According to IDC market forecasts, this is the year when LCD monitor revenues will exceed CRTs; 2004 should be the unit cross-over. Good deal all around. Less lead-laced waste in the landfills. Less energy devoted to firing electrons at unwatched phosphor. More market space for our portfolio company (heh-heh).
6:05:29 PM    

Once again the Bay Area chapter of SIGCHI put on an interesting event at the PARC auditorium yesterday evening, this time featuring BJ Fogg of Stanford University's Captology research group. What's Captology? It's the use of computers for persuasion. We're not just talking your vanilla 'rich media' or pop-up ads here. A page of examples explores the space of 'macrosuasion,' where changes in attitudes are the main point of the product, and 'microsuasion' were it is more at the feature level.

The talk featured a variety of interesting examples. I thought the most interesting were the US Army's first-person shooter simulation game with the player in the place of a recruit [one million active users, including current military], and the RSI Guard product designed to prevent or mitigate repetitive stress injuries from computer use. In both cases, the products persuade through involvement (my terminology), having the user enact a role with built-in valency. In the latter case, the product has an upfront interview asking the user just how fervently they want to be nagged.

BJ has a new book just out from Morgan-Kaufmann, revealing a fair amount of design and framework previously reserved to clients. Suggested for those interested in computers as media or practical applications of computer based persuasion (and propaganda).
5:17:31 PM    

It's apparently associated with a number of power management problems with iBooks and TiBooks, including possible inducing failure of batteries through mechanisms unknown (to me, at least). See articles here and here (scan down for 'power management'), and discussions on Apple's site here and here.

Unfortunately, I heard about this f2f literally hours after running Software Update and putting in 10.2.4. After sitting overnight on sleep, connected to the wall, my TiBook showed 95% battery this AM. After running half the day plugged in on my desk, I'm now seeing 94% battery. Wonder how many days I have left, and whether they'll get out a patch before I'm DOA. Wonder how many batteries they'll end up having to replace. Wonder if SQA is actually showing up to work over in Cupertino. Bottom line: If you're running on a portable with OS X, avoid downloading this turkey.
1:58:45 PM