Niall Kennedy's home on the web
The St. Paul Saints of the Northern League are auctioning the opportunity to be a professional baseball player for a day. “[T]he winning bidder will work out with the team and will be guaranteed an official plate appearance.” Bidding ends on May 3.
Step out to the plate in front of 6,000 fans and take a few swings against the Sioux Falls Canaries.
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.
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!
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.