Jimmy Wales will launch Wikia early next year. Promising.
A Sample of Madison’s 2006 Christmas Lights
Surfer Survives Two Shark Attacks
Royce Fraley has surfed the unforgiving, storm-swelled waves of Northern California for three decades, and also — by chance — explored the hunting habits and appetites of great white sharks.
But this holiday season he’s spending time ashore in Guerneville with his wife and their two young children. He hasn’t been surfing since his latest brush with fate. Two weeks ago, he became one of the world’s few surfers to have survived two separate shark attacks — the latest incident involving a shark that pulled him at least 15 feet below the surface.
“I’m not chomping at the bit to get back into the water,” Fraley, 43, told The Chronicle. “I had an offer to go surfing with a buddy last Sunday, and I declined. I’m definitely taking a break and enjoying my family. … If my feet were dangling down, I might not even have a leg or be here today. It’s made me more respectful of my life and my family.”
A History of Information Processing
TO FIND A SITUATION COMPARABLE TO THE PRESENT WE NEED TO REVISIT THE LAST GREAT INFORMATION REVOLUTION WHICH TOOK PLACE MORE THAN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
This timeline is revised and expanded from the timeline available in the printed edition of From Gutenberg to the Internet, and widened greatly in scope. It is a work in progress, continuing the research which I began in the printed book. This is one of an untold number of timelines on the web. Even so, the approach that I am taking in building this growing timeline is, as far as I know, unique, at least for now. Thus some explanation may be in order. These introductory remarks, which I began writing in December 2005, first concern From Gutenberg to the Internet and then address issues involved with studying the history of information recorded in physical form in relationship to the history of information in digital form. They are a result of my continuing studies since the book was published, and they are evolving into another book. Your comments would be appreciated.
Sales Taxes & Online Shopping
But even Christmas stories, from Dickens to Seuss, need a villain. We’d like to nominate your friendly neighborhood state governments, which for years now have been predicting dire declines in state finances because untaxed online shopping would erode the revenue-raising ability of sales taxes.
As usual, the political gloom proved to be overwrought. State tax revenues took a header in 2002 along with the rest of the economy, but they’ve been growing smartly ever since. The third quarter of this year saw state tax revenues up 4.6% over last year, and that was a deceleration from growth that has bumped along at close to 10% at times in recent years. State sales-tax receipts grew at 4% in the third quarter–and that was the slowest growth in three years. The biggest news about the sales-tax apocalypse is that it isn’t happening.
But the strong trend lines for overall tax receipts and sales-tax revenue in particular haven’t slowed the move among states to grab a piece of the online-sales pie. In the 14 years since the Supreme Court ruled that the myriad state and local taxes were too complex for mail-order retailers to be expected to master, there’s been a movement to obviate that argument by “streamlining” the country’s many sales-tax regimes.
A Relatively Dark Chat with Frank Gehry
Describing what it takes for him to accept a commission, Mr. Gehry says, “The determining factor is: Can I get it done while I am still alive?” Explaining why he doesn’t build houses any more, Mr. Gehry says, “They involve a lot of personal hand holding. I guess at my age I don’t have the patience.”
Probably more than most architects, one sees Mr. Gehry’s buildings–buildings that have been described as resembling ruffling sails or looking like they are melting–and has a sense that there is a single personality behind them.
“I don’t know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do,” Mr. Gehry says. “Architects have to become parental. They have to learn to be parental.” By this he means that an architect has to listen to his client but also remain firm about what the architect knows best, the aesthetics of a building. This, Mr. Gehry says, is what makes an architect relevant in the process that leads to a completed building. “I think a lot of my colleagues lose it, lose that relevance in the spirit of serving their client, so that no matter what, they are serving the client. Even if the building they produce, that they think serves the client, doesn’t really serve the client because it’s not very good.”
An Interesting Look at Xerox Management’s Missed Market Opportunities (PC’s, the GUI, Networking)
Peter McColough never powered up a personal computer, but he helped unleash the digital revolution.
Many of the technologies at the center of today’s computerized offices and homes — the mouse, the laser printer, the local area network — were first developed in the 1970s at a Silicon Valley skunk works he chartered at Xerox Corp.
But Xerox never reached Mr. McColough’s goal of being at the forefront of what he called “the architecture of information.” The company still best known for copiers pioneered in the 1950s and ’60s failed to develop many of the technologies into marketable products. Instead, a herd of start-ups, often headed by the very workers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Campus who had invented them, rumbled in and created industries in personal computers, networking, office software and others.
“If Xerox had known what it had and had taken advantage of its real opportunities, it could have been as big as IBM plus Microsoft plus Xerox combined — and the largest high-technology company in the world,” Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs is quoted as saying in “Joe Wilson and the Creation of Xerox,” a book by Charles Ellis about the company and its early chief executive.
The reasons for Xerox’s inability to take advantage of its own inventions are debated in business schools to this day. Jacob Goldman, Xerox’s chief scientist at the time who founded PARC, blames short-sighted managers unwilling to take chances on small-scale, unproven technologies. “They managed the company quarter to quarter and looked at the bottom line,” Mr. Goldman says. “They weren’t thinking about the future really.”
A Health Information Exchange Conversation
Dr. John Halamka joins me for this week’s podcast. He’s a renaissance guy: a physician, a CIO, and a healthcare IT innovator whose work I mentioned in a pair of InfoWorld columns. Lots of people are talking about secure exchange of medical records and portable continuity of care documents. John Halamka is on the front lines actually making this these visions real. Among other activities he chairs the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), which began exchanging financial and insurance data almost a decade ago and is now handling clinical data as well in the form of e-prescriptions. The technical, legal, and operational issues are daunting, but you’ll enjoy his pragmatic style and infectious enthusiasm.
“Bad ISP’s
Here’s a list of ISPs (Internet service provider) that are known to cause trouble for BitTorrent clients or P2P in general and the reason why. If you are using one consider finding a new, better one. If your ISP is not on the list come to the IRC channel and tell the OPs, they can add it. Read about Good settings and NAT problem first though.
Interesting OAG Travel Data
“The facts show that scheduled airlines offered more seats in 2006 than ever before with more than three billion seats being made available to the flying public,” said Duncan Alexander, managing director, OAG. “At a very conservative estimate of a 70 percent load factor that means over 2.3 billion passengers will have flown during 2006. That is more than 6.3 million people flying every day of the year on either business or leisure.”
“Given the schedules already in the OAG system for the first quarter of 2007, the trend of more seats and flights being offered by the world’s scheduled airlines, and more people flying on both long and short haul, looks to continue,” he said.