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Wednesday, July 17, 2002

A hidden engine behind the stock declines (as opposed the obvious engine:  the malfeasance of America's corporate executives) are hedgefunds that control $560 b in assets for the extremely wealthy (this is double 2 years ago).  These unregulated and secretive funds are heavily shorting the market, driving it lower.  The upshot is that as wealthy individuals get wealthier in the short term due to these actions, the process is helping to harm the market's long-term prospects and perhaps the economy in general.  The presence of so much money in opportunistic, leveraged funds is troubling.  These funds ride trends (up or down) and often accelerate and or exagerate their impact.  Given that the current trend is down, we can expect it to get much worse than it would have been given the aggressive actions of these funds.  Further, it adds to the image that the US markets are only a playground for the wealthy or "the connected" and not a place for individuals and their hard earned dollars. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 2:38:08 PM    Clarence Westberg's Links & Comments

I've been using Mikel's "newsviews" tool for Radio and I like it alot.  It allows you to sort RSS subscriptions by category.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 2:35:58 PM    Clarence Westberg's Links & Comments

My notes from the keynote announcing Jaguar. Jaguar, aka, Mac OS X 10.2 - The price tag of OS X 10.2 is $129, and it hits the shelves August 24 (You knew this was coming...but off the cuff, $129? I had better start saving some pennies...) - iChat - Uses your mac.com account to access AOL Instant Messenger - Also ties in with Rendezvous to automatically add any users around you on the network or Wi-Fi to your buddy list - File transfer will be supported on iChat - A new Address Book also coming to OS X 10.2 - Address Book can tie in via Bluetooth to enabled cell phones to transfer contact information - Address Book can also dial outgoing calls, or match up info from caller ID systems on inbound calls to names in the contact database - New Mail app, with junk mail filtering - The new "Junk Mail" feature turns most Spam posts brown, and the Mail software can go into a "training" mode to update and learn which mail is Spam - Rendezvous offers automatic discovery of devices over an IP network with no configuration on your part. - HP, Epson and Lexmark have adopted Rendezvous and plan to build its capabilities into their network printers. - Inkwell, the handwriting software that is part of OS X 10.2 is mentioned but not demoed. - Introduction of Sherlock 3 - Intro includes showing stock data, movie previews and a theater locator - Universal Access in OS X 10.2 includes zooming, a screen reader and other features. - QuickTime 6 is integrated into OS X 10.2...already since its release yesterday, more than 1.2 million people have downloaded QuickTime 6 - The Finder also offers integrated search capabilities. - The new Finder in 10.2 will include Spring Loaded folders, a feature many people miss from the Classic Mac - It appears that the update to 10.2 will be available only on CD, from first mention of the software - It will officially be called Mac OS X 10.2 [Mac Net Journal] 12:03:51 PM    Clarence Westberg's Links & Comments

xmlhack is "the editor of choice for hack 'n slashing your XML files." [Scripting News] 9:50:01 AM    Clarence Westberg's Links & Comments

Man arrested for burning kitten on grill [CNN - US] 9:46:55 AM    Clarence Westberg's Links & Comments

Lost: One Russian Spacecraft. The Russians, er, misplaced an experimental inflatable space vehicle after a successful (?) test-run. Link Discuss (Thanks, John!) [Boing Boing Blog] 7:23:49 AM    Clarence Westberg's Links & Comments

Amazon API. Cool, Amazon releases their a web service API! Interfaces to the Amazon API are an rpc/encoded SOAP endpoint described with WSDL and a raw XML over HTTP endpoint described using XML schemas & prose. Savvy move. There are already some quite interesting uses of the API: BookWatch combines RSS, the Google API and the Amazon API; and Similarities Graph creates diagrams of the similarities between books. For fun, check out the Similarities Graph for C# Essentials. When looking at the API one thing I noticed was both the WSDL and XSDs type everything as string even if a more specific schema type exists. For example, in the SOAP API /Details/ImageUrlSmall is typed as xs:string, I would have expected this to be xs:anyURI. Any thoughts on why they chose this route? [update: Sam posited interop as the reason and suggested adding anyURI tests to SOAPBuilders] [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 7:16:01 AM    Clarence Westberg's Links & Comments

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