When pasting text default to plain text.

When I am pasting text from one window into another window, I almost never want to preserve the font and formatting from the previous window. I'm moving information into a different context. The first context has a particular look and feel. The new context invariably has a different look and feel. I want the information that I'm adding into the new context to fit the overall look and feel for the new context, not the old one. Therefore, text should default to pasting as plain text (or "paste and match style" as Apple calls it). I should not have to click on "Paste Special..." and then choose "unformatted text" from a menu and then click OK, every time I want to paste something. That's too much clicking. The extra clicking should be preserved for the rare case where I do want the formatting preserved. If most users feel differently about this, at least make the default behavior configurable!

Things I wish Microsoft and Apple would do differently #7432

At a press conference this morning at the National Press club in Washington, the Space Solar Alliance for Future Energy (SSAFE) announced a milestone demonstration of the critical technology enabling SBSP:  long-distance, solar-powered wireless power transmission.

The Technology Liberation Front » A Major Milestone for Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP)

Many of Georgia's internet servers were under external control from late Thursday,' before the actual war began.

Slashdot | Evidence of Russian Cyberwarfare Against Georgia

Support from studios has been widely cited as the reason for Blu-ray's victory, but few consumers know that the studios were likely won over by the presence of a digital lock on movies called BD+, a far more sophisticated and resilient digital rights management, or DRM, system than that offered by HD DVD.

This is very interesting.

How Crypto Won the DVD War | Threat Level from Wired.com

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution.

John McCain’s MySpace Page “Enhanced”

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Go to Google News, and then past this into your URL window and hit enter

Open Notepad and type in this phrase, without the quote marks and with no carriage return: "Bush hid the facts". Now save it and open it again.

Seriously, try this before you click through this link.

27B Stroke 6: Fun MS bug.

In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

The trouble with Microsoft.

Windows Is So Slow, but Why? - New York Times

Acidus wrote:

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems

Tom will be talking about some enhancements he is working on for Wikipedia at Phreaknic. Looks like this issue is only growing.

Ironically, the original poster suffers from having looked at a particular article at a particularly bad timeslice and gotten an ugly result. The present text of the Bill Gates article is greatly improved. Interestingly, this is exactly the sort of problem that my wikipedia talk looks toward addressing.

Furthermore, its important to understand what wikipedia is and what it is not. Wikipedia is not a replacement for a traditional encyclopedia. This does not mean it isn't useful. A famous engineer's cynicism is: Cost, Speed, or Quality, pick one. An Encyclopedia is a model that picks Quality. Encyclopedias are slow and expensive, but the results are good. Wikipedias are fast and cheap, and the results are not as good.

If you want to teach 11 year olds about the history of Greece, you don't want wikipedia. They may get bad information, they can't easily reference a particular revision (most people don't understand how to do that with wikipedia), and they are going to be exposed to poor grammar and poor structure at a time when you are trying to teach them how to communicate effectively.

If you want to learn about a terrorist incident that occured two months ago, an encyclopedia is of no use. You could turn to the press, but old press articles are hard to find, and Wikipedia is often a vastly more useful resource, because it presents information in a matter of fact way and often draws from a wider array of resources (including press reports which form a primary source material).

Wikipedia fills the gap between the bleeding edge of the headlines and the cast in stone of dusty reference materials in a way that no other resource can. The sooner people realise that every tool doesn't have to solve every problem the better they'll be at figuring out how to make their tools really succeed at the particular things they are well suited for.

it suddenly occured to me that as there needs to be a way of judging, other than the facility of editing it, the quality of ( or usefulness, or a variety of criteria) of articles on wikipedia.
how about a simple facility of voting for articles and obviously articles which consistantly score badly should pop up for review.
although should each edit deserve a fresh score or should past editions be included but weighted according to the edit
that way adding a comma won't remove a particularly good set of scores and thus discourage edits or adding a comma set to zero a deservely bad score.
plus a scoring system is in accordance with wikipedia's democratic philosophy and adds an element of meritocracy.
systems need feedback
plus different writers could get, like the reputation agent, different scores

RE: Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems | The Register

The Internet's primary oversight body approved a plan Wednesday to create a virtual red-light district, setting the stage for pornographic Web sites to use new addresses ending in "xxx"

Lauren Weinstein has observed that this may open pandora's box as conservative groups move to push content into this TLD and ban it. Legislatures will write laws requiring ISPs to block it, as well as requiring sites with certain content to be listed under it. Some sites which are clearly not porn sites but which have some content which may be inappropriate for children will be forced into this box under duress, and they'll fight back. And then there is the matter of interstate commerce. In sum, this is going to start a constitutional fireworks show.

Furthermore, I want to point out that ICANN is totally inept at choosing TLDs in general. I don't think that they should be allowed to do it. They have too much power to shape the internet, they are really not accountable to anyone, and they are terrible at it.

Consider .BIZ. Self respecting people do business, not "bizzzzzz." Bizzzz is what people who fence stolen goods do. No one uses that tld.

.XXX is simply a bad choice for a domain name. They should have used .SEX. XXX implies hard core porn. SEX is far more likely to be acceptable to a wider range of websites and I think would result in fewer legal battles. For example, sites about sex education would love to be listed under .sex, but would refuse to be classified as XXX. However, the conservative christians will want them clumped into the red light district so they can block them more easily, and so the fireworks...

Not to mention that .KIDS, which I think is a great idea, and presents fewer legal difficulties, is still considered a bad idea by ICANN. Obviously some people might have different opinions about content that is appropriate for the .kids tld, but the issue is likely to be less contentious as no one will be forced into the domain.

I actually considered applying for a position at ICANN, but I am not Joi Ito. Yet.

CNN.com - Stage set for '.xxx' Internet addresses - Jun 2, 2005