WebSitesOfNote

The Top Ten Lies of Engineers:

If income is defined in terms of the services that are yielded by the products (and services) that we buy, it is much more equal than if it is defined in money terms. The comment compares a Camry to a Lexus. The Lexus is a better car, but it costs three times as much and is it three times better? No. The 18-year-old Macallan (a single-malt Scotch) costs about twice as much as the 12-year-old, but the difference in taste is very slight. This seems a general characteristic of luxury goods. This is the sense in which people of widely different incomes can all consider themselves middle-class without being delusional.

QA's job is simple: they figure out what the software actually does. Developers produce software, and they believe it will do X, Y, and Z. They've set out to write it so it does these things. They worked hard to make it do these things. They believe it will do these things.

But does it?

Some months ago, one of our R&D people had made an off-the-cuff suggestion to a supplier, providing an edge-of-napkin sketch for a new product idea. This idea had little, if anything, to do with us. The supplier, to everyone's surprise, followed up on the suggestion and developed a patented and what appears to be high potential product. And, as it happens, the supplier included our lab rat’s name in the patent. The question asked by our top lawyer, Rigor Mortis, is whether or not the employee has rights to the patent or do these rights, by virtue of a signed employment contract, transfer to the company.

Honorary Tutsis: "From Jared Diamond's Collapse: Especially puzzling, if one believes that there was nothing more to the genocide than Hutu-versus-Tutsi ethnic hatred fanned by politicians, are events in northwestern Rwanda. There, in a community where virtually everybody was Hutu and there was only a single Tutsi, mass killing still took place--of Hutu by other Hutu. While the proprtional death toll there, estimated as 'at least 5% of the population' may have been somewhat lower than that overall in Rwanda (11%), it still takes some explaining why a Hutu community would kill at least 5% of its members in the absence of ethnic motives. Elsewhere in Rwanda, as the 1994 genocide proceeded and as the number of Tutsi declined, Hutu turned to attacking each other. ... All but one of the known victims at Kanama fell into one of six categories. First, the single Tutsi at Kanama, a widowed woman, was killed. Whether that had much to do with her being Tutsi is unclear, because she furnished so many other motives for killing; she had inherited much land, the had been involved in many land disputes, she was the widow of a polygnous husband (hence viewed as a competitor of his other wives and their families), and her deceased husband had alread been forced off his land by his half-brothers. Two more categories of victims consisted of Hutu who wer"

Honorary Tutsis: "From Jared Diamond's Collapse: Especially puzzling, if one believes that there was nothing more to the genocide than Hutu-versus-Tutsi ethnic hatred fanned by politicians, are events in northwestern Rwanda. There, in a community where virtually everybody was Hutu and there was only a single Tutsi, mass killing still took place--of Hutu by other Hutu. While the proprtional death toll there, estimated as 'at least 5% of the population' may have been somewhat lower than that overall in Rwanda (11%), it still takes some explaining why a Hutu community would kill at least 5% of its members in the absence of ethnic motives. Elsewhere in Rwanda, as the 1994 genocide proceeded and as the number of Tutsi declined, Hutu turned to attacking each other. ... All but one of the known victims at Kanama fell into one of six categories. First, the single Tutsi at Kanama, a widowed woman, was killed. Whether that had much to do with her being Tutsi is unclear, because she furnished so many other motives for killing; she had inherited much land, the had been involved in many land disputes, she was the widow of a polygnous husband (hence viewed as a competitor of his other wives and their families), and her deceased husband had alread been forced off his land by his half-brothers. Two more categories of victims consisted of Hutu who wer"

Instead, things like distributed teams and the ability to work from home have a lot more to do with always-on, high speed internet connections and free open-source technologies

It's not that the software has become easier to develop thanks to open APIs and such, but that software can now connect into online services with much more ease. It's those services that are not easily replicated. In other words, the challenge isn't about being able to easily reuse software, but to use the connectivity to tap into resources that can't just be built (such as communities or large data stores).

Planes, trains and automobiles: In Wired, where they report a Honda dealer is handing out “Just Looking” stickers to people entering teh showroom, and the salesmen will leave them alone until they rip their sticker off. The result is a dramatic increase in sales.

Guns vs. Random Bits:
An illustrative example is the Great Firewall of China. The Chinese government has put in place technologies to block their citizens’ access to certain information and to monitor their citizens’ communications. There are privacy-enhancing technologies that could give Chinese citizens access to the open Web and allow them to communicate privately. For example, they could encrypt all of their Internet traffic and pass it through a chain of intermediaries, so that all the government monitors saw was a stream of encrypted bits.

Such technologies work as a technical matter, but they don’t provide much comfort in practice, because people know that using such technologies — conspicuously trafficking in encrypted data — could lead to a visit from the police. Guns trump ciphers.

The Soak:
Ever sat in a meeting with your VP where they were presenting product strategy? Ever sat there, unblinking, shocked and thinking, "This guy, our leader, has absolutely no clue what doing"? That's you in ten years when you've a modicum of success and decided that success is a result of your MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY policy.

"What's really happening in the blogosphere, it seems to me, is that boobus americanus, after generations in the shadows, has found a cultural opening. The universities, the mainstream media, the bien pensants have had their hollowness proven by the blogosphere, and as a result, the sci-fi fans, chiropractors, cultists, yahoos, know-nothings, food nazis, cryonicists, and all other assorted nuts and crazies feel safe in coming out of the woodwork. "

Why Phishing Works: "Interesting paper. Abstract: To build systems shielding users from fraudulent (or phishing) websites, designers need to know which attack strategies work and why. This paper provides the first empirical evidence about which malicious strategies are successful at deceiving general users. We first analyzed a large set of captured phishing attacks and developed a set of hypotheses about why these strategies might work. We then assessed these hypotheses with a usability study in which 22 participants were shown 20 web sites and asked to determine which ones were fraudulent. We found that 23% of the participants did not look at browser-based cues such as the address bar, status bar and the security indicators, leading to incorrect choices 40% of the time. We also found that some visual deception attacks can fool even the most sophisticated users. These results illustrate that standard security indicators are not effective for a substantial fraction of users, and suggest that alternative approaches are needed."

Daily effects: "Today is the 13th successive Tuesday on which the FTSE 100 has fallen - a fact made all the more remarkable because the market has risen over the last 13 weeks.This draws attention to the possibility that some days are better for the stock market than others. Here are average daily changes in the FTSE 100 since January 1 2005:
Monday = 0.124%
Tuesday = 0.011%
Wednesday = -0.033%
Thursday = 0.042%
Friday = 0.206%
The difference between Friday and Tuesday or Wednesday (and the average of Monday-Thursday) is statistically significant at the 5% level.
This is not a new finding. A famous paper (not webbed) by Josef Lakonishok and Seymour Smidt found that the Dow Jones did far better on Fridays than average between 1897 and 1986; for more on this, see the papers here.And Brian Lucey has found that Friday is also a good day for base metals prices. "

The fact that more and more people, especially children, are becoming obese, indicates that there is obviously some caloric/excercise factor in obesity . . . or some as-yet-unknown infectious agent is playing havoc with everyone's biology. Said infectious agent is obviously transmitted through money, since it infects countries pretty much in line with their per-capita GDP . . . but not big denominations, because the obesity ends up concentrated among the poor.

Seth Godin: Don't Take the Money: "Seth Godin offers a concise and well reasoned argument on when not to go looking for venture capital to fund a new business. Particularly useful is his distinction between freelance and entrepreneurial ventures. The latter aims to create an opportunity where '...you scale and suddenly you own real estate or media properties or technology or a system or a brand that people pay for without you actually doing any incremental work yourself.' That 'no incremental work' qualifier is the entrepreneur's equivalent of the VC's exit. It's only feasible if a self-sustaining institution has been created. In contrast, 'A freelance venture is one where you work to get paid.' In other words, it's a services business of some sort. It scales on people coming to work each day. Not so coincidentally, it's the kind of new business that VCs generally avoid. Running this analysis is especially important these days, even on businesses that superficially seem to be about technology, where the potential to follow the entrepreneurial scaling path suggests taking the product road to market. It's at least worth running the case: 'What would happen if we used this to create a low/no-cost offering that in turn enables a sustainable services business?' If nothing else, you should understand the implications if someone else takes that approach. "

Islam, science and deference: "This site reminds us of something overlooked in this week’s debate about the “Enlightenment” – that Islam, in its early years, was wholly consistent with scientific progress. It gave us men such as Al-Razi,discoverer of sulphuric acid and ethanol, Al-Khwarizmi, inventor of algebra, Ibn Firnas, inventor of the glider, astronomer Ibn Al-Shatir, and Al-Haytham, a pioneer in optics. Which raises the question: what exactly is it about the western “Enlightenment” that is alleged to have produced the goods of scientific and technical progress? It’s not any unique conception of rationality, still less a secular one. It's not just the early history of Islam which shows that scientific progress is compatible with religion. Newton, remember, was a religious crank. And the man who gave his name to what we consider the epitome of rational thinking – Bayesianism – was a priest. I suspect the key to progress, which the Enlightenment promoted but did not create, is a rejection of deference, a desire to find things out for oneself rather than take them on trust. The problem, though, is that deference is still with us, even in science, as Steve Fuller points out. In politics and in business, the norm is to defer to “leaders”, and chief executives – a"

Web 3.1 beta 2: "I think this list of Web 3.0 features is really worth absorbing. As a recap, “Web 2.0” is a shorthand for dynamic user interfaces and a first cut of de-coupling application from data using web services. I’d re-phrase their “Web 3.0” vision as follows:
- No user data is hostage to any one service silo. (Web 2.0 isn’t there yet.)
- Aggregators will squeeze value out of the juxtaposition of any and all data. “No value left behind.”
- You have a single, integrated historical view of your digital life.
- All data is perfectly liquid, loosely coupled and re-combinable. (DRM on your metadata = commercial suicide.)
But there’s one thing missing, and maybe it’ll have to wait until “Web 4.0”. ... In this world, money is able to flow in the opposite direction to the bits. "