AOL updated its AOL Journals service today. News.com has a report. Members will be able to add to their journals by sending instant messages or text messages from a mobile phone. AOL claims over 33 million subscribers, but only 220,000 journal creations. 0.7% of all subscribers start a journal? Seems discouraging, but maybe AOL is not marketing the service well enough....
Chris Pratley writes a history of Microsoft Word from his point of view. Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn’t really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer. Understand the market, and the customers, and then go pedal to the metal, with release after release focused on what the customers need, incorporating their feedback. That puts the competition into reaction mode....
Jenna Cooper, captain of the University of Nebraska women's soccer team and member of the U21 player pool, died yesterday from a gunshot wound in her throat. The Nebraska soccer team was celebrating the close of its spring training season....
Fred Kaplan of Slate breaks down the United States budget for nuclear weapons. [T]his year's spending on nuclear activities is equal to what Ronald Reagan spent at the height of the U.S.-Soviet standoff. It exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent—again, in real dollars—throughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War....
Alex Tabarrok writes in the Marginal Revolution weblog about competitive differences between males and females. His writing is based on an article in the August 2003 issue (Vol. 118, Issue 3) of The Quarterly Journal of Economics written by Uri Gneezy, Muriel Niederle and Aldo Rustichini. Very interesting implications for sports as well as business. [I]n the single-sex tournaments the women's performance improves considerably relative to both their performance in the piece rate system and to their performance in the mixed tournament. Women do like to compete just not against men!...
MacMice has a new USB microphone shipping May 7: the MicFlex. Bend it around the back of your screen and aim it at your recording subject. (via Gizmodo) I would like to record more of the technical presentations I attend with the online world, and this new microphone might be a good portable answer! If you have a better solution for audio recording presentations from the crowd, please let me know....
Wal-Mart is now selling PCs using Sun's Java Desktop System through their online store. 1.6 GHz, 128 MB of DDR RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive for $298....
Opera 7.50 beta 1 is now available. Opera Mail now supports RSS newsfeeds. Integrates with Opera address book so you can see custom avatars for weblog publishers and even their IRC nicks. You can also add the blog publisher as a contact direct from the RSS reader. Supports CSS Level 2 revision 1 with few exceptions. "Newsfeeds" added as access point in the e-mail panel RSS 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 are supported Clicking RSS links automatically adds newsfeed to Opera Mail Auto-detection of RSS file (link rel="alternate") displayed in navigation bar...
Why do different CD-R media claim different shelf lives? Dutch personal computer magazine PC Active put 30 brands to the test by placing them in a dark cupboard for two years and retesting. Independent (U.K.) reports on the CD-R test results. 10 percent showed aging problems after two years....
Andy Raskin of Business 2.0: "Creative Commons encourages artists to share and distribute their work for free. And that could be the key to a new multibillion-dollar industry."...
Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »