the case against .NET

Dell’s website has had an overhaul. Initial impressions are of a much crisper, less cluttered design - good.
However, it simply does not work! At least not for me. The main graphical element of the page is a Flash movie which shows different products in turn. Above this is a pulldown menu, [...]

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I’m sure this has been blogged numerous times already (and I didn’t notice), but the biggest problem with Google, for me, has been that searching for product reviews has never worked. The top 20 or so results would always include one or two real reviews, and a pile of shopping sites which offered customers [...]

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Via Jeff Duntemann: -
Several people online, in an almost offhand fashion, have indicated that Vista’s knucklehead UAC feature is training people to click “Allow” automatically, no matter what it’s asking about. That may be the single greatest design error in Vista, and could over time render Vista as insecure as anything that came before it, [...]

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For my money, this has to be the best story to emerge from the blogosphere to date. Watching it develop over the past 2 weeks has been fascinating:

from Mark Russinovich’s original post,
to being picked up by the mainstream media,
to Sony’s repeated attempts to shoot off their own feet,
and the news of pending lawsuits.

And [...]

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Toshiba has introduced a new “VACF” display option on its Tecra M3 series of business notebooks.
The VACF (Viewing Angle Control Filter) feature may be turned on or off as needed. When enabled, it limits display readability, allowing the screen to be viewed only by someone sitting directly in front of the computer. Anyone [...]

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In recent years, Sony has acquired a reputation for marring its usually cute products with at least one cripplingly stupid design flaw. Most notoriously this included an audio player which wouldn’t play MP3 files.
The most common fault with Sony’s products is the inclusion of a MemoryStick slot of some form (there seem to be [...]

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Since Apple introduced the first Macintosh computer in the mid eighties, there’s been no significant change to the way people interact directly with PCs: the mouse/keyboard/menu interface has hardly evolved at all in over 20 years. When you consider the other advances in computing in the same period, this seems fairly remarkable.
I’ve been convinced [...]

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