The New York Times created this for the layperson with great success.

What you probably have here is a subject with at least two different audiences - one is a technically-minded audience building XML tools that needs the technical specification in all its accurate, complex glory. The other production-minded audience that is writing XML code needs a tutorial. These two audiences are better off with two different documents since they have different skills, knowledge, and goals. This explains the popularity of the unfortunately named ...for Dummies book series.

I know of examples where the engineers were specifically thinking of people just like themselves, and other examples where they just assumed there was only one way to design something. At HP, this even has a name: "next bench methodology" -- meaning testing out your design by seeing if the guy at the next bench (notice the hardware bias) likes it. They consider this a feature.

It's amazing other politicians aren't using the Internet as progressively. The two most effective ideas served to cut out the fuzziness and subjective views of the press: using the web site to immediately communicate with voters ("rumor control"), and the publishing of position papers to clearly state the candidate's views.

...it is a colossal moment of joy so everything is really in a way that I cannot express. I would like to be Jupiter and kidnap everybody and lie down in the (inaudible) making love to everybody because I don't know how to express - it's a question of love. You are really, this is a mountain of snow, so delicate, the suavity and the kindness, it is something I cannot forget...

Combine SoundMaker with the more academic but also cheap SoundHack and you've got a lot of digital sound processing power for very little cash.

It's amazing these articles do not mention the concept of racism even once. Racism after all is what this conflict is about. Instead the term "ethnic cleansing" is repeated without the sardonic tone it deserves.

With NATO bombings, their country will return to a primitive state of living that corresponds with their idea of what it means to be civilized. Too bad the point has to be made that way.

The Gov has begun his term by pursuing a number of small personal goals, including reducing the license fee for jet skis and removing the state funding for public broadcasting and getting himself permission to carry a concealed weapon in the State Capitol...Eventually, when the Governor's personal goals are met, we trust he will get around to larger issues.

I agree that both companies and consumers get more accomplished, but what aren't we doing now that we were doing then while waiting for information and service delivery? Was that leisure time or time with friends and family that is now spent figuring out the best place to buy a book or sorting through gobs of price comparisons? I'm afraid we'll hit a wall of maximum efficiency not too long from now and more technology won't give us any more hours in a day. At that point we may have to rely on good old fashioned creativity, but we may to too busy to let our creative minds flourish.

Not surprisingly, Apple isn't making a big deal of it (it's absent from the features list). Researchers at Apple had actually developed this many years ago (an article about it is in this book), but processing power couldn't be spared for audio back then. Now of course we have the butt-kickin' PowerPC. Still, Apple isn't hyping this feature, probably because they figure the public will perceive the sound as more toy than tool. Chances are Apple will gradually improve the audio interface until other operating system designers (e.g. Microsoft) realize its benefits and steal it, just as they did with the graphical interface.

NEW SERVICE Introducing the HomeShark Home & Loan Center available through Futurestep's Life & Career. Here you can shop for homes and home loans, get neighborhood information and find your home's value.

I sincerely do like the history of the shamrock, which is almost Zen-like: "Preaching in the open air on the doctrine of the trinity, he is said to have illustrated the existence of the Three in One by plucking a shamrock from the grass growing at his feet and showing it to his congregation."

The http://www.st-patricks-day.com/ site puts this holiday in perspective...

...Being a religious holiday as well, many attend mass, where it is the traditional day for offering prayers for missionaries throughout the world, before the serious celebrating begins in earnest.

Don't get me wrong, I love MP3s too, I just haven't lost my critical facilities. Way back in 1994 I wrote a paper on this technology, Perceptual Coding, and hoped something like MP3 would come along:

...Other applications include stand-alone converter modules for conversion to any media and, eventually, software encoders. The need for standardization soon becomes apparent, and hopefully it will be met...

Margery's wingspan's all feathers and coke cans, and
TV dinners and letters she won't send, and
Every race night is shot through with sunlight
Trying to hit the big one one last time tonight for
Drunken fathers and stupid mothers and
Boys who can't tell one girl from another

These days many quality sites don't link offsite for fear of losing eyeballs, so only their advertisements link offsite. By considering the advertisers "high-importance" sites Google blows away the egalitarian nature of the 'Net and replaces it with a lot of commercial links. I foresee sites that use this method of determining importance to become the tabloids of the web.

Two Googlers respond lamely:

Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 00:47:53 -0800
To: csilvers@google.com, victorlombardi@yahoo.com, page@cs.stanford.edu
Subject: Re: popularity=quality?


I don't think we will turn into a tabloid. But, time will tell.

-Larry
-------------------------------------
As you can imagine, our opinion is somewhat different. :-) We are certainly aware of the increasing commercialization of the web, and as we work to improve the quality of our search this is one factor we keep in mind.

Thanks for your input!

craig

I don't think any law requiring farmers to buy "terminator" seeds will stand; I'm sure the ACLU is already waiting to sink their jaws into this one. If the law doesn't fall by way of business law, I think it will fall under weight of popular fear of screwing up our own seed supply. As the Prince of Wales said, "this kind of genetic modification takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone." Witness the frenzy in England over genetically modified foods. This story has been covered in America, but for whatever reason it hasn't caused nearly the same uproar. By going down this path, the USDA is tempting fate. I doubt U.S. citizens have a lot of sympathy for the USDA or big seed companies, but they sure do have sympathy for farmers.

I wonder if Apple's "evangelists" started this trend?

Update 3-21-1999: Great minds think alike.

For some reason intellectual capital is sometimes associated with computerization (which is not necessarily productive), whereas it should focus on people and the value of their knowledge.

Strassmann says,

The cost to develop information workers, which I define as an overhead expense for acquiring company-specific knowledge, is very often much greater than the depreciation of the fixed assets and greater than profits for most corporations. The time has come for enterprises to manage knowledge capital as perhaps their most significant asset.

Other points:

• increase the overhead-to-asset conversion efficiency (aka knowledge recycling)- you'll get more return on your investment in knowledge capital if that capital can be used in the long term so "accumulated knowledge can be reapplied without further expense...The company does not have to pay for all of it in every fiscal year"
• "one has to understand that Knowledge Capital does not need to reside exclusively in the heads of employees. It also occupies the mindshare of customers who have expended their own time and money to became habituated to [your] products." Not sure how to capitalize on this, but it's worth more thought
• "Software expenses are now wasted because management uncritically accepts the view that software is largely unrecoverable every time technology, the organization, or business practices experience major changes." Software must be designed for the long run, or else it becomes the biggest computing expense. This is another argument for scripting over low-level programming: it's easier to maintain.
• "The information age is now a reality, because information management can now be planned, budgeted, and controlled as a corporate input and not merely as a technology investment." This challenges the financial-only view of the corporation. It's interesting that as investing in the stock market becomes a matter of easy and extensive exchange of information, there is a natural migration from valuing a company based on traditional assets to valuing it based on its intellectual capitial as well. So the change takes place inside the company as well as out (hopefully).

The goal should be: zero unwanted turnover. When someone approaches an employee with a job offer, the employee's response will be, "Are you kidding? I love this place, I can't imagine leaving."

Is this expensive? Of course it is. You'll see a lot of return on this investment in low turnover and productivity (riffing on the above idea, turnover results in lost company-specific knowledge capital), but I wouldn't claim it would be an economically profitable venture. It would profit in health and happiness. Then again it might be profitable, as Paul Strassman writes:

If organizations spend their money well, employees with 10 years of accumulated knowledge will be worth more than what the company pays them. In that way, the company will be recovering the investment on its knowledge capital as incremental profits.