Massimo Morelli's Weblog

mercoledì 31 luglio 2002

The Hammer is going to miss.  Good. With the processing of a few more observations of asteroid 2002 NT7 through July 28, we can now rule out any Earth impact possibilities for February 1, 2019. While we cannot yet completely rule out an impact possibility on February 1, 2060, it seems very likely that this possibility will be soon ruled out as well as additional positional observations are processed. [jpl] 9:29:00 AM      comment []

martedì 30 luglio 2002

Perl 5.8 is out. 11:37:43 PM      comment []

lunedì 29 luglio 2002

welcome to 1984 Dave. I am afraid the response are: none, no, a lot, not much, the second one you said. If you read a Newsweek account of the development of a new Macintosh, what are the chances that the story bears any resemblance to what happened? If you read a Fortune story about Microsoft is there any truth to it? And how far back does this tradition go? Was there any truth to the history books we read when we were children? Does anyone try to tell the story as it happened or is everyone just trying to sell books and articles? [Scripting News] 5:50:09 PM      comment []

domenica 28 luglio 2002

Digging more into the Jerry Pournelle web site I found a very interesting paper on space flight. There is some math but pretty simple. 5:51:18 PM      comment [] The Hammer of god. 2002 NT7. Seem that we are under some riks. Dr Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, told BBC News Online that "this asteroid has now become the most threatening object in the short history of asteroid detection". There is some coverage on the Jerry Pournelle web site. Also here   4:08:06 PM      comment []

giovedì 25 luglio 2002

If you think your work suck, read this. 12:17:52 AM      comment []

mercoledì 24 luglio 2002

Informative article on stock option value from John Robb. [..] The only real problem here is that people aren't allowed to sell their options on the market.  Part of the reform package that treats options as compensation expenses should be to create a mechanism for employees to sell their vested options on exchanges.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 2:31:03 PM      comment []

lunedì 22 luglio 2002

Via Paolo, Apple refugees. I am considering buying a Mac for my wife (first PC ever). How will she dubbed then? Apple Refugees About yesterday's story, Rudy Rugebregt sent this email width a slightly different POV. re: Apple immigrants and refugees Some of us weren't immigrants so much as we were refugees. I was one of many who, seeing the Michael Spindler "We must crush Microsoft" speech, decided to take refuge at Sun in the early 90's. We watched the homeland burn and spin out of control but kept our faith. Unlike immigrants, refugees yearn to return and bring the language, customs and practices we've learned back to a land we still love. With OSX, we can leverage what we learned at Sun, Cisco, Oracle, Netscape and other refugee camps. It really is that good and deserves a careful look. You don't find indifferent refugees, they are passionate. Immigrants settled. Refugees still want to change the world. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 6:25:49 PM      comment [] At least there is someone reading my weblog: A Very Scary Company.  One thing I wish the EFF should do.  Why don't they blow the trumpet on comScore?  This company has tricked millions of people into "download accelerators" and other trojan horse software that tracks their traffic, credit card usage (it actually captures numbers), and more -- all in the name of so-called research.  Most of the download accelerator software providers they use are front companies.  Hey, this is one of the worst violations of privacy I have ever seen and nobody knows about them.   You know why they don't?  Here is the address of the company: Reston Office (headquarters): 11465 Sunset Hills Road, Suite 200 Reston, VA 20190 Telephone: 703-438-2000 Fax: 703-438-2051 Yahoo Driving Directions If you don't get the implications of this, ask someone what government agency is based in Reston VA.  BTW:  comScore just bought Media Metrix and now own the online consumer data market. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 12:48:13 PM      comment []

venerdì 19 luglio 2002

But weren't they supposed to be the good guys? Google tells Amazon Light to Cease and Desist. Amazon Light, a very cool new use of the Amazon Web Services recently introuced (and clearly inspired by Google's Web API) provides a cleaner-than-Amazon interface to the same data. However, they recently report that they've been asked to cease-and-desist by Google's lawyers. The site was very much like Google's (screenshot) but it was clearly in good taste. I'm not sure why Google is so testy about it. Is a books.google.com coming soon? I wonder if they'll go after Whois Report next. [Thanks to Kevin Burton for alerting me to this.]... [Google Weblog] 10:55:22 AM      comment []

giovedì 18 luglio 2002

Developers: we users are waiting, and we hope also to have something to push to our corporate clients. I have played a little with Mikel Maron new myRadio tool. Also if it's still in an early release stage, it looks incredibly promising. It starts solving the problem of too many channels in the news aggregator. I organized my feeds in 4 different pages (evectors, blogs, italians, news) and now everything is much less cluttered and since the GUI is very similar to my.yahoo it's somehow familiar. This is definely a very important piece for the future of Radio news aggregator. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 9:38:54 PM      comment [] As much as I like the weblog world I think this is an overstatement :-) Welcome to 1984. MIT Technology Review: "Technologyespecially infomation and communications technologyhas been the most liberating force in history. ... It was not Stalinism, but the flow of information that proved to be unstoppable." Weblogs are a large part of this, allowing "the rest of us" to get the word out. What word? Whatever they feel is important, even - and especially - if they think that they know the truth better than the press is reporting. [Steven's Weblog] via [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog] 9:34:20 PM      comment []

mercoledì 17 luglio 2002

John says America is recovering: Greenspan's statement: "We will get past this corporate governance issue. It is most unfortunate and, I think, very regrettable, and it has had negative effects, unquestionably. But beneath it all is still a very soundly functioning system, as best I can see it. "We do have a set of profits data which, for all practical purposes, are free of spin. It's the numbers I was mentioning -- the National Income and Product Accounts numbers -- which essentially takes corporate reports and makes the types of adjustments that one is required to see what is going on. "Those numbers are improving fairly dramatically, as indeed they must because the necessary implications of productivity growth at a 7 percent annual rate in the average of the fourth and first quarters is very difficult to engender without a very major increase in operating earnings. And indeed, that's exactly what is happening." So, once we get by the negative effects of hedge funds hammering the market with short sales after every rally, we will start to see some recovery in the market.  Unfortunately, most individual investors won't be there. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 11:40:35 PM      comment [] Ha ha ha! The talent myth . On the new yorker. Five years ago, several executives at McKinsey & Company, America's largest and most prestigious management-consulting firm, launched what they called the War for Talent. Thousands of questionnaires were sent to managers across the country. Eighteen companies were singled out for special attention, and the consultants spent up to three days at each firm, interviewing everyone from the C.E.O. down to the human-resources staff. McKinsey wanted to document how the top-performing companies in America differed from other firms in the way they handle matters like hiring and promotion. But, as the consultants sifted through the piles of reports and questionnaires and interview transcripts, they grew convinced that the difference between winners and losers was more profound than they had realized. "We looked at one another and suddenly the light bulb blinked on," the three consultants who headed the projectEd Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrodwrite in their new book, also called "The War for Talent." The very best companies, they concluded, had leaders who were obsessed with the talent issue. They recruited ceaselessly, finding and hiring as many top performers as possible. They singled out and segregated their stars, rewarding them disproportionately, and pushing them into ever more senior positions. "Bet on the natural athletes, the ones with the strongest intrinsic skills," the authors approvingly quote one senior General Electric executive as saying. "Don't be afraid to promote stars without specifically relevant experience, seemingly over their heads." Success in the modern economy, according to Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod, requires "the talent mind-set": the "deep-seated belief that having better talent at all levels is how you outperform your competitors." This "talent mind-set" is the new orthodoxy of American management. It is the intellectual justification for why such a high premium is placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the compensation packages for top executives have become so lavish. In the modern corporation, the system is considered only as strong as its stars, and, in the past few years, this message has been preached by consultants and management gurus all over the world. None, however, have spread the word quite so ardently as McKinsey, and, of all its clients, one firm took the talent mind-set closest to heart. It was a company where McKinsey conducted twenty separate projects, where McKinsey's billings topped ten million dollars a year, where a McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings, and where the C.E.O. himself was a former McKinsey partner. The company, of course, was Enron. 11:18:34 PM      comment [] Ask Tog: a very good article, about call centers. 2:46:51 PM      comment []

martedì 16 luglio 2002

Usa like Italy? NYT.  Krugman continues to hammer on Bush's millions.  Why is this a revelation?  There is little doubt in my mind that we live in a Kleptocracy.  Almost nobody in this country with over a couple of million $$ to their name didn't steal it.   Sure, people occasionally do get lucky, but most significant wealth is the direct result of breaking or bending laws,  lies (misrepresentation, dissimulation, dissembling), insider deals, and an ability to "do what it takes."  This applies from Gates down to the plethora of lowly multi-millionaires.   [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 2:59:23 PM      comment [] Paolo is unveiling one of the trick corporations have to inflate margins: price policy. At one time I worked in a dotcom where we were selling shoes. And the price in USA was more than double than in Italy. It's the same in the whole fashion business, even in cars. These corporation are global only when suits them, maybe. Now now... I'm downloading QuickTime 6 and I want to upgrade to the Pro version. How comes that the Pro update is costing $29.99 in the US and Euros 42 in Europe? It's not even localized, if it is I don't care, I want it in English. All they have to do is send a serial number. Does this costs 12 Euros/Dollars more in Europe? [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 2:54:46 PM      comment [] I agree with Joel fully. I could cite scores of similar examples, in Call Center, in Sales and everywhere. Measurement "Thank you for calling Amazon.com, may I help you?" Then -- Click! You're cut off. That's annoying. You just waited 10 minutes to get through to a human and you mysteriously got disconnected right away. Or is it mysterious? According to Mike Daisey, Amazon rated their customer service representatives based on the number of calls taken per hour. The best way to get your performance rating up was to hang up on customers, thus increasing the number of calls you can take every hour. An aberration, you say? When Jeff Weitzen took over Gateway, he instituted a new policy to save money on customer service calls. "Reps who spent more than 13 minutes talking to a customer didn't get their monthly bonuses," writes Katrina Brooker (Business 2.0, April 2001). "As a result, workers began doing just about anything to get customers off the phone: pretending the line wasn't working, hanging up, or often--at great expense--sending them new parts or computers. Not surprisingly, Gateway's customer satisfaction rates, once the best in the industry, fell below average." It seems like any time you try to measure the performance of knowledge workers, things rapidly disintegrate, and you get what Robert D. Austin calls measurement dysfunction. His book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations is an excellent and thorough survey of the subject. Managers like to implement measurement systems, and they like to tie compensation to performance based on these measurement systems. But in the absence of 100% supervision, workers have an incentive to "work to the measurement," concerning themselves solely with the measurement and not with the actual value or quality of their work. Software organizations tend to reward programmers who (a) write lots of code and (b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place. When you try to fix this problem by penalizing programmers for creating bugs, you create a perverse incentive for them to hide their bugs or not tell the testers about new code they wrote in hopes that fewer bugs will be found. You can't win. Fortune 500 CEOs are usually compensated with base salary plus stock options. The stock options are often worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, which makes the base pay almost inconsequential. As a result CEOs do everything they can to inflate the price of the stock, even if it comes at the cost of bankrupting or ruining the company (as we're seeing again and again in the headlines this month.) They'll do this even if the stock only goes up temporarily, and then sell at the peak. Compensation committees are slow to respond, but their latest brilliant idea is to require the executive to hold the stock until they leave the company. Terrific. Now the incentive is to inflate the price of the stock temporarily and then quit. You can't win, again. Don't take my word for it, read Austin's book and you'll understand why this measurement dysfunction is inevitable when you can't completely supervise workers (which is almost always). I've long claimed that incentive pay isn't such a hot idea, even if you could measure who was doing a good job and who wasn't, but Austin reinforces this by showing that you can't even measure performance, so incentive pay is even less likely to work. [Joel on Software] 9:33:46 AM      comment []

lunedì 15 luglio 2002

Best than the 3 I someone here is babbling: My theory uses the three T's: technology, talent and tolerance. You need to have a strong technology base, such as a research university and investment in technology. That alone is a necessary but not in itself sufficient condition. Second, you need to be a place that attracts and retains talent, that has the lifestyle options, the excitement, the energy, the stimulation, that talented, creative people need. And thirdly, you need to be tolerant of diversity so you can attract all sorts of people -- foreign-born people, immigrants, woman as well as men, gays as well as straights, people who look different and have different appearances.[Gurteen Knowledge-Log] via  [Curiouser and curiouser!] 9:15:02 AM      comment []

domenica 14 luglio 2002

I would add a scripting language and a database to the mix. But I agree with Paolo: K-logs and the Google Search Applicance Recently we have been working a lot on k-logs, or knowledge (web) logs, or anyway on the concept of using weblogs as a company internal communication tool. We use k-logs ourselves at evectors and so far everything works perfectly but, of course, I miss google on my intranet. No problem, as you probably know, if you are based in the US you can get it in the form of the Google Search Applicance (there also are ASP based services offered by google). The reason I would like google on my Intranet, is becuse the whole weblogs architecture works perfectly with google (just check your weblog's referer traffic). The real value of google is in their page ranking system, which is based on the fact that users are linking pages from their pages. Now: in a regular intranet site, let alone on file server, there are usually very few or no links. So, on a regular intranet, the Google Search Appliance would be just yet another search engine. But with internal weblogs, everything would start to make sense again. And I have not even told you what we are up to with centralized rss aggregators and dynamic file servers! Anyway, to my enquires google replied saying that they are not distributing it in Europe yet, so I guess I will have to wait some more... ";->" [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 8:23:05 PM      comment [] Oh, oh, I have a couple of friends that will not like this: Thanks to Column Two for passing this on (though I've seen it reposted elsewhere, too). I love the story of visiting the booth at the CMS conference with a client and witnessing this interchange: The head Sales Guy started grilling my client: how many pages did the site have (in the thousands!), how many users updated it (almost ten!). You could hear the Sales Guy's mental cash register ringing up dollars signs as he went straight for the close: "And what are your editors using to update all those pages: Dreamweaver or Frontpage? Or maybe you built your own homegrown CMS?" My faithful client didn't miss a beat. "Actually, have you heard of weblogs?" he asked the Sales Guy. You shoulda seen this guy's face fall - it was like he'd been hit by a truck. "Yeah," he admitted, "So you use blogging software?" "Yeah pretty much," came the answer. "It pretty does most of what I need. There are a couple things you described that I could use, but I can't justify that sort of outlay when blogware hits most of my specs." That was really my eureka moment: my first realization that content management was screwed. Blogs as disruptive technology. John Hiler has written a solid article highlighting the impact that weblogs are starting to have on low-end content management [Column Two] [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog] 5:50:46 PM      comment [] The woes of k-logging? Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog. Paul's original RSS item was shortened, with no link to his own comments on klogging. He speaks of the discomfort in revealing one's klogging to others on a grand scale. Shortly after I arrived, I started keeping a klog of my work. So far I've clued in the few people I've worked with so far to my klog, but as best as I can tell, they haven't paid much attention. I've been struggling with the question about when and how to let the larger project team know about my klog, but so far I've been reluctant to do so. Today I was in kick-off meeting for the large project I've been working on. Towards the end of the meeting, I was almost consumed with the desire to tell people about my klog, but I just couldn't bring myself to speak up. I've asked myself why that is, and the answer isn't straight-forward. I've only been at Tech for six weeks; higher-ed politics are notoriously complicated, and I don't know how people might react to the things I've written. A klog is by definition not politically correct; you say what you think, not what you believe others might want to hear. [Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog via [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog] 5:47:40 PM      comment []

venerdì 12 luglio 2002

Brrr... New Scientist.  Scientists generate complete polio virus from scratch using little more than commonly known data and widely available tools. This was anticipated but never done before. [..] Let me announce that this little experiment makes it officially the day that one person with a $50 k basement lab could declare war on the world, and make it an even fight.  Very, very scary thought. No need to wait for nanotech grey goo, or nuclear proliferation, etc.  Too bad that almost nobody will pay attention to this. Read "The White Plague" ASAP. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:19:30 AM      comment []

giovedì 11 luglio 2002

But you have to sort out the problem of who could see what! Can K-Logs Improve Corporate Integrity. Jim McGee on whether or not the process of klogging could expose fundamental problems in business before thay become Enron-like disasters, and whether this quality makes it more or less likely they will take root. [Blunt Force Trauma] » Is an excellent piece. I particularly like the idea of the k-log as a barometer of corporate culture.  The absence of k-logging could mean many things, however I would take the presence of a healthy k-logging culture to be an excellent sign. [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:17:17 PM      comment [] Curiouser indeed! Radio Randomizer. I've joined Joe Jennet's Radio Randomizer network. Just click the to go to a Radio site somewhere. Via [Curiouser and curiouser!] 6:47:09 PM      comment []

mercoledì 10 luglio 2002

I post this not only because is an interesting article, but also to underline that more and more often Economist article are noted by the blogger community. Edward Felten, fair-use freedom-fighter. Great Economist article on Edward Felten, the "Tinkerer's Champion." Edward and his colleagues were sent legal threats by the RIAA when they prepared an academic presentation exposing the vulnerabilities in SDMI, a copy-prevention schemes for digital music. The EFF took up his case and made the music-bullies back down.  [Boing Boing Blog] 10:02:17 PM      comment [] Why waste cloning on baseball only? Cloning Pelè or Maradona would be much better. ;-> ESPN: "Reports that the son of Ted Williams has frozen the body of the late baseball great, with the alleged hope of reproducing him in some form at a later date, has been met with bewilderment and disgust in baseball circles. But the rational truth, say scientists, is that cloning of humans is right around the corner -- and elite athletes possess some of the most exquisite DNA." [Scripting News] 6:23:34 PM      comment []

martedì 9 luglio 2002

But we have sun, pizza etc... Sigh. Business Week.  Good news on the job front.   The number of jobs in the US is expected to grow by 15% by 2010. >>>As might be expected, jobs for geeks will grow the most, the BLS projects. Software engineering jobs should leap 95% by 2010 -- to some 1.36 million from 697,000 in 2000, says the BLS. Computer support specialists and system administrator positions will rise 92%, to 1.4 million from 734,000 two years ago, according to the BLS. <<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 6:15:53 PM      comment []

lunedì 8 luglio 2002

Scary: Biker-gang hackers finger cyber-cops. Toronto's cyber-cops are no match for the city's biker-gangs. Undercover technology specialists who probe biker-communications are being traced back by the Hell's Angels' black-hat hackers and are subsequently turning up dead.  Via [Boing Boing Blog] 10:37:32 PM      comment [] Computernik! The sputnik race now in supercomputers. Cool! 3:39:14 PM      comment []

domenica 7 luglio 2002

How to backup those enormous pst files? Fire mozilla and go! Mozilla opens up Microsoft's closed Outlook PST format. Tim O'Reilly has written his annual braindump in preparation for the Open Source Convention. His essays are always thoughtful. This time, I was struck by one particular comment: ... [Jon's Radio] 8:29:20 PM      comment [] As always, an informative article by Jon. By the way, this remind me of his book which I liked immensely. Microsoft, NNTP, and the mismanagement of knowledge management. Robert Scoble has a theory about why Outlook doesn't include a newsreader: ... [Jon's Radio] 8:26:11 PM      comment [] Home. My week on the beach is over. Pity. 7:26:29 PM      comment []

© Copyright 2003 Massimo Morelli. Last update: 27/04/2003; 16.08.42.