Opting for ‘old school’ TV, even on a modern set

HILE many of us are afraid of change, some of us refuse to accept change. At some of the worst scenarios, without any awareness, we can miss out on tremendous benefits. Examples from the hardware domain:

• Half of all HDTV owners never use the high definition capabilities of their set.
• Many people still use a single-head display even though they have dual-head graphics card and some old monitor(s) lying around in the house. It is poor use of the available hardware, which few people seem to mind.

As for more examples pertaining to software:

• People browse with Firefox/Opera/Mozilla/Netscape and make no use of tabs.
• Use of heavy and sluggish, Web-based E-mail services, notably MSN/Hotmail. Some vendors/hosts make the exception nonetheless.

Manchester’s notoriously busy transport system

There are some big plans for the transport system in Manchester. Buses might become similar to trams, but will involve no driver or rails. Alas, after scraping of the long-anticipated tram extension, we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

It may sound like science fiction, but Stagecoach, which runs most of the buses in south Manchester’s, says the new service could be in place years before any Metrolink connections are built. The computer-guided buses would be manned by a driver but new ‘optical guidance’ technology means the bus would steer itself along a prescribed route and pull up flush to raised platforms.

This is particularly interesting to me because it happens at the very centre of where I live and work. Moreover, it is related to my research, which is focused on computer vision.

Old stories:

• Autonomous Vehicle in Rough Terrain
• Autonomous Vehicle from Stanford and Volkswagen

Related news: Google launch service offering public transport schedules

Also see: Assorted Manchester photography

Tabs corresponding to separate E-mail messages in Thunderbird

ABBED views in E-mail applications (also referred to as “mail clients”) are a brand new idea as far as I can gather. Thunderbird developers are now said to be going down this unprecedented route. From the recent article:

A developer has added tabbed browsing of e-mail messages to Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, mimicking one of the most popular features of the Firefox and Opera Web browsers.

Tabs corresponding to separate RSS feeds in Owl

I have seen tabs in feed readers before, namely in RSSOwl (shown above). Nonetheless, I believe that incorporation of tabs into E-mail/newsreaders would be uncalled for. Much-familiar applications like Thunderbird would prove confusing to many users unless tabs are shrewdly hidden, thereby protecting users from their freedom.

Tabs make the controls finer, maybe unnecessarily so. E-mail, as oppose to feed readers, is used by merely everybody (assuming Webmail is put aside for the sake of the argument). Not everyone who uses Outlook (Express) can handle higher levels of complexity, let alone those who are new to E-mail altogether. Overall, tabs can make the entry barrier even higher. In firefox, tabs do not appear by default until/unless a second one appears. This makes tabbed browsing a function which is easy to enable if/when the user feels confident. Yet, owing to smart UI design, it never contributes to unnecessary clutter.

Thunderbird and RSSOwl are of course Open Source projects that are not bound to desires of large companies. According to Wozniak (AKA Woz), who is co-founder of Apple, the worst applications come from the large companies, Apple included. To quote Woz, “Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise”.

A shrunk-down screenshot of Thunderbird
‘dressed’ with the CrossOver theme

A single slide from my talk on data recovery (XHTML)

Below is a snippet from an amusing BBC article.

One incident involved a dog that used a USB flash drive as a chew toy and almost ate all its owner’s data.

[...]

But top of the list is an old laptop containing key company data that was found filled with cockroach corpses.

It seems as though computer disasters and Darwin awards are becoming a golden source of joy to the computer literate. This could leverage tentions. People should never be humiliated for being unfamiliar with technology, but then again, this is a blog…

Similar items:

• Data Loss Humor
• iPod nano Crash Testing

Wikipedia will never collect dust on the shelves

A story that has hit many headlines speaks of Wikipedia closing a few doors, making it slightly more difficult to contribute content.

For more details, select your favourite source:

• ZDNet: Growing pains for Wikipedia
• CNN: Online encyclopedia tightens rules
• Associated Press (via Yahoo): Wikipedia Tightens Submission Rules
• CNET/Slashdot: Wikipedia to Restrict Creation of Articles

Related item: Wikipedia Statistics

OpenDocument may lead the way to Web-based office suites
(TinyMCE is shown for illustrational purposes only)

TAGED acceptance of the OpenDocument standard was discussed in the context of Massachusetts. It was also argued, with timely backing from the media, that corporate Open Source migrations are no longer the exception. Finally, IBM have big plans for OpenDocument, which they can vigorously employ and help spread.

IBM plans to support early next year the OpenDocument standard in its desktop software, a product the company intends to market aggressively in developing countries.

IBM and their occasional Open Source push gets mentioned in an article titled “Is Open Source Really Just as Good”? (Part I, Part II – published today)

While I didn’t say it explicitly, when companies like IBM, HP, Novell, Dell and even Sun are driving the adoption, deployment and support of various parts of the LAMP stack in the enterprise, it’s safe to say that the ecosystem for many open source projects is thriving…

Hotter among the gamers’ headlines: Quake4 Demo for Linux

Has Google become Microsoft’s Big Brother as well as ours?

ET us assemble and review at a list of ideas where Microsoft have been claimed to imitate rather than innovate. Most of all, they appear follow Google’s footsteps, rather anxious about the looming threats .

By embarking on projects which have been recently proposed, Microsoft simply make an inimitable Google appear highly inspirational. All are implementations, which have been within their capabilities for years. These were ignored until Google initiatives surfaced or when innovative value was finally realised. It seems as though brainstorming is suppressed in Redmond. Examples:

• New classified lists service
• Satellite maps that make use of AJAX
• Online software/services, namely live.com
• Book scanning
• Search based and encouraged by backlinks
• Context-sensitive advertisement
• (Arguably) Google personalised

There must be more, but I cannot think of any at the moment.