"We propose a model for stochastic formation of opinion clusters, modeled by an evolving network, and herd behavior to account for the observed fat-tail distribution in returns of financial-price data. The only parameter of the model is h, the rate of information dispersion per trade, which is a measure of herding behavior. For h below a critical h^* the system displays a power-law distribution of the returns with exponential cutoff. However, for h>h^* an increase in the probability of large returns is found and may be associated with the occurrence of large crashes. ©2000 The American Physical Society "

"Whiteboarding document sharing inside of a Web browser—collaborative browsing, they call it. A lot of applications already do this. But what we're building is one generic architecture that can really handle the back end for all sorts of those applications. Say you're in Palm Pilot and you want to sync your address book. If you had your address book defined in XML—working with SyncML synching it up to your server—these applications might be using Jabber to send or receive these things on the fly. When you update your address book in one application, it's automatically pushed out to the server The server announces the change to all the other applications listening to that XML, and they receive those updates. "

"Using XML to describe parts of a Web app user interface can make it easy to convert the UI for multiple devices via XSL style sheets. The article describes using XML data and XSL style sheets to build the user interface of complex Web applications. A Web calendar sample application demonstrates the basic techniques and concepts. The article also includes more than two dozen code samples that you can easily extend for your specific requirements."

" If you are a Windows user who really wants to migrate to Linux, but you think you'll feel disenfranchised without your Windows productivity applications, Win4Lin is a must-have. If, on the other hand, you want to run Linux without breaking company rules about which Windows applications you must use for work, then Win4Lin is an absolute necessity."

"Email will become the killerer app. It continued to work when all else failed. Communication - not consumer storefronts - is the core value provided by the net and email is the star. The best things on the net make things easier and faster. Seems simple, but many of the failed business propositions of the past year seemed to go in the opposite direction."

"The purpose of this document is to describe the process of using Linux based tools to setup a server used for streaming MP3 data. With a streaming MP3 server, a wad of MP3's, and a microphone a user can create their own internet radio show complete with snappy banter."

"Internet sites from Ashford.com to ZDNet today reported being hit by a mysterious wave of tangentialism, with the content on many sites rendered almost entirely useless as it trails off in obscure or loosely related cousin George III was the crazy king.

"What concerns us most is that the problem seems to be getting worse, and that each reference is becoming more loosely related to the previous to this I was in sales," said eBay spokesperson Gil Blanc, who added that Buelah would be a good name for a maid."

"While previous studies of continuous emission of drops from a faucet have shown the richness of the system's nonlinear response, a theory of dripping has heretofore been lacking. Long-time behavior of dripping is simulated computationally by tracking the formation of up to several hundred drops in a sequence, rather than the usual single drop, at a given flow rate Q and verified by experiments. As Q increases, the system evolves from a period-1 system through a number of period doubling (halving) bifurcations as dripping ultimately gives way to jetting. That hysteresis can occur is also demonstrated. "

"Once the richer information has been embedded in a page, a program still needs to transform it into the format it requires. At this point another W3C technology, XSLT, has a lot to offer. Given an XHTML page as input, it is useful for selecting and transforming the contents of that page. It provides an excellent bridge from older HTML technology to the nascent XML-based Semantic Web applications. A tool of singular utility when used in conjunction with an XSLT processor is Dave Raggett's "Tidy," which can take HTML and turn it into XHTML. As most web authoring tools still don't have XHTML support, HTML will be created by web authors for some time to come. Tidy facilitates the processing of normal HTML with XSLT, enabling authors of such documents to participate in the Semantic Web."

"Weighing in at under 200 KB, HTML Tidy is the closest you'll get to a perfect HTML utility."

"The IEEE-1394 interface appearing in the current crop of digital electronics gadgets fails to provide the interoperability system makers promised. What's worse, industry experts say, the problems dogging 1394 today — such as mushrooming software complexity — could hold back other wired and wireless consumer interfaces as well, postponing the arrival of truly plug-and-play home networks for perhaps a decade.

"Plug anything — camcorder, PC, set-top — into Playstation 2 with 1394, and you'll basically get no functionality," said Mark Kirstein, vice president of research at Cahners In-Stat Group. "Similarly, only a few MPEG [D-VHS]-based VCRs can talk to DV camcorders. There is a chance of [consumer] backlash when things don't work.""

""It has been personally very frustrating to have such a large portion of our ISP [Internet service provider] base deteriorate so quickly," said Chuck Minn, chairman and co-founder of Covad, the largest competitive Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) carrier. Fully 26 percent of Covad's installed base is connected through "troubled" ISPs, while another 32 percent is with "at-risk" ISPs. While it already had to re-report its third-quarter earnings downward $10.4 million due to these problems, Covad last week projected that it would earn $20 million to $25 million less than the $85 million it was projecting for the fourth quarter.

"These [wholesalers] are really in life support mode, and there's nothing they can do," said Adam Giansiracusa, managing director of technology stocks at Frost Securities. He explained that all of the carriers are trying to get themselves to profitability by scaling back and not growing too quickly, since their ISP customers are performing so poorly."

"...covad has just informed us of your telephone delivery date..."

"...Your circuit order 824414 has been successfully delivered and tested with the local telco and you have been scheduled for a Covad installation...'

"... Your Covad install is swiftly approaching! ..."

0. pick up the phone
1. dial 1.800.555.TELL
2. after introduction say "extensions"
3. say or dial 32523

""Both local papers, in their own ways, exercise judgments that undermine their credibility. The [San Francisco Chronicle's] technology coverage harps on the same tired theme of amazement. My God, says the local paper, look at the wizards and their wonders. The Chron should justrun the same daily headline: "More Cool Stuff From Those Young People in Palo Alto." The [Mercury News] regards the area's newly wealthy as curiosities from another planet. The Merc's recurring headline would say, "They're Rich. They're Young. What Does It Mean for People Who Are Poor Like Us?"" "One former editor at the Merc once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at a banquet, but couldn't bring himself to say a word to the billionaire. He told me later he didn't know what to say to Ellison, whom he noted was at the time the wealthiest man in Silicon Valley.

How is it possible for an editor to be so awed by power, money or influence that he could not even shake another man's hand? Such insecurity in the face of the area's increasing wealth and sophistication is a sad commentary on the people who should be telling the valley's stories""

"The technology boom has been called the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet. Maybe so, but that's not the whole story.

As the events of 2000 have shown, it's also been the greatest legal con game of all time."

"My own profession bears a share of responsibility for the debacle. Journalists served more as stenographers than skeptical observers while technology executives, public-relations people, market "analysts'' and other self-serving participants in the con talked up the New Economy and insisted that some fundamental laws of economics had been repealed.

We celebrated the 21-year-old billionaire of the week. We raved about companies with tiny revenues and no prospect of earnings as the harbinger of a new world, when the newly rediscovered reality was firmly rooted in old truths."

"You know that XML lets you invent your own tags, and that it lets you impose some structure on your data. Beyond that, though, your knowledge of XML is somewhat vague. Improvising hastily, you reply “The data is nicely structured, and the tags are meaningful. The indentation makes it easy to read, too.”"

"All those restless hackers, busy twisting the English language up and down with their obscure puns, busy donating their energy to public projects and passions -- they're still out there, following their coding stars. Their curiosity helped build the Internet, helped make code like Linux, BSD and Perl flourish to the point that the commercial world had to take notice.

But now that the commercial world is no longer quite as obsessed, that doesn't mean they've gone away. They've just turned their energies toward even cooler stuff..."

"Because ballots can be bought, stolen, miscounted, lost, thrown out or sent to Denmark, nobody knows with any precision how many votes go uncounted in American elections. For weeks, Florida has riveted the nation with a mind-numbing array of failures: misleading ballots, contradictory counting standards, discarded votes--19,000 in one county alone. But an examination by The Times in a dozen states from Washington to Texas to New York shows that Florida is not the exception. It is the rule."

now
"Blizzard Warning in effect... at 635 pm...radar indicated a band of moderate to heavy snow stretching from Morris and Joliet...northeast through the downtown and the south side of the city of Chicago. Thunder snow was even reported in downtown Chicago at 630 pm. This heavy snow will continue to move across the southern sections of Chicago through 730 pm...and will affect lake and Porter counties in northwest Indiana through 9 pm. An additional 2 to 4 inches of accumulation is possible in these areas as this band passes through. Northeast winds gusting at 20 to 30 mph will cause significant blowing and drifting of snow...making travel treacherous across northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana tonight."

tonight
"Windy and very cold with snow and blowing snow creating local blizzard conditions. Total storm accumulations 9 to 13 inches. Low 5 to 10 above. North winds 25 to 40 mph becoming northwest. Wind chills occasionally dropping to near 40 below.

"a collaborative weblog exploring and chronicling culture and community on the internet"

"In a keynote session at XML 2000 Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the Wide Web Consortium, outlined his vision for the Semantic Web. In one of his most complete public expositions of the vision to date, he explained the layered architecture that he foresees being developed in the next ten years."

"Amazon.com, Gohastings.com and Kmart's BlueLight.com are among the online merchants selling PlayStation 2 consoles that have had outages or slowdowns while featuring the popular, and scarce, toy. While Amazon has said its troubles are unrelated to heavy traffic, BlueLight and Gohastings, the Internet arm of Hastings Entertainment, say shopping bots are at least partially responsible for their technical glitches.

"We sat there and watched the site get 80,000 hits in a period of minutes," said Dave Karraker, spokesman for San Francisco-based BlueLight, which has suffered periodic delays in doing business because of heavy traffic. "It's clear to us that there are people using bots to scan the site for the PlayStation 2.""

"For two weeks, I've been trying to write about the Blogger phenomenon. Make coffee, turn on the computer, check e-mail, stare at Microsoft Word for a while, and look at some Web sites for inspiration.

And then, instead of writing this column, I would add a bunch of nonsense to my Blogger buddy. It's freakin' addictive. So, if you write for a living, don't read this, and don't try the Web-log game. It's too easy, and it will Suck Your Soul Away."

"Earth to execs: Your quotes are bullshit. You know it. We know it. Don't force your PR folks into fiction writing. Why not quote a customer or supplier—and then only when there’s some actual news-related development? Or be really wild and quote an unrelated credible third party. Finally, consider quoting this person saying something that meaningful or, at the very least, plausible. Otherwise, just stop it. Please, I’m begging you."

"New evidence suggesting people are turning off the Internet in droves may be due to its increasing commercialization one academic suggested Tuesday.

Figures just released by research firm Cyberdialogue show that in 1999 30 million people in the U.S. no longer used the Internet, describing themselves as "former users". This has led experts to question whether a backlash against the Web is beginning. "

"After Linux generated a certain level of buzz, big companies such as IBM and Hewlett Packard began to latch onto it. In recent months, some observers have questioned whether pure Linux companies such as Red Hat could succeed in the long term given the entry of such companies, with their firmly entrenched support services, into the market.

"The original idea of making money from a free operating system was dubious from the start," said a former Red Hat executive who asked not to be identified. "To make it work, if it could work at all, would have required highly skilled management. But with the price of the stock going from 151 to about 6 today, it's clear that the business model is impossible, or that Red Hat's management isn't up to the task, or both. Either way, it doesn't bode well for Red Hat.""

Lou's Views: Penguins vs the Dismal Science

"A key main reason there's so much uncertainty in the industry right now is simply because we're in between equilibrium states. The prior state saw the closed source software/bits for bucks model dominate, with free support, later moving almost entirely to paid support. In that state we had software-only companies of all sizes making a profit, from one-person shareware shops to outfits like our cousins up in Redmond. It was and largely still is an economically viable business model, and it fueled a lot of companies and some spectacular investment portfolios.

The next equilibrium point will be more oriented toward open source, and I suspect that in the long run this will all but eliminate the software-only companies. There will be a lot of consolidation as companies merge and acquire each other, and also evolution, as companies try to stay independent and convert themselves into service companies. I won't guess how far this new equilibrium point will be from the old one, in terms of either time or degree of change from the last point; I don't think anyone can tell for sure while we're in the middle of the transition.

The really interesting thing is that the further we go along this path, the more software will be produced by either the stereotypical open source project, staffed by people scratching an itch and not getting paid for their work, or by large companies, like IBM, HP, Compaq, Intel, and others, that have a financial incentive to spend big money on software they can give away. Don't think for a nanosecond that these companies want to spend horrendous amounts of money developing software they can give us because we're nice or lovable; it's simply in their best interest to do this to promote more pragmatic endeavors, like making money from hardware sales. Seen in this light, the only thing surprising about IBM's stunning, wall-to-wall Linux commitment is that it's not even bigger. IBM, thanks to the variety of hardware platforms it sells and supports, probably has more to gain from Linux's long-term success and arrival as a unifying platform than any other single company."

Making money on open source

"Another market with perhaps the biggest potential for Linux is embedded systems (see Resources for a link to another LinuxWorld.com article on embedded Linux). Linux isn't the perfect embedded OS, but it's fast, tight, and free. You can't beat free, especially when the margins on devices can be low or even dip into negative numbers. (It is not unusual for companies to intentionally lose money on game consoles and other devices that use embedded operating systems, since they make money elsewhere.)

Pure software companies are in a much more difficult position than companies that add value through hardware in one way or another. It is getting increasingly difficult to sell people something they can get for free, and more and more software is free these days."

"The problem isn't to figure out how to sell it, but to mostly give up on the idea of selling software, and look to add and sell value in other ways."

Open Source vs. Commercial Software Development

"And what do we make? Software for those who grew up with computers. Software for people who hate wizards, and plug and play, and lack of control. Software for people who can see the beauty of a properly working system. We make software for people who love choice. We make software that works, even when hardware manufacturers won't pony up the documentation, even when we have to reverse engineer things that should be publicly available, we make it happen.

These are the things that make open source great. This is why even after an 18-hour day, I still have the desire to settle down at my Linux box. This is why I work all week in commercial software and still look forward to a weekend of uninterrupted time to catch up with my own development projects. This is why I'm here, and why I'll continue to be here. This is what open source is all about."

"When users were asked whether they were likely to use a WAP phone within one year, a resounding 70% answered no. WAP is not ready for prime time yet, nor do users expect it to be usable any time soon. Remember, this finding comes after respondents had used WAP services for a week, so their conclusions are significantly more valid than answers from focus group participants who are simply asked to speculate about whether they would like WAP. We surveyed people who had suffered through the painful experience of using WAP, and they definitely didn't like it.

The report details the many usability problems that caused users to come to this negative conclusion. Unless the usability of mobile Internet services and devices improves considerably, people will simply not use them and billions of dollars will be wasted."

# This is a cron script in the gawk language to frequent the various
# charity sites affiliated with thehungersite.com. These sites have
# obtained corporate sponsorship to enable web users to donate food,
# health care, and other goods to the needy by clicking on a link. The
# sites generally count one click per IP address per day. While it's
# hard for people to remember to return to each site each day to donate,
# it's a perfect task for a cron job. This script uses lynx to download
# the page to a temp file, identify the proper link, "click" it (sending
# output to /dev/null), and then remove the temp file. By making this a
# daily cron job, you can cause thousands of dollars to be donated to
# charity each year.

"The strongly worded decision from Leon County circuit court judge N. Sanders Sauls was the most severe blow yet to the Gore campaign. He ruled there was "no credible statistical evidence" or other substantial evidence to show that further recounts had a "reasonable probability" of throwing the presidential election to Mr Gore. "

"The infamous ‘butterfly’ style ballot card used by Palm Beach County, Florida, in the recent US presidential election causes voting errors and raises doubt over the final result — not the conclusion of a democrat-led inquiry, but the finding of psychologists who have examined the controversial ballot paper in new experimental trials."

"Almost eight per cent of people using the butterfly ballot in the trial made mistakes — most inadvertently voting for Clark when they believed they were choosing Chretien. Many more said that the card was confusing."

"The Groove transceiver ? the "space" in which a user works ? includes capabilities that lend themselves to natural and intuitive group interactivity. These include voice communications, instant messaging, text-based chat, and threaded discussion. There are also tools for sharing files, sharing pictures, sharing contacts, and for shared activities such as drawing and Web browsing. After Groove is launched, a user creates a secure shared space to which he can invite others to conduct business or personal affairs. Each Groove shared space is stored locally on the computers of each of the members of the shared space. A change to one member's shared space is reflected on everyone's machine, so their work remains completely synchronized with other members."

"...Groove does not address trust metrics. For now it's an infrastructure play that leaves aside how people collaborate.

These days it is a lot harder than in the early days of Notes to chooses likely collaborative partners when creating ad hoc groups as there is much more information media to choose from. Who's smart, and who's a clown? Working this out should be transparent, and the science is evolving pretty rapidly. Whether Groove intends to swallow such trust metric logic into the platform, or leave it for third parties, will be its next test.

And finally, and this is a question to which all P2P brainstormers should have a some kind of answer, is whether you'll really be able trust the data you're working with."

"This is nuts. We ought to enjoy some basic guarantees -- that our messages come from authenticated sources, are confidential, and haven't been tampered with -- as a matter of course. And Groove makes those guarantees. Crypto is always on, period. You can't even turn it off if you want to. There's nothing to configure, and this was a key design constraint. What Ozzie observed with Notes, over many years, is that security failures almost invariably boiled down to human error. There were too many choices, too many knobs. Groove does away with the knobs."

"Overall, Groove is very promising. The fact that it is simple to use and that it is de-centralized are hugely empowering to peer groups that will use it. The sense of personal control and the simplicity of initiating collaboration are appealing. As en e-learning tool, we just have to wait and see if interesting and innovative applications are built that specifically target learning & KM issues. Most of my students described Groove as an interesting tool. Whether it will evolve beyond being just an interesting tool will largely depend on how learning solution providers react to Groove and what Groove Networks can offer to them in return."

"As much hype as it's gotten, it has a steep road ahead. It's rather obviously missing the elusive "killer app" to get enough people to download it for it to be ubiquitous enough to get people to write apps to get people to download it -- and, even more importantly, use it."

"Hotjabber.com is a free Instant Messaging service for anyone who need to communicate on the Internet. It resembles ICQ and AIM but is far more flexible. With a single client/account you can communicate with ICQ, AIM, Microsoft Messenger and YAHOO Messenger."

"If you’ve used the infamous file-sharing program Napster, you know that while it’s very cool, you still have to wait for the song to download before you can listen to it. A new Silicon Valley start-up called Friskit has come up with something way cooler than file-sharing: stream-sharing. Go to Friskit.com, type in the name of the artist, genre or song that you want to hear, and a few seconds later your chosen music starts playing. How? Friskit searches the Internet for Web sites that stream music (in RealAudio, Windows Media or MP3 formats), then serves them up to you one after the other with very little wait (and no hard-drive clutter, since there’s no downloading). Even better, the interface is so simple and elegant that anyone can use it—something the major record labels with their billion-dollar revenues haven’t been able to manage."

"Undermining Darwin, humiliating one of the most popular science authors alive in Gould, relegating mathematics to the bargain counter - Wolfram knows the scientific community may savage him. He has, he says, intentionally tackled each scientific discipline only enough to pique the interest of its members but not enough "to spoil everybody's fun." Still, he predicts, "People in specialties will be convinced I missed the point." That's why, he says, he's included in the book "a complete history of their field" - as if that's going to do anything but infuriate them more.

For all of his scientific brilliance and real-world success, there is something shockingly naive about Wolfram. He honestly thinks that he can attack the foundation of the modern world, the life's work of millions of scientists, and the heart and soul of academia?and not suffer more than a brief, grumpy backlash before he is lauded as the new King of Science. He also is convinced that his New Science is so simple and so self-evident that he will be invited on talk radio shows all around the country - no doubt explaining the nuances of cellular automata to Howard Stern and his fans."