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“It appears that some readers have taken my article to mean that Navigator 6.0 will not comply with standards at all, or that Navigator 6.0 will be as noncompliant as Navigator 4.x. That is not the case. Netscape and Mozilla engineers deserve tremendous credit for creating a browser that has very good standards compliance. In fact, according to many who have studied it more throughly than I, Mozilla and Netscape 6 are more standards compliant than the competition. See, for example, Netscape Standards
Challenge. I regret that I did not make this more explicit and give more credit to the Mozilla and Netscape engineers in my original article.”

“But American III’s high point is its two-song centerpiece. The first is
Will Oldham’s, “I See a Darkness,” on which it becomes clear that,
perhaps because of his neurological disorder, Cash’s voice isn’t as sure
and strong as it once was. When he quavers, with Oldham singing
backup, “Is there hope that somehow you can save me from this
darkness?” the effect is absolutely devastating. You won’t listen to the
song the same after this. The shivers will eventually leave your spine,
but the residue remains.

That song’s transcendent power also stems from its production, which,
although still sparse, is relatively lush. The organ and piano that rise to
match the guitar remain in use for Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat.”
Chronicling the first-person thoughts of a man being executed, this
song, more than any other on the album, was written for Cash. Building
to a rumbling crescendo, he belts out, “And the mercy seat is smokin’/
And I think my head is meltin’.” This would’ve brought even Gary
Gilmore to tears.”

“We began to notice in early March that Yahoo! pages seemed to be rising in Google search rankings. This was several months before Google’s alliance with Yahoo! was announced on June 26, so we had no reason to think that there was any connection. But Yahoo!’s rankings kept rising in the succeeding months, and the announcement of the Google-Yahoo! alliance naturally raised questions about the connection.

A key point is the size and depth of the Google index. The claim has been made that the reason for Yahoo!’s sudden climb has to do with the size and depth of the Google index — Yahoo! has risen because more pages are being indexed, or maybe because Yahoo! is being more thoroughly indexed after the
alliance. In answer to these suggestions, however, the accompanying table of data shows that the rise in Yahoo! rankings in Google searches occurred well before the Google-Yahoo! alliance, and also well before the increase in size of the Google index.”

“For the record, I did talk with Kimberly Vogel at Google, to see if they have an explanation for this. Her response is that “Google’s index has grown significantly since January 2000 and it has indeed uncovered more Yahoo! pages.” I told her that my data seems to raise questions about this because the big leap by Yahoo! in Google rankings seems to have occurred before the explosive rise in the Google index size. She had no further explanation than this, just saying that what I recorded is an “anomaly.”

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“I have heard from a variety of people about voting instrument confusion in many states, not just near West Palm Beach Florida. We know from lots of examples of usability studies that errors on tasks arising from “dumb mistakes” are very common, with rates of easily 5%, 10%, or more. Elections, even important ones like for President of the United States, are often decided by much slimmer margins than
that. In our ever-mobile world, thorough testing of ballot techniques and standardization may be called for if we are to believe that we truly choose our elected officials rather than flip a coin.”

“Before I review “A Field Guide to the Yettie” I should first acknowledge that I cannot offer an objective critique. I am, after all, a “young entrepreneurial technocrat” — a “yettie” — myself. I write for an online
magazine; I own my fair share of midcentury modern furniture, as well as a soundtrack downloaded from the Web that runs heavily to electronica. Most important, I pass the ultimate yettie test: Although I’m not an extreme example of “an employee of an Internet company [who] cannot explain to my mother exactly what it is I do for a living,” my grandparents still can’t figure out what I do. I carry a cellphone, a Palm Pilot, an MP3 player and a bike messenger bag, drink lattes and shop vintage chic. I know what Unix is.”