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Permanent link to archive for Monday, October 14, 2002. Monday, October 14, 2002

I'm blogging Game 5 of the NLCS in the outliner.  

"After eight years as a Macintosh owner, I switched to a PC with Windows XP and Office XP. Why?

A picture named msmodel.gifBTW, she's not a real person. Thanks to Jim Stegman for the pointer to the Slashdot thread where it is revealed that she's a model in a stock photo database. You'd think Microsoft could at least find one real person to say they made the switch from Mac to Windows and were happy about it. (Postscript: MS nuked the page. Should have taken a screen shot. Damn.) 

Bing! Niklaus Gustavson grabbed a screen shot before they took it down. I love the Internet. John Foster sent me one too. Mike Donnelan had the HTML source in his cache. Paul McJones points out that it's still in Google's cache.  

News.Com: "Did Microsoft suddenly find open-source religion? Hardly. It was dragged there kicking and screaming by its customers." 

Rogers Cadenhead: "I enjoy Slashdot, but how can a site once valued more highly than the New York Yankees be touted as a success because it makes a little money selling T-shirts and soap?" 

A picture named qtips.gifSo, is your brain really hierarchic? I think it is. Here's the informal demo. Suppose I asked you where to find Q-Tips in your house. Where is the lighter fluid? Your Federal tax return for 1998. If you're like me and many other people, each of these things has a "place" where they belong. Where I live, the Q-Tips are in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom off the master bedroom. The lighter fluid is outside next to the briquettes under the overhang by the patio. The tax returns are in the cabinet under the bookshelves in the den. Now think about your whole house, and how many things there are in it, and for almost every thing in your house there's an equivalent place in your brain where you store knowledge of how to retrieve the object. That's a hierarchy. A house is divided into inside and outside, inside is divided into rooms, rooms into fixtures, and then the fixtures break down into compartments with different names depending on whether it's a refrigerator, book case, medicine cabinet, etc. Now of course there are non-hierarchic links, that accounts for serendipity or daydreaming, but when you want to get a job done, hierarchies do the hard work of organizing for quick retrieval. 

ZDNet: "The United States Copyright Office is launching a rare round of public comment on rules that bar people from breaking through digital copy-protection technology on works such as music, movies, software or electronic books. Regulators aren't looking to change the law, but they are looking for public suggestions on what kinds of activity should be legalized in spite of the rules." 

Mitch Ratcliffe notes that some bloggers took money from Microsoft for travel expenses, and apparently didn't disclose that to their readers. "There are people at every company paid to create favorable coverage of the company -- bloggers are an emerging and ripe target for these people," says Ratcliffe. His piece is important. Thanks to Michael Fraase for the pointer. 

Scott Mace is blogging the Parks Associates 15th Annual Forum 2002 from the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco today. 

A picture named jy.gifThinking about thinking. That's the difference between outliner users and everyone else. They think about thinking. They're aware of their own process. Only people who think about thinking get to a place where they can invest in being more efficient in their thinking. Maybe "only" is too strong a word. Some people say they don't think in outlines. Yeah yeah. But hanging information on a hierarchy makes it easy to forget it and focus on new ideas and relationships. It's a good way to relax intellectually.  

In 14 hundred 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. 

John Patrick is blogging Agenda 2003 in Scottsdale, AZ. 

Dan Gillmor: "I'm at Agenda 2003, a considerably downsized version of the ones from the past." 

     

Last update: Monday, October 14, 2002 at 6:04 PM Eastern.

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