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One of the things that few companies do is integrated into the Windows Shell. Windows provides ample opportunities for an application to just dissapear and become part of the operating system. For instance, in a chat program, your chat buddies could appear as icons in a folder right alongside your other files --- dragging and dropping a file onto your friend's icon would start transferring the file. There are a lot of other examples, but part of the problem I think is pride (and not just in windows development) Everybody wants to do something a little differently. If you have a standardized skinnable shell and plug in your apps around that it would do a lot for the appeal of the product.
And don't even get started on annoying popups and those freaking MS Office icons like the paperclip guy.
To me, a big part of design is noticability: if I take my time to notice it, it's getting in the way of the work I want to do.

If I'm not mistaken, all forms of drugs were legal up until around the turn of the century. People used to be able to medicate themselves as they chose. But after society perceived that drugs were causing harm to the youth, there was a big push for leglislation.
If the political push continues against violence in video games (and I think it will), it will be interesting to see if this "war on game violence" plays out the same way. That would mean either some kind of certification to use games or perhaps some biometric age device hooked up to game players. I don't believe games harm anyone, btw, but in politics perception is everything.

Can I Type What I Want In This Sig?

But where do you really draw the line? Most of us spend a lot of time staring at a LCD, would laser-projected images in the retina be that much of a stretch? Gates himself has his company working hard on speech recognition -- which is obviously a step towards taking away the interfaces. It seems to me the clear path is towards zero interfaces: direct brain stimulation. That would truly be the easiest thing for most users to operate. (But I wouldn't want to get a GPF in my brain! Ouch!)
So it's easy to say you're against connecting up to the computer, but it's not a black-and-white situation. I imagine integration will happen over several decades, not all at once.

Know What You're Talking About

I've actually patented the opening of gifts. So take that, Bezos!

Things are heating up!

Seems by now we could have something a little more advanced -- holograms maybe, or at least all images as stereographs. If these robot missions are to take the place of manned exploration as some have indicated, then wouldn't it make sense to do the best you can so that people would feel they were actually there? Even the use of false color bothers me -- do people even know what the real planets look like anymore? Sky and Telescope magazine ran an article last month about how newcomers to astronomy are sometimes dissapointed when they see the real thing! It's because most of the pictures in the mass media have been "enhanced".

Certifications: Worth It Or Waste Of Time?

Seriously. Why are we still building giant fireworks? Couldn't a mass-driver work with new heat-resistant materials? Or those JP Aerospace guys with the blimps-to-orbit plan?
Even the Space Elevator doesn't have this problem. Surely there are better things to do with the money to lower cost-to-orbit than building giant bottle-rockets. As long as we remain under the paradigm of taking our fuel with us, it seems to me the cost and complexity goes through the roof. My two cents only.

NASA Budget Shows Shuttle Phase-Out

I read these every year but I wonder how useful they are. I've never heard of anybody going to their boss with survey results to ask for a raise, and I can't imagine getting your pay cut because others are making more. Perhaps the benefit is in planning for new hires? Telling people you pay better than market rates?
As a consultant, I don't use these to set my rates, and the information is usually historical rather than predictive -- what I'd like to know is what's going to be paying more next year, not last year. But I'm sure there are other uses. Makes for great gossip if nothing else.

Speak Up About Poor Software Quality!

It would take hours just to recite all of that. I wonder how many days or months it took to learn it? Unless they are able to memorize on sight, which is a rare talent, just repeating the digits several times could easily take up a few months.
I guess it's a claim to fame, but geesh, isn't there better ways to spend your time, like posting on slashdot or something?

Modern Software Is Wasting Our Time!

So if I'm somewhere else, say orbiting in the space station, do I have to now lookup every country, every state and province, to see whom I can email or not?
Hey. I love protecting the kids. Perhaps we should all get a law. I'd also like to grow hair and be taller. But until leglislators can change the fabric of reality, these things are not going to happen. Makes for nice press. Little else.

Just How Many Stooges were in the Three Stooges?

Although after "Zork" I didn't see the point. He is building his own MUD MMOG in C#, porting it from older sources. So there must be something about the genre that is enduring. Just guessing, I would imagine the audience averaging around 22. And I don't understand the way the area is evolving. Sharpen up the graphics, use ray-tracing, etc, but isn't the whole point to use your imagination?
At some point, this genre, movies, and cartoons all kind of become the same thing. Maybe that's a good thing? It's definitely a new world. It will be fun to be an old guy going "Back in the day, we had to use a joy stick to move our guy around! And we didn't have holograms, either!

Spank Me, Call Me a Fool -- Microsoft buying something else?

We just agree on a biometric standard? Then instead of worrying about whether somebody stole some silly precious number of yours, you could log in to your computer with a retinal scan or something and be done with it? (Yes. I know there are issues with biometrics, but certainly a triple-system from different vendors, locked into tamper-resistant hardware -- there has to be a solution available, right?) I was blogging about something like that this morning
New Biometric Device From Fujitsu

With all those millions and millions online in China swapping programs, songs and such, you'd think the RIAA would go after them, if the purpose was really to prevent damage to the intellectual property holder.
What's going to be extremely interesting is watching a closed society like China start talking one-on-one to the rest of the world. I'd give it twenty years before public opinion changes in China. I can't see them sharing information freely and being as nationalistic as they currently are. If you want to stop a future war with China, help them talk to each other all you can. My two cents.

Brains! Brains! Give me Brains!

This is an excellent article, and one that anybody with a brain could agree with. But it looks like the history behind this (the last 30 years or so) and the high-priced legal firms will do everything they can to keep the status quo.
I'm afraid that we will eventually have to push for a constitutional ammendment to fix this copyright issue -- there is simply too much inertia for the law to catch up with reality. Who knows how long this will take? If you thought the "war on drugs" was fun, just wait until we do about 40 years of the "war on pirates"

See "SarBox And The World of Tommorrow" before it hits the theatres!

Didn't slashdot run a story a while back about GPL being a price-fixing scheme? Aside from the inital buzz, I never heard any more about it. Is the GPL just kind of a social abstract to kick around, or is it really being enforced and used? I think FSF and the GPL are great ideas, but they're really more _ideas_ than anything else. The articles I found about GPL were mostly companies settling out of case before the case was heard.
How Much Is A Friend Worth?"

From CNN -- "US keeps control over internet computers"
From the Brits -- "US appears to affirm its authority on the internet"
From the Canadians -- "US to control internet traffic"
India -- "US won't cede monopoly on the internet"
Seems like the same story has several different headlines, and to the uniformed eye some of them in conflict (yes. I know you can make the case they're not all that different. But monopoly on the internet it isn't). It would be nice if the people writing the stories understood what a root server was. Might make for a more informed public, you know?
Check out "SarBox And The World Of Tomorrow"

I've just started up a new blog (Captain Picard is following me around!) and it's a hosted site with MySQL and PHP
I'm an old windows programmer, Oracle, SQL Server, Access, VB, C#, etc. I keep wondering: should I take the time to learn PHP for the new site? As an enterprise architect, I used to recommend the "big" solutions to most problems my clients brought me, but I can't help but wonder if in a lot of cases simpler isn't better. I've always understood the simplicity concept with code construction but to some degree it is true of the technology itself.
There has to be a crossover point: where scripting and non-pooled database connections stop being useful, but all I hear are absolute arguments on both sides (stay open source! Stick with the big boys, kid!)
It'd be nice to see an unbiased view of the spectrum from somebody. Anybody know where there's one out there?

Because RSS allows enclosures, and because enclosures contain songs, and because songs can be ill-formed to allow overflow attacks -- therefore there is a weakness in RSS?
Perhaps a weakness in the codec, sure. Or a weakness in who you decide to download files from. Or even a weakness in your firewall applicaiton allowing sneaky code to talk to outside IP addresses. But a bug in RSS itself?
I must be missing something, because that doesn't add up, unless the goal is to change RSS somehow, simply because Longhorn is going to implement it?
Perhaps the unwritten story is that Microsoft is going to allow auto-code distribution and execution, in which case, I would humbly suggest, Microsoft has a problem, not the standard.
My two cents only

Can Chickens Swim? Find Out Now!"

The guiness of Einstein was that he synthesized some more arcane work into some fairly simple equations, continuing to refine what we knew about the universe
But it's already common knowledge that we don't have a GUT yet, and everything we do have seems very complex and overdone, much the same as it was before E=mc2
I can't help but wonder if someone will come along in the next decade or so and synthesize these more complex equations into another step forward for mankind. Who knows? Maybe the answer is something like "42"

Was Worf A Programmer?

So picture this: two years from now you're surfing arond on IE when an ad pops up "Click here for a free vacation to Bermuda" suddenly another ad pops-up on top of that one "Pay no attention to the previous ad, the prevsious ad was not authorized by Microsoft. If you click right away, you can buy Steve Ballmer a new golf club"

Seriously. Does Microsoft have so much cash sitting around they need to buy things? It doesn't even make sense. You would think they had an acquisition strategy, but instead it looks like "Have money, will purchase"

Worf was right!

In the middle of the presentation there's a slide titled "Changing the Game in Candy Bars" with some cool phones in the background.
These are some really hot products. I wish I had these guys on-board last time I did a demo to a client! But I wonder if cell phones are the new candy bars for geeks?
Candy bars, I would guess, are a fairly stable commodity. A Mars bar last year is going to be the same as this year. Eye candy, sure, but not candy bars.
Will all that consumer production value, it makes you wonder how much these companies actually pay product designers to keep new stuff churning out. There's got to be a lot of money in that business. Everybody's getting into it.

Love Boat Meets Santa's Workshop?

Thanks. Excellent article. I would prefer to disagree, however. There is a natural affination, once one begins "thinking" in a certain language to solve problems certain ways. But all computers are Von Neumann machines, and the trick is just to line up the 1s an 0s so the solution appears.
Academically, perhaps this is an area worth further study. Pragmatically, however, it's the equivalent of saying fat people prefer bigger belts. True, but uninformative, imo. Plus. I never liked Whorf that much anyway. He was always trying to shoot something with his phaser.

Do Dinosaurs Taste Good?

I completely agree.
C++ is a high-wire act without a net, no doubt. But more "polished" lanugages, like Java and C# keep the sharp objects away from the developers. Some of those issues you mention are truly gnarly -- and you can get in a world of trouble with C++ code. You can still cut your foot off with Java, but you have to saw at it a little more. My two cents only.

Can chickesn swim? Find out now!

I think the premise of this question is that there is one thing that a person must learn to be marketable in today's environment.
As a marketing wonk can tell you, (no, I'm not one) you're never looking for "one thing". You don't kill flies with shotguns. You should always be looking 2-3 years out and training for what you believe the job market will look like then. If you're not learning something in today's IT business, you're losing ground. Things change, and even more so than the actual skills you have, companies are looking for people who try to keep changing with the times. That's my two cents, anyway.

Chickens that swim! Film at eleven

Gartner just released a study of the top five reasons offshore deals go bust. I hope IBM was paying attention. It sounds like a lot of companies jump into these deals because of the labor differential and then find out later it wasn't such a good deal after all. There are a lot more factors to consider than just free trade, losing American jobs, and profit. Long-term viability has got to be high on the list of things to consider, right? (My blog on this)