2002

Lavish weddings. Sounds a bit of a waste… but if I were offered a wedding in Disneyland, with “Cinderella’s Crystal Coach”, I’d probably pay the $40,000. If I had it, that is.

Salomon Smith Barney sold the CEO of WorldCom lots of IPO shares at a low price. The CEO made lots of money. Technically, that’s a bribe to your customer. But then, so is every free offer, or cross-sale. What makes the SSB-WorldCom deals illegal, this article argues, is that they’re so BIG, and they’re made of OTHER people’s money.

Indian TV commercial storyboards. The plots of several TV ads, in pictures and words. via Someplace Simple

Reactions to Google’s revised search algorithm. People’s rankings on certain keywords appear to have changed. Mine hasn’t. So far.

RIAA sues radio stations for playing their music. (No, not really. It’s a spoof. But I wouldn’t be surprised.) via Scripting News

There’s no point buying faster PCs, since there aren’t many applications that need more computing power, says this NY Times article. via Scripting News

In the past, the bulk of PC sales came from replacements. I’ve seen PCs being replaced because they didn’t have enough RAM for Windows 3.1, or Windows NT ran too slow on them. Today, I’d rather spend the money on a digital video camera and an additional hard disk. My 1.6GHz processor is faster than I need anyway.

What I like best is that three years from now, I don’t need to feel embarrassed about owning an archaic 1.6GHz P4. It’s enough for me!

I have an over-developed dorsal striatum. That’s the brain part that makes you want to eat when you’re not hungry, just because the food’s there. via Plastic

The Social Life of Documents. Interesting article by Xerox’s PARC on the role of documents in the New Economy.

Infosys, Wipro and TCS are “expected to see a higher than expected rise” in their revenues. Hmm… I didn’t know that was logically possible.

A neurological experiment indicates that we can make better decisions sub-consciously, even if we can’t explain why.