Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

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I just discovered The Gurteen Knowledge Website on knowledge management, learning, creativity, innovation & personal development. Here is a quote from the introduction: "This website is a KM resource site aimed at knowledge professionals who wish to transform the way that they work; the way that they manage and interact with other people in their organization and who wish to better leverage workgroup technology. A wealth of information exists that can help us thrive in this new economy."

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Teal Sunglasses points to Jon Udell's piece on XML: "Because XML documents will often model the real business documents that support business processes, such as purchase orders, it's clear that people will need to be able to write them, too. Sadly, the tools that capture nearly all of our keystrokes -- e-mail, word processors, Web pages -- can't compose valid XML. Solving this problem is as critical as any challenge facing Web services today. Ideally every operating system would offer a standard XML editing component, embeddable in Web pages and GUI applications. Wired to a DTD (Document Type Definition) or XML Schema, this component would allow users to interactively create or modify valid instances of the DTD or schema."

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Nicotine 'cooks' proteins in the body: "California scientists have discovered that a byproduct of nicotine, the substance that makes cigarettes so addictive, causes a type of chemical reaction in the body similar to that which occurs when sugar is scorched or food goes bad. This reaction is thought to play a role in diabetes, cancer and other diseases." [Reuters Health eLine]

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Data-mining life on earth: "Every blade of grass, every fish and fowl, slug and snail, has a place on the Web." [Salon.com]

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Comparing Apples and Penguins: "Moshe Bar at Byte.com has performed a careful and thorough side-by-side benchmark/comparison of OS X as a pure server (not desktop) environment by installing both OS X and the SuSE PowerPC Linux distribution on an XServe. Short story: OS X lost to Linux on every measurable count, but Moshe is still impressed, since OS X is so new while Linux has had a decade to tune its subsystems. To my knowledge, this is the first such test done with this degree of care." [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] [Mac Net Journal]

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Creepy Internet Experiment: "Scientists will touch each other over the Internet, literally: In a technological first, they will use pencil-like devices called phantoms... " [Blogcritics]

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Digital Web Magazine - Keep It Simple: Client Centered Design: "Unfortunately there is no general rule for the task of keeping a client's expectations within reasonable limits. Some clients are easily convinced by someone who knows what he's talking about, while others will rigidly maintain their point of view, aided by their nephews who've gone through a Front Page book and therefore know everything there is to know about Web sites." [Serious Instructional Technology]

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Linux, Web Services Will Rule Net: "Open source Linux technology and .Net systems from Microsoft will continue to chip away at the dominate position of Unix operating systems in the server market, making Linux the major server operating system by 2009, according to a study..." [Google Technology News]

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The OpenOffice Experiment: "OpenOffice, a freeware alternative to Microsoft Office, sounds like a software dream on the surface. Although OpenOffice's appeal may grow as Microsoft's licensing rules change and its customers threaten to abandon ship, the transition remains costly and time-consuming." [osOpinion]

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Portrait of a Blogger: "As blogs (love them or hate them) continue to grow in numbers on the 'net, I thought it might be useful to have an easy guide to study the habits and mannerisms of the wide range of bloggers that exist in the blogosphere. So, without any further ado, I give you a quick guide to the types of bloggers one might encounter in the vast internet universe." [kuro5hin.org]

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TCPA and Palladium technical analysis: "This article tries to be an objective technical analysis on the TCPA hardware system and the Palladium operating system. It covers the most important technical details on TCPA and the (dis)information Microsoft has given about Palladium. The full text is reproduced in this article, though you can also view updated versions in english (TCPA and Palladium technical analysis) or spanish (Análisis técnico de TCPA y Palladium)." [kuro5hin.org]