Women’s perception of the Web differs

EX as in “gender”, that is. In an writeup titled “Men Are From Google, Women Are From Yahoo”, a certain difference in browsing habit is highlighted. It claims one is be able to tell apart the two genders, whose exploration of the Internet is driven by other motives.

Men and women have different motivations for doing what they do. According to a recent report from Pew Internet and American Life, women view the Internet as a place to extend, support, and nurture relationships and communities. Men tend to see it as an office, a library, or a playground–screw the community, this is about function not family.

Do men hunt and women nest as Jerry Seinfeld once said? Is that why women settle for whatever is on TV while men strive to find out what else is on TV? This is by no means a chauvinistic statement. The woman’s ability to concentrate on the familiar leads to a loyalty which is most rewarding.

AKING of efficient algorithms and use of more compact data representations have a cost in terms of complexity. They lead to greater coding and programming time, yet there is plenty to be gained.

Broad-scale example: writing of a good search algorithm makes it hard to understand, let alone algorithms that discriminate data. There is a reason why the Web was made available and practical throughout its decade-long extension.

One would say that the Web has been open. Its pertinent objects were also broken down rationally. It was also because not all pages and graphics are bitmaps, but instead the Web exploits wavelets that are based on mathematics or defined a palette and then use some conventions to refer to it.

Moreover, rather than poster-like Web sites, where everything is hard-coded, there emerged a language called (X)HTML which is concise, descriptive, and unambiguous. There are protocols which define how it should be rendered so a description — a code that is — makes it laborious to implement. Construction of pages becomes arguably easier and the end product much more concise, in terms of its size. Versatility (or flexibility) is yet another matter.

The take-home message: complexity in implementation or even specification takes its toll, but entails true benefits. ‘Lazy’ programming leads to inefficiency, whereas tactful complexity pays off in the long run.

Not much to worry Bill Gates

CCORDING to Reuters, Bill Gates states [enormous ASP ‘URL‘] that IBM is the main rival to Microsoft. Google are Apple are said to be smaller factors of concern, which lies in contrary to some fairly recent memo and even a few urgent strategic moves.

IBM studies show that Linux TCO is 40% lower than that of the Windows equivalent. What happens when IBM begin to pull out the Windows equipment from their clients’ operations environment?

What I find most admirable about IBM is that, unlike Google and Microsoft, they give no compelling reason to be hated. They embrace and encourage standards. They cater for diversity where it seems suitable.

I may be an exception and perhaps even an oddity. I lost interest in PDA applications that differ from the most fundamental PIM set. Alas, I sometimes wonder if anything beyond a reliable simplicity is truly necessary. I suspect not.

I bought a Tungsten over a year ago, but I need never do anything that I could not do on the M130, which is a low-end PDA I once owned. It now sits idly and serves no-one even though it works. It has a few minor defects, but workarounds can compensate for all of them. What was its contribution to the subsequent device in the ‘upgrade cycle’? A 32 MB memory card was inherited from the M130, among a few other peripherals. A larger SD card (quarter of a gigabyte) is now available, but it rarely, if ever, gets used. Same programs are used and the capacity required is similar. So what does it all come down to?

Palm rarely ever failed me where it mattered the most: data integrity. After over 3 years of regular use of the Palm I can only vividly recall two incidents of data loss which were a nuisance. Both incidents were not at all severe and they both date back to 2003:

• Incident #1: I was editing a large memo for approximately half an hour without applying the changes. A very rare crash of Memo Pad led to the loss of all changes. A lesson was learned following this loss. As I compose this item on my Palm at the moment, I do not neglect to periodically save it.
• Incident #2: Half a day of changes were lost after restoration from desktop-side backup. Fortunately, all that was lost included a few calender entries, which I could quickly restore from fresh memory

I have had an SD Card-based backup program for over a year, but never had the chance (reason) to use it. Well done, Palm, for preserving my data and preventing me from ever pulling my hair in frustration over data disasters.

Side note: I truly hope that Palm can deliver innovation shortly. They begin to lag far behind their competitors and I am tempted to swap vendors and move to Nokia’s Linux-based tablet.

Life involves accumulation of things, not always objects, money or recognition. Happiness, however, is dependent on the momentum (increment of pace) of this accumulation, so a step up may not necessarily entail happiness. This explains why perpetual happiness is a myth.

To close with a quote which I strongly agree with (from Dr. Kent M. Keith):

“The good you do today will be forgotten
tomorrow. Do good anyway.”

OR quite some time, companies with large budgets have feared the inclusion of free software in their server rooms. Cost was not an issue. Naturally, price was never assumed to lie orthogonally to quality either. Is there a fallacy? There certainly is and it is being perpetuated by those whose interests it serves.

I store about 1.5 GB of mail only to see great reliability. I also maintain Web spaces of roughly the same size and a continuously increased level of complexity. The Linux server and its Linux Web-based applications are both reliable and free. As seems as though the issue remains that in the wealthy working place, people have budgets that they need to make use of. Often they opt for Exchange servers and IIS. The expenditure due to acquisition of ‘premium’ solutions costs people their jobs. Cost cuts are more easily approached due to this. Pure and simple.

The same issues arise in a different context — the context of liability and job protection by sticking to brands. This pattern is an impediment in its own right. FUD continues to impede adoption, as does the norms and perceptions in people’s mind.

Related essay: Operating System Monoculture

In my own mind, there is one golden rule for design with Flash:

Non-Flash browsers should miss no information. Their users should only miss out on the flash (no capital ‘F’ here), but never any content. If proprietary formats like Flash are made a requirement for information extraction, the outlook for the Web seems grim.

It has been a long time since I last designed with Flash. This goes back to 2001, in fact. At the time, little did I know about the SEO impact, which is why I no longer bother with Flash. Originally, its use was not my choice either; it was the client’s.

As a final word of advice (or caution), menus and text should remain in pure-text form, never embedded in something that requires pattern analysis or closed-source software. The same rules apply to graphics (images) where the alt attribute must be used as a surrogate, just in case images are not (or cannot) be displayed.