September 1, 2005
NY Times: Google Dips Into the World of Print Advertising. Google said yesterday that the program was a test and declined to elaborate. But its executives have indicated that they see their rapidly growing online advertising business extending to other media forms. And some marketers see this as a first step.

September 2, 2005
IBM developerWorks: But does it come in purple? Most customization options do very little to alleviate repetitive tasks. Cutting a few centimeters off of the total area a mouse travels in a 10-step process does not substantially alter the time it takes to perform the process. On the other hand, certain customization options are very important, at least for some users.

September 6, 2005
NY Times: Australian Court Rules Kazaa Has Violated Copyrights. The ruling culminates an 18-month legal battle between the recording industry and the Australian-based owners of Kazaa, who said they planned to appeal. The ruling also complemented a United States Supreme Court ruling in June that Internet file-sharing companies like Kazaa could be held liable for copyright piracy.

Useit.Com: The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying. As the chart clearly shows, the curve breaks around the 80% mark. In other words, four-fifths of the orders happen quickly (within three days of the initial visit), but the last fifth constitutes a slow tail, where additional orders accumulate at a drastically reduced pace.

Technology Review: Virus Hunter. But as it turned out, the hours spent taking on alien invaders served as training for battling an altogether different kind of assailant: computer viruses. Hypponen, now the chief research officer of the Finnish computer security firm F-Secure, has become one of the most respected virus hunters in the business.

September 7, 2005
NY Times: Apple Unveils Cellphone Music Player. Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer, attempted today to extend his dominance of the digital music marketplace, introducing a cellphone music player in partnership with Motorola and Cingular, as well as a smaller iPod dubbed the Nano.

ONLamp: How to Decide What Bugs to Fix When, Part 1. Scott Berkun. There are two challenges to making smart bug decisions: first, understanding how to make good bug-fix decisions; and second, creating and following a process that makes it easy to stick to those decisions when the pressure is high.

September 8, 2005
InfoWorld: Are eBay and Skype a good fit? Numerous industry experts are trying to answer that question after learning Thursday that eBay, the undisputed leader in online auction services, is reportedly in talks to acquire Skype Technologies, one of the world's largest providers of free VoIP services.

September 9, 2005
Jeffrey Veen: You'll use Verdana, and you'll be happy. I remember sitting through demos by both Netscape and Microsoft marketing folks, showing us all the wonderful things that would be in the 4.0 versions of their browsers. Not the least of which was the ability to embed fonts -- any font! -- into our pages. Designers rejoice!

NY Times: IPod Phone Isn't Perfect, but It's a Start. And it's certainly true that financial interests of the three collaborators - Apple, Motorola and Cingular - have hog-tied the Rokr in a lot of unnecessary ways. The phone would be so much better if it held more music, let you buy songs directly online and let you use songs as ring tones.

September 12, 2005
The Economist: Science fiction? Whether or not computer, software, consumer-electronics, telecoms, cable and internet companies are in fact out of touch with consumers may be the biggest question facing these industries today. That is because the “digital home”, a concept and category hugely hyped in executive circles but still rarely heard in discussions among consumers, represents their greatest hope for revenue growth.

News.Com: eBay to nab Skype for $2.6 billion. eBay CEO Meg Whitman told investors in a conference call that she hoped a power trio of eBay, Paypal and Skype would deliver an "unparalleled e-commerce and communications engine" by "removing a key point of friction between buyers and sellers."

Useit.Com: Time Budgets for Usability Sessions. In most companies, it's a rare and wonderful experience to have actual customers show up to use the design. You should obviously make the most of this opportunity, but companies often waste too much of their precious time with users.

September 13, 2005
Scott Berkun: Why I switched to Firefox. It’s a sad day and a good day. For years I’ve held onto my IE install out of love. I worked on IE 1.0 thru 5.0, and designed much of its UI. But my love for the past has faded. Last week I switched to Firefox: and I’ve been happy.

PC World: Microsoft Previews Vista, Next Office. Previews of new Windows Vista graphics and a dramatic interface overhaul for Microsoft Office are on the agenda for Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' keynote Tuesday morning at a developer conference in Los Angeles.

September 14, 2005
Fast Company: Brick by Brick: Lego's New Building Blocks. That's the home of Lego Factory, a new initiative that lets fans decide what they'd like to build and then lets them buy the necessary bricks. Customers create any structure they can imagine using Lego's freely downloadable Digital Designer software.

September 15, 2005
EE Times: COW-ing the public with a broadcast flag. The Federal Communications Commission was planning to insinuate this copy-protection software into all new broadcast content until a federal court this year said they lacked jurisdiction. This ruling has only redoubled COW efforts to enlist regulatory agencies in its sacred mission of squeezing every quarter 'til the eagle grins.

September 16, 2005
eWEEK: Microsoft Scraps Old Encryption in New Code. The Redmond, Wash., software company instituted a new policy for all developers that bans functions using the DES, MD4, MD5 and, in some cases, the SHA1 encryption algorithm, which is becoming "creaky at the edges," said Michael Howard, senior security program manager at the company, Howard said.

Wired News: Hands On With the Revolution. Its Japanese designers call it a "game remote control." Nintendo's American employees have taken to calling it "freehand style." Whatever you call it, the controller -- which uses motion-detecting hardware to pinpoint its distance from the screen, location in the room, and even pitch and yaw -- promises a whole new way to play console games.

September 19, 2005
O'Reilly Network: The Next 50 Years of Computer Security. Q&A with Alan Cox. In theory as we get better at security the expected standard rises and those who fail to keep up would become more and more exposed to negligence claims. The bad case is that someone or some organization unleashes a large scale internet PC destroyer before we are ready and legislation gets rushed through in response.

Technology Review: Will Windows Upgrade Hand Power to Big Media? The idea is to make it easier to download HDTV-quality video to your desktop or laptop. But, in the process, critics fear you will lose something: the freedom to use whatever hardware or software you want. So what you'll hear about Vista depends on whom you ask.

Useit.Com: Forms vs. Applications. Most big companies, however, have a legacy of paper forms. As a result, their intranets are littered with online forms that attempt to meet needs that are often better served by real applications with a real dialogue flow and more of a full-fledged GUI.

September 20, 2005
Scott Berkun: Why software sucks (And what to do about it). No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so.

NY Times: File-Sharing Services Seek Pact With Record Studios. At least five online file-sharing companies have started trying to reach an accord with the music industry to convert the free trading of copyrighted music on their networks to paid services, according to several recording industry and file-sharing executives.

September 21, 2005
NY Times: Aha! Video Straight to a Computer. The "Aha!" moment came when JVC looked at the iPod. Why, JVC wondered, are we still recording onto tapes and discs, if we can record directly onto a tiny little hard drive like the iPod's? The camcorder could hold hours and hours of video, and you'd never have to buy another tape or specialized blank DVD.

September 22, 2005
Wired News: A Sci-Fi Future Awaits the Court. Bruce Schneier. Privacy questions will arise from government actions in the "War on Terror"; they will arise from the actions of corporations and individuals. They will include questions of surveillance, profiling and search and seizure. And the decisions of the Supreme Court on these questions will have a profound effect on society.

September 23, 2005
PC World: Nokia Puts Music Phone on Hold. Nokia had originally planned to launch the N91 for the Christmas season with DRM software from the Open Mobile Alliance, upgrading to the Windows DRM next year. However, instead the company began accelerating the inclusion of Windows DRM into the device...

September 26, 2005
Useit.Com: The Power of Defaults. Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience, since that's what most users stick to.

September 27, 2005
BusinessWeek: A New Wireless Order. Sounds like science fiction, but a world where many different types of wireless networks coexist and compete for traffic is just around the corner. And nobody is pushing harder to make it happen than Finnish giant Nokia Corp., maker of nearly one-third of the world's mobile handsets.

September 28, 2005
Cooper: Typography and the User Interface. There is a quiet issue that nags at the computer industry. While processing speed and computational flexibility have grown at incredible rates, our displays, the most human-facing elements of our digital lives, lag behind.

PC World: SanDisk Puts Copy Controls on Flash Cards. Adding DRM will motivate providers of music, games, movies, and other content to sell those products for mobile phones, either as cards sold in retail stores or as downloadable files that can be put on a TrustedFlash card, said Eli Harari, president and CEO of SanDisk.

September 29, 2005
EE Times: LG claims most advanced fuel cell. LG Chem's portable fuel cells are a micro miniaturized product, which is less than 1 liter in the core and weighs less than 1 kilogram. The company claims that its fuel cell system produces 25-W of power, which is the world's largest power output of its kind.