jeremy I’m a fan of Edward Tufte, the guru of charts, but I’m still not sure about his view of PowerPoint. The New York Times Magazine has another article on his recent polemic against Microsoft’s presentation software. Tufte claimed, as the NYT piece says, that Microsoft’s ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension, infusing … Read more
The Washington Times has an interesting piece about the the Internet and technology summit in Switzerland last week. Delegates, it says, were unknowingly bugged with RFID tags, according to researchers who attended the forum. RFID is Radio Frequency ID, which means the tags could have contained and given off all sorts of information, including the … Read more
Here’s a different take on the spam wars: the granny spammer. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution tells the story of Flo Fox, a graying grandmother in a “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt who uses a couple of shopworn computers to out millions of junk e-mails for merchandise ranging from land in Belize to blessed coins. What I … Read more
This from reader Jim Erlandson on Microsoft’s declining support for Windows 98: “Windows 98 support isn’t dropping off the face of the earth according to Microsoft. $35 per incident phone support is. How many people do you know who have spent $35 for a phone call to Microsoft lately? And a quote in C|Net indicates … Read more
Search seems to be this week’s Thang. eWeek reports that Groxis is about to launch a new version of its desktop software that can retrieve results from multiple search engines and instantly categorize them. Rather than returning a simple list of results, Grokker 2 groups them into various categories that are displayed in a visual … Read more