Khoi Vinh nailed it. His excellent post on Subtraction elegantly summarized something I’ve always thought about in user interface design: “most features are built for experts, but most users are intermediates”, thus design for intermediates.
The customer review thread on these Western Digital drives is fascinating. It shows how user perception and screwups by marketing droids can completely ruin the reputation of a product.
The way to get a business to stop doing something is either to remove the economic incentive for doing the unpleasant behavior (i.e. kill revenue), or by raising the cost of the behavior to be prohibitive. Either way you do it, you kill profits and that kills the behavior. The thing is, nobody’s doing much of either against spam. It seems that everyone’s forgotten that spam is not a technical problem to be solved, but an economic one.
A friend of mine works at one of the major DVD manufacturing companies. He says they’re shutting down DVD production and switching to the new HD formats. Others in the industry have said similarly. DVD is dead, long live the New Format - until, of course they come out with the Next New Format and make everyone buy all their movies all over again. This endless succession of industry forcing me to buy new copies of items I already own makes me grumpy. But I wonder if it really matters?
The boot drive in my main desktop just died. Again. Data drives I don’t mind failing - I can just restore them from backup. Boot drives, however, take an entire day to repair as I’ve got to re-install everything all over again. While it is a handy practice to do every few years, a total reinstall is incredibly frustrating when it’s forced upon me.
So, I’ve decided on a new rule: all my boot drives shall henceforth be RAID 1 volumes. The downtime is much better: Hardware replacement time is just a few minutes and I can work off the laptop during the RAID rebuild. That time savings is well worth the extra $100 for a duplicate drive. (I tend to use small drives for the boot drive, then big drives for a separate data volume).
I wish CSS had a few of the features that algorithmic languages have. I’d love to have variables (or even macro substitutions).
Like any geek, I often do some quick maintenance when friend’s complain that their PCs are bogged down. Thrice now, I’ve found that the machines have switched down to PIO mode on their IDE channels. They’re not set to PIO mode in Device Manager, but Microsoft’s ATAPI driver has downgraded them to PIO mode.
They called the internet the great democratizer. Here’s a great example.
