Archive | December 4, 2003

I didn’t know that Borders workers were trying to unionize. They are not having a good time of it. From their website:

“Workers at the Borders Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Mich., went on strike Saturday, November 8, to protest the companyâs unfair labor practices. Also at issue are low wages and poor health benefits for employees. The Ann Arbor bookstore is the original Borders, which has grown into one of the largest bookstore chains in the country with more than 400 shops.”

“In December 2002, the Ann Arbor workers voted 51 to 4 in favor of forming a union, which has been organized within the AFL-CIO-affiliated United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). Negotiations over the past 11 months between the union and management have failed to yield a contract. In early October, union members voted to reject a minimal offer by management, and later in the month authorized the union to strike.”

Steven Black responds to my earlier posting on “White Papers as PDF” with this pointer to Jakob Nielsen’s site: “Thumbs down, Ted. Here’s why: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html”

I agree with Neilsen’s thesis that PDF is not a legitimate format for web pages, and that they are awkward to manipulate. As an experienced PDF author and reader, I have become accustomed to some of the idiosyncracies and appreciate some of the features. For the general public, they are a frustration.

I was looking at a painless and quick way of getting white papers up on the web, suitable for download. They print prettier that way, but they are not web pages. Perhaps I should offer both choices for those who want to read online, and for the search engines to pick up.

Computerworld News reports that Yahoo Instant Messenger contains security flaw. “The buffer overrun vulnerability was found in a file named “yauto.dll,” an ActiveX component of Yahoo Messenger software in versions up to 5.6.0.1347.”

The article includes suggestions on what to do to avoid the problems, as well as advice on disabling ActiveX controls in your browser and Active Scripting, an IE only feature. Better yet, don’t use IE.