The Register: Redmond strives to cram Great MS Hack back in box is a good summary of the news I was trying to resist linking to - honest! ;-)

So did they or didn't they? Through Friday Microsoft spokespeople, spinmeisters and execs seem to have been largely unsuccessful in damping down the fires started by the Wall Street Journal's 'Microsoft hacked' story, but by the end of the day some kind of corporate line seemed to be emerging - they didn't get anything, they didn't change anything, and anyway they weren't in there for long.

Never one to pull their punches, The Register reports that Athlon beats P4 in urinating contest

The latest reports from system builders putting together the first Pentium 4 systems look very encouraging - for AMD.

A leading European PC maker confided to The Reg yesterday:

"If they think this compares to Athlon they are joking. At 1.5GHz the P4 is outperformed by a PIII 933, never mind an Athlon 1GHz which urinates in rather copious quantities over the oversized, overcomplicated piece of silicon."

Just another example of the myth of clock-rate as a measure of performance.

MISS November!

Now having got your attention, I'd just like to thank Seth and the rest of Macrobyte Resources - the Conversant team - for making November the MISS* month. Conversant seriously rocks already but it's customer support like F.C. Support: [MISS] Welcome Messages for New Members that really makes it a pleasure to use Conversant:

This morning we've added a 'welcome message' feature. New members will now receive an email a minute or two after joining your conversation.

I have slightly modified the default e-mail message. I'd encourage any of my regular readers that haven't yet signed up to do so. If you don't receive a nice welcome e-mail within a few minutes of signing up please let me know. Thanks.

*MISS is like KISS - Make It Simple, Stupid

An Anonymous Coward responds to the Dave's Survey post with one of his, or her, own.

Note so sure I like that survey, or the fact that the student (presumably) hides behind and anonymous Yahoo e-mail address. At least last year Scott Ratcliffe was open about his How Funny is Duncan Survey:

He's Billy Connely in disguise(damn funny): 70% (24 votes) 

He's Michael Barrymore in disguise (bloody awful): 11% (4 votes)

No opinion: 17% (6 votes)

Total votes: 34.

cube.ign.com: Gamecube Versus PlayStation 2

If you get anything out of this article, we hope that it's a better sense of just how powerful Nintendo's Gamecube console is, though. We have not set out to prove PlayStation 2 is an inferior system, only that Nintendo's is just as strong in every single respect technically speaking. At the end of the day, we still believe the battlefield will be separated with those that are willing to master PS2's difficulties and create truly amazing software, and those that would prefer not to waste time and energy on struggling with the hardware when they can worry strictly about content on Nintendo's Gamecube and Microsoft's XBox.

Indirectly via SiT - November Special Report: Deconstructing "Groove"

Groove is all over the news these days. Some articles have praised the new "platform", but there are others that dismiss it as a new fad. Our task is to deconstruct Groove and explore its design for e-learning solutions.

E-learning looks like an interesting site. No doubt I will be exploring it further in the future.

elearningpost: October 2000 Theme: Building Online Learning Communities

Community building on the Net is not an easy task. We are not talking of the difficulty in creating community-based products (the software), but of the difficulty in fostering and maintaining online relationships . Communities is about the people, and not about the tools that enable communication. In the following sections, we will guide you through resources on the Net that you can explore to learn about building online communities, be it for business or learning.

I thought that the following citation from the article was very timely. My students will (eventually) appreciate why I pointed this out!:

In a series of four studies, student postings on newsgroups created for their courses at Carleton University were monitored, and opinions were gathered from samples of students and instructors regarding their newsgroup activities. Results show that an overwhelming majority of students never posted messages on newsgroups, nor did their instructors. In addition, a large majority of students rarely read what others had posted? The results clearly indicate that course newsgroups have limited educational value until students and instructors find more time and motivation to make more and better use of the medium.

The Register: Intel patents IA-64 instruction set

A stack of new patents filed by Intel has provoked speculation that the company is in effect trying to patent the IA-64 instruction set.

Dave Winer's latest wierd survey. Interesting results too!!

Jon Udell: Let's Groove With Ray Ozzie

Groove embraces the peer-to-peer model that's all the rage nowadays. Recognize, though, that the project began in 1997, long before Napster and the ensuing P2P hullabaloo. P2P is one of a number of Groove's technological underpinnings (security and synchronization are some others), and it's P2P that gets people's attention nowadays. But the term that defines Groove for me is not P2P. It's groupware.

Paul Everitt in Re: Zope Newbie News explains how Guido van Rossum, Python creator, landed at Digital Creations, the home of the Zope object publishing environment.

When we took a look at our plans, which we'll start talking about more this week, it became clear that this was a golden opportunity. Because of PythonLabs we'll get something better into the market sooner, and the impact of "better/sooner" is enormous. Equally important, Python is our secret weapon, and we're going to help accelerate its success.

In Andrea's Weblog: October 31 2000 Andrea links to a Metafilter thread about the question:

Why do you keep a weblog?

In my case the main reason is to try and apply some self-discipline - a daily round-up of some of the things I've found of interest on the web. Other reasons include the incentive to write more and to put down some thoughts and to maintain an 'annotated' bookmark that I can search later. Alas, I'm not really keeping the bargain I made with myself and my writing has all but dried up. One reason for this in the past couple of weeks is the fact that my rail travel has been greatly curtailed and I've missed the peace and quiet that I need to pursue this activity. Once I get home the family takes precedence - at least until they have all gone to bed and I can steal an hour or so for surfing.

I have no real idea of how many people visit this site and, besides, the number of readers is not really an issue. I know some of my students drop by occasionally and to a certain extent I cater for that community as the links/comments I post about computer and web technologies - in particular computer architecture and design - reflect my interest in these and, to a great extent, what I consider important/fascinating. One of these days I may even make up a list of bookmarks I visit often.

Most of the links I refer to in Duncan's Jotter have been cited on weblogs that I regularly visit. The weblog community is a fascinating mix of people and I just wish there were more hours in the day to visit more of them more regularly than I do.

I'd encourage anyone that may have suggestions for (CAD) links to drop me an e-mail. I do appreciate personal site recommendations.

Thanks for reading.

Duncan

Quite a few of my students have their own web-sites that are often promoted in their e-mail .sigs. I always make an effort to check them out as I usually learn all sorts of interesting things. For instance, what hairstyles they don't like, who the most boring lecturers are, what types of consultancy they offer ;-), etc., etc.

Call me evil, but I like replying to their e-mails with a wee snippet gleaned from their site. For example:

the lectures so far have been so boring that i've starting drawing cartoons on my lecture notes.

Surely not in my lectures ;-)