credit checks are easy and free with Spy-Soft.  Never pay again just to see a copy of
your's or anyone else's credit report!

Take a look at some of the other features packed into Spy-Soft's powerful tools...

- Look at anyone's criminal records
- Examine their driving record
- Locate people who have changed their name
- Locate birth parents and adoptees
- Anonymously surf the internet
- Locate long lost friends  

WARNING:  You may be shocked or overwhelmed by the results of what you
find!!!  

Spy-Soft is simple to install and use and will work on any PC or
Macintosh that has an internet connection.

Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man, because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness. For he wishes only to live like the beast, neither weary nor amid pains, and he wants it in vain, because he does not will it as the animal does. One day the man demands of the beast: "Why do you not talk to me about your happiness and only gaze at me?" The beast wants to answer, too, and say: "That comes about because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say." But by then the beast has already forgotten this reply and remains silent, so that the man wonders on once more.

argh

England's "Endurance UK" has players bob for false teeth in buckets of pig eyeballs and eat quiches full of maggots.

HAVE YOU HEARD OF GROWTH HORMONE (GH)???

Released by your own pituitary gland, GH starts declining in your 20s, even more in your 30s and 40s, eventually resulting in the shrinkage of major organs plus all other symptoms related to old age.

THIS CAN NOW BE REVERSED!!! IN THOUSANDS OF CLINICAL STUDIES, GH HAS BEEN SHOWN TO ACCOMPLISH THE FOLLOWING:

• * Reduce body fat and build lean muscle WITHOUT EXERCISE!
• * Enhance sexual performance  
• * Remove wrinkles and cellulite
• * Lower blood pressure and improve cholesterol profile
• * Improve sleep, vision and memory  
• * Restore hair color and growth
• * Strengthen the immune system  
• * Increase energy and cardiac output
• * Turn back your body's biological time clock 10-20 years
• in 6 months of usage !!!

For MORE INFORMATION and your FREE INFO-PAK,

Call 24 hrs. (recorded message):

1 888-248-4571

SALES REPS NEEDED (NOT MLM)

Do not delete this, it may be the most important thing you read this year!

If you need to make a few thousand dollars REALLY FAST, then please take a moment to read this simple program I am sharing with you.  You DO NOT have to send $5 to five people, buy their reports or recipes or anything like that. Nor will you have to invest more money later to get things going.

THIS IS THE FASTEST, EASIEST PROGRAM YOU WILL EVER DO. Complete it in one hour and you will never forget the day you first received it.

The following is a plan to benefit you and your future.

BE PREPARED TO GET EXCITED...YOU WON'T BE DISAPPOINTED!!!

Read the following and you will agree this is a very exciting opportunity.  Only invest a little bit of time, and your reward could mean thousands of dollars! Good luck!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

(Typical chain letter scam follows)

Pleasure without conscience

Knowledge without character

Commerce without morality

Science without humanity

Worship without sacrifice

Politics without principle

Rights without responsibilities [Arun Gandhi]

Technology without direction [Steven W. Gilbert]

Connection without community

Teaching without joy

Learning without hope

http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/opinion/story?id=38b308270

It's weird, but not totally unexpected. It turns out that the Web is infecting organizations with the characteristics of its own architecture. So, if you want to know what a hyperlinked organization looks like, look at what the Web itself is like.

What's the Web's character? You can slice it into seven basic themes:

1. Hyperlinked. Before the Web, computer networks were laid out in advance like well-planned cities. Who got connected to whom and how was all part of the master plan. And once you were connected, there was a recognizable central authority responsible for the whole shebang. The Web isn't even a little like that. The Web literally consists of hundreds of millions of pages hyperlinked together by the author of each individual page. Anyone can plug in and any page can be linked to any other, without asking permission. The Web is constantly spinning itself -- many small pieces loosely joining themselves as they see fit.

2. Decentralized. No one is in charge of the Net. There is no central clearing house that dispatches all requests and approves all submissions. No one ordered the Web built. There is no CEO of the Web. There is no one to sue. There's no one to complain to. There's no one to fix it when it breaks. There's no one to thank.

3. Hyper time. Internet time is, famously, seven times the velocity of "normal" time. And yet we use the leisurely verb browse to describe our behavior on the Web because in the virtual world, I feel I can move about at my own pace, exploring when and where I want. I can take a quick look at a site and come back later without having to find another parking space, go to the end of the line, or pay a second entry fee. The Web puts the control of my time into my hands.

4. Open, direct access. The Net provides what feels like direct access to everyone else on the Net and to every piece of information that's ever been posted. If you want to go to a page you just click on the link and, boom, you're there. There's nothing standing between you and the rest of the world of people and pages.

5. Rich data. The currency of the Web isn't green bar printouts of facts and stats. It's pages. Humans have been creating pages since the invention of paper and dirty water. Pages -- or "documents," as we sometimes say -- are extraordinarily complex ways of presenting information. Typically, they tell you as much about the author as about their topic, a big change from the pre-Web information environment that aimed at generating faceless data.

6. Broken. Because the Web is by far the largest, most complex network ever built, and because no one owns it or controls it, it is always going to be, in the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, "a little bit broken."

7. Borderless. Because traditional networks were concerned as much with security as with access, it was usually made clear where your stuff ended and other people's stuff began. The Web, on the other hand, was designed so that you can include a link to a page without having to get the author's permission. Thus, on the Web it is often hard to tell exactly where the boundaries are.

Phone-net is obviously different from regular web-surfing. The screen's a bit small. (Phone.com and others have SDKs that strip the graphics and other superfluous elements from standard HTML pages.) Apps will be point-and-click stuff like shopping, traffic, stock quotes. The guy across from me could order take-out from his Sprint mobile phone.

Security is a giant looming issue (when the phone knows where you are, you may get beamed messages from the storefront you're passing; the Russkis zapped a Chechen general who injudiciously provided a homing device with his cell phone.)

A number of people are gearing up to offer Wireless ASP services. They'll convert and phone-enable your standard web pages. (I call these "WASPs".)

This is classic Fast Company stuff--the revoilutionary zeal of the 1960s and the therapeutic language of the early 1970s have been seamlessly assimilated by the business world. Revolution and change now involve making alternations to flow charts, building "extreme teams" and dropping words line "zoomwidth."

The world loves a landscape, hates an abstract. (Who are these people?)

 As we enter the twenty-first century, the business world is consumed by questions  about e-commerce. In this article, four close observers of e-commerce speculate  about the future of commerce.
 
 Adrian Slywotzky believes the Internet will overturn the inefficient push model  of supplier-customer interaction. He predicts that in all sorts of markets,  customers will use choiceboards—interactive, on-line systems that let people  design their own products by choosing from a menu of attributes, prices, and  delivery options. And he explores how the shifting role of the customer—from  passive recipient to active designer—will change the way companies compete.  
 
 Clayton Christensen and Richard Tedlow agree that e-commerce, on a broad level,  will change the basis of competitive advantage in retailing. The essential mission  of retailers—getting the right product in the right place at the right price  at the right time—is a constant. But over the years retailers have fulfilled  that mission differently thanks to a series of disruptive technologies. The  authors identify patterns in the way that previous retailing transformations  have unfolded to shed light on how retailing may evolve in the Internet era.  
 

I'm No Doofus. I'm a Genius.
 from The New York Times, 1/19/00
 
 He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool, according to an  old Chinese proverb. But new research suggests that if this is so, such fools  are abundant.
 
 Two psychologists, Dr. Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois and Dr. David  Dunning of Cornell University, found in a series of studies that incompetence  often accompanies overconfidence. Asked to rate their skill on tests of logic,  grammar and humor, subjects who scored lowest were also the most likely to "grossly  overestimate" their performance, the researchers found.
 
 These results make sense, Kruger and Dunning wrote in a recent article in The  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, because the knowledge necessary  to perform competently is often the same knowledge required to evaluate competence.  
 
 Unlike their incompetent peers, subjects who did well on the tests tended to  underestimate their abilities a bit. But asked to "grade" the tests of others,  they quickly upgraded their self-assessments. "They instantly realize, 'My God,  I had no idea people were so lousy!"' Kruger said.
 
 In contrast, low-scoring subjects further inflated their self-judgments after  seeing the work of their peers. Only when they received training in the skills  demanded by the tests did the inept subjects grow more realistic in their evaluations.  
 
 The findings, the researchers said, fit well with previous work showing that  overconfidence is a common human trait.
 
 In their most recent studies, the psychologists have examined people's assessments  of their performance on drivers' tests. Their finding: "There is very little,  if any, correlation between how much people think they know about driving safety  and how much they really know," said Dunning. "And of course, they overestimate  how much they know."
 
 -- By ERICA GOODE

e-mail of the day

Lose Weight While You'er Sleeping? Sounds Impossible We Know........BUT It's  Not!

Over 50 million Americans are on a diet of some kind, and most are frustrated  to tears! Dieting doesn't work for the simple reason..... If you restrict calories,  the body goes into starvation mode and starts consuming MUSCLE for food and  storing FAT for reserves!

DREAM AWAY was developed by an M.D. and Is Back by Extensive Scientific  Research. A unique combination of nutrients ..... Actually Instructs Your Body  to Use FAT rather than MUSCLE! These ingredients work in synergy to help you  achieve your Health & Appearance

Goals! Click NOW to find out more

Experience  California.

from glassdogTM 1/18/00

As part of their recently redesigned Web site, United Airlines will now send  a message to your alphanumeric pager or cell phone equipped to receive text  messages informing you of a specific flight's information, including expected  arrival time and gate number so you can stop asking the people at the counter  who are always too busy fiddling with the video games to give you any real help,  anyway.

"This is just the first leg of a caterpillar of virtual services we'll be offering  our passengers in the coming months," an airline spokesperson said. "Soon you'll  be able to have virtual sex in our fleet's restrooms, get drunk and berate our  flight attendants and drive the luggage trams around the tarmac, crashing them  into 747's in flaming conflagrations, all via the convenience of wireless communications!"  Plans for Virtual Vomit, allowing customers to upchuck their in-flight chicken  dinner in 1-bit grayscale, have reportedly been scrapped.

1/18/00. Today's New York Times reports that the incompetent think themselves  competent. It's like the fact that a majority of male drivers think they're  among the top 10% most skilled drivers.

Fast Food, Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age

ne source of a pervasive millennial malaise is the perception that American life has come down to a couple of monster corporations selling the same Gap chinos and Egg McMuffins on every corner, from sea to shining sea -- that the rich pageantry of the national folklife, in all its pungent variety, has played itself out in a roadside litter of discarded clamshell burger boxes and chicken buckets. Every city looks just the same, its presence marked upon the landscape not by impressive civic monuments but by a garishly lighted corridor of brand-name drive-ins, pointing the way from the Interstate to an all but abandoned urban center: McDonald's, Arby's, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut. Topeka or Syracuse, Cheyenne or Memphis -- only the order of the pseudo-haciendas and the golden arches changes: Wendy's, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Arby's, McDonald's.

The garish fantasy of early fast-food architecture clearly derived from the look-at-me buildings of Southern California, where endemic automobility took hold earliest and the builder's task was to cause a motorist whizzing by at 20 or 30 miles per hour to gape, pull over in mute disbelief and buy something. California restaurants came in all shapes and disguises, from derby hats to giant hollow statues of dogs from which frankfurters were dispensed. Early McDonald's stands, their roof lines canted rakishly upward, were banded with eye-popping red and white stripes, like so many supine candy canes. Taco Bells once looked like mission churches on speed. The success of McDonald's Ray Kroc (his 1.6-ounce burger sold for 15 cents in 1955) and his fellow giants of the industry in establishing a sense of place, however crudely, is best illustrated by the current models of their restaurants, in which the symbolic trappings have become tasteful logos applied to otherwise unremarkable structures.

Dr. Wilson: On the basis of our understanding of the behavior of nonhuman primates, our closest genetic relatives, and a mounting body of evidence from psychology and anthropology, I would venture that the following behaviors are unlikely to change in any fundamental way:

A tendency toward hierarchy.

A tendency toward, emphasis upon, and deep personal concern about status and recognition.

A great value placed individually upon self-esteem as part of individual integrity.

A desire for a substantial degree of personal privacy, including private space.

Deep sexual bonding and deep parental bonding, with both types of bonding having numerous and complex manifestations in cultural life.

An aversion to incestuous behavior.

Tribalism of some kind, even if it comes down to national soccer teams.

Twirling Globe Stops to Greet 2000, One Midnight After Another By ROBERT D. MCFADDEN

Two thousand years after Christ's obscure birth in a dusty town in Judea, the world's six billion people -- most of them non-Christian and many of them preoccupied with terrorism, computers, diets, bank accounts, politics and the perils of the future -- rode their turning blue planet across time's invisible line today and, by common consent, looked into the dawn of a new millennium.

What they first saw was a party. It was garish, glittering and global, and millions, setting religious considerations and personal concerns aside, joined in the festivities to celebrate the conjunction of a new year, a new century and a new thousand-year cycle of history. They also put aside the inconvenient fact that the millennium, technically, is still a year off.

It hardly mattered. In New York's Times Square and across the United States, in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, in cities and towns all over the world, bells pealed, crowds shrieked and surged, skyrockets soared into the night, fireworks burst into supernovas, "Auld Lang Syne" rang out, lights pulsed, loved ones and friends embraced, and the music and Champagne flowed.

The vaunted Internet will (a) bring the world into loving, beeping communication, or (b) become the vehicle for e-larceny, e-terror and e-anarchy; (c) prove that untaxed commerce is a boon to humankind, or (d) provide the tax revenues to redistribute wealth throughout the world; (e) be replaced by the Outernet, a rigorously policed method of thought control throughout the solar system; (f) be devoured by incensed mall rats rebelling against computer hermitism.

Chris Locke may have been a drug-abusing former alcoholic (as he tells everyone), but he did spot the potential of the web long before many others. Ex-hippies such as Mr Locke, who continued to harbour ambitions to change society, were often the first to grasp the populist implications of the Internet. After a stint at Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics institute, Mr Locke started in 1993 the Internet Business Report, the first publication to cover what would eventually become the dot.com industry, then sold the idea of what would later be called a “portal” to one of the web’s first entrepreneurs, Alan Meckler. Mr Locke ran that site, called MecklerWeb, for a while before falling out with Mr Meckler. But by this time, Mr Locke had established himself as the first loud and opinionated e-commerce pundit, a field that has since grown both crowded and very lucrative (many become venture capitalists).

The wisdom of RageBoy

For the past four years, Mr Locke has exorcised his demons with an irregular e-mail screed sent under the name of his one-man consultancy, Entropy Gradient Reversals, that he runs out of his home office in Boulder, Colorado. As often as not, he writes in the voice of his psychotic alter-ego, RageBoy, in a profanity-laced ramble that occasionally touches on the subject of Internet business strategy, ridiculing all it sees. There are plenty of nuts out there firing off crazed e-mails, but what is extraordinary about Mr Locke is that he has attracted some 3,500 devoted readers from some of the Internet’s largest firms.

After months of paging through his abuse, they eventually realise that it is all a subversive demonstration of his big idea, “gonzo marketing”, the notion that the Internet represents a perfect opportunity for big companies to reach a new class of young, hip consumer with edgy, humorous and self-deprecating web content. This notion has recently been adopted wholesale, not just by many of the computer companies Mr Locke berated, but also by the young Internet firms that now pepper American television with surreal advertisements showing waves of dogs attacking marching bands, island-owning tow-truck drivers and hysterical executives on park benches.

What a perfect metaphor for trust, the issue I keep circling back to as I ponder the future of online learning. Are we going to set people free or are we going to control what comes into their computers?

Hi,4 years ago my cousin from Italy bought SWATCH-solar.Now i have a problem.When there is no sun my watch is not working because the battery can not be recharged.My guarantee is off,but I'm asking youif there is any decision of the problem please send me mail.Perhaps if I can buy new battery but you know the bettery of these model is special. Thank you.

A page of Internet Time Group's site says "This is not Swatch." This character apparently didn't read that far.

Spam of the day:

UNIVERSITY DIPLOMAS

Obtain a prosperous future, money earning power, and the admiration of all.

Diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities based on your present knowledge and life experience.

No required tests, classes, books, or interviews.

Bachelors, masters, MBA, and doctorate (PhD) diplomas available in the field of your choice.

No one is turned down.

Confidentiality assured.

CALL NOW to receive your diploma within days!!!

1-602-230-4252

Call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including Sundays and holidays.

The online Christmas shopping barage has begun: "Say it with software this holiday season" suggests ZDNet.

I've decided to start putting latest stuff at the top here. Not as a UI thing. Rather, the most recent stuff is generally the most interesting, for me as well as for others.

Weblogs! are coming on strong, finding the needles buried in the hay and keeping it entertaining while they do so. Dozens upon dozens of bright people finding and highlighting great stuff. This goes beyond Dave Winer's aggregation tools because every log reflects the interests and personality of its author. The internal equivalent of web logs should be de rigeur in learning environments.

November 19, 1999

rageboy: So I should end this now, but that's way too dramatic and drama is  the wrong note to end on. I think I need to put in something ordinary here,  pedestrian. A joke maybe. A duck walks into a bar...

Because, whatever it is, it's just the normal regular passage of time. Nothing  mystical. Nothing shocking. We are born. We grow old. We die. In between, we  sometimes get a glimpse of something. If I knew what it was, I'd tell you in  a second. I don't know. Take this piece of writing as my prayer flag flapping  out in the wind of a day that came on sideways. Who knows where it's headed?  Tomorrow I have a con-call at noon, a website to build, and forty-one phone  calls to return. Possibly lunch.

11/22/99 Rich Karlgaard, Forbes, writes,

No joke--computation is racing toward infinite power at zero cost. Faster than we ever thought. Moore's Law will skip past silicon, giving the finger as it goes. A single molecular chip will rival the human brain by 2020, all of New York City's brains by 2040, and the world's by 2050."

And lack of innovation, supposedly stifled for ten years by Microsoft?

What about:

• Tim Berners-Lee completed his work on the World Wide Web.
• The Web browser was invented at the University of Illinois.
• Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Netscape to commercialize the browser.
• Jeff Bezos started Amazon and launched the e-commerce revolution.
• Venture capital thrown at information technology startups rose fortyfold from $2 billion a year to $80 billion a year, when you include corporate VCs and angels.
• The Palm Pilot reached a million customers faster than any other computing device in history.
• Palm licensed its operating system to Nokia and Handspring, cutting Microsoft Windows CE off at the knees.
• Sun Microsystems invented the Java language and started a mass exodus of computer programming talent away from Microsoft toward Sun. The exodus continues.
• Sun won the Internet server battle and checked progress of Microsoft Windows NT in its tracks.
• AOL grew faster than Microsoft.
• AOL's stock rose faster than Microsoft's.
• AOL's home page kicked MSN nine ways till Sunday.
• So did Yahoo's.
• A Finnish entrepreneur tunneled under the Windows monopoly to create Linux.
• Linux acquired 12 million customers, all at the leading edge of Web-centric computing.
• Red Hat, a Linux support company, went public and attained a multibillion-dollar market cap.
• ASPs (application service providers), an idea developed with a goal to cripple Microsoft, became, this year, the hottest funded category of software.
• Steve Jobs returned to Apple and made it once again the fastest growing major PC company.

Yeah, Microsoft has sure killed innovation during its decade of monopoly dominance.

November 26, 1999

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America  
 by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham

good on mergers and  acquisitions

Reviewer: clocke@panix.com from Boulder, Colorado July 22, 1999

I really enjoyed this book. Not only is Buffett a brilliant investor and corporate  analyst, he also has a great sense of humor. That caught me completely off guard.  I wasn't expecting it at all in someone who deals in such weighty financial  matters. It's too bad the guy drinks so much, through I guess that's the lifestyle  down there in the islands. The only reason I gave this one a four is that I  was disappointed to see none of his terrific lyrics included. But funny, oh  yes! And some good tips on mergers and acquisitions too.

jaycross@InternetTime.com