snowdeal.org

“Start with the Macintosh Finder. Borrow some good ideas from Windows Explorer. Package everything as components. And then toss in some ideas that have been floating around Apple for years (but never got shipped).”

“Eazel has taken the Windows Explorer metaphor and pushed it even further. Nautilus has the usual forward and back buttons, a history list, and the ability to view web pages. But it’s got some spiffy new tricks, too.”

“I’m following in the footsteps of an earlier poster in saying that I’m disappointed to see Apple and NeXT’s best and brightest come up with… a file browser. I’m just as disappointed as I was five years ago when I signed up to be one of the first fifteen-hundred BeBox developers, after I discovered what their idea of “revolutionizing” the operating system was.

To quote Alan Cooper, from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design:

Even though the file system is an internal facility that shouldn’t–by all rights–even affect the user, it creates a large problem because the influence of the file system on the interface of most programs is very deep. The most intractable problems facing user interface designers usually concern the file system and its demands. It affects our menus, our dialogs, even the procedural framework of our programs, and this influence is likely to continue indefinitely unless we make a concerted effort to stop it.

Currently, most software treats the file system in much the same way that the operating system shell does (Explorer, File Manager). This is tantamount to you dealing with your car the same way your mechanic does. Even though this approach is tragically bad, it is an established, de facto standard
and there is considerable resistance to improving it.

Fundamentally, I’m a bit tired of hearing about how everyone’s “revolutionizing” everything, when they’re really not. Look: revolution and revolutioniz e both imply “sudden, radical, or complete change”. The American colonies didn’t fight the Revolutionary War to install a local king. The French Revolution wasn’t so they could hire a newer, prettier cake-eater.

The file system, fundamentally, is an implementation detail. It’s an artifact of how “things have always been done”. It’s a drag on doing real, substantive improvement to the way computers work for people. There are millions of people out there who have never used a computer, and have yet to learn. They don’t need to learn what a filesystem is, or to navigate it. They need to be able to find and use the information and tools that are important to them, period.

If we truly want to revolutionize the user interface, the user experience, etc., then we really need to start with a more fundamental re-thinking of how things work.”

“It would be interesting to track the pace of meme transmission…and the speed at which transmission seems to be increasing. The difficulty in doing so is not knowing what to keep track of. When I see things, I can’t really tell the difference between meme-worthy & non-meme-worthy material…I’m more of an unwitting participant than trend spotter.”

“It would also be interesting to track the path of meme transmission. One primitive way this is done in the scope of weblogs is with the “via” or attribute link, where a blogger gives credit to the blog where he or she spotted what they’re posting about. Sometimes, you can track these links back several steps. Another related area where people are trying to more formally track such flows is with RSS headline feeds. I believe the original idea of RSS is that a site would simply offer an RSS-formatted index of what’s on their site, and others would use that to link back to them. But with all the crazy aggregation and syndication stuff being done by folks like Moreover, UserLand, ClickFeed, and Oreilly with Meerkat, one RSS feed can be the input for a system that then outputs it again, possibly categorized, commentated, or otherwise editorialized. Information you’re reading on one site could have conceivably gone through a long chain of such services. But since there’s nothing built into RSS to track this, this path is lost. The next version of RSS may account for such things. This isn’t exactly meme tracking, but it could be — especially where there is an editorial layer. And even more so if you think beyond just headlines (what RSS is mostly used for today) to weblogs syndicating other weblogs, picking and choosing the posts (memes, potentially?) that they like. Hmmm… “

“The idea of a meme, combined with the Darwinian model of selection, could in principle provide a powerful framework to explain culture, provided that culture was made up of memes. This, however, is far from being the case. A meme, as defined by Dawkins — there are many looser uses of the term that amount to little more than a new name for the old idea of a cultural trait — is a cultural replicator, just as a gene is a biological replicator. A replicator, I argue, is defined not just by the combination of a causal link and a relative identity of relevant properties between replicator and replica, but by the fact that the information that determines the properties of the replica is wholly derived from the replicator, or nearly so. The issue here is not the relative faithfulness of the copying process. It is whether the replica, perfect or imperfect, is in fact produced by a copying process. When a non-negligible part of the information realised in the replica originates from sources other than the replicator itself, so that its properties, even if identical with the alleged replicator, are not derived from it, then one is not dealing with a true replicator — in the cultural case, not with a true meme. Few cultural items are true memes, or even are “memish” enough for the meme model to apply.”

“Kaiser Permanente violated the patient confidentiality of hundreds of members last week when e-mails containing sensitive medical information, names and home phone numbers were mistakenly sent
to the wrong people, Kaiser officials disclosed yesterday.”

“Kaiser Permanente violated the patient confidentiality of hundreds of members last week when e-mails containing sensitive medical information, names and home phone numbers were mistakenly sent
to the wrong people, Kaiser officials disclosed yesterday.”

“The knives are out for WAP technology. Following the huge hype of the last 12 months, it’s becoming apparent that it just isn’t delivering. Naturally, the naysayers have now become the “told-you-so-ers”. However, the disappointment of WAP technology needs some more careful analysis. The industry deserves a good wrap on the knuckles. Much of what has happened was avoidable. Will the lessons be learned?”

“The biggest single mistake was to take the view that an internet enabled phone is a general purpose device. It was an easy mistake to make. A computer with web browser was a general purpose device. You can use it to surf any web site. A phone is also a general purpose device. You can use it to call any number. However, when you put the two together, the combination is limited. To be completely general
purpose it would need to have a keyboard, a full size screen and a phone transceiver built in together. It would need to be both a computer and a phone, i.e. a laptop with a phone built in. Current WAP Phones are still phones, but they are NOT computers in the sense of a PC. This was the first mistake – marketing the device as if it was a computer.

A WAP Phone is an “invisible computer” or it ought to be. A WAP Phone thought of as an invisible computer, becomes an information appliance. Furthermore, each different form factor of WAP Phone is a different information appliance. The whole industry failed to realize this. Information appliances should be designed for a specific purpose or a limited set of purposes. In other words, with current technology,
the “walled garden” approach was correct providing what was inside the garden made sense for the specific information appliance, as a single product.

The purposes to which a WAP phone can be put is somewhat controlled by the modality of the device. For example, a 4 line display is very different from an 8 or 12 line display. A 2K deck size is very different from an 8K deck size. As the devices change and grow more powerful the range of tasks to which they are suitable grows larger. Identifying and developing such compelling uses for the small screens was
always going to be difficult.”

“They found that 39% of the premature babies had below normal IQs of 85 or less, compared with 13% of the babies carried to full term. The international average is only 16%.

Of the premature children, 61% had special needs or were “low achievers” in school, compared with 23% of the full term children.

And 28 of the 118 premature children were classified as having learning disabilities, compared with 11 of the full term children.”