Status-Q

[Original Link] Mark Pilgrim has a pretty thorough list of the main user-interface changes in Panther.

All the major political parties here are concerned about the fact that fewer and fewer young people are involved or interested in politics. I think this is inevitable. As most political extremes collapse towards the centre, we may end up with more stable ways to govern the country, but it’s hardly the thing to excite young minds. Teenagers want protests to take part in, causes to fight for, rogues to be outraged at. They don’t want anything middle-of-the-road.

Who was it who said, “If you’re not a communist before you’re thirty, you haven’t got a heart. If you’re still a communist after you’re thirty, you haven’t got a brain.” ?

[Original Link] John Naughton on Microsoft Office 2003.

Apple’s Mail.app has some problems, but in general I like it very much. A handy feature I’ve just discovered is that you can select more than one mailbox at once, and the message list shows the union of the messages in all selected mailboxes. Handy, for example, if you want to track a conversation and see messages in chronological order from both your incoming and outgoing mail.

I also like the ‘Highlight thread of selected message’ option, which keeps the messages in their natural order but highlights those with the same subject as the one you’re currently viewing. This is much more natural for me than a fully-threaded list, though that option will also be available in the next version of OS X.

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This looks like quite clever hardware, but there’s no way I’d buy a Microsoft-based phone after my own experiences with the iPaq and, more importantly, seeing a friend’s constant frustration with his SPV – a phone which would regularly do such things as ring and then deny you the ability to answer the incoming call, and which would need regular rebooting.

I mean, come on – pick one big software company in the world that you would least like to trust your personal communications to..

Here’s a fact that’s reasonably well-known among anybody who’s been tinkering with Windows for a few years: If you don’t want your machine to run the software on a CD automatically when you insert it into your machine, hold down ‘shift’.

In what must be one of the silliest of the recent “Let’s sue a student” cases, SunComm are planning to sue John Halderman for pointing this out. Why? Because the ‘autorun’ feature was used by their CD copy-protection software, and by pressing shift you can bypass it.

The company claims to have lost $10 million of its value as a result of Halderman pointing this out. Which makes me wonder what they think such blatantly useless technology is actually worth? It doesn’t need a PhD student to deduce how to break this – it’s the first thing most 12-year-olds would look at as well.

“It may not be focussed on me. If I’m blurry, it’s because it’s still focussed on the Buddha.”

And this morning I’m back in Cambridge. Autumn has started in the two weeks I’ve been away, and I’m rather enjoying the change in temperature.

Last night I sat in an Irish pub, listening to U2 and The Corrs coming from the loudspeakers, and drinking a pint of Kilkenny. Nothing too unusual about that. The strange part was that I was in Taipei, surrounded by mildly inebriated ex-pats who were telling me about the best places to buy property in Beijing.

I’m over here for various business meetings and to visit Computex – the Taiwanese equivalent of Comdex. Huge numbers of booths in three halls – I only saw a small fraction of them. Though some belong to people like Microsoft, the majority are small organisations trying to find people who will re-badge or re-sell their particular gadgets. Some are as dull as front panels for CDROM drives. Others are more interesting; the massage ball powered from the USB port, for example, is something no self-respecting geek should be without.

There are huge numbers of USB flash drives in every colour and shape you can imagine, as jewellery, as key-rings, or with built-in MP3 players. Buying small numbers here is hard. Arranging to import them in large numbers into Europe with your branding on them is easy.

It can be hard to know who actually makes what. I would admire some device at a booth, and ask whether the company made the electronics inside it, or just the case. Sometimes it would turn out that they only made the label on the front.