tonight has been hectic, between packing, cleaning, writing, thinking, and all that, one server is acting up, i had to drive into the office twice to fix it, once because i thought i had a brilliant fix, that broke it worse, and second once i realized i'd broke it worse. well, when i come back from this trip to dc, i'm replacing that server, its old, i have the replacement and that will be that.

Deans can count. Erik Duval, on measuring the quality of academic communications:

What we really ought to try and measure includes more subtle things,
like

• how useful was this publication for others?
• how much effect did it actually have on the field?
• etc.

Well, maybe not all researchers have that preference, but the people
who administer academia sure do. William Arms, in his article Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing on the Web, quoted the saying “Our dean can't read, but he sure can count”…

[Seb's Open Research]

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i doubt anyone really wants to measure relevancy…. why? people have, and the curve isn't pretty at all… it is conic section, where a few things are the canon and then it slopes steeply away in short order, most papers never are cited again. only some books are frequently used, in short, there is alot of irrelevance, and in part this is how it should be when there are specializations in which there are less than 20 practitioners worldwide.

This is how PowerPoint was born. Background on Microsoft PowerPoint: “Although now a Microsoft product, PowerPoint was originally developed by Bob Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student who envisioned an easy-to-use presentation program that would manipulate a string of single pages, or “slides”. [...] PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 and was originally only available for the Apple Macintosh, and only in black-and-white. It generated text-and-graphics pages that a photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies.”

I didn't realize that PowerPoint was first a Mac product, in the same way as Excel was. And that originally PowerPoint was not a Microsoft product. [Universal Rule]

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great little story on wikipedia. just how much innovation in major companies is created by the purchasing of other companies? just read oligopoly watch…. there you'll see that acquisition is innovation.

Regulators Meet on Proposal to Brand Microsoft a Monopolist: “On Monday, top antitrust regulators from the 15 nations in the European Union will gather here in the Centre Borschette, a bunkerlike building a stone's throw from the headquarters of the European Commission, to discuss a draft ruling that finds Microsoft guilty of abusing its dominance in operating software.” [Universal Rule]

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well this proposal, if it occurs, would not remove their monopoly power, it would only allow competition in one industry. that is the wrong way to go. eu should demand that microsoft create a new company for their media tools.