DISQUS

But Craig would rather focus on the user. Brilliant? Or deluded?

It's working for them, so 'brilliant'. If they were going under and the model was not working then 'deluded'.

I have Parallels on my Mac - it's pretty nifty. Sadly it does not task switch from Mac to the guest OS very quickly - it feels a lot like changing gears on a large truck. There is a shift, a lot of metal groaning as the gears clank and crash down below, your speed drops and then mmm-rrrrrrrrrRRRRR your speed picks up.

I'm sure a great deal of this is attributed to my 'only' having 1 GB of RAM.

I think Rob has a point. The OS killer a few years ago was the web browser - ask George Gilder! He wrote an entire BOOK about the telecosm and Microsoft's imminent irrelevance.

A stock market or any kind of internal means to let the citizens determine what happens inside the company would be very cool indeed. Google PM? They seem to have enough brainpower to put something like that in motion, and enough computing resources to make it go giddyap.

Half-baked thought - Google is embracing the free-market.

No, internally. It's remarked that many organizatinos participate in the free market but internally the resemble command-driven economies.

Five-year plans, top-down resource allocation you know what I mean.

It didn't work for Russia, and it frequently doesn't work if your company needs to be agile in the market. As you noted Microsoft missed the internet. The only problem is it's the only system we know.

So maybe Google has found a way to let the folks on the inside unlcok themselves from the internal command-style economy.

If so (and I could be all wrong) I'd bet on Google over the competition.

If you want to be treated as journalists in some sense, that includes dealing with the risk of libel and defamation lawsuits.

I am not sure but it's my impresssion the majority of bloggers don't want to be journalists but rather they simply want to speak their mind.

That said I'm more than willing to be responsible for libel, copyright infringement and etc - the same as anyone else. In return I don't expect to be singled out just because I have a blog. That might be wishful thinking.

There does seem to be a strong case of perception over reality at work in the (now withdrawn) lawsuit. A journalist who commits egregious libel is in trouble professionally - or so I assume. A blogger whose day job is down at the mill? You can't threaten a man like that by the old rules.

Coffee and WIFI. You can dispense with one or the other but having either is a nice touch.

I agree that PPT is over rated. Last presentation I gave I had a set of PPT slides ready but .. they were talking points for the talk. Which is a _good_ thing because the overhead was missing so I made do without.

The talk degenerated (or evolved) into a nice bull session. We would have been there for hours (fen will talk anything to death) but the room was booked after our session.

Of course you should have opinions. However .. from the point of view of a consumer not a producer of news it's not the public who holds journalists to standards of impossible objectivity but you guys.

That is - y'all say "we're objective and repot only the facts" and news consumers are like all 'ya right" and you guys are like "no really" and we're like "okay what-E-ver but what about this and that clear example of bias" and round and round it goes.

We're _all_ victims of a glass society where information propagates at light speed and nothing is going to remain hidden. This time it's John Green next time it might be someone finding an obscure post I made to a listserv back in the day. Not that I am anyone of note (aside from my job with an odd company) but still.

The real fun comes when people figure out how to apply this to other industries.

Granted other industries Are Different. Capital costs alone will keep people from Craiglisting (say) Boeing or Airbus. Of course I'm sure the conventional wisdom in the publishing industry said this twenty years ago as well.

Plenty of companies do that and no one complains.

Good to hear. We release stuff 'the old fashioned way' but a great deal of 'stuff' we do is simply not worth the time and energy it takes to do a PR right, but we do want people to know about it. Thus, the blog.

Oh you wanted something usable. There is just no pleasing some people (grin).

There is VirtualPC - http://www.apple.com/macosx/applications/virtua...

There are others - some inexpensive, some open source. I have a mild itch to test these - the one thing I miss from my Windows laptop is the abilty to play Civ2 - but have not done so yet.