I'm in the classroom, getting ready for the meetup.

Today we're going to start an upgrade of the Scripting2 test community, and enter the age of collaborative writing!

This will be the Nth attempted launch of instant outlining. This time I think we may have the critical mass we need to actually get it booted up. Also, instead of building on Friendfeed, I've written my own realtime engine based on long polling. It was fun to put together, and I think it will be quite reliable. Heh. We'll see.

In any case, the group here will help me figure out if it's ready or not. If it is, I'll write a howto for the non-New York-based users of Scripting2 (there are some now).

Meanwhile Marc Barrot is making excellent progress at doing a browser-based outliner for updating Scripting2 sites. Marc is based in London (that's in England!).

This is a test for the demo for the thursday group.

 7/15/2010; 6:52:00 PM.   .

In 1994, a professor in Virginia found a bug in the Intel Pentium chip that caused one in 9 billion floating point computations to be in error. Everyone agreed that very few people would ever see the error, but Intel handled it the way Apple is handling the (apparently) far more serious problem with the iPhone, resulting in a massive recall that cost Intel $475 million. There was wide consensus at the time that it was a PR bug more than a technical one. If they had not resisted, had been more empathetic, the cost would not have been nearly so great.

Intel was surprised to learn that users expected their computers to be computationally perfect. Engineers at Intel must have known, previously, that they weren't. That's what they were trying to "explain" but the users didn't want to hear it.

In the same way Apple people are surprised to learn that many users want to use iPhones to talk on the phone.

Engineers look at their own products differently than users do.

 7/15/2010; 1:56:51 PM.   .