Jinn of Quality and Risk

netRaker provides automated Web site evaluation tools for the review and analysis of user experience. 

May linkrot itself rot! Brad DeLong: The first lesson is that linkrot is incredibly rapid. The second lesson is that it thus becomes critically important not just to link but to quote--and to quote extensively. The third lesson is that not even fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency can defeat linkrot. If you want your links to be worth anything in two, three, or five years, download *all* the pages you're linking to to your hard disk. This is a serious problem. Human knowledge and Web-based conversations are recorded but ephemerally so, or so it seems at the moment. Luckily, Google already has a complete archive of Usenet newsgroups, going back to 1981; they may choose to build a complete archive of the Web. Then browsers can automatically check with a Web archive when a page is lost (aka "404, not found"). The Wayback Machine (aka Internet Archive) can help, but I have yet to see a browser solving 404 messages with it. 

Bagged salad sales in the United States have soared, exceeding $2 billion last year. When you buy it at the store, it's hard to imagine how complicated the production of this seemingly simple food is. Maybe I'll go back to making my own salads. NYT: There is a reason bagged lettuce costs more than twice as much as a head of iceberg. It is not easy getting those perfectly formed leaves, washed and still fresh, from the soil to the table. The process requires speed, technology, secrecy about that technology and plain-old farmers' ingenuity. 

They have achieved and maintained a level of service over the last 112 years to which top-notch Indian business empires can only aspire. ... The humble "dabba wallahs," or tiffin deliverymen, in the teeming city of Mumbai, are part of... the world's most ingenious meal distribution system. 

Not just for bread alone. Brent Simmons: One of the reasons I develop for OS X is that, when it comes to user interface, this is the big leagues, this is the show. 

Thomas Sowell: Those who are crying "tax cuts for the rich" never define where "rich" begins. It takes a household income of just $83,500 to be in the top 20 percent... Even to make the top 5 percent requires a household income of just over $150,000... The only people whose taxes can be cut are people who are paying taxes... Tax rates are so skewed that a relatively small percentage of the population pays a huge proportion of the taxes at any given time. 

Larry Barrett (Baseline): After two humiliating technology failures, six major news services are disbanding VNS, a [US] consortium formed to count votes and conduct Election Day surveys. No information given about which IT consultancy was in charge of development...