Status-Q

[Original Link] Dan Bricklin, lucky chap, has had a really good play on a Segway and records his experiences.

Microsoft Hailstorm (aka World Domination v2.0) is dead!
New York Times story. [Memex 1.1] Bit of a non-starter, really. How many will mourn its passing?

[Original Link] Jolly good show, I say. Takes quite a lot to make us dash for anything! But as somebody on Slashdot commented, this map paints a less enthralling picture.

It’s that time again – I’m starting to consider a new mobile phone, with the added twist this time that I’ll have to pay for it myself.

I’ve looked at various offerings from Sony, Erricson & Motorola, but, as at least three different salesmen have said to me, once you’ve had a Nokia, you’ve been spoiled. I don’t know why it is, but no matter how appealing the various bells and whistles on the other makes, you can’t beat a Nokia for convenience and ease of use. The only reason, I think, that the others sell as well as they do is because many people have to buy a phone based on colour, weight and size. Few shops are able to let you play with the user interface for any length of time before you hand over the cash.

It’s a similar situation with Apple. Those who have had the chance to use a Mac for any length of time are often reluctant to go back to Windows – especially since the new Mac OS has sorted out the reliability issues – even if more bells and whistles are available for Windows machines.

Of course, Apple have only 5% of their target market, where Nokia have the majority of theirs, so buying Apple is seen as a riskier decision. But that’s changing, as the things you can do on your machine become less important than the things you can connect to with it. It’s like moving to a Nokia and finding that your old chargers, belt clips etc no longer work, and you have to key in your phone book again, but you can make phone calls to your Motorola-owning friends just as easily. Perhaps even more so…

JN on the problems in AOL/Time Warner. If you’re putting people in a walled garden, make sure the walls are high enough that they can’t see what’s outside.

Looking forward to seeing the next episode of the new version of the Forsyte Saga tomorrow night. Quite fun, but not having seen the original, I’ll need to wait until the end to comment on the plot as a whole. By then, of course, it’ll be the Hindsyte Saga.

A new kind of security worry for corporate IT managers. Did it leak, or was it hacked?

John Naughton comments on a ZD Net article about BT’s plans to deploy some 802.11 hotspots in the UK.

Wacky new PDAs from Sony. SF Chronicle comments.

The quest for the origin of the saying known as ‘Hanlon’s Razor’ continues! I recorded Joe Biglen’s correspondence here and here last year, where he describes how Robert J. Hanlon, a friend of his, contributed it to a book published in 1980.

Today, Scott Enderle writes that it may be a variation on a sentence in Robert Heinlein’s “Logic of Empire” (1941):
“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity”

So it may have been Heinlein’s Razor before Hanlon’s. That two Roberts with similar surnames should both be credited with the same phrase seems remarkable. Perhaps Heinlein was the originator, but Hanlon also deserves some credit for publicising it in the form which became widely known.

I’ve been thinking about all sorts of situations where an Instant Outline might be automatically-generated from other tree-structured data, especially filesystems.

Imagine a cvs2io utility, for example, which would monitor the changes in a CVS tree and export the changes as an IO. Software developers could then easily notice updates to their favourite packages.

And then I realised I was being a bit slow, because Radio already automatically generates an outline from its filesystem. It’s called directory.opml, and by subscribing to mine in your IO-capable package you get to see all the changes on this web site. Which you almost certainly don’t want to do, by the way! That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, I’ve never quite worked out when directory.opml gets updated.

Jon Udell has written the first really coherent explanation of Instant Outlining that I’ve seen.