> I hate to say this but Microsoft is a virtual > monopoly because the majority of people want it to be.
That doesn't make much sense to me. The fact that Windows is installed by default on almost all new consumer desktop machines hardly supports the notion that people are "choosing" to run Windows over any alternative.
Most people don't know, or can even conceive of, different software and operating systems other than those made my Microsoft. So the notion of "wanting" Microsoft products is pretty meaningless in that context.
> It takes several keypresses to send a single > character in morse
Which is why advanced morse coders use a heck of a lot of contractions. Verbatim transcriptions of advanced morse conversations make latter-day SMS "cul8r" stuff look long winded. I wonder if he was allowed to use them on the test?
My grandfather (G6GO, a radio ham for almost 60 years) had a dictionary of morse contractions - there are/were loads of them in common use, and many other specialist ones within fields (like shipping and the postal service). "CQ" is the obvious one, as well as various that crept into non-morse use like TTFN and IIRC.
But it is the security firms that promote this idea that if you run their software, your box is "bullet proof".
Exactly. Yet the real mystery is why people who pay AV vendors don't complain when they shafted by a new email Trojan that of course the AV vendor can't protect them against because they never new about it in the first place. The central premise of AV software is flawed - why can't users see this?
This is just another nail the coffin of the whole "anti-virus" idea. Even since Melissa (and even earlier) it's been plain that AV software's ability to prevent infection is always going to be limited. Take Explorezip - the company I was working for at the time of that outbreak was running up-to-date AV software. Yet we got completely smashed by that Trojan when it came in over the email and had to wait about 12 hours for a fix.
The sheer rage on the MDs face when he met the IT director was amazing. How come we had been shut down by a virus when we had been paying hundreds a month for "protection"?
The use of AV software is, in my opinion, stupid. Shutting gates after the horse has bolted is bad enough, but having to PATCH that software's OWN VUNLERABILITIES is sheer lunacy.
People in generations to come are going to laugh at us. They are really, really going to laugh at hose naive and stupid we were to let the AV industry utterly lead us up the garden path.
Oh, and how we let Microsoft make it all happen in the first place, natch.
Here in the UK, ringtones are big business. Kids (mainly) subscribe to ringtone "clubs" that allow them to download the latest chart hits, novelty sounds, etc. as.mid (or whatever) to their phone.
But much of this is felled by the fact that you can't get a ringtone into your phone in any other way (i.e. sent by SMS, WAP push).
If phones like this come out where you can simply rip CDs, d/l mp3s and the like and USB them to the handsent, what happens to the "ringtone" industry?
Of course, I might not be understanding the full picture here as I've never downloaded a ringtone myself.
Password management is like the spam problem: it's too complicated to come up with a solution that works because there are, unfortunately, humans involved.
The only "policy" I know of that stands any chance of working in the long term is NOT TO HAVE PASSWORDS.
Far too many systems demand passwords when they don't need them. All applications should be written that assume authentication is managed elsewhere - and only fall back to "local" authentication if the environment they're in doesn't have such a system.
OK maybe this is just summed up by "single sign on" but it's a bit more than that - a shift in attitude perhaps.
> The fraudulent people are the ones that accepted > it for a conference whitout revewing.
Oh get over it! Without unlimited funding for every last paper to be read, discussed and reviewed before being published, it's the way the system has to work.
It's not as if the whole world collapses if a crappy bit of science gets published.
From the "slap-the-threat-of-terrorism-everywhere" department:
The following pillars of Western Democracah are hereby also identified as being hideously vulnerable and must be RADICALLY PROTECTED BY NEW LAWS:
- Roads (public) - Motor vehicles - Food - Buildings - Water - Air - Books - Magazines - Furniture - Electricity - Gas (liquid) - Gas (er, gassy) - Speech - Thought - The moon - Everything else that we might think could be fucked up by somebody who has a grudge against anything.
Please bend over and kiss all you freedom goodbye. You owe it to your children's future.
We all have different ways of doing it, but if I tried that, I'd go insane.
Sure - if I lose my PDA and I'd not backed it up (or the 256-bit Blowfish key is compromised by alien quantum computing intelligence), I'm a loser. But no plan is foolproof, and since I trust myself to follow a routine of adding/updating passwords on my PC, then synching them to my PDA immediately (which I do) before I go out sky-diving or whatever. I feel a lot more confident I can mitagate the risk that way rather than having to juggle some rotated security level bingo in my head.
70% of the time I use my PDA it's to get passwords. I have ALL my passwords stored in DataViz Passwords Plus. There are currently over 50 of the buggers. I have an "uber password" I use to unlock them, which is a password I only use for that purpose.
Gave up trying to remember passwords years ago - now I can have huge long cryptic ones as well and have no feare of forgetting them, and I've never had a single problem since. Well, until I forgot the uber password, that is...
Raskin, whether you liked him or not, forced you to think about the issue of usability in the light of learnability, which are too often very separate things. It is possible for an interface to be hard to learn, yet very usable once you understand how it works, and god knows the opposite is also true. This is obviously not a very commercial idea, and possibly why he never got on with Steve Jobs.
Raskin knew that usability isnt just what looks good in the showroom, but what endures and helps the user once the eye candy has worn off. Very few have been prepared or able to make that leap.
I don't think you understand the relationship between Marx and the ideas of Marxism, which are the cause of all these books you're worrying about.
Marx was, whether you like it or not, the single most influential individual of the modern age in the sense that for most of the last two centuries one half the world "believed" in his ideas (or versions of his ideas) while the other half explicitly did not. So important were these beliefs that they've overshadowed almost all world history to the present day.
You cannot seriously compare Marx with other philosophers and thinkers in the way you are doing. It's like complaining that the Bible has a larger readership than Dr Atkins' New Diet Revolution.
What's really wrong is the "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality of software designers to the use of passwords.
Passwords should protect things. The trouble with so many passwords is that they don't because their use is too trivial.
If you have something to protect, you will take steps to think about whether a) it's being protected and b) if the level of that protection is high enough. If, however, you are forced to provide a password to every little thing as part of your daily life, your ability to think effectively about those two things is eroded since you start getting a completely false sense that just because you provide a password for something, it's safe and secure.
So - I say BAN ALL PASSWORDS unless there is a rock-solid reason for having something password protected. Why do I need to authenticate to my office network, then authenticate AGAIN to my intranet, then AGAIN to the timesheets, or to my email etc. etc.
Software designers need to use password authentication as a last resort, or make it an option for users so that they can think about the aforementioned things properly.
If I, eh, appropriate a hat from a headless person, did I steal the hat? (Example intentionally
silly)
Actually, that's quite profound. In the case of a composer having their work "stolen" by a BT user, that composer really doesn't have a head - because that head is the property of the music publisher. The composer has already sold the "hat" (work) to the publisher, and the most they can expect after that is some royalties (about 2 or 3 percent unless you're a megastar).
Now this is assuming they have a publisher, which - surprise! - is the case in 100% of cases brought by the RIAA.
This is why the RIAA doesn't bring cases against file sharers that exchange music by, say, unsigned bands, or even bands on smaller labels.
And to reprise that "hat" analogy, take the drummer for James Brown's band. He's arguably the most sampled musician ever by a long chalk.
The RIAA should be making him a multi-millionaire. But by now you see it doesn't quite work like that.
> I conclude that most people download for personal > gain, to the detriment of the copyright holder.
I'd agree with the first part of that (well, it's hardly a "conclusion" as you put it - more like a no-brainer!), but the second needs clarifying: in almost all cases it's to the detriment of the copyright PUBLISHER.
The fact that most IP rights are transferred to publishers, who then collect fees for use of the work, is at the heart of this whole debate. If you think it's "stealing" from the artist, you're (usually) wrong. In general, the publisher charges buyers of the work large fees for it, takes a big bite of the cash, and give a (really tiny) amount to the artist. Don't believe me?
If P2P and other systems like collaborative filtering erode the role of the publisher, while they're unlikely to make the publishing go away, they may well start to redress this balance in favour of the artist, and put the publishing industry back where it belongs as a service, and not the master, of the artist.
> I've always been under the impression that the > typical person who makes money off of IP has a > rather modest income.
And why do you think that is?
Boing Boing had a link the other day to a German survey of musician's earnings showing that in 1994, PRS income distribution of its 15,500 writer members showed that only 204 made more than US$38,000 that year. Ten (10) made over US$187,000.
Now, I'd guess that there were more than a couple of hundred music executives, middle management and other staff in the German music publishing industry that made over US$38,000 that year. And they made their money from the music that those people wrote.
Whether or not you think that's fair, moral or anything else, it's an interesting fact, don't you think? I'd say that on those figures, any assertion that copyright exists to protect the earnings of artists is at best inaccurate, and at worst a big fucking lie.
There was a considerably less hilarious, but almost equally opaque, piece by her that appeared in the Economist's "The World In 2005" this January entitled "Totally Digital."
In it, Ms Fiorina trudged through various "Look out, techology is going to change everything!" moo-hah, backed by just about zero evidence, predictive courage or indeed much logic. I thought it was the weakest article I've ever seen in an Economist publication. Here's a choice clip:
"And it [technology!] will change democracy. Today millions of consumers vote for "American Idol" finalists using their mobile phones. How long before they expect to cast ballots the same way?"
Zzzzz.There was a considerably less hilarious, but almost equally opaque, piece by her that appeared in the Economist's "The World In 2005" this January entitled "Totally Digital."
In it, Ms Fiorina trudged through various "Look out, technology is going to change everything!" moo-hah, backed by just about zero evidence, predictive courage or indeed much logic. I thought it was the weakest article I've ever seen in an Economist publication. Here's a choice clip:
"And it [technology!] will change democracy. Today millions of consumers vote for "American Idol" finalists using their mobile phones. How long before they expect to cast ballots the same way?"
> The best thing you can do is enforce that the > computer world is a business and a profession.
All that makes sense, but unless your day job is *also* fixing computers, then consider that parents, relatives and the odd friend only really ask you to help them as a last resort. They *know* you're busy, they *know* you don't fix computers for a living. If you charged them, that would lower the threshold at which they decide to call you because they'd feel justified in picking up the phone every time their machines went beep.
Barter a bit, rely on some unspoken reciprocation in some form, but don't charge unless you are prepared to make time to allow for what will happen.
My use of computers has always involved the clipboard. I'm not old enough to have done a significant amount of work on machines that didn't have it in some form but it's always struck me as intriguing because it's the only part of most WIMP interfaces that gets heavily used yet doesn't feed back at all. It's invisible, and using it is more like using a *NIX CLUI, where commands only feed back when something goes wrong. That's the first thing I like about it.
When I use the clipboard a special part of my brain kicks in and starts working with the system. When I hit CTRL+C I remember not only the fact that there is something in the clipboard, but that it's relevant to the task I'm performing. Once that task has finished, or my use of the UI moves to something else, my mind marks the clipboard as "stale." Sometimes I suddenly recall that the thing I've currently got in the clipboard will help me. That same part of my mind marks it as "fresh" even if I didn't predict that it would when I made the clip. This is real "usability verses learnability" territory. But there's more.
That we owe a huge debt to the clipboard is apparent when you consider that just about all major content management projects depend on it. Despite the marketing mumbo about automating imports from "legacy formats," at some point in such projects a team of people will sit down with content in one format and copy/paste all or part of it into the format desired by the new CMS. I've been involved in too many CMS builds to think this doesn't happen. That it is usually cheaper to use a team of copy/paste monkeys than to design and test a transformation and load routine means that the practice isn't going to die out very soon. By that indication alone, the clipboard is probably the single most important piece of software for our "information age."
But there are problems. The clipboard would be top of my list of perfect OS utilities along with drag-and-drop and ALT+TAB. If only it wasn't for one thing: text formatting inheritance.
Perhaps my acute sensitivity to the utility of the clipboard has made me hyper-sensitive to the abomnible pain in the arse that is text formatting inheritance. Take a common example. I have a Word document in which there is a paragraph I want to copy to a PowerPoint slide I am writing. My Word document's text is in Arial Bold 12-point. I want to paste it into my PPT, which just happens to be using Futura Light 18-point at the point I want to insert the text. So I copy the text to the clipboard from Word, and paste it in. Only it goes in AS ARIAL BOLD 12-POINT.
Who in their right mind would want this to happen by default? Not only can you not turn this behaviours off in most applications, but there's not even a keystroke for "paste special" either. If you copy from a web browser into Word or another MS app, it'll attempt to paste it in as some godforsaken HTML table! Why? What's the point? I find myself then having to seek out "paste special" on the menu bar (no keystroke, remember) or using the formatting clone tool or something. So that's suddenly about five mouse gestures when it could have been two keystrokes. And it's not just limited to MS applications either. It happens to varying degrees with others as well.
How can this be a good idea? What have we done to deserve such as carbuncle on the otherwise perfect face of the clipboard? It's as if somebody (well, Microsoft mostly) have it in for the thing. The difficulties with text formatting inheritance is compounded by the strange and inexplicable existence of the "multiple clipboard" in, of all applications, Outlook (and some others I've encountered). You can't tell me they got that out of user testing: "You know, I've often wished I had the ability to put lots of things in my clipboard, but I'm not interested in being able to tell the difference between each clip - just give me an application icon for each. Oh, and when its full, ask me a difficult question about what to do so as to utterly break my concentration. And I don't want the ability to turn this behaviour off either."
Hmmm. Maybe I'll update that Wikipeodia entry later...
Slashdot Mirror
> I hate to say this but Microsoft is a virtual
> monopoly because the majority of people want it to be.
That doesn't make much sense to me. The fact that Windows is installed by default on almost all new consumer desktop machines hardly supports the notion that people are "choosing" to run Windows over any alternative.
Most people don't know, or can even conceive of, different software and operating systems other than those made my Microsoft. So the notion of "wanting" Microsoft products is pretty meaningless in that context.
> It takes several keypresses to send a single
> character in morse
Which is why advanced morse coders use a heck of a lot of contractions. Verbatim transcriptions of advanced morse conversations make latter-day SMS "cul8r" stuff look long winded. I wonder if he was allowed to use them on the test?
My grandfather (G6GO, a radio ham for almost 60 years) had a dictionary of morse contractions - there are/were loads of them in common use, and many other specialist ones within fields (like shipping and the postal service). "CQ" is the obvious one, as well as various that crept into non-morse use like TTFN and IIRC.
Here's a mail I've just sent to info@odeon.com:
I am trying to access your website using Firefox. It doesn't work.
I see that www.ugccinemas.co.uk works fine. So I've just booked four tickets to see Sin City tomorrow night.
If your website worked, you'd have got my money.
Make your website work with Firefox!
Exactly. Yet the real mystery is why people who pay AV vendors don't complain when they shafted by a new email Trojan that of course the AV vendor can't protect them against because they never new about it in the first place. The central premise of AV software is flawed - why can't users see this?
This is just another nail the coffin of the whole "anti-virus" idea. Even since Melissa (and even earlier) it's been plain that AV software's ability to prevent infection is always going to be limited. Take Explorezip - the company I was working for at the time of that outbreak was running up-to-date AV software. Yet we got completely smashed by that Trojan when it came in over the email and had to wait about 12 hours for a fix.
The sheer rage on the MDs face when he met the IT director was amazing. How come we had been shut down by a virus when we had been paying hundreds a month for "protection"?
The use of AV software is, in my opinion, stupid. Shutting gates after the horse has bolted is bad enough, but having to PATCH that software's OWN VUNLERABILITIES is sheer lunacy.
People in generations to come are going to laugh at us. They are really, really going to laugh at hose naive and stupid we were to let the AV industry utterly lead us up the garden path.
Oh, and how we let Microsoft make it all happen in the first place, natch.
Here in the UK, ringtones are big business. Kids (mainly) subscribe to ringtone "clubs" that allow them to download the latest chart hits, novelty sounds, etc. as .mid (or whatever) to their phone.
But much of this is felled by the fact that you can't get a ringtone into your phone in any other way (i.e. sent by SMS, WAP push).
If phones like this come out where you can simply rip CDs, d/l mp3s and the like and USB them to the handsent, what happens to the "ringtone" industry?
Of course, I might not be understanding the full picture here as I've never downloaded a ringtone myself.
SpamCannibal is a very satisfying way of ripping the rug from from infected hosts.
A bit controversial, mind you, but I'd like to see it incorporated in some projects like IPCop, for example.
Password management is like the spam problem: it's too complicated to come up with a solution that works because there are, unfortunately, humans involved.
The only "policy" I know of that stands any chance of working in the long term is NOT TO HAVE PASSWORDS.
Far too many systems demand passwords when they don't need them. All applications should be written that assume authentication is managed elsewhere - and only fall back to "local" authentication if the environment they're in doesn't have such a system.
OK maybe this is just summed up by "single sign on" but it's a bit more than that - a shift in attitude perhaps.
> The fraudulent people are the ones that accepted
> it for a conference whitout revewing.
Oh get over it! Without unlimited funding for every last paper to be read, discussed and reviewed before being published, it's the way the system has to work.
It's not as if the whole world collapses if a crappy bit of science gets published.
From the "slap-the-threat-of-terrorism-everywhere" department:
The following pillars of Western Democracah are hereby also identified as being hideously vulnerable and must be RADICALLY PROTECTED BY NEW LAWS:
- Roads (public)
- Motor vehicles
- Food
- Buildings
- Water
- Air
- Books
- Magazines
- Furniture
- Electricity
- Gas (liquid)
- Gas (er, gassy)
- Speech
- Thought
- The moon
- Everything else that we might think could be fucked up by somebody who has a grudge against anything.
Please bend over and kiss all you freedom goodbye. You owe it to your children's future.
We all have different ways of doing it, but if I tried that, I'd go insane.
Sure - if I lose my PDA and I'd not backed it up (or the 256-bit Blowfish key is compromised by alien quantum computing intelligence), I'm a loser. But no plan is foolproof, and since I trust myself to follow a routine of adding/updating passwords on my PC, then synching them to my PDA immediately (which I do) before I go out sky-diving or whatever. I feel a lot more confident I can mitagate the risk that way rather than having to juggle some rotated security level bingo in my head.
70% of the time I use my PDA it's to get passwords. I have ALL my passwords stored in DataViz Passwords Plus. There are currently over 50 of the buggers. I have an "uber password" I use to unlock them, which is a password I only use for that purpose.
Gave up trying to remember passwords years ago - now I can have huge long cryptic ones as well and have no feare of forgetting them, and I've never had a single problem since. Well, until I forgot the uber password, that is...
Raskin, whether you liked him or not, forced you to think about the issue of usability in the light of learnability, which are too often very separate things. It is possible for an interface to be hard to learn, yet very usable once you understand how it works, and god knows the opposite is also true. This is obviously not a very commercial idea, and possibly why he never got on with Steve Jobs.
Raskin knew that usability isnt just what looks good in the showroom, but what endures and helps the user once the eye candy has worn off. Very few have been prepared or able to make that leap.
I don't think you understand the relationship between Marx and the ideas of Marxism, which are the cause of all these books you're worrying about.
Marx was, whether you like it or not, the single most influential individual of the modern age in the sense that for most of the last two centuries one half the world "believed" in his ideas (or versions of his ideas) while the other half explicitly did not. So important were these beliefs that they've overshadowed almost all world history to the present day.
You cannot seriously compare Marx with other philosophers and thinkers in the way you are doing. It's like complaining that the Bible has a larger readership than Dr Atkins' New Diet Revolution.
Marx the person or Marxism? I would suggest the latter - since Marxism is a political philosphy worthy of at least a few bookshelves.
Benjamin Franklin was simply one man, as Marx was, but unlike Marx, he didn't found and then inspire a century of academic thought.
The researcher you mention was comparing chalk with cheese.
Well it *is* an article from Adaptive Path - they're a consultancy. They borrow your watch to tell you the time... etc. etc.
They're trying to sell their "product" of consultancy - it's not as if they'll be doing any of the coding, or even understanding the finer points.
Got a response back this morning:
=================
Apologise for the mistake.
This has now been corrected.
Darren Waters
Acting Editor, Technology
BBC News website
0208 225 9370
http://news.bbc.co.uk/technology
=================
So, I'm satisfied at that.
What's really wrong is the "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality of software designers to the use of passwords.
Passwords should protect things. The trouble with so many passwords is that they don't because their use is too trivial.
If you have something to protect, you will take steps to think about whether a) it's being protected and b) if the level of that protection is high enough. If, however, you are forced to provide a password to every little thing as part of your daily life, your ability to think effectively about those two things is eroded since you start getting a completely false sense that just because you provide a password for something, it's safe and secure.
So - I say BAN ALL PASSWORDS unless there is a rock-solid reason for having something password protected. Why do I need to authenticate to my office network, then authenticate AGAIN to my intranet, then AGAIN to the timesheets, or to my email etc. etc.
Software designers need to use password authentication as a last resort, or make it an option for users so that they can think about the aforementioned things properly.
Actually, that's quite profound. In the case of a composer having their work "stolen" by a BT user, that composer really doesn't have a head - because that head is the property of the music publisher. The composer has already sold the "hat" (work) to the publisher, and the most they can expect after that is some royalties (about 2 or 3 percent unless you're a megastar).
Now this is assuming they have a publisher, which - surprise! - is the case in 100% of cases brought by the RIAA.
This is why the RIAA doesn't bring cases against file sharers that exchange music by, say, unsigned bands, or even bands on smaller labels.
And to reprise that "hat" analogy, take the drummer for James Brown's band. He's arguably the most sampled musician ever by a long chalk.
The RIAA should be making him a multi-millionaire. But by now you see it doesn't quite work like that.
> I conclude that most people download for personal
> gain, to the detriment of the copyright holder.
I'd agree with the first part of that (well, it's hardly a "conclusion" as you put it - more like a no-brainer!), but the second needs clarifying: in almost all cases it's to the detriment of the copyright PUBLISHER.
The fact that most IP rights are transferred to publishers, who then collect fees for use of the work, is at the heart of this whole debate. If you think it's "stealing" from the artist, you're (usually) wrong. In general, the publisher charges buyers of the work large fees for it, takes a big bite of the cash, and give a (really tiny) amount to the artist. Don't believe me?
If P2P and other systems like collaborative filtering erode the role of the publisher, while they're unlikely to make the publishing go away, they may well start to redress this balance in favour of the artist, and put the publishing industry back where it belongs as a service, and not the master, of the artist.
Now how do you feel about copyright "theft"?
> I've always been under the impression that the
> typical person who makes money off of IP has a
> rather modest income.
And why do you think that is?
Boing Boing had a link the other day to a German survey of musician's earnings showing that in 1994, PRS income distribution of its 15,500 writer members showed that only 204 made more than US$38,000 that year. Ten (10) made over US$187,000.
Now, I'd guess that there were more than a couple of hundred music executives, middle management and other staff in the German music publishing industry that made over US$38,000 that year. And they made their money from the music that those people wrote.
Whether or not you think that's fair, moral or anything else, it's an interesting fact, don't you think? I'd say that on those figures, any assertion that copyright exists to protect the earnings of artists is at best inaccurate, and at worst a big fucking lie.
Readers - did you spot my shakey CTRL+V finger?
I wish you could edit your own posts...
There was a considerably less hilarious, but almost equally opaque, piece by her that appeared in the Economist's "The World In 2005" this January entitled "Totally Digital."
In it, Ms Fiorina trudged through various "Look out, techology is going to change everything!" moo-hah, backed by just about zero evidence, predictive courage or indeed much logic. I thought it was the weakest article I've ever seen in an Economist publication. Here's a choice clip:
"And it [technology!] will change democracy. Today millions of consumers vote for "American Idol" finalists using their mobile phones. How long before they expect to cast ballots the same way?"
Zzzzz.There was a considerably less hilarious, but almost equally opaque, piece by her that appeared in the Economist's "The World In 2005" this January entitled "Totally Digital."
In it, Ms Fiorina trudged through various "Look out, technology is going to change everything!" moo-hah, backed by just about zero evidence, predictive courage or indeed much logic. I thought it was the weakest article I've ever seen in an Economist publication. Here's a choice clip:
"And it [technology!] will change democracy. Today millions of consumers vote for "American Idol" finalists using their mobile phones. How long before they expect to cast ballots the same way?"
Zzzzz.
> The best thing you can do is enforce that the
> computer world is a business and a profession.
All that makes sense, but unless your day job is *also* fixing computers, then consider that parents, relatives and the odd friend only really ask you to help them as a last resort. They *know* you're busy, they *know* you don't fix computers for a living. If you charged them, that would lower the threshold at which they decide to call you because they'd feel justified in picking up the phone every time their machines went beep.
Barter a bit, rely on some unspoken reciprocation in some form, but don't charge unless you are prepared to make time to allow for what will happen.
No, really - the clipboard.
My use of computers has always involved the clipboard. I'm not old enough to have done a significant amount of work on machines that didn't have it in some form but it's always struck me as intriguing because it's the only part of most WIMP interfaces that gets heavily used yet doesn't feed back at all. It's invisible, and using it is more like using a *NIX CLUI, where commands only feed back when something goes wrong. That's the first thing I like about it.
When I use the clipboard a special part of my brain kicks in and starts working with the system. When I hit CTRL+C I remember not only the fact that there is something in the clipboard, but that it's relevant to the task I'm performing. Once that task has finished, or my use of the UI moves to something else, my mind marks the clipboard as "stale." Sometimes I suddenly recall that the thing I've currently got in the clipboard will help me. That same part of my mind marks it as "fresh" even if I didn't predict that it would when I made the clip. This is real "usability verses learnability" territory. But there's more.
That we owe a huge debt to the clipboard is apparent when you consider that just about all major content management projects depend on it. Despite the marketing mumbo about automating imports from "legacy formats," at some point in such projects a team of people will sit down with content in one format and copy/paste all or part of it into the format desired by the new CMS. I've been involved in too many CMS builds to think this doesn't happen. That it is usually cheaper to use a team of copy/paste monkeys than to design and test a transformation and load routine means that the practice isn't going to die out very soon. By that indication alone, the clipboard is probably the single most important piece of software for our "information age."
But there are problems. The clipboard would be top of my list of perfect OS utilities along with drag-and-drop and ALT+TAB. If only it wasn't for one thing: text formatting inheritance.
Perhaps my acute sensitivity to the utility of the clipboard has made me hyper-sensitive to the abomnible pain in the arse that is text formatting inheritance. Take a common example. I have a Word document in which there is a paragraph I want to copy to a PowerPoint slide I am writing. My Word document's text is in Arial Bold 12-point. I want to paste it into my PPT, which just happens to be using Futura Light 18-point at the point I want to insert the text. So I copy the text to the clipboard from Word, and paste it in. Only it goes in AS ARIAL BOLD 12-POINT.
Who in their right mind would want this to happen by default? Not only can you not turn this behaviours off in most applications, but there's not even a keystroke for "paste special" either. If you copy from a web browser into Word or another MS app, it'll attempt to paste it in as some godforsaken HTML table! Why? What's the point? I find myself then having to seek out "paste special" on the menu bar (no keystroke, remember) or using the formatting clone tool or something. So that's suddenly about five mouse gestures when it could have been two keystrokes. And it's not just limited to MS applications either. It happens to varying degrees with others as well.
How can this be a good idea? What have we done to deserve such as carbuncle on the otherwise perfect face of the clipboard? It's as if somebody (well, Microsoft mostly) have it in for the thing. The difficulties with text formatting inheritance is compounded by the strange and inexplicable existence of the "multiple clipboard" in, of all applications, Outlook (and some others I've encountered). You can't tell me they got that out of user testing: "You know, I've often wished I had the ability to put lots of things in my clipboard, but I'm not interested in being able to tell the difference between each clip - just give me an application icon for each. Oh, and when its full, ask me a difficult question about what to do so as to utterly break my concentration. And I don't want the ability to turn this behaviour off either."
Hmmm. Maybe I'll update that Wikipeodia entry later...