Another talk I'm watching is "Watson, 18 months later: Using customer feedback to change the way we build software". Watson is the internal name for that little popup you get when an application supporting watson crashes, or any crash on windows xp. It's quite an amazing tool.
11:54:54 PM    comments ==

Charles Wiltgen: A .NET primer for Mac users. [Hack the Planet]

A good primer on what this whole .NET thing is.

10:47:08 PM    comments ==

An radio update broke me again. I applied my code fix again.
If the userland folks can't take the fix... mabye they can teach me a way to automatically apply it when they break me?

10:25:12 PM    comments ==

Malcolm Gladwell is gave a talk today titled, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference". I'm finally getting a chance to watch it now.

He is starting out with a story from his book about suicides in macronesia in male teens. There is actually a trend of this there. Ideas that spread like a virus. Another example is about the coke sickness in beligium, which on further evidence had nothing to do with coke. Hysterical epidemics.

There are negative and positive ones. We had an extreamly quick adoption of seatbelts. It happend over 4 years. Normally this type of thing takes 30 years. We had a seat belt wearing epidemic.

Marketing is the attempt to stimulate or simulate the epidemics.

These things spread person to person, not mass media. Uptalk and fainting are the example he gives. He doesn't think that there is a form of immunization. Further Americans right now are probably more resistance then most to mass media. He also has a notion of a connector, people who are extra high socializers.

Tiny changes (which can't be pre-predicted) make a big difference. Direct Mail example. Big Bird was the tiny change that made Seasame Street work.

Next book will be about panic versus choking. In failure you can go to intellectual choking, while panic is going all emotion. It's about dealing with causes vrs environment.

Sesame Street chapter was written so that he could hang out with them. In the 70s there was better writting for the show, full of adult jokes that required an almost encylopedic knowledge of culture.

3:39:55 PM    comments ==