To Talk of Many Things

Regulating Minors' Net Access Can Backfire. From SF Gate: “When Chris Manley, a high school senior in South Carolina, started thinking about applying for college, his teachers recommended he use the school library computer to research universities like Duke and Stanford. But he couldn't reach their Web sites. This was hardly a case of computer illiteracy. “At my school they have filtering software,” Manley says simply, “and I can't get to these sites, because they've been blocked.”"… [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Paul Larson on The Motley Fool: Four Hurdles for Microsoft:

1. The European Union is borrowing a page from the Justice Department's book and taking a tough look at the company's competitive practices.
2. The fact that Microsoft was deemed a monopoly and violated the Sherman Antitrust Act has not changed, and there is still an open-ended legal question concerning what exactly will happen to Microsoft.
3. The economy has made computer users much more resistant to software “churn,” and it remains to be seen if Windows XP is enough of a step forward to get people to open their wallets.
4. How can you watch Ballmer on stage and not want to short the stock?

10:32:24 PM  

[Jake's Brainpan]

A word from Intuit. Engineering Project Manager for Quicken Mac 2002, Ed Fernandez: “Quicken 2002 [Mac/OS X] uses the same standards as the Quicken 2002 Windows product for communicating with the brokerages.”

“While theoretically it should be trivial for them to turn on the switch that accepts Mac users, the reason some of them are reluctant to do so has to do with support costs.”
[Archipelago]

HailStorm promise and threat remain distant. News.com: HailStorm promise and threat remain distant “Microsoft's HailStorm initiative has been described as everything from a weapon aimed at America Online to a crucial component of the software giant's move to a subscription-based business model. But how, exactly, will HailStorm work, and where does Microsoft make money on the service?” [QubeQuorner]

I just love it when a plan comes together! Yesterday I met with my friend Peter Ford to finalize our plans for Weblogs In Education. The result is schoolblogs.com. Once again “Userland”'s excellent products made this a snap for this ex-VJ First I downloaded Peter's site from the editthispage.com server and installed it on my own “Frontier” server running in the DataBarn, next I added a siteTree so the blog becomes a hosting site and presto! Instant results. Now I have two of these setups running on the same server, my first pass was with myjamby.com which functions in the same manner. Now to start unfolding our plan…stay tuned to schoolblogs for more! [Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]

Sony Pulls Plug on e Villa. After only two months on the retail market, Sony has withdrawn its “network entertainment center” from the market and says it will offer customers a full refund. [internetnews.com: Product News]

MS releases IIS 'lockdown' utility. Apparently, not all sysadmins appreciate having to disable 10 different auxiliary services and set up secure file permissions manually on each and every new IIS installation. I'd say “better late than never,” but that would still give Microsoft too much credit. [diveintomark]

AMA Criticized for Letting Drugs Firms Pay for Ethics Campaign. They're spearheading a campaign to educate doctors about the evils of taking money from drug companies. Of the one million dollars they've raised for this campaign, 2/3 of it came from… drug companies. [diveintomark]

And You Thought You Had Source Control Problems

Ray Ozzie sent me a link to a presentation given by Mark Lucovsky, a developer at Microsoft, about the Windows NT development process.

29 million lines of code. Source code takes up 50 gigabytes. Build takes 8 hours on a 4 CPU machine. 1000 machines in the “stress test” farm.

No, they don't use SourceSafe.  But I don't think CVS could handle it, either.

[Joel on Software]

News.Com: Lawyer Lessig raps new copyright laws. The DMCA is being used “to scare you away from innovating without permission” of entrenched companies, Lessig said. But the precedent is foolish; a more reasonable approach would be to prosecute those who misuse technology rather than those who create it, he said. [Tomalak's Realm]