A list of design bugs that has been haunting computers since the invention of the GUI.
(Mac related, but mostly general stuff)

Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs

julie-h @ slashdot writes “DVD Jon has done it again.
This time it wasn’t Apple the target, but Microsoft’s WMV9 video format. There is as always a working Proof of Concept program with screenshots.”

Slashdot | Jon Bringing WMV9 to Linux

Downhill Battle has released the first public preview of Blog Torrent a “simplified” BitTorrent package that they developed because, “Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings.

Blog Torrent is a key first step of our plan to make software that builds participatory culture. Video (specifically television) is a huge part of culture. But it’s still an extremely top-down medium– even as the tools to high quality video and animation have become extremely cheap, very few people watch any significant amount of video other than what’s on networks and cable. We think homemade video can compete directly against professional television, especially as reality shows have brought down viewers expectations about the production values needed to make engaging TV.

Blog Torrent

Blog Torrent Preview | Downhill Battle

US boffins are developing mobile phones which learn user’s daily habits so that they can become “mobile digital secretaries”.

Going beyond the calendar feature common in many current mobiles, the “smarter smartphone” learns about people’s preferences by logging calls and noting when application like cameras are used. Location-based functions allow the phone to keep record where you work and socialise. The phone also makes note of Bluetooth pairing bonds, in theory allowing it to build a profile of who you socialise with. This information would be sent to a server which processes data and returns suggestions or reminders.

The Register | Smart phone predicts owner’s behaviour

New search engine ranks papers by importance, and finds the free versions.

Imagine searching the Internet and being able to restrict your results to academic texts. Today Google launched a free search engine that aims to do just that. Google Scholar searches only journal articles, theses,books, preprints, and technical reports across any area of research.

A test version of the search engine is available at scholar.google.com, so you can try it out. In a search for the phrase “human genome”, for example, a normal Google web search throws back 450,000 or so hits, with genome centres and databases and other websites ranked top.

news @ nature.com – Scientists get their own Google