intodimensions.com

Boxesandarrows.com:

In April 2004, Boxes and Arrows sent a set of questions to Steve Krug for an interview to be published in the June edition. What we didn’t know at the time was that Steve is a notoriously slow and methodical writer. Eleven months later, to our great delight, this interview turned up. Thanks Steve!

NVu 1.0 has been released. It’s not as good or capable as Dreamweaver but it’s pretty darn good for the price (free!).

CNBC:

CNBC: What’s your sense of file-sharing? You’ve got Grokster, you’ve got BitTorrent. Is this the scourge everybody’s talking about, or is this the future of Hollywood?

Lucas: I think eventually this will be the future of Hollywood, once they get the technology sorted out. Hollywood isn’t interested in investing in any new technologies, or following new directions. The business is going to go down, down, down before they finally realize what Steve Jobs and a few others have already realized — that there is a way to make a business model out of this.

CNBC: As a filmmaker, does it concern you that this kind of thing is going on?

Lucas: I wouldn’t make any more expensive movies, and I won’t. I wouldn’t walk into that and spend $100 million on a movie, because you’re not going to get your money back. I mean, we’ve lost tens of millions of dollars on piracy.

FINALLY someone in Hollywood who gets it! There’s not going to be any going back on swapping movies online. The only question is when is Hollywood going to realize that and work with tech-companies to come up with a solution that people think is good enough, just like the music industry and Apple/iTunes.

I recently read an article on Smallbusinesscomputing.com about the services offered by Anonymizer. The article has the title “Remain anonymous” and I expected something about in general how a business user can stay anonymous online but to my surprise I found that it was nothing more than a glorified sales-pitch for Anonymizer’s products, disguised as an “editorial.” Puzzled as I was I sent the writer of the article an email:

“Perhaps I read the article wrong, but the impression I get is this is nothing but a nice ad for Anonymizer products. Where’s the critical view on what their products do and what they can be used for? How protected is a user really? Any empirical tests that can tell me if I am really anonymous or not? Where’s the look at alternative products/services? Why are there no alternative views to Cotrell presented? I would certainly expect more from a “managing editor.”

//Magnus”

And the reply was:

Hi Magnus,

The story was a news announcement and an overview of what the company offers. The critical view comes when we review products. You’ll note that we do not endorse the company’s claims — we’re simply reporting them.

Thanks for your comments,

Lauren

Lauren Simonds
Managing Editor
SmallBusinessComputing.com

Ms. Simonds should get credit for replying to me, not everyone would have. But her reasoning seems a bit strange to me. It was a “news announcement” and “an overview” of what Anonymizer offers. To me the article doesn’t come across as a “news announcement.” Perhaps I’m being misled by the title but I would expect some critical thought and analysis about the products and probably also something about other, competing products. Other publications seem to do a better job of distinguishing between what is just presenting something that has not been reviewed and checked and what has. What makes it worse in this case, I think, is that it’s signed by the “managing editor” of the publication. That certainly indicates that it’s either his/her editorial, which means it’s totally their personal opinion and in which cased it might be okay with this article, or that it’s somhow sanctioned and approved by the editor, in which case it’s not okay. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but it certainly seemed a bit “fishy” to me. Anyway, Anonymizer should be happy. They got free and uncriticial publicity.

The trip to Portland, Oregon, was a success apart from getting a kidney stone. I woke up Saturday morning with pain, just like I’ve had before with kidney stones (FYI, severe pain on one side of the lower abdomen reaching around to the back, very sensitive between the legs, nausea and potentially vomiting, upset stomach when going to the bathroom). Since my flight back was Saturday night I figured I wouldn’t take any chances so I went to the closest ER. They scanned me and sure enough- another stone. So they gave me strong medicine and I managed to get back home on that. Sunday night I gave birth to a little kidney stone

I’m off to Portland, Oregon, for a few days. I’ve never even been to the west coast so it’ll be interesting to see that part of the country. From what I can tell Oregon is a very beautiful state.

Apparently, the cost of health care insurance as paid by employees went up about 5% more in the last year than inflation:

Health spending by privately insured Americans rose 8.2 percent in 2004, virtually the same increase as the previous year, analysts at the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan research group, found.

More significantly, for the eighth straight year the growth in medical costs far outpaced growth of wages — by nearly four times in 2004 — a trend that suggests more Americans will be unable to afford their health insurance, center President Paul Ginsburg said.

When is it going to end? Sooner or later something’s going to have to be done about the health care insurance mess in the US, but no politician is going to have the guts to stand up and do something about it, I think. It’s going to have to come to a total breakdown in the system it seems, before someone actually cares enough to act.

CNet:

Use of Microsoft Windows XP has grown inside corporations, but a new study shows that nearly half of business PCs are still running the older Windows 2000.

The study, released Tuesday by AssetMetrix, underscores a recurring problem for Microsoft: While the company spends billions of dollars developing new versions of Windows and its Office desktop software, many customers are slow to give up older versions of software that’s paid for and works just fine.

Why give up a perfectly good OS (2000) to invest a lot of money on a new one that doesn’t give that many additional benefits? Windows 2000 is still a good OS for many businesses and homes. What does XP provide? A flashier interface, some more drivers and plug-and-play! That doesn’t constitute enough benefits to justify an upgrade, and I’m not sure Longhorn will either, especially since it’s likely to come with a hefty increase in hardware requirements. Another problem for Microsoft is that they did such a darn good job with 2000 in terms of stability and performance (it runs really well on relatively old hardware) that businesses can run it without spending money on expensive new hardware. It’s in my experience more stable than XP and you can run pretty much all new software so again - why upgrade? Longhorn better offer something fantastic in terms of stability, security, and usability, and run on modest hardware for it to really attract upgraders.

I was looking around for a good CSS editor and managed to find a XML editor as well and they’re both free. They are Morphon Technologies’ CSS-Editor and XML-Editor.

Take a look at Apple.com’s look over the years.