Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

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Nokia to acquire Sega.com: "Mobile phone giant Nokia is to acquire the assets of Sega's online and wireless gaming operation to boost its own N-Gage online games device." [The Register]

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Analysis of Linux Code that SCO Alleges Is In Violation Of Their Copyright and Trade Secrets: "SCO's response to this document is It's his word against ours. I'm not, however, asking you to rely on my word. I've presented you with links to the evidence, all of which is available at web sites not under my control. I've never asked you for a non-disclosure agreement. I haven't changed any of my information into unreadable fonts. It would be nice if SCO would operate that way, too."

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"There are 10 types of people - those who know binary and those who don't." (Received by e-mail from a colleague.)

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Birth of first internet sperm bank baby: "The birth of the first internet spermbank baby is announced - a healthy boy whose arrival exposes a hole in the regulations that govern fertility treatment." [Guardian Unlimited]

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Microsoft to lock down MSN Messenger network: "Microsoft Corp. is making changes to its MSN instant messaging (IM) service that will lock out users of third-party software that uses the service as well as users of older versions of Microsoft's own Messenger client, the company said Tuesday." [InfoWorld: Top News]

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Big Water: "I also need to drop some of the bad writing habits I've picked up with weblog writing, such as the assumptions, the higher level of familiarity, the creative spelling and sentence construction, the use of 'so', and the other quaint little short-cuts that fit this format, but not necessarily others." [Burningbird]

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Doc Searls points to Garrison Keillor: "Californians are more interested in politics than the rest of us and enjoy elections and I trust that the movement to recall Gov. Davis' successor will begin as soon as he is sworn in. Eventually, Web technology will allow Californians to hold an instant referendum on all issues and you won't need a governor, just a state Web master."

Some people actually work -- Comment()
Jeremy Zawodny writes: "E-mail is not real-time. It never has been. Why do you assume that your messages and received and read within 20 seconds? Some people actually work." --- This is a good point. You don't need to be available immediately! There is a recent report (in PDF) about the cost of e-mail interruption: "The time it takes the average employee to recover from an email interrupt and to return to their work at the same work rate at which they left it, is on average 64 seconds." Thus, if you receive 50 e-mails in a day, you might lose almost on hour of productive time. Thus, setting in your mail program the interval between e-mail checks to one hour is a good tactic, as is disabling all notifications of received e-mail.