Wacom has dropped the price of their 15" Cintiq monitor from $3,500 to $1,900. Cool. The Cintiq lets you draw directly on the LCD screen, with 512 levels of pressure sensitivity. While I like working with a tablet when it comes to graphics, I would much prefer to be able to draw directly on the screen.

They have also introduced an 18.1" version of the Cintiq, which currently runs for $3,500. The newer model has a 27 ms response time, can be rotated 180 degrees, and has 512 levels of pressure sensitivity. Very nice.

12:58:05 PM    

Bravo to Ed Cone for pushing back against one of the great listmakers of our time, Eric Raymond, who did more to divide the software world than just about anyone. [Scripting News]

OK, I'm confused. Ed says:

Three big issues of my youth made me a Democrat: race, Vietnam, and Watergate. I'm still not a racist, still against knee-jerk militarism, and still against abuse of government power.

It is my understanding that

1. Southern Democrats fought against the civil rights bills that were proposed at the time, and what got the Voting Rights Act passed was the attack on marchers in Selma Alabama.
2. Kennedy got us into Vietnam, Johnson continued the effort, and Nixon started pulling the troops out, albeit reluctantly.
3. Watergate: Bad idea, and an excellent example of how not to hold the reins of power. 

 I'm not trying to slam Ed by any means, I'm an independent myself, I'm wondering if that which I was taught growing up did not reflect the reality of the situation, or if I'm just missing some piece of the puzzle.

12:18:35 PM    

Jon Udell.  The government, and especially the FBI, needs a weblog network.

>>>Such an overlay network needn't, of course, intersect with public blogspace. But purely internal use of existing low-tech weblog software could reproduce the same effect: a knowledge network with human routers. Would it be perfectly secure? Of course not. But in the end, what's the greater risk? That the enemy might discover we had connected the dots and have to change its plans? Or that we have no hope of connecting the dots at all?<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

My thoughts exactly. Combine this with an internal thesaurus so that everyone is using the same terminology, allow for searching by keyword and phrase (google appliance anyone?) And get all of the departments feeding new their data into it as well as having teams archiving old data in the new format and you are set.

11:50:40 AM    

John Garside is making me late for work today because he sent me a message saying that rather than using any of the well-known news aggregators, he's using "an app which will track ANY site (including DHTML, SSL ...) every second, with eminently searchable aarchives, new content highlighted/on my harddrive (100 sites downloaded per minute)."

Naturally, I couldn't ignore that comment, so I visited the page he sent (http://www.japanacea.com/page1013.html), and while I recognize a couple of the programs listed (like InfoMinder), I had never heard of their choice pick (and the one John uses), WebSite-Watcher. Here's a list of features from the WW site:

• monitors websites with a minimum of time and online cost
• saves changed websites to your hard disk
• highlights changes in pages that have been modified
• highlights specified words in a website
• archives store websites for future reference
• works with all main web browsers - IE, Netscape & Opera
  
• Many more features to be up to date!

It certainly sounds intriguing, so I'm going to download since it has a 30-day trial period (it costs $40). Although it's being sold as a way to track your competition, its ability to archive contents is appealing. Another plus is that it integrates into Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Opera, although it is a Windows-only product.

Anybody else know anything about this software?

9:50:58 AM    

Technology Briefing: Software. ADVENT REDUCES SALES FORECAST; ELECTRONIC ARTS AGREES TO BUY BLACK BOX;. [New York Times: Technology]

Black Box made the excellent Sega Soccer Slam, so I hope that they can continue to make the fun, innovative games that they have made once they are absorbed.

9:46:08 AM    

Paolo: "It's important to consider that 'set of news sources' could also mean reports generated by your accounting software, status of your servers, posts in a discussion group, orders from your e-commerce site, updates from your co-workers workflow management software.." Thanks Paolo, that's absolutely true. [Scripting News]

Wow. Have a dashboard running that is tied into the opml feeds of your workers and you can track their progress on the projects they are working on. Tie it into their blogs and you can catch documentation changes in realtime. Tie it into your database and you can be alerted to status changes instantly. SWEET!

9:23:39 AM