His main complaint is that it’s so different that it’s frustrating to existing users:
The Ribbon mimics the tabbed interfaces of the Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 browsers. It looks cool, but it took me most of five minutes to find, set, and test the Track Changes options my editor expects. As my deadline [...]
Bob Moser provides a history of the Republican takeover of Southern politics and explains why Democrats should keep trying to get elected here. He believes that the key is to eschew the pandering, centrist sales pitch that Democrats have been giving in hopes of sucking up to moderate Republicans and offering up candidates who clearly [...]
Interesting thoughts on why game worlds outperform virtual worlds like Second Life:
In this telling, games are not just special, they are special in a way that relieves designers of the pursuit of maximal realism. There is still a premium on good design and playability, but the magic circle, acceptance of arbitrary difficulties, and [...]
Scott Rosenberg has an op-ed in the Washington Post on the occasion of the Windows Vista launch. In it, he explains how the Vista delays are typical of many large software development projects:
The software business remains full of optimists who, bless them, think they know how to fix their field’s problems and overcome [...]
I haven’t been following the Scooter Libby trial very closely, but it sure looks to me like Ari Fleischer might have done Libby’s defense in yesterday. Here’s Michael Isikoff:
What’s significant is the detail that Fleischer provided. He said that Libby told him not just that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA, but that [...]
I loved the link blog. Short, sweet entries, simple layout, utter elegance. But very few people subscribed to it, so I’m moving all of the action back to the main blog, which gives me the benefit of doing more pull quoting. I made this decision last week, but then I saw what Jason Kottke [...]
3quarksdaily editor Abbas Raza, who grew up in a Shiite family, explains the origins of Shiism and the Shiite holiday Ashura today. He also has some pictures of Shiites observing Ashura in New York City this morning.
Dick Cheney’s office will not disclose who works there or what they do:
Think about that. The Vice President of the United States refuses to divulge who works in his office. Rozen’s article provides an estimate of 88 persons on the VP’s staff, which I take to mean that the OVP won’t even say [...]
The pervasiveness of Wikipedia is only increasing. The New York Times reports on judges citing Wikipedia in their rulings:
A simple search of published court decisions shows that Wikipedia is frequently cited by judges around the country, involving serious issues and the bizarre — such as a 2005 tax case before the Tennessee Court [...]
This looks bad:
Today, someone (thanks!) pointed me to a patent application by Microsoft for an “Object test bench”. The patent application, filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, is here. The patent claims the invention of “a facility” (the object test bench) that “receives an instantiated object, displays the [...]