Topics on businesses, good and bad.
Before the Internet became widespread, AOL made money by charging ridiculously high rates to access the content on their network. Afterwards, their content was worth less every day as web sites sprang up everywhere, so they reinvented themselves as an Internet Service Provider (a pretty slick move, in my opinion, not that they had a …
Continue reading ‘“AOL sales drop by a quarter, reports billion dollar loss”’ »
Sometimes I think Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy) is just throwing outrageous stuff out there on his blog, to provoke reactions. I can’t tell if this article, on getting rid of cash and making all financial transactions digital, is one of those though, or if he truly believes that it’s possible. It would offer …
I love this… an advertising gimmick gone wrong, and a company that made good on it… after a fashion. 🙂
I’ve often wondered just how Microsoft could be so incompetent. This quote might just shed some light on it: […] Notwithstanding Kin’s shortcomings as a product, the most entertaining aspect of the cock-up is that it appears to be the result of ego battles in Redmond: rumor has it that Kin was throttled in its …
Continue reading ‘“Microsoft writes down $240m on Kin debacle”’ »
It’s a good concept, but is it going to catch on? […] the question remains, will consumers care about not possessing the files? There are clear advantages in not doing so: you don’t need buckets of local storage, and you don’t have to fear losing your collection to burglars or housefires. There are clear advantages …
Continue reading ‘“Movie, tech giants prep universal online media store”’ »
I never realized, until I started reading the Bad Science blog, just how much “spin” there is in science papers. Spin is great when shooting pool, but it’s simply dishonest when someone uses it in a scientific paper. And when that paper is about the efficacy of a medicine or the safety of a product, …
Most of the licenses listed here are perfectly normal, but there are a few really odd ones…
If newspapers are relying on paywalls to survive, then they really are the equivalent of walking dead men. Even more so than those of us who have watched this saga from the beginning realized. As this article points out, there’s no point to putting the papers online if only subscribers can see them or link …
Some companies are accused of paying people to sit around doing nothing, but this is just ridiculous.
I’ve been pained for several years by the ads in one of my RSS feeds. Mozilla Thunderbird (my program of choice for handling e-mail and RSS feeds) waits until it has all of the images for a message before rendering any of the message, including its text. That’s fine, I don’t mind text or non-animated …