20 November 2002

Spacey Site Screens Writers WIRED -- Michael Stroud reports how Kevin Spacey reviews amateur film makers online. They can upload their work and have it reviewed by peers. [Wired News]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Death by Spam Kevin Werbach -- Spam will kill email as we know it. One-third of the 30 billion e-mails sent worldwide each day are spam. That's 10 billion daily pitches for herbal Viagra, Nigerian scams, and genital- enlarging creams piling up in our inboxes. Neither legislation nor litigation against spammers has stemmed the tide, and they're not going to have much of an effect in the future, either. It's time to give up: Despite the best efforts of legislators, lawyers, and computer programmers, spam has won. Spam is killing e-mail. [Werblog]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Finding: International Call Revenue Plunged TELEGEOGRAPHY -- "[I]nternational call revenue plunged by $10 billion in 2001, the largest single-year decline on record." [Telegeography]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Spielberg Nation Tim Kirby -- Armed with their Sonys and Macs, and their iMovie or Adobe editing software, just plain people (some watching their kids show them how it's done) can capture relatively high-quality moving images, PLUS use post-production functions like high-speed editing. And it's in Dublin. [Irish New Media Cuts]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Why NetFlix Continues to Succeed THE SHIFTED LIBRARIAN -- Jenny Levine recently made some new additions to her NetFlix rental queue, and received the following email from them: "We noticed that you recently added Enigma to your Rental Queue. We would like to alert you to a possible issue. It has been brought to our attention by the DVD manufacturers that the Enigma DVD is not viewable on most Toshiba DVD players.  If you have a Toshiba DVD player, you may want to select another title. Review your Rental Queue: http://www.netflix.com/Queue We apologize for the inconvenience. Sincerely, Your Friends at Netflix" How cool is that? Kind of the anti-Universal BMG (the record company that plans to release ALL their CDs with copy protection now, even if it means they don't work in little things like PCs and car stereos). The entertainment industry could learn a lot from these folks - they're customer-centric, they're service-oriented, and they provide a valuable service (to me, at least) at a reasonable price with a minimum of hassle. That's why they got more of my money this year than the record companies. [The Shifted Librarian]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Switch to Canada AABLOG -- Here's a funny Switch Parody. "On many occasions, I've heard someone say, 'If you don't love the United States of America, then get the hell out.' I did.... My name is John, and I'm a Canadian." [AaBlog 2.0 and Jenny Levine]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Broadband for All UK Schools SEISS ie -- Just like the goal of UK educators, many attending the regional SEISS conference in Kilkenny this week want broadband for all schools, but it's unrealistic to expect that kind of goal before five years are up. [The Register]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

The Ungoogleables COLLISION DETECTION net -- What do you call people who don't show up on a Google search? How do you describe a person who doesn't generate even a single page hit? Jenny Levine calls them "ungoogleables." The point being, you have to avoid doing and being an awful lot of things to stay off of Google. Though the number of North Americans who don't appear on Google is probably still quite big, it's diminishing every day. I wonder if at some point in the far future, the world of data will be so huge and all-encompassing that there will be a final person who is the last one to not crop up in a major search engine? Kinda like a noosphere version of Mary Shelley's The Last Man (or the Left Behind series). Will there be people who try as hard as possible not to be Googleable? If you don't appear on Google, it can seem a little unnerving to the rest of us! It's like being The Man Who Didn't Exist, one of those bit characters on the X-files who doesn't have fingerprints." [Jenny Levine, Collision Detection and Hippo Dignity]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Bookshelf: Critical Chain by Eliyahu M. Goldratt Eliyahu Goldratt --  Critical Chain applies the Theory of Constraints, introduced in The Goal, to project management, and it seems to really make sense. Joel Spolsky takes the scenario of creating Painless Software Schedules. Most people's intuition is to come up with conservative, padded estimates for each task, but they still find that their schedules always slip. Goldratt shows that the slip is precisely because we pad the estimates for each step, which leads to three problems: "Student Syndrome" - no matter how long you give students to work on something, they will start the night before. Phil Greenspun noticed this: "The first term that we taught 6.916, we gave the students one week to do Problem Set 1. It was pretty tough and some of them worked all night the last two nights. Having watched them still at their terminals when we left the lab at 4:00 am, we wanted to be kinder and gentler the next semester. So we gave them two weeks to do the same homework assignment. The first week went by. The students were working on other classes, playing sports on the lawn, going out with friends. They didn't start working on the problem set until a few days before it was due and ended up in the lab all night just as before." Multitasking, which, as I discuss, makes the lead time for each step dramatically longer, and the fact that delays accumulate, while advances do not (for example, if you have finished this week's work on Friday morning, chances are you will waste time on Friday afternoon rather than starting the next week's work. But if you don't make it on time, you'll still leave at 5 o'clock on Friday, accumulating a delay.) Goldratt's solution is to choose task estimates that are not padded: each individual task's estimate should be exactly in the middle of the probability curve, so there is a 50% chance you will finish early and a 50% chance you will be late. You should move all the padding to the end of the project (or milestone) where it won't do any harm. If you're doing any kind of project scheduling or management, Goldratt's books will help you stay on track.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Sighting: Newzcrawler NEWZCRAWLER -- This little news appgregator application scans, indexes and archives weblogs for me. Recommended.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

IT Architecture: Heart of the Matter INFORMATION WEEK -- When listening to John Quigley, director of Motorola Semiconductor Product Sector a few weeks ago, I copped onto a theme he practises -- that he wants management to state their requirements, and then his team will convert those into tech specs. John Foley and Martin Garvey pick up this theme too, writing how changes in IT architecture revise the whole discussion to one around business-process flows. Meanwhile, InfoWorld's Chad Dickerson looks at a related theme: "Control and Flexibility." Brent Sleeper thinks this tension goes to the very heart of the architectural shift represented by web services [Brent Sleeper's Web Journal]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Resource: AvaQuest AVAQUEST -- Here's an interesting demo that actually resutrns valid results to the question "Who is Bernie Goldbach?" [Tim Kirby]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Sighting: Eircom 4012 SMS Phones eircom -- Lots of Irish ads for the eircom 4012 SMS phones now. These are rebadged Siemens Gigaset units and they work well. So if you can visit an electronics shop in Germany and don't mind reading instructions in German, buying the same Siemens kit in Germany is cheaper. And as members of the Irish Open Mailing List point out, Siemens offer some very nice and inexpensive cordless ISDN options.   [Comment on Shoptalk]