NYPress - Top Drawer-Le Maitre - Taki - Vol. 15, Iss. 13 "What would have happened had Germany won the war [WWI]?" Provocative scenario of the day, via Robot Wisdom

Son Offers Mom's Wisdom on eBay

NYTimes.com Review The Electric Psychologist "Eventually the answer to the question why Licklider isn't better known becomes clearer. He wasn't mediagenic, didn't start a company, didn't invent a gadget or write any software. He was, however, a kind of ideal bureaucrat, whose detailed knowledge and selfless enthusiasm were instrumental in getting America and the world online and out of that cold basement with the punch cards. Waldrop's account of his and many others' world-transforming contributions is compelling." You must read this book if you care about the history of computing and the Internet...

Yahoo! sneaks in yet more spam Seems to be going out of its way to alienate customers

Linux and Office: What a Concept "CrossOver Office is priced at $54.95 per user, with workgroup, site and enterprise license discounts available."

Forbes.com: Out of the Box -- Intel and IBM fight for the post-PC future "Intel Chairman Andrew Grove knows how to make an entrance. Before a crowd of 5,000 at Intel's annual sales meeting in San Francisco in late January, Grove glided up a ramp and onto the stage aboard a Segway, the superhyped, stand-up scooter that some have trumpeted as the greatest invention since the PC. .. The prototype of the vehicle, Grove told the crowd, used a handful of Intel chips. The final version used none. .. Grove's message: Get ready for the electronic future--and get scared that Intel won't play a central role in shaping it. The next chip revolution will take place far beyond the beige computing box under your desk, in a plethora of new and strange devices with an entirely different set of needs. The collision of three tech trends--vanishingly small but powerful chips, the Internet and wireless data communications--is creating a new era of engineering, with great potential to reshuffle business models, spheres of influence and profits."

Virtual Game Weapons Bought With Real Money "Players can advance more quickly by using potent weapons that make their avatars stronger. And for those who lack the time or patience to acquire the goods within the game's confines, Mr. Selden provides an answer in the material universe... Buying up merchandise and virtual currency from those abandoning the game, Mr. Selden resells the goods to eager players, often for a handsome profit. In doing so, he has established an exchange rate between game currency and the dollar, emerging within the GemStone subculture as equal parts Alan Greenspan and J. P. Morgan."

Forbes.com: Analyze This "Despite the software slump, sales are booming in business intelligence, a new tool that promises relief for performance anxiety." ... "The trick to the software is a built-in translator called a semantic layer that Business Objects patented ten years ago and that it claims is widely imitated by rivals. It turns queries such as "sales of TV by region to men under 40" into dozens of lines of database gobbledygook that fetch and combine answers from sales, inventory and customer databases"

Interactive TV Deal Unites Moxi Digital With Digeo "Analysts said that the acquisition of Moxi would position Mr. Allen well for further attempts to move into interactive cable services. But it may also intensify competition between Mr. Allen, who is also chairman of Charter Communications, the nation's fourth-largest cable company, and his former partner, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft."

Moxi Plans Merger With digeo, TV Firm Owned by Paul Allen "Moxi Digital Inc., a high-profile interactive-television company founded by entrepreneur Steve Perlman, is merging with digeo Inc., a small but well-connected TV company created by investor Paul Allen."

‘Back to the Frontier’ "But we’re only beginning to grasp how weird it is to have wireless Net access all the time. One harbinger: during Tuesday morning’s session with Qwest telecommunications CEO Joe Nacchio, several conference participants were typing their impressions into personal “Web logs,” online diaries available to all on the Internet. One of these “bloggers,” Doc Searls, got an e-mail from a friend across the country, who noted that Nacchio—who at that moment was onstage complaining about how tough life was in telecom—had sold huge amounts of stocks over the past two years. Searls located a page from Yahoo Finance with the particulars and linked it to his log. Another blogger in the room read Searls’s log, and copied the link to his own site, acidly commenting on the inappropriateness of Nacchio’s whining. Though it’s not clear how many in the room were reading the Web logs, apparently there were a lot. In any case, it seemed that the room palpably chilled toward the pugnacious executive. This is a dangerous trend for public speakers everywhere." (via Dave Winer)

ATXTA - Acronyms, Text, Abbreviations, Jargon, Slang, Buzzwords, Emoticons, and Messaging They have "RTFM" and a text messaging guide that'll come in handy one of these days (via Neat New Stuff)

Sun aiming office software at mainstream - Tech News - CNET.com Will be interesting to see how they can keep this going, with its creator now working elsewhere etc.

Thunder Lizard Productions - Top 10 Tips for Usable Flash "... you achieve usability by understanding the people who will be using your site, identifying the goals they're trying to accomplish, and addressing those goals within an engaging design. Design and usability can go hand-in-hand. Creating an interface that focuses solely on design or usability detracts from the overall user experience."

Long Bets "The Long Bets website is designed... ...as an arena for competitive, accountable predictions (Long Bets). ...as a forum for focussed discussion and debate about prediction. ...as an attractive tool for philanthropic giving. ...as a way to foster better long-term thinking." (Thanks Paul)

Knowledge@Wharton: Lawrence Lessig’s Messianic Manifesto: A Doomsday Look at Cyberspace (free registration required) "The hype is deserved: Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World offers a devastating analysis of how the freedom and creativity originally built into the Internet are now being built out of it by corporations and lawyers with a vested interest in controlling what people do online and deciding who has access to what." (read the entire review before you buy a copy)

The Register: IE 6.0 is burying Netscape "The tally, extrapolated from the web logs of the 125,000 sites WebSideStory surveys, has Netscape usage at an all-time low of just 7%, down from a fairly steady 12% prior to IE 6.0's launch, with IE making up the bulk of the remaining usage. IE 6.0, released last year, is used by 30% of web surfers, the survey found."

As the Web Matures, Fun Is Hard to Find "Just 11 years after it was born and about 6 years after it became popular, the Web has lost its luster. Many who once raved about surfing from address to address on the Web now lump site-seeing with other online chores, like checking the In box."

O'Reilly Network: Get Your Rotor [Microsoft shared source CLI] Running [Mar. 27, 2002] "So, you'd like to experiment with Rotor. Given that it's made up of approximately 9,700 files and 1.9 million lines of code, it is definitely a little intimidating."

The New Yorker: The Social Life of Paper, by Malcolm Gladwell Back to the drawing board for collaborative authoring tools (other than paper-based ones, that is; via Slashdot)