Jumble of Links from Friday
Work was pretty slow yesterday, and Mary Beth is in West Virginia visiting a medical school, so I spent quite a bit of time pottering about online yesterday. The following are the interesting bits I found.
By coincidence, two unscientific political quizzes were making the rounds yesterday. Both measure your political beliefs in two dimensions (economic and social). Although both tests have questions that are uncomfortably vague, The Political Compass is the more neutrally-worded of the two, whereas the polarized version for Americans (from a dating site, no less) is an abomination. No surprises in the results, but fun anyway.
Next, I really enjoyed this link about subverting companies to make them user-focused. Since the article echoes some of the themes of the Cluetrain Manifesto, it’s hardly surprising that I found the link via Luis Villa.
From JWZ: Your DNA sequence as an attractive wall hanging.
Slashdot featured a story from the Wall Street Journal that tells the story of how Microsoft has had to change its software development methods on Vista to be more incremental. I’ve told several people recently that the main problem with Microsoft is that they keep trying to reproduce the success of Windows 95, only they think that the way to do so is to just make all the same mistakes. Though Win 95 was a big success due to good timing and excellent marketing, apparently Microsoft thinks they won by changing every bit of the software, all at once. And that’s just a recipe for software disaster.
Finally, we have more proof that it’s impossible to talk to Richard Stallman.
Tags: culture war, dna, Links, politics
August 21st, 2007 at 10:45 am
[...] in my semi-tradition of posting links on Friday, here are some things I found this [...]