I can't see a good electrical reason for that -- imagine a hypothetical system where the entire transmission system is isolated via a relay. The relay only kicks on when a transmission is to be done. I cannot see any signal strength drain in such a system.
It may be that the currently popular design for two-way devices does this, but that's about as far as I'd be willing to buy into.
You can't read it now -- someone's apparently DoSing Groklaw at the moment, according to the message that comes up on their website. I assume that there's probably a competent IT type or two trying to track down whoever's doing it.
I did read that before Groklaw went down, though. Facinating.:-)
Given the fact that Disney is a large company, it's pretty safe to say that they use Linux. Linux is everywhere. It may not be dominant on the desktop yet, but I sincerely doubt that there are any Fortune 500 companies that don't use Linux in one form or another.
When, aside from the hubub over Enron (and that because of massive press coverage over the masses of blue-collar workers that were pretty nastily stripped of their retirement fund by execs), has the federal government been known to be even remotely aggressive at trying to go after white-collar-criminals?
...this one "to be filed against Daimler-Chrysler, alleging that they are infringing SCO's copyright by using code relating to 'core operating system functionality' of SCO System 5."...
In other news, Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, was unexpectedly killed yesterday when his vehicle's braking system inexplicably malfunctioned on I-40 yesterday...
One thing that has surprised me is how much real-time synthesized audio has been overlooked in games.
It's clear from watching an animation (FLCL is a good example) or movie that has extremely good music/video synchronization that having a tie between the two can have a phenomenal impact on the emotions of the viewer.
If you can make music ramp up and then peak just as an explosion occurs, the viewer is much more impacted by the visuals.
In general, however, the trend in games has been very simple -- have a set of pre-recorded tracks, and change to a particular track for each "area" of a game.
There have been a few good moves. One notable one is Total Annihilation. TA had a John Williamseque soundtrack that was normally epic sounding. However, when battle heated up, the game would transition into much more rapid, frentic music.
Video games are a perfect medium for audio synthesis. Frequently game engines know that something is going to happen shortly in the future, and audio synchronization is extremely powerful with respect to the player, who is already immersed.
Among other things that I'd like to see tried:
* For games which either store note information or have enough CPU time to do real-time rate shifting, adjusting the BPM in real-time of a track being played may be effective. As the game gets more intense, speed the music up.
* Transition at points intelligently. I could see a sound engine existing that stored a set of samples and transition points. For example, normally Track 1 loops as Krog the Barbarian walks around. When Krog gets in a fight, instead of doing a primitive transition (cutting out one track and in another or doing an immediate crossfade), set a flag in the sound engine "transition-to-battle-music-at-earliest-opportunit y". Then, when we reach the next transition point (say, point A) we transition into prerecorded transition 1A2 that takes us from track 1 to track 2. This lets music flow seamlessly as we play the game.
* Synchronize visual effects to music. There are a number of visual effects that could be postponed for a given amount of time. If a building is destroyed, why not allow it to burn onscreen until the next triple-beat comes along, at which point three explosions could go off, wiping out the building.
* Use dynamic instrument substitution. I don't think I've ever seen this, but I'd like to see a game playing a music track with note information (say, MIDI or MOD). When the main character enters a jungle area, the snare drum becomes a jungle drum. No idea how well this would work, and could flop, but it'd be interesting to try out.
* If your game lets a player substitute his own music (a la some X-Box and PC games), do beat detection, and tie the beat into some visual elements. You might even be able to get away with non-real-time work. I've been unimpressed with the beat detection in xmms's visualization plugins, but I'm convinced that good beat detection *is* feasible.
For those that have never played Rez, it's worth a look. A good chunk of why the game is so amazing is because of the good synchronization between audio and video.
The Diebold rep is basically admitting that at least some of the security and privacy promises in electronic voting are based on user perception, not reality.
Companies have marketers, and that's all these folks do.
When you buy a car, how much actual reality is involved, and how much user perception?
* The first is an element in the Apple HIG. While the HIG is not a "textbook to HCI", it has very good, well-developed suggestions, and arguments against guidelines in it should probably be well supported -- Apple was famous for a decade and a half primarily on the strength of the content in the HIG. The Apple HIG states that program state should not change based on the location of the mouse cursor alone -- a mouse button should be pressed to indicate that an action is taking place. The reason? The user always feels that he is in control and can move the mouse around without causing anything to happen. It also means that he does not need to wave the mouse to operate a program. Note that this guideline has been broken before by Apple in the form of Balloon Help. Basically, not changing state is important to allowing the user to feel in control of the computer, and free to move the mouse as he desires.
* The second argument was from a major HCI figure, though I cannot remember whether it was from iarchitects or from something from Jakob Nielson. I rather wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. "If your interface does not immediately make apparent what is clickable and what is not, and you need to insert rollovers to make things clear to the user, you have failed to make an intuitive interface." The idea of *having* a desktop with possible choices to click on available is that all choices are immediately apparent. An interface that requires rollovers requires the user to move the mouse around to determine what is clickable. We have standardized interface elements so that it's easily apparent how things work at a single glance from the user. Falling back to visual identification via rollovers is a big step backwards.
Rollovers became popular starting sometime in the "multimedia era" when CD-ROMs were coming out, and there was loads of Director-produced custom interfaces being produced by graphic designers. They ignored the standard widgets, and Photoshopped up their own. Unfortunately, it was frequently difficult to figure out when something was even a *control*, and so they had to provide rollovers.
The second major boom came when big images with imagemaps started becoming popular on the Web, and graphic designers started getting paid good wages to produce websites. All of a sudden, a bunch of pages were covered with huge images with knobby things, metallic things, slider things, little ridges, dimples, rectangles, and whatnot. Some chunks of these interfaces were clickable and some were not. They were essentially unusable without rollover highlighting and the user waving his mouse around each page to figure out what was a control.
* I have a third and final argument, which comes simply from me, though I'm sure it's not original. I find animation to be something that should be strictly reserved for important attention-getting. Short of making noises (which is disruptive in, say, an office environment), there are few other good ways to attract the user's attention without grabbing control of the environment and slapping a dialog up in front of everything else (something to be avoided if at all possible). There have been few sanctioned uses of animation in Apple's history (again, I use Apple as an example because Apple traditionally had very good UI work). One of these is the "barber pole", or equivalent of the progress bar for tasks with an unknown completion time. I believe that the only other animated elements are menubar flashing (to visually indicate a beep), application menu flashing (to indicate an error status), and ZoomRect()-style animation to indicate the source of an item being opened. Except for the barber pole and the application menu flashing (which indicates a fairly serious condition), all are directly triggered as a result of user input and are quickly over over. This reserves animation
Sweet buttery Jesus, man. You claim you're a teleconference operator, but you sound like a guerilla political activist. That is an awfully effective-sounding idea.
Navigating a tree-structured history doesn't entail the use of a platform-native tree widget. I'd consider that pretty awkward, actually, considering the low average branching factor of such a tree.
Heck, it could even be a set of generated webpages.
From a storage standpoint, it isn't a big issue. What would that be, the equivalent of an MP3 or two each month? I know that being able to locate where I was at some point in time would be quite valuable to me, much more than an MP3...and most office workers have far more hard drive space than will ever be used in the life of their system.
I suspect that one of the major improvements that has not been made to business software that *could* be is in the area of version control and history. Why aren't Office documents version-controlled? Workers have plenty of disk space, and this would clearly provide a bunch of valuable data. Why can't I look at a file on my disk, search through an sha1-indexed downloads database maintained by my browser, and determine where I downloaded the file from? Why can't Windows hand me a list of things I did during the last boot before my system stopped working properly -- installing software, registry settings that have been modified by software -- and provide the ability to roll back to a known good state? These are all things that would be useful in an office.
This thing is so useful that I wish to high heaven that it was part of the base Firefox distribution. It's like the difference between having the ability to disable animated GIFs and not, or having the ability to block popups or not.
I mean, I'm sure that it would drive Macromedia bonkers, but dammit, the user comes first, and Flash *is* heavily used by ads.
Oh, and if I can throw in another suggestion: Use Privoxy. Some folks may have used Junkbuster a while back and noticed that development has slowed down to nothing -- Privoxy is the continuation. And...it's wonderful. I've turned off all image blocking in my browser, because Privoxy does a better job than my manual blocks. It blocks on image sizes and locations, and when it blocks an image, inserts a bit of HTML that lets you click to view the image (an irritation with Junkbuster is that false positives were extremely aggravating). There's an easy-to-use web configuration interface on Privoxy that can be easily accessed whenever anything is blocked. I just love this program. Aside from Google's non-irritating-and-frequently-useful ads, between Firefox's features, Flash Click to View, and Privoxy, I can't remember the last time I had to see an ad.
The problem I have is that Microsoft takes an approach of trying to slap patches over broken systems. Putting a personal firewall on each system? Oh, for the *love* of *God*. If they'd strictly verify all the data coming into all those ports they open out-of-box (or not *open* said ports), they wouldn't have problems in the first place.
Much as I hate to admit it, and as strongly as I feel that rollover highlighting is a flawed UI concept, enough websites rely on rollover capabilities being present in a browser that it may be rough to disable them.
On the other hand, I think there there are few compelling reasons for allowing websites to modify the status bar information. Doing so is a serious security issue. Users (well, they won't think in about this in rigorous terms, but they do so unconsciously) treat the status bar as a source of trusted communication between their browser and them. If remote websites can muck with it, they lose the ability to trust that area.
I suspect that there are more sites that break with popups disabled than with status bar text and rollovers disabled combined...but we still do it. The main reason remote websites have so much control over browsers today is because of a Microsoft-started prescedent of trusting websites, of treating web developers as application developers. They aren't. Every website you visit just plain isn't trusted, and there should be much tougher rules on what websites can do to a browser. Allowing a website to, say, change the appearance of widgets is, IMHO, unacceptable.
A question: Does Mozilla/Firefox/Phoenix really need to do this itself?
Something like this is ultimately a gamble which may or may not pay off...and if it doesn't work, there's a huge amount of cruft dumped in the codebase?
I'd rather see something like the approach Apple used with KHTML in making Safari. If someone wants to make a program called, say, "Mozilla Platform" that *uses* Mozilla, I think that'd be a lot safer than trying to make one massive integrated push.
I think that trying to integrate everything has been the largest problem facing the Mozilla project. I have, many times, contributed patches to open source projects. I have never contributed to Mozilla, because the project was (at least to me) very large and overwhelming...and I only really cared about fixing problems that affected me. If I ran into a problem, it was often something that would require learning a huge amount about how Mozilla is structured to fix. I'm okay spending a day or two fixing a minor problem on a project that's irritating me. I'm not willing to spend a week doing so.
The "integrated" approach is a turn off from a resource standpoint. It made the Mozilla suite large from a disk and memory usage standpoint.
It meant that releases had to be spaced widely apart, and that one broken component could hold up releases of the rest of the package.
It meant that you had to lug around a mail client, web page design program, etc that you might really not be interested in.
In general, I think that Open Source does better if taken in smaller chunks. It makes rewrites and bugfixes more localized, it lets users choose the best option for them (rather than using that mail client that's bundled and always in their face), it keeps resource usage low, and it lets developers release on a more timely schedule.
SVG is much different from Flash. Flash is currently primarily used for two things: (1) to provide crummy interfaces (an ugly wart from designers coming from the "multimedia era" when CD-ROMs came out and later the ".com era" when people thought that novelty was what made people keep coming back to websites). (2) To provide an efficient format for vector-based graphic animation.
SVG is lousy at both of the above. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).
SVG is good, IMHO, for the following:
1) Tagged diagrams. SVG allows tagging elements with data. This could be a big benefit for CAD and diagram usage.
2) More complex webpage layout. I've never seen it actually done, but it seems that SVG could be used to define arbitrarily-shaped regions in a webpage...up until now, the only regions designers have had to work with, the only thing they could flow text around, was rectangular regions
3) Vector graphics. Plain and simple, it's a standard format for storing vector graphics. This is good for both standalone files and for efficient web-based transmission of graphics.
As for your question about what SVG-based graphic tools are out there -- take a look at sodipodi. It isn't Illustrator (yet), and it isn't going to be for at least a while to come, but it's usable for basic work.
This assumes, of course, that your mousewheel is properly set up systemwide (i.e. you can scroll through documents with it).
I do wish that I knew how to globally and persistently increase text size by some percentage. I like to sit back from my monitor sometimes, but I still don't know of a setting that will let me pull this off.
I'd be interested in a feature I saw suggested once -- a full, eternally (well, unless the user desires to remove it for privacy reasons) persistent tree-like history. The user could go back to any point in time and trace back and forward along browsing sessions.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, MSIE by default does an MSN search for anything that name resolution fails on.
So if people are used to just using the MSIE location bar to locate something, this will prevent them from reaching the xfree86.org site.
And THANK GOD she muzzled McBridge and his cronies.
It seems that the author of the SCO-Monty Python parody was ahead of us on this one:
SCO Lawyer: (brightly) You haven't asked me about Pine, sir.
Judge: Would it be worth it?
SCO Lawyer: Could be....
Judge: Have you - (to McBride)SHUT THAT DAMN WORD PROCESSOR OFF!
I can't see a good electrical reason for that -- imagine a hypothetical system where the entire transmission system is isolated via a relay. The relay only kicks on when a transmission is to be done. I cannot see any signal strength drain in such a system.
It may be that the currently popular design for two-way devices does this, but that's about as far as I'd be willing to buy into.
You can't read it now -- someone's apparently DoSing Groklaw at the moment, according to the message that comes up on their website. I assume that there's probably a competent IT type or two trying to track down whoever's doing it.
:-)
I did read that before Groklaw went down, though. Facinating.
Now if only Firefox had the ability to disable animated GIFs. Or has it, and am I missing something?
Yup.
Given the fact that Disney is a large company, it's pretty safe to say that they use Linux. Linux is everywhere. It may not be dominant on the desktop yet, but I sincerely doubt that there are any Fortune 500 companies that don't use Linux in one form or another.
and states that SCO is full of crap
I think that there are few people that know of SCO (and that includes the WSJ) that have not at one time or another said that SCO is full of crap.
When, aside from the hubub over Enron (and that because of massive press coverage over the masses of blue-collar workers that were pretty nastily stripped of their retirement fund by execs), has the federal government been known to be even remotely aggressive at trying to go after white-collar-criminals?
...this one "to be filed against Daimler-Chrysler, alleging that they are infringing SCO's copyright by using code relating to 'core operating system functionality' of SCO System 5."...
In other news, Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, was unexpectedly killed yesterday when his vehicle's braking system inexplicably malfunctioned on I-40 yesterday...
One thing that has surprised me is how much real-time synthesized audio has been overlooked in games.
t y". Then, when we reach the next transition point (say, point A) we transition into prerecorded transition 1A2 that takes us from track 1 to track 2. This lets music flow seamlessly as we play the game.
It's clear from watching an animation (FLCL is a good example) or movie that has extremely good music/video synchronization that having a tie between the two can have a phenomenal impact on the emotions of the viewer.
If you can make music ramp up and then peak just as an explosion occurs, the viewer is much more impacted by the visuals.
In general, however, the trend in games has been very simple -- have a set of pre-recorded tracks, and change to a particular track for each "area" of a game.
There have been a few good moves. One notable one is Total Annihilation. TA had a John Williamseque soundtrack that was normally epic sounding. However, when battle heated up, the game would transition into much more rapid, frentic music.
Video games are a perfect medium for audio synthesis. Frequently game engines know that something is going to happen shortly in the future, and audio synchronization is extremely powerful with respect to the player, who is already immersed.
Among other things that I'd like to see tried:
* For games which either store note information or have enough CPU time to do real-time rate shifting, adjusting the BPM in real-time of a track being played may be effective. As the game gets more intense, speed the music up.
* Transition at points intelligently. I could see a sound engine existing that stored a set of samples and transition points. For example, normally Track 1 loops as Krog the Barbarian walks around. When Krog gets in a fight, instead of doing a primitive transition (cutting out one track and in another or doing an immediate crossfade), set a flag in the sound engine "transition-to-battle-music-at-earliest-opportuni
* Synchronize visual effects to music. There are a number of visual effects that could be postponed for a given amount of time. If a building is destroyed, why not allow it to burn onscreen until the next triple-beat comes along, at which point three explosions could go off, wiping out the building.
* Use dynamic instrument substitution. I don't think I've ever seen this, but I'd like to see a game playing a music track with note information (say, MIDI or MOD). When the main character enters a jungle area, the snare drum becomes a jungle drum. No idea how well this would work, and could flop, but it'd be interesting to try out.
* If your game lets a player substitute his own music (a la some X-Box and PC games), do beat detection, and tie the beat into some visual elements. You might even be able to get away with non-real-time work. I've been unimpressed with the beat detection in xmms's visualization plugins, but I'm convinced that good beat detection *is* feasible.
For those that have never played Rez, it's worth a look. A good chunk of why the game is so amazing is because of the good synchronization between audio and video.
The Diebold rep is basically admitting that at least some of the security and privacy promises in electronic voting are based on user perception, not reality.
Companies have marketers, and that's all these folks do.
When you buy a car, how much actual reality is involved, and how much user perception?
Man, memory seems so cheap these days. If it was being fixed before, I can't imagine what it'd be like without price fixing.
Good thinking -- though it'd be interesting to come up with a good, immediately clear way of presenting this data to the user.
Security is one of a very few areas where being unintuitive is absolutely unacceptable.
Two major issues:
* The first is an element in the Apple HIG. While the HIG is not a "textbook to HCI", it has very good, well-developed suggestions, and arguments against guidelines in it should probably be well supported -- Apple was famous for a decade and a half primarily on the strength of the content in the HIG. The Apple HIG states that program state should not change based on the location of the mouse cursor alone -- a mouse button should be pressed to indicate that an action is taking place. The reason? The user always feels that he is in control and can move the mouse around without causing anything to happen. It also means that he does not need to wave the mouse to operate a program. Note that this guideline has been broken before by Apple in the form of Balloon Help. Basically, not changing state is important to allowing the user to feel in control of the computer, and free to move the mouse as he desires.
* The second argument was from a major HCI figure, though I cannot remember whether it was from iarchitects or from something from Jakob Nielson. I rather wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. "If your interface does not immediately make apparent what is clickable and what is not, and you need to insert rollovers to make things clear to the user, you have failed to make an intuitive interface." The idea of *having* a desktop with possible choices to click on available is that all choices are immediately apparent. An interface that requires rollovers requires the user to move the mouse around to determine what is clickable. We have standardized interface elements so that it's easily apparent how things work at a single glance from the user. Falling back to visual identification via rollovers is a big step backwards.
Rollovers became popular starting sometime in the
"multimedia era" when CD-ROMs were coming out, and there was loads of Director-produced custom interfaces being produced by graphic designers. They ignored the standard widgets, and Photoshopped up their own. Unfortunately, it was frequently difficult to figure out when something was even a *control*, and so they had to provide rollovers.
The second major boom came when big images with imagemaps started becoming popular on the Web, and graphic designers started getting paid good wages to produce websites. All of a sudden, a bunch of pages were covered with huge images with knobby things, metallic things, slider things, little ridges, dimples, rectangles, and whatnot. Some chunks of these interfaces were clickable and some were not. They were essentially unusable without rollover highlighting and the user waving his mouse around each page to figure out what was a control.
* I have a third and final argument, which comes simply from me, though I'm sure it's not original. I find animation to be something that should be strictly reserved for important attention-getting. Short of making noises (which is disruptive in, say, an office environment), there are few other good ways to attract the user's attention without grabbing control of the environment and slapping a dialog up in front of everything else (something to be avoided if at all possible). There have been few sanctioned uses of animation in Apple's history (again, I use Apple as an example because Apple traditionally had very good UI work). One of these is the "barber pole", or equivalent of the progress bar for tasks with an unknown completion time. I believe that the only other animated elements are menubar flashing (to visually indicate a beep), application menu flashing (to indicate an error status), and ZoomRect()-style animation to indicate the source of an item being opened. Except for the barber pole and the application menu flashing (which indicates a fairly serious condition), all are directly triggered as a result of user input and are quickly over over. This reserves animation
Sweet buttery Jesus, man. You claim you're a teleconference operator, but you sound like a guerilla political activist. That is an awfully effective-sounding idea.
Navigating a tree-structured history doesn't entail the use of a platform-native tree widget. I'd consider that pretty awkward, actually, considering the low average branching factor of such a tree.
Heck, it could even be a set of generated webpages.
From a storage standpoint, it isn't a big issue. What would that be, the equivalent of an MP3 or two each month? I know that being able to locate where I was at some point in time would be quite valuable to me, much more than an MP3...and most office workers have far more hard drive space than will ever be used in the life of their system.
I suspect that one of the major improvements that has not been made to business software that *could* be is in the area of version control and history. Why aren't Office documents version-controlled? Workers have plenty of disk space, and this would clearly provide a bunch of valuable data. Why can't I look at a file on my disk, search through an sha1-indexed downloads database maintained by my browser, and determine where I downloaded the file from? Why can't Windows hand me a list of things I did during the last boot before my system stopped working properly -- installing software, registry settings that have been modified by software -- and provide the ability to roll back to a known good state? These are all things that would be useful in an office.
This thing is so useful that I wish to high heaven that it was part of the base Firefox distribution. It's like the difference between having the ability to disable animated GIFs and not, or having the ability to block popups or not.
I mean, I'm sure that it would drive Macromedia bonkers, but dammit, the user comes first, and Flash *is* heavily used by ads.
Oh, and if I can throw in another suggestion: Use Privoxy. Some folks may have used Junkbuster a while back and noticed that development has slowed down to nothing -- Privoxy is the continuation. And...it's wonderful. I've turned off all image blocking in my browser, because Privoxy does a better job than my manual blocks. It blocks on image sizes and locations, and when it blocks an image, inserts a bit of HTML that lets you click to view the image (an irritation with Junkbuster is that false positives were extremely aggravating). There's an easy-to-use web configuration interface on Privoxy that can be easily accessed whenever anything is blocked. I just love this program. Aside from Google's non-irritating-and-frequently-useful ads, between Firefox's features, Flash Click to View, and Privoxy, I can't remember the last time I had to see an ad.
The problem I have is that Microsoft takes an approach of trying to slap patches over broken systems. Putting a personal firewall on each system? Oh, for the *love* of *God*. If they'd strictly verify all the data coming into all those ports they open out-of-box (or not *open* said ports), they wouldn't have problems in the first place.
Much as I hate to admit it, and as strongly as I feel that rollover highlighting is a flawed UI concept, enough websites rely on rollover capabilities being present in a browser that it may be rough to disable them.
On the other hand, I think there there are few compelling reasons for allowing websites to modify the status bar information. Doing so is a serious security issue. Users (well, they won't think in about this in rigorous terms, but they do so unconsciously) treat the status bar as a source of trusted communication between their browser and them. If remote websites can muck with it, they lose the ability to trust that area.
I suspect that there are more sites that break with popups disabled than with status bar text and rollovers disabled combined...but we still do it. The main reason remote websites have so much control over browsers today is because of a Microsoft-started prescedent of trusting websites, of treating web developers as application developers. They aren't. Every website you visit just plain isn't trusted, and there should be much tougher rules on what websites can do to a browser. Allowing a website to, say, change the appearance of widgets is, IMHO, unacceptable.
A question: Does Mozilla/Firefox/Phoenix really need to do this itself?
Something like this is ultimately a gamble which may or may not pay off...and if it doesn't work, there's a huge amount of cruft dumped in the codebase?
I'd rather see something like the approach Apple used with KHTML in making Safari. If someone wants to make a program called, say, "Mozilla Platform" that *uses* Mozilla, I think that'd be a lot safer than trying to make one massive integrated push.
I think that trying to integrate everything has been the largest problem facing the Mozilla project. I have, many times, contributed patches to open source projects. I have never contributed to Mozilla, because the project was (at least to me) very large and overwhelming...and I only really cared about fixing problems that affected me. If I ran into a problem, it was often something that would require learning a huge amount about how Mozilla is structured to fix. I'm okay spending a day or two fixing a minor problem on a project that's irritating me. I'm not willing to spend a week doing so.
The "integrated" approach is a turn off from a resource standpoint. It made the Mozilla suite large from a disk and memory usage standpoint.
It meant that releases had to be spaced widely apart, and that one broken component could hold up releases of the rest of the package.
It meant that you had to lug around a mail client, web page design program, etc that you might really not be interested in.
In general, I think that Open Source does better if taken in smaller chunks. It makes rewrites and bugfixes more localized, it lets users choose the best option for them (rather than using that mail client that's bundled and always in their face), it keeps resource usage low, and it lets developers release on a more timely schedule.
Middle-click-opens-new-tabs-in-background works fine for me in Firefox on Linux.
SVG is much different from Flash. Flash is currently primarily used for two things: (1) to provide crummy interfaces (an ugly wart from designers coming from the "multimedia era" when CD-ROMs came out and later the ".com era" when people thought that novelty was what made people keep coming back to websites). (2) To provide an efficient format for vector-based graphic animation.
SVG is lousy at both of the above. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).
SVG is good, IMHO, for the following:
1) Tagged diagrams. SVG allows tagging elements with data. This could be a big benefit for CAD and diagram usage.
2) More complex webpage layout. I've never seen it actually done, but it seems that SVG could be used to define arbitrarily-shaped regions in a webpage...up until now, the only regions designers have had to work with, the only thing they could flow text around, was rectangular regions
3) Vector graphics. Plain and simple, it's a standard format for storing vector graphics. This is good for both standalone files and for efficient web-based transmission of graphics.
As for your question about what SVG-based graphic tools are out there -- take a look at sodipodi. It isn't Illustrator (yet), and it isn't going to be for at least a while to come, but it's usable for basic work.
Ctrl-mousewheel works fine in Firefox on Linux.
This assumes, of course, that your mousewheel is properly set up systemwide (i.e. you can scroll through documents with it).
I do wish that I knew how to globally and persistently increase text size by some percentage. I like to sit back from my monitor sometimes, but I still don't know of a setting that will let me pull this off.
Hard drives are much faster now, both in seek times and throughput, than in LC days.
Also, lookahead reads are more intelligent, we have more RAM to cache stuff, and OS loaders are smarter about only reading what data they need.
Mozilla startup time is the best argument against widespread use of XML (for simple local storage of data) that I can think of.
Opera can do this.
I'd be interested in a feature I saw suggested once -- a full, eternally (well, unless the user desires to remove it for privacy reasons) persistent tree-like history. The user could go back to any point in time and trace back and forward along browsing sessions.