Thursday, February 21, 2002

"Welcome to ERights.org, home of E, the secure distributed pure-object platform and p2p scripting language for writing Capability-Based Smart Contracts."    A discussion of relative naming and local namespaces. 9:24:00 PM

From The Essential Drucker, p. 207: The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness: in one's own work (it content its level its standards, and its impacts) in one's relations with others (with superiors, associates, subordinates), and in the use of the tools of the executive such as meetings or reports. The great majority of people tend to focus downward.  They are occupied with efforts rather than results.  They worry over what the organization and their superiors "owe" them and should do for them.  And they are consious above all  of the authority they "should have."  As a result, they render themselves ineffectual... ... The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank.  But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior is in the most literal sense of the phrase, "top management."  He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole. 9:16:19 PM

From The Essential Drucker, p.195: Asked by the reporter, "How in this confused situation can you retain command?" the young captain said, "Around here, I am only the guy who is responsible.  If these men don't know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I'm too far away to tell them.  My job is to make sure they know.  What they do depends on the situation which only they can judge.  The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot." I thought that was a really good statement of what most managers seem to do poorly, i.e.  taking responsibility for communicating the objectives and the strategy for acheiving them, for teaching good tactics, and for ensuring a positive outcome, while leaving the on-the-spot execution to people on the front-line and trusting them to do it.  It seems like most managers spend their time either trying to change the objectives because the don't want to be responsible for the outcome or trying to take responsibility for all the day to day execution because they haven't put their subordinates in a position to do it for them. 8:54:06 PM

[Scripting News] Shifted Librarian: How to use YACCS with Radio.   I switched to YACCS because it puts comment counts on each item and because you can pull comments down with News Aggregator.  Pretty cool. 7:32:17 PM

BEA takes the performance lead with new ECPerf results - BEA performance smokes the competition... some say it's because of JRockit's VM.   7:08:36 PM

[ZDNet Tech News] Analysts: iMacs flying off shelves. Though firm sales figures aren't available yet, anecdotal evidence suggests Apple's new flat-panel iMacs are selling strongly, say Wall Street analysts. 5:48:43 PM

[The Motley Fool] Importance of Enterprise Value. Find out why enterprise value is more important than market cap. 2:55:54 PM

[BBC World] Kidnapped US reporter is dead. The US Government confirms that reporter Daniel Pearl, abducted in Pakistan in January as he investigated Islamic militants, is dead. 2:44:02 PM

[Scripting News] Daniel Berlinger posts a mini-review of Six Degrees.  not much of a review... 2:30:40 PM

[inessential.com] There’s a cost: it takes mental effort on the part of the user to filter out all the extraneous stuff. Rather than make your site sticky, all this extra stuff can drive down traffic. Exactly... people will spend more time on high-yield information sources. 2:26:08 PM

[inessential.com] Here’s an example: Mac OS X Hints. It’s one of my favorite sites. Great content. I’ve even donated money to it. I point to it often from mac.scripting.com. 2:25:27 PM

[inessential.com] Theory: RSS is popular in part because it routes around the kitchen-sink designs of many news sites. partly... but I think it also routes around the homogenization of those same sites too. tunability and diversity. 2:23:33 PM

[BBC World] US economic momentum grows. The US economic recovery could be much faster and stronger than expected, according to new data. 2:21:01 PM

[ZDNet Tech News] Old-school hacker Mitnick sees new tricks. Labeled a 'computer terrorist' by the FBI, Kevin Mitnick hacked into the networks of Sun and others in the early 1990s. Now he's checking out the new wave at the RSA security confab. interesting account of a mitnik hack 2:14:48 PM

[Robot Wisdom] Consortium: Lucid 14-year history of W's relations with Enron 10:03:02 AM

[kuro5hin.org] The future of Apple. Having just become the owner of an Apple iBook (blueberry, yum.) I've been forced to re-evaluate my apple-is-for-weenies-who-cant-use-pc's attitude. I'm hoping this won't start a flamewar, but I would like to share some first thoughts, and to see some discussion on the future of Apple.   There definitley seems to be some groundswell behind Macs in the geek community.  I would be impressed in Apple succeeded in tipping that market.  I know I certainly want one with OS X at this point :). 9:59:44 AM

[Tomalak's Realm] Semantic Studios: Social Network Analysis. How do knowledge workers learn? How do they decide what to learn next? What motivates them to share? These questions are central to the challenges of knowledge management, and yet most corporate portals and online communities are designed in ignorance of their answers.  This sounds interesting.   The question of "What motivates them to share" is not the right question to ask, though.  Or at least, not when it's a prelude to building a system to bribe people to share.   Mostly people share when it's easy and it costs them nothing -- specifically, when they don't have to spend their time spend their time on activities that don't offer a direct payback to them.   I think the trick will be to find a way to leverage the work people do to maintain their knowledge externally for their own benefit in order to help other people access it too.    9:50:13 AM

[Scripting News] Thanks to CamWorld for the link to this Walmart computer, $399, with no operating system. Screen shot.    Operating system not included.   9:42:43 AM

[The Motley Fool] The Breaking Point. Scandals are effecting positive change in skating and the financial markets.  Sure, positive long term results, but the short term results should be negative -- One of the things a market needs to be efficient is trust.  We've just found out that our trust was unfounded and that the risks are greater than we can really know or even assess in some cases.  This has to create a general downward pressure on stocks as people re-adjust their valuations to reflect the increased risk.   The real question is will we recoup the lost trust in the long run?    9:41:01 AM

[IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] SOAP encodings, WSDL, and XML schema types (XML.com)  How handy... I just needed to read an article on a topic like this... 9:36:14 AM

[The New York Times: National] 30-Day Notice for a Mass Eviction. A mass eviction has shaken Sacramento communities and raised questions about month-to-month leases. Yikes! 8:54:55 AM

New Radio UserLand feature: Comments.  8:49:55 AM

[IDG InfoWorld] Microsoft brews enterprise Hailstorm Backpedalling a little on their plans to sell services instead of software, they'll now be selling services and software -- for those unimaginalbe cases when companies don't want to use Microsoft's "free" services.    The question is - is microsoft playing dumb with this whole "we didn't think it all the way through" thing just to seem less threatening?   Or where they really just this clueless.   History says they sometimes miss things out of arrogance, not out lack of forethought. 7:57:10 AM

[SJL's Radio Weblog] Recession is code word for opprtunity. Eastside Journal Feb 20 2002 11:30PM ET "When times are tough, conventional wisdom dictates that businesses cut back on expenses and exercise caution while waiting for the economy to recover. Unconventional wisdom advocates the opposite approach. Instead of applying the brakes during recessionary times, this school of thought believes in putting their pedals to the metal. Grab market share while the grabbing is cheap, they say. It's the way the rich keep on getting richer." This makes sense - take action to squeeze your opponents out of marketshare while their down.   Seems like there have to be limits on when you could apply this strategy -- at some point, there is a reality that people are spending less on fewer things -- you can't win customers who aren't buying. 7:19:44 AM

[ZDNet Tech News] MS tools Windows security kit. The Baseline Security Advisor will scan Windows computers for unpatched programs, weak passwords, and vulnerabilities in the operating system. 7:14:13 AM