Doubt's Log

Vegan Couple Starved Toddler, Cops Say [Fox News]

"The cost attributed to a few specific computer viruses in the last two years eclipses the entire military budget of the "Axis of Evil" and has been more expensive to the nation than the Afghan war."

"The Symantec quote of $100 billion in virus damages exceeds by three times the amount of money the U.S. government annoyingly spends on medical research."

Mark Baker: "I agree completely."  [Scripting News]

The other problem with REST  is that the Header/URL can only get so big, but a post can send a ton of data.

Gates testified monolithic OS design is a necessity today.
He lied. He knows that he lied. Nothing new. [Craig Burton: logs, links, life, and lexicon]

Read gates' testimony, It's all about being a brand and a platform, not the specific OS design. It's about realizing that your shell doesn't work when you take away the dependant gui widgets and replace them with an incompatable one. You add value to a platform by giving it capabilities that your competitors platform doesn't have, and then you make sure that your platform utilizes that functionality to the best possible experience. If there are excess that are not about this (like what that link above is implying with the msn explorer icon) then they should probably be addressed, but this is not what the states proposals seem to be about.

A Better UI (for entering weblog entries)

Entering weblog entries into this little box is just getting annoying. I often find that I want to make the box bigger, or I'm writing a longer entry that is just too hard to work with without being able to quicksave. It would also be nice to get spell checking and make it easy to add pictures.

A Better UI (for reading the news aggergator)

There should be select all/select none buttons. Why do I have to go to a preference and back to select all the items? Keyboard shortcuts. Let me click on an item and hit the delete key, or on a set of items. Give me a page with the list of channels I'm on that have entries, and show me how many entries are there. Extra: Try to realize what a given entry is about, create a view where all such entries are shown together.

Hi!

I'm listening to a presentation of what Office might want from research in the future. The start of this is about what made office successful to date. The correct bet on gui. The bet that offering a package of apps that cost X together in a package < 2X. Buying powerpoint and then moving the presentation away from slide productions, to a computer presentation. 300 Million use outlook, about half of them pay for it. It's tough to sell people on the idea that task panes/smart tags lets you do something new (powerpoint was a much easier sell). People also grumble about the price because they look at the price relative to the PC. They will agree that on an hourly basis it is definatly worth it, but because it's bits and they need to cut cost, ms should just reduce the price. Office Year to Year growth is bottoming out. Microsoft's invovement in productivity software has stopped tracking the growth.