Main Dish:

- first 10 people that email me get a copy of "SAP Netweaver for Dummies" free of charge.

- study finds that half of all spam and phishing emails have fake "from" email addresses. Thanks for clearing that up, I was wondering why that guy from Nigeria wasn't responding to my request for more information.
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/dailyedition.html#4

- the EU sanctions on M$oft have been put on hold while the courts examine the ruling.
http://news.com.com/EU+suspends+Microsoft+sanctions/2100-1014_3-5249327.html?tag=nefd.top

- very cool applet that encodes your email address as javascript. via Kirsten at reinvention.
http://automaticlabs.com/products/enkoderform

- Barry is a fan of the tablet PC. The reason I bring this up is to ask an entirely different question altogether: why is it that some consumer devices, like the tablet PC, capture the imagination of some really smart and saavy people, yet fail to achieve any measure of commercial success? Is it that tech people are more amenable to the ideosyncracies of new devices, and accepting of their shortcomings? Think about the Newton, widely panned and even today Apple has not offered a PDA, yet for other companies at a different point in time, the results were wild success.
http://www.edithere.com/barry/2004/06/27#a1199

- interesting observation. With web content and applications, we've become accustomed to EULA click-throughs. RSS has no rights management gateway, so EULA are easily skirted.
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/06/28/how_to_sign_up_for_a.html

- "Smirnoff considers the artist's work a perfect way to reach a teenage market and is keen to commission Moose again." Is it just me, or does a vodka company targeting teenagers cause you distress?
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=535331

- my friend Pravin is always trying to get me to use Firefox, which I did for a while (love the tabbed browsing interface). But it's just too much of a PITA to figure out how to make all my regular sites (like SAP's internal network) work on it. So I'm back on IE, despite the security risks.
http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/46869

- I don't think that every business should rush out and get a blog. I can't tell you how many board meetings I've been in lately and someone pipes up about how blogging is hot and how the company should do blogging... whatever that means. The point of blogs is to personalize something that can't easily be desribed, like a point of view or ideoology (or as my wife like to call this blog, "a fabulous display of bad grammar amid a sea of incoherent ramblings "). Group blogs, like Many-to-Many, work because of the personalities behind them and the common thread of interest that acts like glue. I'm not so sure that company blogs will have the required honesty, candidness, and most importantly, human voice that is necessary. A perfect example of this is the fact that this blog is actually a promotion vehicle for the idea of using blogs in business to reach customers, which not to say that it's overtly biased, just colored (I enjoy reading it at any rate).
http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/2004/06/hackingnetflixc.html

- how cost of living affects the cost of productivity
http://radio.weblogs.com/0111718/2004/06/27.html#a182

- good piece on web services identity management. I looked at a deal in this space and found the technology to be pretty daunting. There has been a sea surge of technology around security, many more layers than there were previously and web services extends the range considerably. The stuff about SAML assertions is particularly important insofar as the security landscape of the future.
http://www.looselycoupled.com/stories/2004/crisis-id0622.html

- WTF kind of marketing message is Friendster aiming for? Whoever dreamt up this series of emails should be tossed out on their ass. via Danah Boyd.
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/06/25/friendster_is_desperate_viral_marketing_failed.html

- the source of Harvard's wealth
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2004/06/25#a5188

- the RFID bracelets for kids in parks are really cool. Our newborn baby was fitted with a bracelet (actually, it was on his leg) when we were in the hospital that would trigger an alarm and lock down the hospital if he was carried across a boundary in the maternity ward. My wife also received a bracelet that was paired to the baby's to ensure that the right baby was brought to her.
http://www.rfidprivacy.org/blog/archives/000119.html

- it doesn't "install" applications on your PC, it just "runs" them on your PC. There's a lot of dancing around the issue by the Beastie Boys as it relates to the DRM dustup they are in the middle of. You can nuance it all you want, but the fact remains that I can't use the songs on this disc without using them through their player application. What's happened here is that I went from having a license to use the content in any legal way (specifically, personal copies) to having a license to use the content through their prescribed mechanism. via slashdot
http://www.beastieboys.com/news.php

- first of all, this smartphone is the first one I've seen that falls into the "I gotta have this category!", and secondly, it's really a telling commentary on how much power has shifted to the carriers in this business when you're not even sure who makes the handset.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/28/t-mobile_mda_3/

- the FCC has stepped in and told airports that not only do they not own the unlicensed spectrum in their facilities, they can't regulate it either. There has been building friction between airports who use 802.11 for all kinds of applications, and their tenants who are deploying 802.11 hotspots and stepping on each other. This is an important decision because it reinforces the notion commercial landlords of all types have no legal ability to tell tenants what kind of wireless technologies they can deploy.
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100811

Comments

[DJ]

Rather than stick with IE, could you not email the internal SAP web people and ask them to fix the site? I've been doing that for some problems I've found (in CSS) on SAP's SDN, and to their credit, they respond. It's the only way forward.

Kind regards
DJ

[Frank Koehntopp]

Jeff,
I just wanted to say thank you for the book. It arrived yesterday, so it was faster than another parcel from within germany that I'm also waiting for ;)

Again - thanks a lot.