rc3.org

I am sorely tempted to start sending strongly worded emails to people who maintain Web sites that use Western (ISO-8859-1) encoding but lead my browser to believe they are encoded in Unicode. Is that wrong?

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Adam Shostack predicts that phishing will kill online banking unless banks start using email more intelligently. His recommendations make sense for any business that uses email to communicate with its customers.

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Steven A. Shaw argues in the New York Times that we should do away with tipping. Here’s the crux of the matter:

Customers believe in tipping because they think it makes economic sense. “Waiters know that they won’t get paid if they don’t do a good job,” is how most advocates of the system [...]

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Here’s what Miguel de Icaza has to say about MVC architecture for Web applications:

The development model in ASP.NET is lighter than the development model with J2EE. J2EE has taken this approach of Model-View-Controller, which is a beautiful thing from an academic perspective, but it does add a burden. At Ximian we consulted with [...]

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Last week I linked to Cory Doctorow’s rant against Apple supporting and utilizing the Trusted Computing platform in the version of Mac OS X for Intel processors. I’d be a fool not to link to John Gruber’s response as well.

Cory’s rant was a visceral shot across the bow, warning Apple away from a worst case [...]

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On the subject of Google’s reprisal against CNet for publishing information found via Google about CEO Eric Schmidt in a news article, Jason Shellen says there’s a difference between public data and publicizing data, which I agree with. The point he seems to be missing is that search engines like Google exist to shorten the [...]

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Today, I watched Fog of War, the Oscar-award winning documentary from Errol Morris featuring former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who served under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. For a bio of McNamara, see his Wikipedia article.

I thought Fog of War was perhaps the most astounding documentary I’ve ever seen. Many people who were against the [...]

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Maciej Ceglowski’s article, A Rocket To Nowhere, is a must read. He explains the failings of the space shuttle program, starting with the initial design. It’s the kind of article you’d expect to read in the New Yorker, except that it’s freely available on a personal site. Amazing stuff.

My favorite quote:

There is no [...]

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Ed Felten has a sumamry of the lawsuit filed by ISS and Cisco against Mike Lynn, the security researcher who gave a talk on a Cisco exploit at the BlackHat computer security conference. Jennifer Granick is representing Lynn, and a legal defense fund has been established. Bruce Schneier points out that Cisco has only [...]

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Yes, the amount of time President Bush spends on vacation still ticks me off.

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