b.cognosco

I discovered the answer to my VPN problem while stuck at the local Firestone service center this week, trying to get the tires on my truck rotated. I spent two hours there and they never managed to do the job. I would have been perturbed had I not made a useful discovery about my network while twiddling my thumbs in the lobby [...more]

BN Takes Write-off for iUniverse, Others

3:08:29 PM

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Barnes & Noble's sales performance is down from a year ago -- no surprise in the current market. As a result the company is writing down certain investments, including some of the money invested in Internet-based self-publishing company iUniverse, Inc.

Investments Not Paying Off at Barnes & Noble. TheStreet.com Aug 22 2002 1:17PM ET
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The company also said it wrote off $14.7 million, or 13 cents a share, in other investments in the second quarter, including iUniverse.com, Book magazine, enews inc. and Indigo Books and Music.
[...]
[Moreover - Book publishing news]

Kartoo Graphical Search Engine

12:12:46 PM

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Scott Walker points to an interesting search engine. Kartoo has both a Flash version and an HTML version. I avoid Flash sites like the plague, but you should at least take a look at the Flash version of Kartoo. They may be on the verge of figuring out how to use Flash for something besides getting in the way.

New kid on the search engine block . . .

I'd been trying for several days to locate a presentation I'd seen online back in my days as a QA Manager, on the relationship between the varying types of "quality" that are desirable at different stages in the technology product lifecycle, as defined by Geoffrey Moore (you know: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards). Anyway, several Google searches failed to turn up the presentation I was looking for, though they all brought up various versions of a paper by Joanna Rothman on essentially the same topic. I also tried manually poking around on StickyMinds.com, QAForums/QALinks, Satisfice's site, and other resources I used in those days.

This morning, I came across a reference to Kartoo, described as a search engine that presented results visually, with links between the returned hits indicated. I tried the search there, and found the presentation I was looking for immediately. The presentation of search results is very similar to the representation used by The Brain. I have no idea how extensive the index behind Kartoo is, or how well it works overall, but it's already been worthwhile for me.
[Radio Rackensack]