captain-m

I like Seth Godin's take on the ads:

"[...] Vista and PowerPoint and Microsoft's other core non-game products are largely devoid of personality and are optimized to be sold to organizations that prefer it that way. Microsoft can change this if they want to, but until they do, running ads pretending to be something other than that is a waste of money."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/what-adverti...

More like; Unless you restrict the use of a piece of software to a highly marketed and desired piece of hardware.

In this case doing better than the competition doesn't mean doing well. It doesn't even mean acceptable. I don't use any apple products and I don't really care either way, but saying that they're better than the competition doesn't mean anything.

"She gets me going on purpose just so she can see my arms waving and the vein pop out of my head while I'm trying to describe this stuff. I don't think she really pays all that much attention to what I'm actually saying."

My friends do this to me all the time. I know they don't really care but they keep asking questions until I can't resist explaining stuff to them.

It always makes me smile when I get one of these on my Arch box. Especially when it claims to have found a critical virus in C:\Program Files\....

Canonical doesn't, gnome does. http://usability.gnome.org/

I agree. In a lot of cases it's a mistake to cater to inexperienced users by making your GUI 'intuitive'. The bulk of your users are intermediates and power users. A user interface should cater to those people and gently nudge beginners in the same direction.

The old word interface (not the ribbon) actually did a pretty good job in this. Beginners used the menubar to do things. The options where accompanied by icons ("ooh, that's the same as the one on the iconbar.") and keyboard shortcuts ("What happens if I press Ctrl - S?"). The user interface doesn't get in the way of power users and teaches beginners and intermediate users.

I guess it's because almost every windows user is familiar with the button in the lower left corner nowadays. It's been that way for almost 13 years now.

Cuil does have some things going for it though. They have a great privacy policy and the category function seems to be working quite well.

Hopefully the search results will improve over time. I'd love to see a Google competitor.

Why not? The writing is pretty good and I always get a chuckle out of them. It's worth my ten minutes a day.

Exactly. Another factor when you subscribe to a lot of feeds is overlap. I subscribe to all sites I find interesting so more often than not the articles I probably wouldn't want to miss show up on multiple sites. This way I can hit 'Mark all as read' without feeling like I've missed something.

From the trends page on google reader: "From your 114 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 9,483 items."

If growth isn't a concern why not force people to wait a certain amount of time after signing up before they're allowed to post?

That way new users can get a feel for the community before they start posting and you only get users with a real interest in the stories posted here.

  Nature, it seems, is the popular name
  for milliards and milliards and milliards
  of particles playing their infinite game
  of billiards and billiards and billiards.

I agree that Stallman's stab at the gates foundation is cheap and uncalled for. However, if you're going to write an article accusing someone else of FUD you'd better make sure you're not guilty of it yourself.

>"Is Richard Stallman seriously suggesting that it’s right to illegally obtain copyrighted software?"

No he isn't. He's suggesting that Bill Gates should have allowed people to share his software.

>"It’s one thing to say that Gates should never have charged for his software and another to say that it’s OK to use it without paying."

Stallman is saying that the software should have been free as in speech, not free as in beer. Nowhere did he imply that it's OK to use the software without paying.

Why? Isn't a two way street between browser teams and web developers a good thing?

"I think the current copyright situation lets citizens do pretty much whatever they want"

Share a song with some friends, create a mashup of two cool songs, use some music in a short film they've made, make a collage of different drawings, write new lyrics for an existing song and record that, use samples from an existing song to create something new etc. etc.