Jinn of Quality and Risk

28-year old entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth will blast off in a Russian rocket on Apr-25, to spend 10 days on the ISS. (South) Africa's first spacefarer, Mark made good money with Internet security, founding Thawte and selling it to VeriSign for $400m. He follows the American Dennis Tito who flew to the ISS in May 2001. Both are reported to have paid $20m. Many companies have plans to develop space tourism in the coming years, from suborbital flights to moontrips. Thus, expect prices to drop dramatically within one decade, and... see you there! You no longer have to join ESA or NASA. 

All across the Internet, content and service providers are slowly beginning to send visitors the same message: "The free lunch is over. The free ride is over. Pay up." ... For a few fleeting moments companies were convinced that the best way to build market share was to simply give away their widgets for free. 

Naming conventions (for types, variables, constants, subprograms, parameters, classes, etc.) are a recurring issue in programming circles, because they relate to the need for abstraction, context, concretisation, and productivity. The Hungarian notation is a (very) bad solution, unfortunately adopted and promoted by Microsoft; the above is an interesting article and discussion at kuro5hin (a quote: "Hungarian Notation is the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques.") 

A few industrial research labs have defined the HCI field and nurtured the most important work, most notably Xerox PARC. "Dating back to Vannevar Bush's description of hypertext in 1945, Doug Engelbart's invention of the mouse in 1964, and many other early projects, HCI has a rich history of research that has defined the way we interact with technology today." [UseIt Alertbox]

Some notes:

• Nielsen is focused on human-workstation/server interaction (rather than broader human-computer interaction which includes the range of computers people don't think about as computers, such as microwave ovens and air traffic control systems).
• The article would be more useful if it included the reasoning behind the ranking.
• His contention that Microsoft tops the list in this decade is ridiculous — Apple is the innovator.
• Bell Labs produced ground-breaking research in the 80's (i.e. Pike's bitmap window systems and multi-tasking graphical terminals).
• Those interested in the subject may want to look at some Business Week articles (somewhat dated, June 1997): Top Research Labs by Topic, 1978 vs. 1997, Where IT Researchers Wish They Could Work, and Top 20 US Research Labs.

 

The five planets visible to the naked eye are lined up in the sky. This rare grouping of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will not be seen again for a century. Best time to watch will be the first week of May.