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Linked List: May 26, 2006

Friday, 26 May 2006

Mini-Microsoft Calls for Layoffs 

Echoing several of the points I tried to make in “[Confidence Game][cg]” today, Mini-Microsoft explains why he wants Microsoft to reduce its head count:

So one fundamental problem with my big layoffs idea is that the folks who have been responsible for us getting to this stage are most likely not going to be swept up in any house cleaning, but rather it will be the people that they have led.

Differentiation 

Jasper Hauser on the app icon for Dashcode.

Office 12 and the Forthcoming UI Cargo Cults 

Ian Griffiths predicts that we (or at least Windows users) are in store for an avalanche of crummy Office 12-inspired “ribbon” UI designs. (Via John Siracusa via AIM.).

E-Theft at E-Trade 

Wil Shipley gets screwed over by an identity thief and E-Trade.

Web Sites Markup as Graphs 

HTML tags for popular web sites visualized as graphs. Beautiful and interesting — and there’s a Java applet to generate graphs on your own. (Via Cameron Moll.)

Gentlemen Prefer PDFs 

Tim O’Reilly:

One of the interesting outcomes of our Rough Cuts early access program is some great data on the strong preference of our customers for downloadable PDFs over print books. Based on a little less than 3 months of data, we see that of the customers who’ve bought Rough Cuts, 60% chose the PDF-only option; 36% chose the bundle of PDF plus print book, and only 4% chose to pre-order the print book only.

FireBug 0.4 

JavaScript debugger for Firefox.

Columbine, Videogames as Expression, and Ineffability 

Interesting discussion as to why people are repulsed by the mere idea of a game based on a real-life tragedy, but not books or movies. (And yet another example of the Associated Press emphasizing controversy above all else.)

1983 Apple Lisa Sales Marketing Binder 

Charles Eicher:

I have painstakingly scanned the original Lisa Sales Marketing Binder that was issued to Apple dealerships in 1983, and I am releasing it for download as a 33 MB PDF file. […]

I thought the most interesting part of this binder was the section on the Lisa’s rivals. Apple produced a competitive analysis of the Lisa vs. computer and software systems from IBM, DEC, Corvus, Fortune Systems, and Xerox. It is a snapshot of high-end office computing in 1983, just before the Macintosh was released.

Doug Bowman Goes to Google? 

According to this report from an attendee of the Webstock conference in New Zealand, Doug “Stopdesign” Bowman announced that he has accepted a position at Google. Perhaps this signals an end to Google’s rather crummy visual design? (Via Chris Clark).

Update: This might just be a reference to Bowman’s contract gig helping to design Google Calendar, which Bowman mentioned last month on his weblog.