Early this week it was announc …

Early this week it was announced that the Irish Police force, the Gardai, are to follow a zero tolerance policy with regards to speeding. If you do even 1 mph above the 30 mph speed limit you’ll be fined and receive penalty points. This of course ignores the fact that both speedometers and police radar guns aren’t completely accurate. Owen has more to say on his site.

There's a thread this morning …

There’s a thread this morning on the ILUG mailing list about switching from a Windows email server to Linux. Here’s one reply from Kevin Lyda.

On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 01:22:55AM -0000, Ciaran Costelloe wrote:

> The issue that worries me is switching for Windows-based email to
> Linux-based email.

obviously support is a big issue with linux. that’s something to consider. you sent your mail at 1:22am and it took nearly 30 minutes to get two answers to your questions. obviously with software from large, closed-source software firms you’d get much quicker answers at a cheaper price.

The Sendo Papers: Microsoft's …

The Sendo Papers: Microsoft’s Master Plan Basically Microsoft was desperate to sign on an OEM for it’s Smartphone and got Sendo on board by investing in them and promising that they would be a launch partner. However, Microsoft then used the industry knowledge garnered from Sendo and the deal itself to go out and recruit other manufacturers like Orange. When that was done, Microsoft did what they needed to do to screw Sendo.

The Usability of Open Source S …

The Usability of Open Source Software “They just don’t like to do the boring stuff for the stupid people!” (Sterling, 2002)

Open source communities have successfully developed a great deal of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability.