Monthly Archives: October 2003

User-Hostile Interfaces

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FoxBlogScriptError.GIFA friend let me know that my page was throwing a scripting error in Internet Explorer. I hadn’t thought of trying that – it works okay in Mozilla and Opera. Here’s the dialog box. Notice the editbox on the bottom half? You can’t copy the text from the dialog. Why would you? Perhaps you want to log the error. Or post it to a newsgroup seeking help. Or search online for the error. Or send an email to Craig letting him know he, too, has a scripting error. If you don’t want to let people edit it, why would you put it in an editbox? Stupid user interface design.

Cringely: How Microsoft’s Misunderstanding of Open Source Hurts Us All

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“This week, speaking at a Gartner conference in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said some fascinating things about Linux and about Open Source software in general. And thanks to those remarks and the blinding realization they caused for me, I finally understand exactly why Microsoft doesn’t understand Open Source.”

Cringely always makes interesting reading. Listen and watch Ballmer’s statements here.

NYT: Amazon Offer Worries Authors (but not all for the same reason)

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Amazon Offer Worries Authors. From David K. Kirkpatrick of New York Times: Technology: “Amazon.com has introduced a feature that lets users search for specific words or phrases in a database of the texts of 120,000 books, drawing skepticism from an authors’ group. ”

Amazon has offered to remove books whose authors do not want to participate. That’s even worse. Search on “Visual FoxPro SourceSafe” and you get a list of 48 books on Visual Basic, Visual InterDev, SQL Server, MSDE and even Dreamweaver. Hello? How about a book on SourceSafe? There are three, including my own, and mine has several pages on Visual FoxPro.

I suspect that Amazon hasn’t indexed the Hentzenwerke Publishing book, and hence we are sidelined. Indexing 120,000 books means marginalizing the great variety formerly available from Amazon. I am disappointed.