I'm not sure what you mean by "can't do what I ask her to do", but if I remember correctly, whatever Outlook is on my new XP computer at work does this by default when you hit "reply": indent the original (including a short version of the headers) and place it below my own signature; place the cursor at the top. From here, it's exceedingly difficult to do the (apparently old school) "reply after bits of email - breaking my reply into several section - answering individual parts" thing. You have to go out of your way to either cut and paste bits of the original up into the reply, or move your signature below the original. The default Outlook email format is rich text (mostly for the indenting to work). If you go to the trouble to set the default to plain text, then you have the option of including replies prefixed with "> " but also placed under your signature with the cursor at the very top.
So, unless you know what you want to do, and go to great length to achieve it, Outlook cannot do the old school reply to bits after said bits. It's as if Outlook was written specifically to annoy the old school emailers by making it all but impossible for newcomers to compose email that way.
Outlook is the bane of email
on
Email Turns 34
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
MS Outlook is the bane of my email existence. Its inability to group conversation threads encourages replies to include the conversation in its entirety. Its insistence that the reply precede the original drives me batty. I have not used GMail, but that "conversations" thingy looks moderately interesting, if it can display more than a single line of previous messages... Why not an email interface more like IM for conversations? Cut out the redundant headers and signatures. Oh wait, MS Outlook doesn't do the standard "-- \n" signature prefix. Lack of PGP/MIME support just kills me.
Can't remember where I saw this:
Because it breaks the thread of conversation.
Why is top posting bad?
Also, I'd like a clearer picture of who sent it, who got it (the Cc: list), and when they sent it. I find this very difficult in MS Outlook which I use at work for various reasons mostly outside my control.
On a slightly different note, there is little I hate more than receiving an email that's been forwarded 700 times and having to scroll through a million >>>>> > >> just to see the message (using mutt for these forwards; perhaps MS Outlook doesn't display all that preceding crud, I don't know).
In conclusion, Outlook has done more to make email a painful experience than Sat^H^H^HAlan Ralsky himself.
I'm a bit surprised at those fluorescent numbers... I don't have the box to one of my fluorescent bulbs handy to double check that, but I do know that while not as hot as incandescents, they become very hot to the touch when in use. I've never touched a lamp sized LED bulb however.
One disadvantage of fluorescents is that they contain mercury. Newer fluorescents may have found a way around this however; I'm not sure.
Not surprisingly, many of the websites I saw talked about future improvements in LED tech with goals around 100 lumens per watt.
Sorry... a scooter with pedals? And why pedal if it's solar powered?
On a different note, I'm curious as to the energy efficiency of a human on a
bicycle as compared to a car (with one or four human riders)... but I'm not
really sure where to start.
I guess you could say a car gets 25 miles per gallon or so, and calculate
miles per input energy given that a gallon of gas stores X joules of energy...
then somehow calculate the energy spent to pedal a bicycle a mile... surely
someone has done this?
Look at the mythology of any culture and you will find heroes. Heroes are
interesting, and they are everywhere. They are role models or simply the
embodiment of the values of a particular culture. Doubtless this can be taken
to obsession. But for me, DVD Jon represents a certain aspect of freedom, and I
like that.
I'd say we should do it to be more inline with good usability in general,
not necessarily windows or mac... If it's possible to unplug a usb device
without "unmounting" (and it is indeed possible), then it will be done either
by accident or simply because it's easier than first unmounting. The system
has no business failing due to such an inevitability.
And what if Ford sells you a car that fails to leap to the side to avoid an
imminent collision, causing you do get into a very bad accident? And if Ford
sells you a car that can drive into a building at 100mph? And if you use your
car in some extreme environment that causes the breaks to degrade rapidly?
What if the steering only locks after 20 years of use? I think you need to
make a distinction between gross negligence and simple physics. Certainly if
Ford misrepresents the capabilities of the auto that is different, but one
simply cannot expect everything to work perfectly at all times. Life is fatal;
everything is a tradeoff of risks, and at the end of the day you've got to
watch out for yourself.
There's also a big difference in that if I drive a faulty car (which there
are various regulations against, or at least manufacturers must meet various
regulations before they can sell a car), I put you in danger. If I
use faulty software, I only put my data in danger (ignoring worms and the
like). I'm not really interested in paying more for higher quality becaue you
think I should.
That leaves the question: if my faulty software damages your data becaue it
contracted some malware that attacked you (or perhaps it's just faulty
somehow), then who is at fault? Should the internet be regulated like roads
are? I would like to think "no, certainly not", but who knows. Would
regulation even improve things? Highly unlikely I think.
Indeed. I am a materials researcher (a very young and uneducated one however), and "movement" may have several definitions... in a paperclip for example, bending it back and forth inches crystal planes over one another until dislocations pile up and the whole thing is too brittle to bend anymore (planes don't slide well through dislocations). In a ceramic, flexure causes intrinsic pores and cracks to propagate until a large fracture forms. In a ferroelectric, ions move back and forth from their rest position under an applied field to store charge. In everything, atoms and ions diffuse over time leading to likely degradation of properties. I wouldn't really consider diffusion or ion polarization "movement", but in the case of a ferroelectric you are repeatedly straining the crystal in each charge/discharge cycle even if nothing is "moving".
In a metal (and other materials), there are both elastic strain: reversible stretching of bonds between atoms, and plastic strain: irreversible crystal planes inching and sliding over one another. (side note: metals are not as "strong" as ceramics in that a ceramic strains less under a given stress, but metals enter the energy absorbing plastic strain region while ceramics undergo brittle failure). If the movement is entirely elastic, then it's possible that diffusion is the only potential killer, or crack propagation; crack kills. I don't think a single walled perfect carbon nanotube could even strain plastically nor fail from crack propagation, but multi-walled tubes could strain plastically I imagine, and I don't think there are perfect (crack free) nanotubes.
Simply insert it in the keyslot, and press the Start button.
Bad. It's likely you will forget to put your key in occasionally. With current keyed ignitions, this is all but impossible. And I really don't see how this would be any easier than combining the key slot and the start button to gain the advantage of making it impossible to forget to put the key in (it could be mostly identical to a standard ignition: you merely turn the key to "start" or "on" rather than turn and hold to turn the engine), though I haven't used it so perhaps I should hold judgement.
In fact, with the i-Tech Option Pack, you don't even need to take the key out of your pocket
Better, but it may or may not be immediately obvious why the car won't start in case you forget the key. (though you probably needed the key to get into the car in the first place.)
New technology is cool, but it always seems to have design issues... I truly wonder about the thought processes that went into some of these implementations.
What I want in a DVD player (or any movie player):
Play videos from any "region"
Ignore Macrovision
Allow skipping of FBI warning, etc.
I managed to get a DVD player that can do the first two (it also does PAL->NTSC conversion), but not the last (and I actually have an old TV with only coax input, so I must run the DVD (at the time, the DVD only had RCA analog out) through a VHS player which doesn't work due to Macrovision; I've been bitten and I wasn't even trying to copy... luckily I also have an old VHS player that doesn't have auto-tracking, woohoo).
I absolutely abhor shopping for these things because it's such an effort to do the research and find something that works how I want it to. It's tough being a discerning shopper. Is there a DVD player that can skip "non-skippable" things? Can I do this from Linux (in which case, is there a DVD drive that is region free? I assume Macrovision isn't an issue... even if I were to record analog with a VHS deck...).
So, yay to no region codes, but to the current DVD player shopping: AAAAAAAAAAAH!! #%$@!
That will send the message "We like your products,
Yes. Yes it will.
At least write them and complain... though I still don't see how buying their products will help convince them they must change their ways. Does sony even make anything worth buying?
Ah, the voice of reason. I have read Schneier's opinions on this subject before, and it seems that so many posts have missed the point. If credit card companies can do it, so can banks, and so should banks, which is the entire point.
That's why I always carry a bomb with me on all flights. If the odds are pretty bad that there is a bomb on any given flight, imagine the odds against having two!
Ha!
Regarding safe flight: 9/11 will never happen again. If you were on a plane that was being hijacked, would you sit quietly and wait for the ransom to be paid? No, you'd fight for your life (as the passengers on one flight apparently did once they learned what had happened with the others. in the future, this reaction would happen much sooner).
That's not to say we shouldn't be careful flying these missiles across the sky, but I do get the impression that much airport security is mostly for show. I've carried a razor blade onto a plane post 9/11, no problem. It was my pencil sharpener and carried within a metal pencil case. Same kind that fits into a box cutter. I also believe it would be quite simple to make a belt buckle or some other object into a container for all sorts of weaponry. Explosives make me nervous. Knives do not, as they cannot fend off a herd of passengers fearing for their lives.
... don't read much actual Philosophy, do you? Makes it kind of hard to analyze Ethics if you've only done it from the comfort of the omniscient armchair.
so... libraries don't have armchairs?
the mere fact that an embryo has the potential to become a human being
There's your mistake... I think those on the other side of the fence treat an embryo as a human being. Assume this other sider believes in a "soul", and it is this "soul" that is the defining mark of a human being. I really can't see any point for the soul to come into existence except at the moment the egg is fertilized. Though perhaps I have misunderstood those on the other side.
For one thing, many things have the potential (i.e., have some causal relationship) to the creation of a healthy infant child. As someone else once suggested to me, one such thing is a glance of flirtation toward a fertile young woman. From that glance, there exists the potential for intercourse; from that intercourse, the potential of conception; from that conception, the potential of a human child in the form of an embryo.
I must be gone now, for it is my moral obligation to make babies with all the fertile women I've laid eyes on today. (I like this "philosophy" stuff!)
> When it can live outside the womb of the host mother.
I wonder... would your opinion change if the unborn fetus could be succesfully transplanted to another, possibly artificial, womb?
Would your opinion change if the mother was far from any society and the new born child faced certain death without the mother?
It seems that your definition is highly dependent on external circumstances. Not that that is a deal breaker necessarily, just interesting.
I propose a compromise: allow the extraction of the live fetus from a woman's womb at any point. After that, it's on its own, to fend for itself or be saved by a motivated third party.
But things that could hurt bunches of people are designed by teams of engineers (for better or worse). Doctors certainly consult other doctors, but I don't think it's quite the same.
I love LyX. And I did a majority of my college papers in straight LaTeX because of its beautiful output and because I just wanted to learn it (using octave + gnuplot to make "pslatex" graphs using the beautiful LaTeX font was a colassal pain but very pretty).
But if LaTeX does something wrong... its a pain to fix. And debugging a document is absolutely no fun. So, LyX is very nice... don't usually need to debug (unless you messed up an imported pslatex file), but has the same limitations of LaTeX where if it doesn't do something right then it's a big pain to fix.
I think it's just that computers are fairly new and unfamiliar (my baby
boomer parents didn't grow up with them), fairly complex, and fairly poorly
implemented (possibly due to their newness).
Familiarity
I can easily see when a toaster is full of
crumbs or smoking, and I know how to get rid of the crumbs by shaking them out
due to my familiarity with the basic physics of everyday life.
Complexity
I can learn everything about a toaster in a few minutes. Computer have
vastly more functions that a toaster.
Poor Implementation
I can also easily see that the toaster won't fit in a standard envelope.
If I want to send it across the country, I'll have to use DHL or something.
It's not so easy on a computer. Even the experienced can hardly do it at a
glance. "ls" doesn't tell you, icons don't tell you; you need "ls -l" or "view
details". P.S. I thank GNU extensions for ls -lh
In the real world, it's easy to tell if something should be mailed or not.
Pick it up. Is it a brick or is it a few sheets of paper? In a computer, it's
very difficult. Click "view details" on your file manager. Compare that
number with what you know about hard drive sizes, network speeds, etc.
Computers need a different way to indicate file size than an often obscured
number. For text files, it's not too hard. Maybe show a thicker icon that
looks like a stack of pages. One sheet == small. Many sheets == big, might
want to FedEx that one -- I mean not email it. With images and other file
types, it's not so easy. More creative minds than mine can surely come up with
something though. Maybe it needn't be a real space analogy like the stack of
pages.
That still leaves one problem. File size per se doesn't matter; it's
relative file size. But relative to what? Ten years ago, you might not want
to email 1 meg attachments. Now it's not such a big deal (excepting dialup).
How does an interface like above reflect this and answer the question: is this
ok to email? Or at a different level, what are we trying to indicate by "file
size"? How much disk space it needs? How long it will take to download? How
long it will take to read? All of these are intuitively known for real space
objects due to lifetimes of experience. The fact that every computer file has
an icon the same size as every other icon isn't helping people build up
experience in computer space.
I'm sure that some people don't need to decide whether to use the postal
service or, say, FedEx. The shipping department decides for them. So, what is
this person's goal when emailing a large attachment? "I want these other
people to see this document. Computer, make it so." Could the computer not
make a decision whether to email this as an attachment or for example, upload
it somewhere and email a link? Sure that opens up a bunch of problems, but
it's not outside the realm of possibility. And there are probably better ways
to implement such a thing, but the idea is there.
Didn't Nokia's cell phones trounce Motorola's for offering colors and changeable faceplates when Motorola insisted on the "black with red LED" signature Motorola design? At least, that's what I was told on a tour at some Motorola museum.
So yeah, probably the increased cost had something to do with it. Or maybe they still marketed to business. As a lawyer do you really want to walk into a courtroom with an Andromeda Green laptop cover? Or wearing jeans and a bright T-shirt? Didn't think so. Also, I imagine the laptop buyer is often not the laptop user in a business setting; the user gets what she is given, not what she wants.
Whatever the reason for the failure, that one line comment at the article's end was inane.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what you mean by "can't do what I ask her to do", but if I remember correctly, whatever Outlook is on my new XP computer at work does this by default when you hit "reply": indent the original (including a short version of the headers) and place it below my own signature; place the cursor at the top. From here, it's exceedingly difficult to do the (apparently old school) "reply after bits of email - breaking my reply into several section - answering individual parts" thing. You have to go out of your way to either cut and paste bits of the original up into the reply, or move your signature below the original. The default Outlook email format is rich text (mostly for the indenting to work). If you go to the trouble to set the default to plain text, then you have the option of including replies prefixed with "> " but also placed under your signature with the cursor at the very top.
So, unless you know what you want to do, and go to great length to achieve it, Outlook cannot do the old school reply to bits after said bits. It's as if Outlook was written specifically to annoy the old school emailers by making it all but impossible for newcomers to compose email that way.
MS Outlook is the bane of my email existence. Its inability to group conversation threads encourages replies to include the conversation in its entirety. Its insistence that the reply precede the original drives me batty. I have not used GMail, but that "conversations" thingy looks moderately interesting, if it can display more than a single line of previous messages... Why not an email interface more like IM for conversations? Cut out the redundant headers and signatures. Oh wait, MS Outlook doesn't do the standard "-- \n" signature prefix. Lack of PGP/MIME support just kills me.
Can't remember where I saw this:
Also, I'd like a clearer picture of who sent it, who got it (the Cc: list), and when they sent it. I find this very difficult in MS Outlook which I use at work for various reasons mostly outside my control.
On a slightly different note, there is little I hate more than receiving an email that's been forwarded 700 times and having to scroll through a million >>>>> > >> just to see the message (using mutt for these forwards; perhaps MS Outlook doesn't display all that preceding crud, I don't know).
In conclusion, Outlook has done more to make email a painful experience than Sat^H^H^HAlan Ralsky himself.
Bulb Efficiency (lumens per watt)
[1] Why LEDs can be 10 times as efficient as incandescents in some applications but not in general home lighting!
[2] Are fluorescent bulbs really more efficient than normal light bulbs?
I'm a bit surprised at those fluorescent numbers... I don't have the box to one of my fluorescent bulbs handy to double check that, but I do know that while not as hot as incandescents, they become very hot to the touch when in use. I've never touched a lamp sized LED bulb however.
One disadvantage of fluorescents is that they contain mercury. Newer fluorescents may have found a way around this however; I'm not sure.
Not surprisingly, many of the websites I saw talked about future improvements in LED tech with goals around 100 lumens per watt.
Sorry... a scooter with pedals? And why pedal if it's solar powered?
On a different note, I'm curious as to the energy efficiency of a human on a bicycle as compared to a car (with one or four human riders)... but I'm not really sure where to start.
I guess you could say a car gets 25 miles per gallon or so, and calculate miles per input energy given that a gallon of gas stores X joules of energy... then somehow calculate the energy spent to pedal a bicycle a mile... surely someone has done this?
Look at the mythology of any culture and you will find heroes. Heroes are interesting, and they are everywhere. They are role models or simply the embodiment of the values of a particular culture. Doubtless this can be taken to obsession. But for me, DVD Jon represents a certain aspect of freedom, and I like that.
I'd say we should do it to be more inline with good usability in general, not necessarily windows or mac... If it's possible to unplug a usb device without "unmounting" (and it is indeed possible), then it will be done either by accident or simply because it's easier than first unmounting. The system has no business failing due to such an inevitability.
How dare anyone be uncomfortable in social situations! The nerve!
And what if Ford sells you a car that fails to leap to the side to avoid an imminent collision, causing you do get into a very bad accident? And if Ford sells you a car that can drive into a building at 100mph? And if you use your car in some extreme environment that causes the breaks to degrade rapidly? What if the steering only locks after 20 years of use? I think you need to make a distinction between gross negligence and simple physics. Certainly if Ford misrepresents the capabilities of the auto that is different, but one simply cannot expect everything to work perfectly at all times. Life is fatal; everything is a tradeoff of risks, and at the end of the day you've got to watch out for yourself.
There's also a big difference in that if I drive a faulty car (which there are various regulations against, or at least manufacturers must meet various regulations before they can sell a car), I put you in danger. If I use faulty software, I only put my data in danger (ignoring worms and the like). I'm not really interested in paying more for higher quality becaue you think I should.
That leaves the question: if my faulty software damages your data becaue it contracted some malware that attacked you (or perhaps it's just faulty somehow), then who is at fault? Should the internet be regulated like roads are? I would like to think "no, certainly not", but who knows. Would regulation even improve things? Highly unlikely I think.
But the brand has entered your thoughts. That's all that matters.
Kids, don't forget to take your iPills today? (iTamins?)
Indeed. I am a materials researcher (a very young and uneducated one however), and "movement" may have several definitions... in a paperclip for example, bending it back and forth inches crystal planes over one another until dislocations pile up and the whole thing is too brittle to bend anymore (planes don't slide well through dislocations). In a ceramic, flexure causes intrinsic pores and cracks to propagate until a large fracture forms. In a ferroelectric, ions move back and forth from their rest position under an applied field to store charge. In everything, atoms and ions diffuse over time leading to likely degradation of properties. I wouldn't really consider diffusion or ion polarization "movement", but in the case of a ferroelectric you are repeatedly straining the crystal in each charge/discharge cycle even if nothing is "moving".
In a metal (and other materials), there are both elastic strain: reversible stretching of bonds between atoms, and plastic strain: irreversible crystal planes inching and sliding over one another. (side note: metals are not as "strong" as ceramics in that a ceramic strains less under a given stress, but metals enter the energy absorbing plastic strain region while ceramics undergo brittle failure). If the movement is entirely elastic, then it's possible that diffusion is the only potential killer, or crack propagation; crack kills. I don't think a single walled perfect carbon nanotube could even strain plastically nor fail from crack propagation, but multi-walled tubes could strain plastically I imagine, and I don't think there are perfect (crack free) nanotubes.
Simply insert it in the keyslot, and press the Start button.
Bad. It's likely you will forget to put your key in occasionally. With current keyed ignitions, this is all but impossible. And I really don't see how this would be any easier than combining the key slot and the start button to gain the advantage of making it impossible to forget to put the key in (it could be mostly identical to a standard ignition: you merely turn the key to "start" or "on" rather than turn and hold to turn the engine), though I haven't used it so perhaps I should hold judgement.
In fact, with the i-Tech Option Pack, you don't even need to take the key out of your pocket
Better, but it may or may not be immediately obvious why the car won't start in case you forget the key. (though you probably needed the key to get into the car in the first place.)
New technology is cool, but it always seems to have design issues... I truly wonder about the thought processes that went into some of these implementations.
What I want in a DVD player (or any movie player):
I managed to get a DVD player that can do the first two (it also does PAL->NTSC conversion), but not the last (and I actually have an old TV with only coax input, so I must run the DVD (at the time, the DVD only had RCA analog out) through a VHS player which doesn't work due to Macrovision; I've been bitten and I wasn't even trying to copy... luckily I also have an old VHS player that doesn't have auto-tracking, woohoo).
I absolutely abhor shopping for these things because it's such an effort to do the research and find something that works how I want it to. It's tough being a discerning shopper. Is there a DVD player that can skip "non-skippable" things? Can I do this from Linux (in which case, is there a DVD drive that is region free? I assume Macrovision isn't an issue... even if I were to record analog with a VHS deck...).
So, yay to no region codes, but to the current DVD player shopping: AAAAAAAAAAAH!! #%$@!
That will send the message "We like your products,
Yes. Yes it will.
At least write them and complain... though I still don't see how buying their products will help convince them they must change their ways. Does sony even make anything worth buying?
Ah, the voice of reason. I have read Schneier's opinions on this subject before, and it seems that so many posts have missed the point. If credit card companies can do it, so can banks, and so should banks, which is the entire point.
That's why I always carry a bomb with me on all flights. If the odds are pretty bad that there is a bomb on any given flight, imagine the odds against having two!
Ha!
Regarding safe flight: 9/11 will never happen again. If you were on a plane that was being hijacked, would you sit quietly and wait for the ransom to be paid? No, you'd fight for your life (as the passengers on one flight apparently did once they learned what had happened with the others. in the future, this reaction would happen much sooner).
That's not to say we shouldn't be careful flying these missiles across the sky, but I do get the impression that much airport security is mostly for show. I've carried a razor blade onto a plane post 9/11, no problem. It was my pencil sharpener and carried within a metal pencil case. Same kind that fits into a box cutter. I also believe it would be quite simple to make a belt buckle or some other object into a container for all sorts of weaponry. Explosives make me nervous. Knives do not, as they cannot fend off a herd of passengers fearing for their lives.
so... libraries don't have armchairs?
the mere fact that an embryo has the potential to become a human being
There's your mistake... I think those on the other side of the fence treat an embryo as a human being. Assume this other sider believes in a "soul", and it is this "soul" that is the defining mark of a human being. I really can't see any point for the soul to come into existence except at the moment the egg is fertilized. Though perhaps I have misunderstood those on the other side.
For one thing, many things have the potential (i.e., have some causal relationship) to the creation of a healthy infant child. As someone else once suggested to me, one such thing is a glance of flirtation toward a fertile young woman. From that glance, there exists the potential for intercourse; from that intercourse, the potential of conception; from that conception, the potential of a human child in the form of an embryo.
I must be gone now, for it is my moral obligation to make babies with all the fertile women I've laid eyes on today. (I like this "philosophy" stuff!)
>> When does a baby truly become a person?
> When it can live outside the womb of the host mother.
I wonder... would your opinion change if the unborn fetus could be succesfully transplanted to another, possibly artificial, womb?
Would your opinion change if the mother was far from any society and the new born child faced certain death without the mother?
It seems that your definition is highly dependent on external circumstances. Not that that is a deal breaker necessarily, just interesting.
I propose a compromise: allow the extraction of the live fetus from a woman's womb at any point. After that, it's on its own, to fend for itself or be saved by a motivated third party.
Don't be daft. If one believes that a embryo is alive and deserving of life (you were an embryo once), then your agruments apply there as well.
But things that could hurt bunches of people are designed by teams of engineers (for better or worse). Doctors certainly consult other doctors, but I don't think it's quite the same.
I love LyX. And I did a majority of my college papers in straight LaTeX because of its beautiful output and because I just wanted to learn it (using octave + gnuplot to make "pslatex" graphs using the beautiful LaTeX font was a colassal pain but very pretty).
But if LaTeX does something wrong... its a pain to fix. And debugging a document is absolutely no fun. So, LyX is very nice... don't usually need to debug (unless you messed up an imported pslatex file), but has the same limitations of LaTeX where if it doesn't do something right then it's a big pain to fix.
I think it's just that computers are fairly new and unfamiliar (my baby boomer parents didn't grow up with them), fairly complex, and fairly poorly implemented (possibly due to their newness).
Familiarity I can easily see when a toaster is full of crumbs or smoking, and I know how to get rid of the crumbs by shaking them out due to my familiarity with the basic physics of everyday life. Complexity I can learn everything about a toaster in a few minutes. Computer have vastly more functions that a toaster. Poor Implementation I can also easily see that the toaster won't fit in a standard envelope. If I want to send it across the country, I'll have to use DHL or something. It's not so easy on a computer. Even the experienced can hardly do it at a glance. "ls" doesn't tell you, icons don't tell you; you need "ls -l" or "view details". P.S. I thank GNU extensions for ls -lhIn the real world, it's easy to tell if something should be mailed or not. Pick it up. Is it a brick or is it a few sheets of paper? In a computer, it's very difficult. Click "view details" on your file manager. Compare that number with what you know about hard drive sizes, network speeds, etc. Computers need a different way to indicate file size than an often obscured number. For text files, it's not too hard. Maybe show a thicker icon that looks like a stack of pages. One sheet == small. Many sheets == big, might want to FedEx that one -- I mean not email it. With images and other file types, it's not so easy. More creative minds than mine can surely come up with something though. Maybe it needn't be a real space analogy like the stack of pages.
That still leaves one problem. File size per se doesn't matter; it's relative file size. But relative to what? Ten years ago, you might not want to email 1 meg attachments. Now it's not such a big deal (excepting dialup). How does an interface like above reflect this and answer the question: is this ok to email? Or at a different level, what are we trying to indicate by "file size"? How much disk space it needs? How long it will take to download? How long it will take to read? All of these are intuitively known for real space objects due to lifetimes of experience. The fact that every computer file has an icon the same size as every other icon isn't helping people build up experience in computer space.
I'm sure that some people don't need to decide whether to use the postal service or, say, FedEx. The shipping department decides for them. So, what is this person's goal when emailing a large attachment? "I want these other people to see this document. Computer, make it so." Could the computer not make a decision whether to email this as an attachment or for example, upload it somewhere and email a link? Sure that opens up a bunch of problems, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. And there are probably better ways to implement such a thing, but the idea is there.
Clean?? There are greasy fingerprints all over!
Didn't Nokia's cell phones trounce Motorola's for offering colors and changeable faceplates when Motorola insisted on the "black with red LED" signature Motorola design? At least, that's what I was told on a tour at some Motorola museum.
So yeah, probably the increased cost had something to do with it. Or maybe they still marketed to business. As a lawyer do you really want to walk into a courtroom with an Andromeda Green laptop cover? Or wearing jeans and a bright T-shirt? Didn't think so. Also, I imagine the laptop buyer is often not the laptop user in a business setting; the user gets what she is given, not what she wants.
Whatever the reason for the failure, that one line comment at the article's end was inane.