WorldCAD Access

The Machine Never Had a Soul

Opinion Tracy Kidder's groundbreaking 1981 "The Soul of the Machine" book described the speed at which Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 mini-computer was launched. The "soul" consisted of the engineers who brought the machine to life. Today, however, we realize the machine, which now dominates us, has no soul. Robert Sterling expresses our frustration for us. (Robert Sterling’s cry against the machine with no soul was first posted on Twitter at https://x.com/RobertMSterling/status/1889097312103747776.) --- I don’t want to connect my coffee machine to the wifi network I don’t want to share the file with OneDrive I don’t want to download an app... Read more →

Crowdstrike Strikes out

Opinion Image credit: @aaronoleary Crowdstrike provides Falcon threat checking software to approximately 60% of businesses running on Windows, and a software update shut all those computers down. The flaw crashed computers, because the software has root access -- the ultimate level of access. Twitter was unaffected, and so it let loose with real-time reports, fixes, and reactions. Here is some of the best of it. - - - Cameron Wilson: Reports of Windows computers showing BSOD errors across a lot of different sectors: supermarkets, banks, broadcasters, etc. Downdetector, which shows crowdsourced reports of outages, going crazy rn. Elon Musk: Biggest... Read more →

The Clock Is Ticktocking on TikTok

Opinion The government of the USA brought in legislation over TikTok, and today president Biden signed it. TikTok USA now has nine months to divest itself from its Chinese Communist Party-controlled parent company ByteDance -- by January 19, the day before inauguration day. In reaction, @tiktokpolicy complained, "This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will challenge it in court. We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail." Twitter quickly went into truth-check mode: @michaelsobolik: The one word missing from this statement: 'divestment'. Because the legislation doesn't ban TikTok. And... Read more →

Reimagining the Desktop with Deta

Opinion I took in the "secret," invite-only Webinar for the spring release of Deta from Luma yesterday. I’ve been beta testing Deta for a couple of months now, and I don't particularly get it -- how would it be useful to me? I hoped that by watching the Webinar I would get more of a clue. Webinar hosted by Luma The Holy Grail Computing has a decades-long long history of user interfaces, starting with PARC’s Star system in 1981 -- released a full three months before IBM announced its first PC. PARC's desktop design, which we all use now (graphical... Read more →

Facebook Failed. Twitter Thrilled.

Opinion Joan Donovan: With the tech crash upon us, what would be the worst thing that could happen if we just did not log back in to Meta products, like Facebook, Whatsapp, Instaagram, or Threads? Jane Manchun Wong: Woke up and can't login to work. Am I getting fired? Elon Musk: If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working. Tim Pool: Using X [Twitter] to tell people your social networks are down kinda wild. Boz: This was a particularly unusual issue where the server was erroneously telling the headset it had been logged out. Nikita Bier: Last... Read more →

Twitteratti who jeered self-serious letter on AI

Opinion Investment firm Silicon Angle got AI firms to sign onto a letter promising to make AI as important as gas-guzzling cars and industry-destroying Internet. You can read the full letter and the list of signatories at https://openletter.svangel.com. Twitter reacted with cheers and jeers. Here are some of the best jeers. Source: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1764659720642818414. Text of open letter promising to make the world better thru great AI Neoluddite: I wonder if you will break this pledge quicker than the last pledge you made to Elon Musk in the Founding Agreement of OpenAI. Martin Shkreli: never ever ever Logos & Aesthes: We... Read more →

Icedrive is my 6th cloud storage provider

Opinion My scanned slides archived on pCloud, which operates like P: drive on computers; Icedrive operates similarly, as I: Remember when Dropbox dropped on us? Although it was extolled for being new and therefore cool, it really was just FTP with a prettier face. (FTP, file transfer protocol, was the way we moved big files around before Dropbox; using FTP was not pretty.) (1) Dropbox was even better by giving away boatloads of storage for free for all kinds of reasons. I took advantage of many of them, and so today I still have 26GB of storage free with it,... Read more →

Revolt at OpenAI: The Fallout

Opinion I think what happened at OpenAI was that the board, which has the responsibility of ensuring AI is developed responsibly (see corporate structure below), became worried about the commercial direction in which ChatGPT seemed to be heading, and so fired the man leading the charge. Microsoft, which hopes that commercializing AI will help them win the race against other mega-tech-giants, naturally wants to hire him. Structure of OpenAI In my opinion, the potential importance of AI is a scam, and Microsoft might end up looking as foolish as following its desperate purchase of Nokia. Opinion-ators on Twitter -- and... Read more →

Humour Leaves OpenAI: The Aftermath

Opinion With the fired OpenAI ceo now an employee of Microsoft, along with about 100 of his mates, I'll be interested to watch how long the serial entrepreneur lasts inside the corporate behemoth. Meanwhile on Twitter, staff and commentators have some bitterness to float: @bradlightcap (COO OpenAI): "OpenAI is nothing without its people." @miramurati (CTO OpenAI): "OpenAI is nothing without its people." @danbarker: "OpenAI's board gave themselves the prime duty to 'protect humanity' from AI, but seem to have ended up inadvertently handing much control of that to Microsoft." @joe_darko: "By the way, [OpenAI ex-ceo] Sam and [OpenAI ex-co-founder] Greg... Read more →

Twitter Outdoes Itself on OpenAI's Uncoup

Opinion The twitteratti had their bags of popcorn out upon the news that the board of OpenAI asked the former ceo to be the reinstated ceo. Here are some of the best ones: "Sam Altman returning to OpenAI after a day is like Steve Jobs returning to Apple after 12 years, but for the TikTok generation." - @mattturck "reinforcement learning from human feedback" - @ryxcommar "'Hey Ilya, it's Satya. If you want those Azure credits to work on Monday, we're going to need Sam back'." - kantrowitz "Anyway, he's gonna be INSUFFERABLE if they bring him back. He already has... Read more →

Best Tweets on OpenAI's Coup

Opinion Following Friday late afternoon's ouster of OpenAI's ceo Sam Altman, followed by co-founder Greg Brockman quitting, the twitterverse offered up its own version of advice: "Quitting as president of a company as massive as OpenAI with a lower-case only email is so insanely based I can hardly believe it's real." - @functi0nzer0 "pretty wild that the first job openai took was sam's" - @blader "BREAKING: Convoy of black vehicles fill SF streets as ousted Open AI leader attempts coup to reseize power." - @antoniogm "If Biden wasn't a million years old, he would issue an executive order to preserve... Read more →

Puzzled About Making Mailto Work (Again) with Eudora

Opinion When you click a link in a Web page for emailing someone, a simple piece of HTML code in the link opens your default email software with a new message, and with the recipient’s email address automatically inserted (see figure below). Very handy! This, however, hasn’t been working with Eudora for a while now. I just ignored it, as my Web browser nicely offers to copy the email address for me, as shown below. Then I paste the copied email address into the new message in Eudora. In the Registry A reader recently asked if there was a way... Read more →

Why Creo Is Unlikely To Be PTC’s Next Onshape

Melt the boat I've made the statement that I doubt PTC will be able to turn all of Creo into an Onshape-like online app, as executives have been telling financial analysts. PTC spent over half-a-billion dollars buying Onshape from venture capitalists who had funded the ex-Solidworks staff who programmed it, and a few short years ago promised an Onshape-like version of Creo in five to ten years. We’ll see. In recent conference calls, PTC execs stopped talking about Project Atlas. Autodesk has, after all, been plugging away at the problem for more than a decade, starting when it bought a... Read more →

The Twitteratti snarks on Facebook's revenue decline

Even Walmart is down this quarter @devilslayer1802: This is the first time EVER Facebook has had a quarter year-on-year revenue decline. Anthony DeRosa / @anthony: Facebook parent Meta posted its biggest drop in daily users and its first decline in revenue as the company struggles to adjust to macroeconomic forces and growing competition from rival TikTok. @infographx: Gen Z is literally ditching all the other social apps, except TikTok. Chaotic Goode / @laurengoode: “Meta shares have lost about half their value since beginning of the year, underscoring investor concern about the health of the co's advertising business. That unit has... Read more →

Apple dangles Facebook

Live by the ad, die by the ad Facebook was this week kneecapped for being a one-trick revenue pony in pretty much only selling ads based on skifing (local slang for taking things without permission) our personal details. Facebook's underwhelming financial report was due to Apple increasing privacy in its products, making Facebook less attractive to ad agencies. One estimate* is that 70% of the loss of ad revenue was due to Apple's hardening of privacy, which, over time, Apple will make more stringent. And so for Facebook, this will not be a one-time drop, which the stock market noted... Read more →

Best tweets on Zucker's recent disinvolvement

Cuomo blast radius (@benyt) As the head of CNN leaves the network following a sexual relationship scandal, Twitter voiced its opinion: "Breaking news from the Caligula News Network. CNN could completely solve their ratings problem by turning their studio cameras 180 degrees in the opposite direction." - @iowahawkblog "Over the last year, CNN has made more news than they have reported." - @KateHydeNY "Jeffery Toobin is the only person at CNN that keeps his hands to himself" - @Richard_Harambe "congratulations to jeff zucker for his new show on CNN+" - @SaysSimonson "CNN blames Russia for Zucker's illicit relationship" - @zerohedge... Read more →

Using Asynchronous Communication in CAD

Guest editorial by Cedric Desbordes More than any other DWG vendor, Graebert of Germany has done more to connect the primary design platforms with one another -- desktop/laptop on Linux/Mac/Windows; tablet/phone on Android/iOS; and Web browsers. The name of the company may not be familiar to you, as they tend to sell white label CAD. Companies like Corel, Dassault Systems, and Onshape use Graebert's "ARES" code for their DWG editors. Here, business development manager Cedric Desbordes describes how this trifecta of CAD platforms is useful for today's WFH environment. Asynchronous communication means that all parties don't have to be online... Read more →

3 amazing functions in Opera Web browser

Nifty I've been using the Opera Web browser since v4, back when its boasts was that it could fit on a 1.44MB floppy disc. In addition to being not-Internet Explorer and not-Firefox (the two browsers with the largest market share back then), it had a developer mode that displayed all the text of a Web site. This was especially useful for reading sites that otherwise required one to sign up. After v12, Opera had a split inside the company, with the founder going off to start up the Vivaldi browser, saying he wanted to return the browser to its Opera... Read more →

People tracking is so insidious

Enuff already It was bad enough to see how many corporations track us by doing something as innocuous reading just the headlines at a government-funded Web site like Deutsche Welle (the German international broadcaster). The list I show below (found at dw.com/en/european-union-general-data-protection-regulationgdpr-valid-may-25-2018/a-18265246) is about 2/3 of the data skimmers DW employs. It got worse when at a trial last week we learned that Google still tracks us when we run its browser in incognito mode -- never mind what it states: It's what Google doesn't say in its incognito statement that's alarming. - - - It is the nice things... Read more →

The Reverse Network Effect

Millions of lost users In my previous post, Why Google (Cannot) Fall, I wrote about the Network Effect, which tends to insulate giant social media companies from decline. When more people use a network service, like Facebook, then even more people have a reason to use it. Barely a week after I wrote that, we saw the effects of the reverse network effect: the more people are banned (or quit) from social media, the more depart. By coincidence, my daughter-in-law and I quit Facebook the day before Twitter banned the president of the United States. We quit, because Facebook had... Read more →

Updated: How to make Eudora 7 work with Gmail servers

Thanks to Hermes Eudora is an old email client. Last updated in 2006, it does not do well on Windows 8/10. It is software that I have been using on my desktop computers since December, 1994, when I first got onto the Internet (from CompuServe). My 96-year-old dad uses it. Today many, who tend to get their email through a Web browser and with free clients like GMail and Outlook, see it as a dinosaur. Eudora's Unique Functions Except that Eudora does things no modern email client does, and I have tried a dozen alternatives over the years. Here are... Read more →

Now is the time to cancel MailChimp

"In our sole discretion" About five years ago I was looking around for the mass email service to take over my homegrown effort. I was spending too much time updating the mailing list, and there were firms who promised to take the work over for me -- for a fee, 'natch. I settled on MailChimp, and for the most part it worked mostly to my satisfaction, at first. I have just two needs in sending out my weekly upFront.eZine newsletter: Take care of additions, subtractions, and changes to the mailing list Let me create my newsletter in the way I... Read more →

What I found when I bought a commercial-grade WiFi access point

Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LR wifi access point I live in a "BC Box" home, a rectangular house designed to maximize the interior space. These homes put the natural gas furnace and hot water heater in the center of the house, in the basement, with sheet metal ducts and copper piping spreading tentacle-like throughout the home. My Internet service arrives via an ADSL cable in the basement, at a corner -- the worst possible location. For more than a decade, I battled to get a strong, reliable WiFi signal past all that metal in the middle of the house. A few years ago,... Read more →

Opting out of (some) stalker ads

Ever notice the same ads appearing, no matter which Web site you visit? These are stalker ads. At some point you showed an interest in the product (at a Web site), which recorded your visit with a cookie stored on your computer. Ad firms read the cookie, and then serve up ads from that company on many other sites -- bombarding you with the same ad, over and over again. In the ad world, this makes sense. In the real world, it doesn't. We know that repetition leads to irritation and tuning-out. Worse, the mindless stalking is a waste of... Read more →

My internet access got 5x faster today, but it doesn't feel like it

My Internet service provider is Telus, a company that gets fined repeatedly by Canada's regulatory agency for poor customer service. One of their favorite tactics is to reduce prices and improve service to match the competition -- but avoid telling customers, leaving us with slower service and paying higher monthly fees. Last month, though, Telus made a mistake. By accident, it told customers that higher Internet access speeds are available. It sent commissioned sales people door to door, hoping to sign us up for their version of cablevision "because Telus installed a fiber optic network in your neighbourhood." It did?... Read more →

Tired

Oh, and by the way, I'm off Twitter - Updated

I was on Twitter, um, about for two years, I think it was. First, I was bummed off about it, because I tried following tons of tweets. The output from Twitter is called the "firehose," because the amount bowls you over. Mostly retweets and irrelevant tweets ("Getting in my car with a coffee"). After that experience, I declared Twitter dumb. But Twitter gets used a lot at conferences, and so I tried again. This time I kept my Follow list down to 25, half of whom rarely posted. After a year of two of this diminished following, however, I began... Read more →

Headline writers rachet up the verbs to out-compete the competition

Isn't a free press great? Headline writers get to pump the up verbs and adjectives to make the headline more exciting than the story. Here's today's example: Andy Dolan of Daily Mail: A Body Caught on Google Street View? The Huffington Post: Google Street View Pictures Capture Girl's ‘Body’ Sprawled On Sidewalk Sara Jerome of Hillicon Valley: Google Street View Photo of Motionless girl Stirs Neighborhood Confusion Maureen O'Connor of Gawker: Child Plays Dead on Google Street View, Horrifies a Nation Chris Matyszczyk of CNET News: Google Street View ‘dead body’ Mystery Solved (The girl was playing dead to tease... Read more →

CNN freaks out over the "big Internet crunch"; rest easy there, CNN

I've always said that journalists who work for the general media don't get math or religion. It's time to add technology to the list, as CNN ably illustrates today. In writing Are you ready for the big internet crunch?, CNN creates a straw man: the Internet is running out of IP addresses. The problems begin in the very first sentence of the scare piece: Within 18 months it is estimated that the number of new devices able to connect to the world wide web will plummet as we run out of "IP addresses".... "We" are not running out of IP... Read more →

Eudora lives! as Penelope

Ever since I first got onto the Internet in 1994, I have been using Eudora as my email client. (That's because it was part of the software collection the ISP provided to me, along with Netscape Navigator, WS_FTP, and I can't recall what else. I still use that FTP program, as well.) Qualcomm maintained Eudora for many years, and then gave up on it, but opened the source code. The Mozilla foundation took it over, creating Thunderbird for Linux, Mac, and Windows. I've been trying to like Thunderbird, but still prefer the aging Eudora. Thunderbird is similar but too different... Read more →

Here's why you cannot trust the cloud

The #1 reason to no rely on the cloud for storing your documents is that you are no longer in control of your own data. Here's an example, and not the first, either: Google deleted my blog, heliogenic.blogspot.com. The reason: "spam".... I don't know what to do, two years of work deleted. The blog's author is the copyright holder; is Google permitted to take over ownership of the blog's content by making it no longer available? Kind of like a librarian chucking out volumes whose content she disagrees with. (You can, however, read the blog stored in Google's search cache.)... Read more →

When Wireless Internet Almost Works

I'm at a hotel here in St Petersburg where Internet access is cheap: about $3 for the day (as compared to $30 a day charged by hotels in Europe). The hotel front desk gave me the signon info, but my netbook would not connect. Both Linux Mint and Windows 7 gave cryptic error messages. They both acknowledged that the hotel's wireless existed, but complained that "the settings are incompatible." Incompatible wireless networking? The system used by this Russian hotel seemed standard enough. After some poking about the network settings, I finally discovered the problem: identical SSIDs. It appears that I... Read more →

Replacing Presto Linux with Ubuntu Remix

So, Windows 7 Release Candidate disappoints. Presto Linux disappoints. What to do? I read of Ubuntu Remix, a version of the popular Linus operating systems designed for the small screens of netbooks, and gave it a try. After downloading, you install it on a USB key, and then boot from there. The drawback is that a typical 1GB USB key has room only for the OS, not for any patches, additional apps, and data. As well, USB keys consist of slow memory, so Linux runs faster off the hard drive. I liked it enough that I decided to install it... Read more →

Online Boxing Day Experience

The US has Black Friday following American Thanksgiving, presumably not related to Black Peter from The Netherlands. Canad has Boxing Day following Christian Christmas. For most of my life, Boxing Day was one day of extra low sales prices. Then it began to spread to Boxing Week, and this year Sears Canada had its Boxing Week sale in the week before Christmas Day! Best Buy Canada, its FutureShop cousin, and The Source (Circuit City in Canada) blasted out emails with instructions on how to shop their Boxing Day specials online -- starting 5pm PST on December 24. Looking over all... Read more →

Overcharged by Telus

While the Internet is down, I feel like I have lost my arms! A couple of weeks ago I wondered if I could get faster DSL service from my ISP, Telus, a telephone company that has the local monopoly in Alberta and British Columbia. I had been reading about new Super DSL available in some areas of the United States, and had been spoiled by the 6x faster service while teaching last Spring at the BCIT technical college. It turns out I cannot ever have faster service, because of my distance from the central office -- I am stuck at... Read more →

Downloading Firefox 3.0: Just Don't Do It

The Mozilla foundation is hoping for a new world record for downloads in a single day. It hopes to make a big splash for its FireFox browser when 3.0 is launched. Problem is, FireFox is now so popular it suffers from Upgrade Lag. That's where third-party apps are not yet compatible with the new release of platform software. I found that out when I installed a beta of FireFox 3; important add-ons like Google Gears don't work (yet). That meant going through the difficult process of uninstalling 3 to put 2 back on. It was unpleasant. So, don't install FireFox... Read more →

$44 Billion Don't Seem Much When...

Microsoft wants to pay $44 billion for Yahoo. That seemed like a lot of money to me until I heard that Mars is buying Wrigley for $23 billion. The second-biggest Internet company is worth $44 billion, just twice the value of a chewing gum company. And to think that a candy bar company has a spare $23 billion laying around. Puts the whole Internet thing into the small end of a perspective on what's really important in this world, don't it? Read more →

Competing Headlines: Germany

When all else fails, the state should rescue flailing banks, said Deutsche Bank's chief economist. (link) ...versus... The German government has derailed a high-speed rail project because of runaway costs. (link) Read more →

Apple's License-free Software

There have been plenty'o complaints over Apple's repeated attempts to install its Safari-brand Web browser onto computers that run that competing operating system, Windows. Cf. fig. below. Here are the problems with the dialog box: Select the items you want to update - I can't select them, because Apple has already done that for me. I can only unselect. - Safari cannot be updated, for it was never installed on this computer. Safari for Windows is the ... easiest to use web browser - I had installed it on another computer, and found it non-intuitive -- not easy to use.... Read more →

Mt St Helens Webcam

Every day or so I check the webcam trained on Mt St Helens. This mountain blew off its top in 1980. The US parks service mounted a Web cam on a nearby mountain, and trained it on the crater across the valley. It lets you observe mountain conditions; a friend who teaches Grade 3 students gets them to observe it from time to time. The real reason for the web cam, of course, is to record the next eruption. Several summers ago, hoards of media camped out for several weeks, speculating that another eruption was imminent. It would have been... Read more →

This is Web 2.0

Yesterday was Christmas, and I should have taken a picture of our living room last night: My son, his girlfriend, and my daughters -- sitting in our living room, notebook computers in their laps: chatting to each other, at the same time as typing to each other and their friends through MSN Messenger and Facebook. Read more →

How Low Can MSFT's Marketshare Go?

The November numbers are out, and Microsoft's marketshare in search continues to sink. November =7.1% October = 7.4% November last year = 9.8% And it makes one wonder just how tiny their marketshare will get. Continuing to fall 2.7 points a year, we can project the intersection with 0% in June 2010. Read more →

We Don't Want a "Better" Experience

My wife uses Hotmail for email, and she is irritated these days by Microsoft's insistance that the new Live version of Hotmail is a "better" experience. I am sure that marketing types and programmer people are all excited over what they've created, but change only irritates my wife. She is, what I would comfortably call, a computer neophyte. Once she learns how to accomplish a task, she doesn't want to have to relearn it just because some over-excited marketing type or bored programmer person decides that Hotmail's screens need change. Not that the better experience claimed by Microsoft is in... Read more →

AOL Really Is That Bad

I had never experienced AOL, other than receiving all those diskettes and CDs over the years. I think the funniest AOL CD was the one co-branded with the Royal Bank of Canada. Say what? While in Germany visiting an elderly relative, I was excited to learn that she had Internet! Excited, because I thought I would be sans-Internet for 3-4 days. All I needed to do, I figured, was unplug the ethernet cable from her computer, and then plug it into my notebook computer. But it could not connect to the Internet. Hmm. The relative offered to phone a friend... Read more →

Data is the New Aluminum

Growing up in the northern Canadian company town of Kitimat, we got to see propaganda movies presented by Alcan, especially the one where the company boasted that it cost $500 million dollars to build the dam reversing the Nechako River, the hydro electric facility in the mountain at Kemano, transmission towers, the world's second-largest aluminum smelter, and the town site of Kitimat. $0.5B just doesn't go as far as it did in the early 1950s Last week, Microsoft announced it would spend that much on just one datacenter outside of Chicago. (A datacenter is simply a building with lots and... Read more →

Please Do Not Delete This Spam

My weblogs have been attacked by many spam postings this week, and I have diligent in reporting the unwanted postings to Six Apart (they host this blog) and deleting the spurious entries. It got bad enough that I had to switch to manual publishing of comments on one of my blogs. Thus, I was amused at this spam comment that arrived now: Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children Uganda Uh huh, if you work with the original meaning for spam, as Spam, the canned ham product. And... Read more →

Blanketing Cities with Free WiFi is Stupid

Yesterday's CNET notes that "Companies don't seem interested in building public broadband infrastructure for small towns, so municipalities will have to get creative." I have found the idea of blanketing cities with WiFi to be a stupid idea. Just as cell phone systems have blank areas, so too does WiFi. In any case, there is no need for WiFi in most areas: walk down my street with a WiFi detector and every second home is broadcasting an SSID. Stand on any street corner in the business section, and you'll pick up a half-dozen SSIDs. There is no need for blanket... Read more →

Why I DON'T Download Songs

With all the talk of Apple and EMI and iPod and ACC and MP3, I realized something yesterday: I don't download songs. I wondered, "Why don't I?" Here's some of the reasons: 1. Downloading is a hassle. The sites want all kinds of information, including credit card info -- even when I have a free download credit. And before that, there's the difficult methods of trying to find artists and albums. Too often, albums are the Greatest Hits variety, not the originals. Too often, multiple versions get in the way: extended, dance, new mix, greatest hit... 2. Downloading is song-oriented,... Read more →

Codeorama WebOS from Brazil

An employee of Codeorama suggested I look at their WebOS. Very cool looking, but so similar to Apple OX X's desktop that I fear for Codeorama's legal future. It is said to work with FireFox and Internet Explorer, but also came up in the Opera Web browser I use -- but many items failed to work. I switched to FireFox, and more items worked, but then Codeorama crashed FireFox when I closed a window. Of course, that might be a problem with the latest rev of FireFox, because my wife experienced it crashing multiple times accessing the Globe&Mail Web site... Read more →

Amazon Has No Room for the Long Tail

Chris Anderson uses Amazon.com as one of his favorite examples in "The Long Tail." He rhapsodizes over the ability of virtual stores like NetFlix (movies), Rhapsody (music), and Amazon (books) to stock thousands, millions more items than physical stores like Blockbuster, Tower Records, and Barnes&Nobel. (The theory of the "Long Tail" says that digitization and the Internet allow for almost-free warehouse and distribution costs. Because it costs so little, millions of items become available for sale that would otherwise be too expensive to stock -- even if there are just a couple of customers per month per item. I employ... Read more →