California is trying to convince some of its prison inmates to volunteer to be sent to privately managed facilities in other states in order to ease overcrowding in its prisons. How do you encourage people to volunteer to be relocated to Tennessee? Two words: marketing video.
The conditional shuffle is a useful new coinage. Greg Sargent applies it to Tom Friedman’s support of the “surge” in Iraq, but it can be applied to all sorts of situations. Think about it the next time someone says they can support adding some huge new feature to the product, but only if QA can get it completely tested in three days. By conditioning their support on a milestone that could never possibly be met, this person theoretically gives themselves an out when things don’t turn out as expected. When the feature gets added and the release is delayed by three months, the conditionalizer evades accountability by saying that they only supported it under certain conditions which were not met. Never mind the fact that it was foreseeable that those conditions were never going to be met. ...
One of my favorite writers on the topic of software development discusses one of my favorite pieces of software with its author. Here’s Allan Odgaard on the future of TextMate as a product: So one option is to hire programmers and basically build a company. Is this something I want to do? Maybe, but running a company requires a steady cash flow. Hiring good programmers can be difficult, and hiring a bad programmer can turn out to be worse than not hire anyone at all, but you will rarely know in advance. ...
The chief prosecutor in the United Kingdom, Sir Ken Macdonald, on the war on terror: London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, ‘soldiers’. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a ‘war on terror’, just as there can be no such thing as a ‘war on drugs’. ...
Many are photos taken by amateurs, the rights to which Microsoft purchased: Creative Director Jenny Lam expanded the search to Flickr and contacted people who took really interesting pictures, asking them, “So, how would you like one of your photos included among the default wallpapers in Windows Vista?” The Flickr artists were excited to be a part of Windows Vista (one of them by an astonishing coincidence happened to be a beta tester), and after the lawyers had their say–because nothing is complete without lawyers getting involved–Microsoft sent the photographers on a commissioned photo shoot. ...
The memory card doors on Diebold voting machines are physically secured using a mailbox lock. Freedom to Tinker has the details on how you can make your own key: According to published reports, nearly all the machines deployed around the country use the exact same key. Up to this point we’ve been careful not to say precisely which key or show the particular pattern of the cuts. The shape of a key is like a password – it only provides security if you keep it secret from the bad guys. We’ve tried to keep the shape secret so as not to make an attacker’s job even marginally easier, and you would expect a security-conscious vendor to do the same. ...
Valentine’s Day is coming up, so I thought I’d post a little guide to romantic gift giving. For the longest time, I had no idea how to give a romantic gift, mainly because I didn’t understand what the word “romantic” means. I’m a guy who interfaces more with computers than with people, and who enjoys reading about economics and sports statistics. One day I was driving home from work and realized that the word “romantic” is an antonym of the word “practical” and suddenly a lot of things I had been missing became clear to me. For example, if you’re like me, you never understood why so many people find jewelry to be a wonderful gift to receive. Allow me to explain. ...
In the comments of my post complaining about unwanted mouseover effects on Web pages yesterday, Dave Adams mentioned the NoScript add-on for Firefox. It turns of JavaScript for all domains except for those that you add to a whitelist. I’m normally in favor of using Web sites in the way that the publishers intend, but advertising has become so intrusive lately that I’m starting to change my philosophy. A few weeks ago I started using Flashblock again, and now I’ve added NoScript as well. ...
From the AP: Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft. Spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM Corp., which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ...
Netflix is buying the movies and renting them anyway. Good for them.