Email is broken. But how to fix it?

Less is more.

Technology sucks. Not so much the kind ordinary consumers buy, but the massive, multi-million-dollar software projects large enterprises implement.

Wikipedia is viewed as authoritative on every topic it covers. That opens some interesting possibilities.

The video iPod is interesting. But those new Macs, whoa!

Extrapolating an exponential growth curve into the future is very risky.

I am not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV. But I have a legal question if there's a DMCA expert floating around out there.

Suppose that I own a huge collection of DVDs (as many of us do), and I want to back them up onto a big hard drive. This is purely because (a) sometimes it is more convenient to watch a DVD on my laptop and the hard drive takes less power than the DVD player; and (b) I have small children and I want to have a backup in case they scratch the original.

I spend my professional life worried about usability, particularly the usability of phone-based customer service. I've even written a book (with cartoons!) on the topic, though in the book we mostly avoid the word "usability" since it tends to scare away marketing executives and service managers.

Given that (as a rule) phone-based customer service and personal computers are two of the most frustrating consumer experiences today, and that usability problems are at the core of both, this has been brewing inside me for a long time.

Fast Company asks the question: "What, exactly, is Microsoft getting for its $6 billion/year in R&D spending?"

They're hardly the first to ask this question, and I've asked similar questions in the past. The paradox is that Microsoft spends more on R&D than anyone else in the industry--heck, practically more than the entire rest of the software industry combined [note: This rhetorical flourish might even be true depending on how you allocate hardware vs. software R&D at places like Apple and IBM] and more than the GDP of some African nations--but seems to have very little to show for it in terms of breakthrough new products.

My beloved TiBook died on Saturday night. It was old for a laptop: over three years of rough use. The paint was completely gone from the places I rest my wrists, and the CD ROM made an ominous clattering sound when it spun up, so the final expiration was no great surprise. After trying all kinds of tricks to get it to work again, I finally made the determination that the patient was beyond help.

At this point, it became an organ donor. The battery was nearly new, and the hard drive perfectly functional. I bought a FireWire enclosure for the hard drive and a set of Torx screwdrivers, and with about fifteen minutes' work, the hard drive (with all my precious files) became an external FireWire drive. I dubbed it the Brain-in-a-Jar.

Wikipedia is a free, collaborative online encyclopedia written and edited through the volunteer efforts of literally thousands of people. The unique feature of Wikipedia (or any wiki) is that anyone can contribute or edit the content. Software features make it easy to identify gross acts of vandalism and revert articles to earlier, known good, states. The result is an amazing resource, in the depth and breadth of the content.

But how authoritative is it? In other words, how sure can you be that information in the Wikipedia is true and complete?

Early this year, I wrote an article about why I don't think Microsoft's Portable Media Center is likely to succeed. Now that products have been announced (even if you can't actually buy one yet), it begs the question of how to make a product which would be the same runaway success in video as the iPod was in music.

The reason the iPod has been so successful isn't that Apple came up with something truly innovative. Rather, they took an existing idea (the portable MP3 player) and essentially perfected it with something close to the ideal combination of price, features, usability, and style. Then, they marketed the beejeebuz out of it. Replicating this success in video will mean starting over from scratch, not refining the existing iPod.

"Why aren't we living in Hollywood's vision of the Year 2000?"

Except that....we are. But people who ask that question are just thinking of the wrong genre. The Hollywood vision of the Year 2000 we're living isn't the Buck Rogers genre. We're living the Science Fiction/Comedy genre.

I was reminded again today of just how fragile software is. For some reason, a piece of code which had been working reliably for months suddenly stopped working, because a standard library refused to link properly. Nothing had changed in months. We eventually traced the problem to a corrupted cache, which we fixed by removing completely.

We would never tolerate this kind of behavior in many other kinds of systems. Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, shooting a hole in a car doesn't cause it to explode. Despite the enormous energy contained in a spinning jet engine, a bird flying into it won't cause pieces of turbine to go into low-Earth orbit (though it won't be good for the bird, either). Skyscrapers don't tumble to the ground every time a toilet overflows.

Those who have been reading my scribblings for a while know that I'm a declared skeptic of Social Networking Software. The main reason is that it seems to provide relatively little benefit for the effort to sign up and maintain the network, and that what benefits it does provide are often already being provided elsewhere.

That said, there is a better way. Most Social Networking Software today works by tracking Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) links. This works on the principle that "a friend of my friend is also my friend." So, if I declare all my friends, and all my friends do the same, then I've uncovered an exponentially larger number of friends-of-friends.

Bill Gates has us imagine a future where hardware is free. Not literally free, but free compared to what we pay for a level of performance today. This isn't such a hard thing to imagine, given that the price/performance for today's hardware viewed through the lens of, say, 20 years ago, makes today's hardware seem very nearly free.

Controlled nuclear fusion as a power source is something which has been "just around the corner" for the last 50 years, but the inherent problems have been just too difficult to overcome. We had the hysteria about so-called "cold fusion" a decade ago (now completely discredited), but in general the approach has been to build really really big fusion reactors and make tiny incremental improvements over the course of decades. Now, a small-scale approach based on a phenomenon called sonoluminescence (meaning "light from sound") appears to be bearing fruit.

The St. Paul Winter Carnival Ice Palace has been open for a little over a week now, and they're doing a land-office business. For those not familiar with this odd tradition up here in the Frozen North, every decade or so on average since the late 1800's, the city of St. Paul has built a huge palace from blocks of ice cut from a nearby frozen lake. Lit with colored spotlights from the inside, the result is truly spectacular.

My reaction on seeing the Ice Palace was probably the same as most guys of my age and personality type: "Cool! I want one for my backyard!"