Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

Slashdot (News for Nerds; Stuff that matters) have shown some rare figures of the way employees in the IT industry use the World Wide Web:

…Microsoft employees use Google for their searches 66% of the time, but MSN Search only 20% of the time, and Firefox is their second most popular browser behind Internet Explorer 6′s whopping 98.76% share. Google employees use Google as their search engine 100% of the time and 21% use a Mozilla or Firefox browser. Apple employees like Google best and 68% use Safari…

From my previous item, it is implied that I live at night. Very few people wake up shortly past midnight, but let me explain why this induces a huge gain. Here are my top 3 motivations:

• Network load is sometimes only 10% of that at daytime. I can download a full backup of my ¼ gig Web space in under a minute.
• Traffic and pollution of daytime are avoided.
• Psychlogical uplift from work completed before the day began.

On the downside, a person’s nightlife (in the conventional sense) is shattered.

Dvorak uncensored is a well-known Web log run by the famous John C. Dvorak. Judging by the times of his posts, he goes to bed after 1AM and wakes up before 5AM (although timestamps can be altered in WordPress). I personally sleep from 7PM to 1AM, but this still gives me more than Dvorak’s 4-minus-hour sleep. Another such ‘super-human’ is my Ph.D. supervisor, Prof. Chris Taylor OBE; I suspect he gets no more sleep than Dvorak. More people to list: Winston Churchill with about 3 hours a night and Margaret Thatcher with 4. (so I’ve heard)

PalmAddict refer to MyPalmLife, who refer to Crimson Fire, who have released a Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance emulator for Palm.

With a large SD card, hundreds of Nintendo games can be carried in one’s pocket. Can this lead off a massive switch to Palm? Refer to PalmAddict for more information.

Picture from Crimson Fire

A pattern I always come across is that of sites with long (and often pointless) drivel which rarely fits the patience span of readers. According to this item, people will not read an E-mail that is longer than 15 lines. I have come to the conclusion that the more words you write, the less words (in total) will get read.

A good exemplar of succinct reporting is Photo Matt. Here is a bad example:

The E-mail on the right was sent to me from freshmeat.net this morning. It was intended to inform me about an update to Red Feline Backup. Latest release has a progress bar! Could this E-mail not be made shorter?
 
 
 
 
 

CBS News and the BBC report another mad cow woe in Canada. This is likely to sway the U.S. to stick to a current Canadian cattle ban.

One more reason to stick to poultry and fish…

Last night I voiced a problem which I have experienced for over a year. Every once in a while, when using the shortcut stroke, text gets erased for no apparent reason. It turned out that other people suffer from the same problem and here is its cause, explained by James Anderson from alt.comp.sys.palmtops.pilot on January 3rd:

It’s a bug in the keyboard driver: every 16th shortcut it deletes the last 16 characters. The only solution is to disable the driver when you aren’t using the keyboard. When you enable the driver again its shortcut count will start over from zero.

As a strong Palm advocate, it disappoints me that fundametal mistakes can be made. Nonetheless, Palm devices remain notably stable.

When Palm refuses to go right

Cited by: PalmAddict