Monday, June 30, 2003

Ebay No Longer Gold Mine. On ebay, "the average selling price of collectibles has fallen by 38 percent since 2000.... [M]aking matters worse for sellers of collectibles, only 45 percent of items put up for auction were sold this year, down from 55 percent last year and 72 percent in 2000." [Comics Worth Reading] 8:30:35 PM

Ain't that America? Denounced as un-American after he blasted Bush on his 21st album, John Mellencamp talks about the rise of Fox News, pay-for-play, what's wrong with the Rolling Stones and why most Republicans aren't rich enough to be Republicans. [Salon.com] 8:30:16 PM

New Java aims to simplify. Sun releases a new version of its Java for desktops that aims to make the software faster, more familiar in appearance, and less daunting for nonprogrammers. [CNET News.com] 8:29:53 PM

VMware makes going virtual easier. Find your Control Center [The Register] 8:29:31 PM

Optimizing Disks Is a Waste of Time (30-Jun-2003; 14.7K) [TidBITS] 8:29:13 PM

Australian Beats Agassi at Wimbledon With 46 Aces. It was the second consecutive year that Andre Agassi went out early at the world's most historic tournament. By Christopher Clarey. [New York Times: NYT HomePage] 8:28:50 PM

Casady & Greene to cease operations Thursday. An era is ending. Casady & Greene, a company that's been publishing software since 1984, will officially cease business as of Thursday. "With computers coming out loaded with software the way they are, people don't seem to think they need extras," Bonnie Mitchell of C&G told MacCentral. "And a small third-party company like ours finds it difficult to convince people that they do, in fact, need such extras. The products we carry will go back to their owners -- we don't own any of them -- and those owners will be supporting them and probably offering them for sale." [MacCentral] 8:28:23 PM

Command Sets for Safari, iChat available. CommandSets.com, a Mac speech middleware developer, has released the completed version of their Safari Command Set for iListen and ViaVoice. The Safari Command Set adds 78 spoken commands to automate many of Safari 1.0's functions; the set costs US$10. [MacCentral] 8:27:48 PM

Useit.Com: Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster. Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at Xerox PARC by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online. [Tomalak's Realm] 10:49:38 AM