Wow, this is so awesomely catty. Harks back to the good old days in comp.infosystems.www. Thanks to Simon for the pointer. I added my two cents.
Hmm, based upon the websites, if you were a prospective student, which would you rather go to?
One of these sites isn’t designing to its audience. See also: Aesthetics and Usability: A Look at Color and Balance, IBM relates Perceived Usability to the Real Thing. Snide remark: what good are blue links if you’re going to force the page width to 950 pixels? [actually there’s no strong relationship; try 2: what good are blue links if it looks hideous?]
Related Sites: GUUUI – The Interaction Designer’s Coffee Break, InfoDesign, Usability Views, cityofsound/blog, antenna, brightly colored food, Bloug, In My Experience
Tim Robbins, National Press Club, Washington DC, April 15, 2003:
I imagined our leaders seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat versus Republican, white versus black, or any of the other ridiculous divisions that dominate our public discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television telling the citizens that although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can’t, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields.
Of course, the rest of the speech goes on to outline how wrong things have gone. And well, he’s right, of course. I was speaking about this with a friend about this a few weeks ago while I was feeling particularly frustrated and helpless. There are more and better ways to make a difference than screaming into the storm. Less talking, more doing.
Thanks for Nothing: Bush’s gift to taxpayers—and Halliburton.
But this is nation-building Republican-style, with huge contracts awarded in secret to politically connected companies. They now say that the “emergency” oil-field contract to Halliburton, formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney—and, gosh, who would have predicted that Iraq’s oil fields might need to be repaired after a war?—is only worth $600 million, not the $7 billion originally reported. I suppose we should be grateful for that.
Oops
Insects thrive on GM ‘pest-killing’ crops
They fed resistant larvae of the diamondback moth – an increasingly troublesome pest in the southern US and in the tropics – on normal cabbage leaves and ones that had been treated with a Bt toxin. The larvae eating the treated leaves grew much faster and bigger – with a 56 per cent higher growth rate.
Defense agency pulls OpenBSD funding:
About $1 million had been allotted to add new security features to OpenBSD, an open-source OS that many consider to be the most secure free implementation of a Unix-like system. The project had finished most of the work in the first three months of the grant and had been recently using the money to fund more security enhancements to the software, de Raadt said at a recent security conference.
…
Earlier this week, de Raadt said he was told that officials from DARPA were concerned about statements appearing in press reports that indicated most of the grant was being funneled to foreign researchers, an apparent no-no for government-funded projects. Moreover, de Raadt believed that the U.S. government took exception to comments he made indicating that the money spent on his project meant that fewer cruise missiles were being built.
Some good comments in the /. Firebird post, including one by Mike Shaver (blog) that seems to sum up things:
I’m not involved in the day-to-day operation of Mozilla anymore, and I’ve been under email siege for days now. When this whole thing started, I was sympathetic to their emotional reaction, and interested in finding ways to mitigate the (incredibly small) chance of user confusion. Now, I don’t want to have anything to do with the Firebird people at all, I no longer care much for their feelings, and I’m very unlikely to expend more effort in trying to reach some sort of outcome that makes them happy. Maybe that was their intent, but maybe I’m starting to understand why their dealings with Borland were so troublesome.
Also, from a thread w/ an IBPhoenix developer:
I belive the IBP people had some more of a dialog (or with others in Moz, I only started my own conversations direct with Moz people recently) – but even that is limited to whoever is willing to reply.
Maybe it would have been easier to get in touch with them if they weren’t so busy dealing with all the spamming?
Note to self: Daniel Lanois is doing a free in-store performance at Amoeba on Wednesday, April 23 @ 7PM
Stem cells help paralysed mice walk – over in Italy, that is. Here in the good ol’ US of A, stem cells are the devil’s work.
Cells injected into the bloodstream found their way to the animals’ brains, where they repaired damaged and inflamed areas. Four out of 15 mice with paralysed back legs moved normally after treatment1.
“It’s a great recovery,” says team member Angelo Vescovi of the Stem Cell Research Institute at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, Italy. The other 11 mice retained only minor tail paralysis.
KCBS: Bomb Threat at Car Dealership
LOS ANGELES (CBS) A man claiming to have a bomb entered the Felix Chevrolet dealership in southwest Los Angeles Thursday, leading to an hours-long standoff with police.
Police are being very tight-lipped about the incident, but according to KCAL 9 News, the threat could be linked to an extortion plot.
Sounds about right. I had heard about the person w/ the bomb story from security, and while I was out getting lunch, there were multiple people who for some reason or other asked me if I knew what was going on. One student mentioned that the police weren’t telling them anything about what was going on.