Core Dump

It could take years before Windows can be as flexible as Microsoft needs it to be to pump out new features quickly. But the cultural shift is in swing. Hours after showing off Windows Vista to software makers this month, Mr. Gates in an interview noted how Microsoft's Office group is now using some of Mr. Srivastava's tools to improve its code. "It's amazing the invention those guys have brought forward," he said. "I wish we'd done it earlier."

Mr Fletcher, managing director of Computer People, said: "We're finding that many clients are increasingly requiring professionals who have concise communication expertise as they recognise this improves company productivity in the long run."

Hugo and Nebula-award winning sf writer James Patrick Kelly is a brilliant writer, a fantastic teacher (being his student at the Clarion Writers' Workshop went a long way to turning me into a real writer) and a genuine mensch.

As I tried Office 12 in its current form I went through some stages. First I was curious about it but I quickly warmed to the new approach. It’s not just the ribbons and chunks, but the improved tooltips and menus, galleries, live preview and floaties that all combine to make the new UI work quite well.

But after a while I became frustrated by the lack of configurability. There’s no direct way to reorder or even resize chunks and so you’re stuck with the arrangement that Microsoft has decreed. I'm also concerned that the new galleries will lead to a sameness about documents as people use the supplied options.

Having sensed that the software has reached the limits of functionality, Microsoft has been preparing its most radical overhaul ever for Word, Excel and friends. With Office 12, due next year, the company plans to do away with a system that depends on people remembering which series of menus lead to a particular command. Instead, users will see a "ribbon" of different commands above their document, with the options changing depending on the task. Microsoft previewed the new look for Office at last week's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.

This Apollo
redux has the same fatal flaw as Apollo: The specialized throwaway
systems invented to get (back) to the Moon ASAP were (will be) far too
labor-intensive at far too low a max flight rate to allow affordable
followup. The new ships are not only based in significant part on
existing Shuttle components and facilities, but they are to be operated
in significant part by the existing Shuttle organization. IE, tens of
thousands of people narrowly specialized in various aspects of flying a
handful of astronauts on a handful of missions a year - at, by the time
all this fixed overhead is added up, billions of dollars a mission.
Like Apollo, NASA's new ESAS plan has built into it the seeds of its
shutdown by some future Congress, once the warm glow of the first few
daring missions has once again faded.

"I think the US is in a terrible state of denial," he says firmly. "Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Gotterdammerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong. Even here in California, 50% of cars on the freeway are SUVs, and they're political statements: they say, we're going to take the rest of the world down with us because we don't give a damn. Essentially they're Republican vehicles: when you see an SUV go by, you know the driver voted for Bush. I do think the world has larger global warming problems, but if the US were actually engaged in dealing with them, there'd be a sense that the worst abuser had seen the light and the whole world was on the same page. There's a really sizeable minority here who back measures to reduce emissions, but the political process is controlled by the Republican administration, which is basically in thrall to the oil industry. So it'll come down to another election - and with the last two elections both in their different ways perhaps having been stolen, we can't even really count on democracy anymore. It's pretty scary here."

IE is a ghetto. There are specs I wrote for UI features in 1998 that are unchanged today, 7 years later, in a world where browser usage has changed dramatically. I’ve watched bugs that I fought to have fixed in 5.0 become regressions, appearing in 5.01 and surviving in 6.0. Even though it’s the product I was proudest of, using it now makes me sad - it’s been left behind. I do read the IE blog now and again - smart folks are working - but there’s nothing for me to install.

JU: Yeah, somebody had a nice quote that RSS is the human face on Web services. I kind of like that a lot and related to that is something that I've said a few times, which is that human beings are the exception handlers in all workflows. And so...

BG: Absolutely. That's a really good way of capturing something I was saying about the boundary between structured and unstructured. Eventually you've got to know who in what role and how to communicate to them, because if software could just talk to software, we could get rid of all the humans. Everything that's real, eventually there's a human involved in. And there is a little bit of tension between very interpretive, simple-to-create stuff, like REST or POX, and very structured, tight stuff like Web services. And if the industry is smart, we can get the best of both worlds, where things that are not very complex, you just want to go get a stock quote, a weather thing, fine. Use REST. Even, you know, go to Wordpad and type in the ugly URL.

• Create unlimited numbers of multiple, overlapping conditions throughout your documents

• Assign conditions directly in the structure, rather than in the FrameMaker’s proprietary conditional text format

• Preserve conditions during an SGML/XML roundtrip

So what is Britishness? Maybe your heart sinks at the thought of the next 30 minutes exploring that less than fascinating question, so perhaps it's best to skip it. But I've called this talk "The Condition of Brit", because Britishness is something that permeates my soul and which I can never throw off. Perhaps how it manifests itself in me will emerge indirectly as I go along.

Let me introduce you to one of the greatest mysteries of our time: After more than 20 years of research, development and competition in the field of HCI, not one single leading operating system developing company has come up with an OS that utilizes the four corners of the screen. Any five-year-old earth child has probably already figured out that the screen corners are the easiest points to hit - the only locations hittable without looking. Ray Charles figured that out. Stevie Wonder figured that out. And they would probably make a better design team than any money-driven market thugs.

The trouble is that some require expertise beyond that of those most likely to use them, and none can match the features or ease of use of major proprietary programs. As a result, none of the three applications I unearthed -- AurigaDoc, export from DocBook, and HelpMaker -- is completely satisfactory.

One of the earliest and perhaps clearest alarms about Hurricane Katrina's potential threat to New Orleans was sounded not by the Weather Channel or a government agency but by a self-described weather nerd sitting on a couch in Indiana with a laptop computer and a remote control.

"At the risk of being alarmist, we could be 3-4 days away from an unprecedented cataclysm that could kill as many as 100,000 people in New Orleans," Brendan Loy, who is 23 and has no formal meteorological training, wrote on Aug. 26 in his blog, irishtrojan.com. "If I were in New Orleans, I would seriously consider getting the hell out of Dodge right now, just in case."

I do not say this to minimize what actually occurred in New Orleans. Far from it! What occurred is plenty bad enough; it's one of the two worst natural disasters in American history as it is, without any hypothetical scenarios worsening it. The reason I'm pointing out the "it could have been worse" scenario is to reiterate the absolute absurdity of statements by the likes of Michael Chertoff and Michael Brown that they were somehow "surprised" by how bad Katrina's devastation was. If that's true, they're criminally incompetent, and if it's not true, they're lying to the public in the name of political spin. If they were surprised by anything, it should have been by the fact that New Orleans didn't get it even worse.

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

A man suddenly found his laptop would only boot up to the 'blue screen of death', putting his data at risk. A week later, his nephew admitted that he used its screen as a punching bag to relieve his frustrations with the slow computer. The man sent his nephew back to live with his parents.