Cox Crow

Highly Recommended for Increasing Your Billable Hours

Rick Klau has helpfully pointed out Why Microsoft Word Is Not Ready for the Law Office. Now, will Zimran model anger as a consumption good and apply that pent-up rage to the market propects of Apple Document?

10:48:10 PM # Google It!

[This page intentionally left blank by the Microsoft Word text selection algorithm.]

10:00:17 PM #

Kronos

Bambi Francisco thinks that AT&T should pick up Covad

it'll keep losing customers like myself if it doesn't get with the program and offer another product. I'm not talking about the low-hanging fruit called local phone service. What's the value of low-hanging fruit if it's spoiling anyway? I'm talking about high-speed Internet access. [via Broadbandreports]

Ma Bell? I'd think more appropriately Kronos. AT&T, like other telecom entities, ILECs included, would prefer to seek rent through gaming the regulatory system rather than investing in facilities. Purchasing capacity from the provider of that last mile of wire may be cheaper than investing in the last mile itself, but it ignores the writing on the wall.

What mattered most in my decision-making process was high-speed Internet access. The local and long distance services were just add-on commodity features. SBC got my business because it had the high-speed offering. It wasn't because the local phone company had better local or long-distance rates, and certainly its awful radio commercials in the Bay area almost drove me away.

February 26, 2003: AT&T looking local

David Dornan, CEO of the nation's largest long-distance company, said Tuesday that AT&T had identified three systems as early favorites to provide the connection between its telephone networks and residential or business customers: cable TV lines, steroid-injected wireless networks and electrical grids.

9:06:51 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

The Advent of a Young Blogger

Raph Levien's son Alan has begun to explore the wonders of writing on-line.

Raph says,

Last night, Alan wrote the first entry in his new blog. I typed most of it, but he's rapidly getting better at keying.

Alan says,

I always keep dreaming about wanting a Chinese dragon. There are Chinese dragons: fire, water, earth, metal, wood.

(Maybe blogs.levien.com will pull Raph's brother Alex out of the woodwork. Dude, you disappeared.)

8:21:55 PM # Google It!

Bundling Against the Cold

Sun is bundling the other planets into the Solaris operating environment [c|net via OSNews]. From a software distribution perspective, I think this makes a fair amount of sense: ship everything in one package, then install, and license (and patch), what you want. What needs to be there is a means to install a minimal system. Because while everything and the kitchen sink may be on the media, I don't want it on my servers. That, ease of licensing, dependancy resolution, and package management, will make or break the implementation.

It has to be easy to buy, easy to install, easy to run, and easy to maintain — not like trying to determine which minor version of which Java SDK needs to be downloaded. Making life less confusing for the purchaser and those of us on the line can only help Sun's prospects.

5:52:43 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, System Administration

Powell wanted the new bargain to be "enjoy your monopoly on the pipe to the home, but now everyone with a pipe to the home can offer whatever they want down it" believing that, in the packet switched world, any pipe can be a phone, TV, radio, etc.
— Zimran Ahmed

3:27:40 PM #
categories: Industry

In the matter of Municipal Broadband

Playing Twenty Questions: SBC Survey or political propaganda? [Broadbandreports]

3:10:14 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Get Out of My Way!

Microsoft Word sucks for writing. I spend too much time on getting the text to look like shit. And, because I pretend to be a meticulous typesetter, I correct the styles and other crapola in templates that I inherit. But do these changes make it back to the Great Unwashed? No, of course not. They'll still type two linefeeds after each paragraph, hit the spacebar five times to indent paragraphs, and line up columns with multiple tabs. And then Word tries to help — and makes it worse! Instead of deleting a line, it moves the tab stop left? Making a list? Forget about styles, we'll change them on you in unexpected ways. Think you know grammar? I bet you didn't know that sentence fragments in a list must begin with a capital. Think that the w3c's mis-identification of lists as a block element is whack? That's nothing compared to not being able to format them. Well, Bill, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

2:48:25 PM # Google It!
categories: Dear Microsoft

In Memoriam: BBEdit Lite

And so today is the first day since BBEdit 2.1 shipped in April 1992 that there is not a free version of BBEdit available. That’s a shame, because all things considered, the world was a better place when there was a free version of BBEdit available for anyone to use.
— Daring Fireball

BBEdit Lite was my introduction to BBEdit. If it weren't for BBEdit Lite, I wouldn't be using BBEdit today. Well, not exactly today, since I'm at work and running Windows 2000, but it's on my Dock. The trade-off between features and costs of the two versions of BBEdit seemed to me to be well-balanced. I hope the demonstration versions can engender the same desire.

1:35:36 PM # Google It!

You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours

Hello Associate,

We noticed that you were accepted to the Amazon.com Associate Program several weeks ago but have yet to send an order. Here are three quick and easy steps to help you get started:

What about the step where someone reads my website and clicks on a link? Can you help with that one? I've mentioned some books, so I've done my part.

11:43:59 AM # Google It!

A Better Bank

Rather, a better bank website. I'd like mine to take a hint from 37signals's [via Meryl's Notes] or, at the very least, PayPal.

9:35:17 AM # Google It!