Intriguing article on why we love rounded corners: http://www.basement.org/archives/2005/11/why_do_we_love_rounded_corners.html

Interesting read, but I disagree with the hypothesis given for why we (currently) love rounded corners.

I would guess, and history will prove me right or not, that the primary reason we love rounded corners is nothing more substantial than temporary differentiation.

On the web, for instance, it remains true that rounded corners are a minor barrier-to-entry of "cool" website designs (I had to waste an hour of my life making those silly rounded corners on this blog in Photoshop, and then playing with CSS and tables so they worked properly in the major browsers), so they do, to a very small degree, differentiate a design. By the same token, there was a time when everyone thought that animated cursors, background music, and intro flash graphics were a great thing because each of them required a bit of knowledge and effort. It certainly isn't a given that such preferences remain.

Earlier I said that history would prove me right or not, but really there is plenty of historical evidence already demonstrating this recursion of aesthetic preferences: Design trends have tended towards extreme roundedness ("organic"), back to squared and sharp ("modern"), then back to rounded, then back to squared and sharp, in an endless cycle. You can look in virtually every market (cars given as examples here) where this cycle took place, with each design philosophy welcomed as interesting and fresh looking, but quickly evolving to old and dated as everyone followed suit.

Soon enough everything old is new again, and it repeats ad nauseam.

I would predict that as more and more blog templates incorporate rounded corners, and CSS3 makes them absolutely pedestrian, rounded corners will become the domain of the amateur johnny-come-lately. At that point we'll be talking about our next-generation, ultra-modern square corners.

Lately I've been getting a lot of "we'd love to get your feedback about the [Product you purchased or Event you attended]. Please take at few moments and fill out our survey at ..." request emails. Usually they have the carrot of some trivial low-value prize. Other times they exhort you to help make the world a better place by giving some feedback.

There was a time, quite a few years ago, when I enjoyed filling out these surveys, and I actually participated. I really, truly felt that I was helping improve events and products, and generally making the world a better place. And hey, there's a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of winning a $10 Amazon coupon!

It was on someone else's time anyways (most of these are sent to employees at workplaces who are more likely to give up 15 minutes or more for some random survey), so why not?

Nowadays I never fill out online surveys - I've become too jaded about them. All opinion companies pull the same gross abuse-of-trust scam, which is the old "tell you that it's only a couple of minutes, but really it's 20 pages long with 10 questions on each page, with absolutely no indicator of how far you are. Ha ha ha sucker!". Of course they're hoping that once you've committed the time for the first 4 pages, you're going to keep pushing yourself to finish what you started. "Okay...fine...just one more set of questions," until you've burned 45 minutes of your time to help an opinion company get a commission.

Wasted Power

I've been thinking a lot about power consumption in our PCs. For instance that a PC sitting idle, monitor(s) in standby mode, is consuming 70W or more in many cases. All while doing nothing more than anxiously awaiting your return (if you're silly enough to run some sort of 3D "screensaver", that number increases significantly).

Often they're idling around the clock on the off chance that you might wander by and desire instant PC satisfaction. In the corporate setting it's frequently policy to leave workstations on around the clock, for the infrequent occasion that the network admin team needs to roll out a patch.

In the former case you should look at standby or "hibernation". In the latter case, the admins should be using Wake-on-LAN, which is supported close to universally. Dated arguments about system failure or hard drives seizures on start-up aren't rational, or even statistically valid worries.

Increasing Consumption

Which brings me to online power consumption: the power your computer is burning when it's busy doing actually useful work for you. Over the past decade processor power consumption has skyrocketed (with brief retreats, followed by the next surge into power gluttony). Thankfully, though, the power consumed by a processor does scale in a loose correlation with load: A processor at 100% utilization uses more power, and generates more heat, than one idling, courtesy of various power saving strategies available on modern PCs and operating systems (such as the HLT instruction). This is even more evident with mobile processors, which actually reduce the voltage under a lower processing load, saving even more energy (and thus reducing the heat output proportionately, as well as the need for noisy internal fans).

These savings are offset, though, by the monster co-processor that most PCs have: The videocard GPU, which offloads 3D graphics operations to a hugely complex piece of silicon (video card GPUs are far more complex than your CPU in most cases). Couple that with huge amounts of power-sucking ultra-high speed onboard memory, and video cards are now pushing 150W+ of power consumption under a load (such as when running a 1st person shooter). Thankfully modern video subsystem turn off a substantial portion of their circuitry when it's unneeded, such as in the 2D world when composing a document in Word, vastly reducing power consumption.

Nonetheless when the demand is high and you add together the load of a processor running at 100% with a video card doing the same, you have a recipe for a tremendous power sink that doubles as a competent space heater.

The end result of this power consumption is increased resource usage, higher electric bills and demand on the grid, PCs that require more fans and cooling solutions (and thus create more noise pollution), and often a hotter, less comfortable environment.

Even if you don't care about the environment or rising power costs, and if you enjoy the balmy 40C room temperature, when you're using a mobile PC the the lifespan of your battery, along with the ability to use your laptop without it igniting your pants on fire, depends upon the efficient use of computing resources. In that case you absolutely want your processor and supporting systems (e.g. graphics GPU) doing the absolute least amount of work possible to satisfy your requirements, doing what matters to you without wasting cycles with frivolity.

Windows Vista

Which brings me to Windows Vista (previously Windows Longhorn).

One of the major new features of Windows Vista is the Aero Glass experience (both as an API for applications, and the shell itself). Aero Glass in essence turns your desktop into a video game: Instead of the current model where the GDI draws on a 2D palette, updating the video card memory (making use of acceleration routines that the video card supports) only when changes occur, the model of Aero Glass is that of a traditional game: With every "frame" the scene is wiped clean and re-rendered from scratch, layering "textures" that represent application canvases onto 3-D polygons and building the user experience from there.

This system will attempt to push 60-90FPS of user experience goodness through your video card.

In many cases this will max out even high end video cards. Even where it doesn't, all of the shaders and T&L engines on the video card are engaged - the additional power consumption will be considerable. This could easily add 150W+ to your system power load, and could absolutely devastate battery lifespan for portables. This is on top of the fact that you're suddenly measuring your GUI in frames per second.

In other words the new, shiny user experience in Aero Glass isn't just making use of unleveraged hardware in your PC (which is a valid point - there's a big powerful graphics card there, so why should it go to waste) - It's also considerably adding to the power consumption, heat generation, and cooling requirements. In the mobile world it would be hugely detrimental to the battery lifespan.

All to add a bit of eye candy that, at least as far as I've seen, marginally improves usability.

A recent up-and-comer web destination has been http://www.digg.com.

Promoted as a democratic competitor to Slashdot, Digg has differentiated itself by the fact that the community (in true "Web 2.0" form) determines the visibility of stories - as opposed to the paid editors of Slashdot - voting stories up by "Digging" them. Those stories that are voted upon enough get boosted to the "front page" (or the front page of one of the sections, like software), vastly increasing their exposure, while the stories that don't catch on quickly degrade to irrelevance in the Digg world.

The problem I have with Digg is the same problem I see with many community-driven sites: It isn't a large body of domain-knowledgeable, unbiased, critical evaluators spending needed time to evaluate the worthiness of submissions, but instead is largely a bunch of fly-by visitors that are often going with whatever has the feel of an appropriate story, going with whatever the herd thinks (in situations like that, where voting is free, people often express their feelings superficially, feeling obligated to contribute to the democracy but preferring to do so with minimal effort). Groupthink in action. This same principal applies at Flickr as well, where the most interesting pictures are the pictures from people heavily involved in the community, and that have already appeared as interesting (e.g. most of the viewers aren't talent scouts out watching the raw talent - instead they're watching the big leagues and commenting on who's good). It's not that those pictures aren't interesting - there are often fantastic pictures in that set - but rather it's just that they are selected from a very small set of the available Flickr photos.

This same problem appears in Slashdot moderation, where it's quite easy to game the system. You can ensure that your comment will get moderated up to Score:5 by following a couple of simple posting rules.

• Post early - right after the story appears
• Post near the top - if you didn't get in early, then post as a reply to one of the early stories. Most moderators are lazy and just want to find something to blow the points on quickly
• Longer posts usually get moderated up (even if it's redundantly saying the same thing)
• Say something cluefully anti-Microsoft (not just an empty M$ rant - the crowd is too cynical about that), pro-Firefox, pro-Linux, or contrarian pro-Microsoft (anti-Linux will never get you points, but if you're pro-Microsoft in a contrarian way - the "I'll probably get moderated down for this..." - you'll get the vote of the contrarian crowd).
• Make a post soliciting an insightful comment. e.g. "Could someone explain to me, an unpolished rube, why...?"
• It's critical to get the first mod up, by following the above rules, because many mods look at the already culled posts, scanning the Score:2 and Score:3 posts for something to moderate up.

This is possible because many of the people with mod points simply want to exhaust them as quickly as possible - this is actually encouraged by Slashdot - so they moderate up whatever has the feel of a prototypical Score:5 comment. Even if it isn't based on the referenced article, makes a nonsensical point, or is a brutally obvious karma whore, it will be Score:5 in no time.

Of course Digg might not be ideal, and even though the highest ranked stories are examples of Groupthink herding in action, it's not like the editors at Slashdot do a better job. Most of them don't even read their own site (evident by the incredible number of duplicate stories. I visit Slashdot once or twice a day, yet even I manage to immediately spot the duplicates that people who get paid to do this fulltime amazingly can't), and many of the stories they pick are dated and of marginal interest to most of the community.

My ideal situation would be a composite site - I'd love to see the best of both worlds, where it isn't a select group of apathetic employees doing the selection, nor is it a random group of herding individuals engaged in groupthink, but rather it's my own anointed group of selectors. This could be accomplished in a Digg type setting by allowing me to agree or disagree with the selection of a story. As it learns my opinion of stories, complex associative data mining could be used to build a set of stories agreed to by a set of individuals with similar selection criteria. I don't want to have to manually select "friends" or build any web of trusts, but rather it should be easy to implement based upon my tastes correlated with the tastes of others.

In a simplified form, what I'm talking about is implemented by http://www.stumbleupon.com/, albeit in web toolbar form.

Every month or so, increasing in frequency as the holiday season approaches (courtesy of PR shops acting on behalf of Microsoft and its hardware partners), there are newspaper and television pieces about Microsoft's Media Center OS and the hardware that hosts it. Each time it's presented as a revolution in the living room, and there are bold predictions about how this year it'll take the world by storm.

While everyone seems to focus on the operating system as the critical link that will yield convergence, I think that's the least of the reason why computers were deported from the living rooms to home offices everywhere.

Instead there have been some historical problems that have thwarted convergence:

1. As computers grew from the Commodore 64s and Atari 800 era into highly capable devices, like the Amiga and Atari ST, that growth brought with it a need for more resolution than televisions could handle. This is what kicked the computer out of the living room, as computers now required their own, special monitor, and conversely there was no way that you were going to watch television on a 14" VGA monitor. Quite a few years back, just under a decade ago, Gateway tried making a 27" television/computer monitor to support their convergence device, but the result was a subpar computer monitor that doubled as a subpar television.
2. The wires of keyboards and mice are very unsavoury in the living room, not to mention that a modern PC needs to be networked to really be usable.
3. Computers take a long time to get going - they aren't very convenient - and they are noisy beasts.
4. Computers are ugly.

Thankfully there have been some great advances in all of these areas. First and foremost, home television and computer display technology have merged, and we now have relatively inexpensive, large (27"+) multimedia displays yielding a million pixels or more (720p and up). Many of these feature perfect-fidelity digital DVI or HDMI ports to transport the display of the PC accurately on your living room display. My living room television is a better computer monitor than the one in my home office.

Advances in wireless technology have brought us wireless networking (no running CAT5e to your living room), but also reliable wireless keyboards and mice: you can stick them under the couch, and you don't have a sloppy setup in the corner of the room.

On the topic of aesthetics, several manufacturers are now (finally!) making PCs in a standard home-theatre equipment form, making it fit in beautifully alongside your other equipment. No longer does convergence mean having a beige mini-tower in the corner of your room. With this they've equipped it with virtually silent fans and hard drives, ensuring that it's sonically unobtrusive.

So now we have good looking, high power, convenient computing devices that display gorgeously on our living room displays. Convergence is upon us, and whether it's used to play MAME games, poker online, or as an MP3 repositorie, the computer has re-entered the living room. I don't even care if it acts as a PVR - I have a stand-alone device to do that - but if it can interface with the television source provider and their HDTV and digital content, and it does a competent job at it, then it could do that task as well.

Sidenote: Microsoft recented inked an agreement with the cable and satellite cabal that will see them including CableCard functionality in their media centers by next Christmas. This is tremendously important, as without this there was no way that your Media Center could make use of all of the digital and digital HDTV channels on the provider's feed, instead being limited to the analog signals.

Speaking of that, a "fun project" I had been considering was a DVI loop-thru adapter in my media PC - one that took the uncompressed DVI 720p signal in an input, and passed it untouched into a DVI 720p DVI-D output. The purpose would be that I could then start overlaying graphics on the computer - the processing demands would be significant, but I mean things like a little translucent icon saying that mail has arrived or a skype call is incoming, or whatever. Of course this brings up digital rights management (DRM) issues: This would not work for HDCP protected content, nor will it work when Microsoft integrates CableCard functionality, as they'll have the swear on their first goldfish's grave that there is no way evil programmers can alter or intercept the signal.

This Friday I was chatting with a respected industry contact - someone who I consider reliable regarding Google's technology initiatives - and was passed some interesting and exciting information. The impetus of the discussion was an entry I put up back on October 3rd - a post in which I opined that Google is big enough that it can lead web standards rather than just follow them. If the source is to be believed, and I think they should be believed, I made a lucky guess and there is some truth to it.

I will add the caveat that the information I have been fed could be completely bogus misdirection: It could be a market research probe to see how the community accepts it, or it could be a bit of a hint of what Google is up to in efforts to prepare the marketplace. I should also say that normally I would disregard this sort of information if I can't publicly attribute it to someone credible, but in this case I find it so logical, and thought-provoking, that I'll make an exception.

The "facts", purportedly and as interpreted by me from a casual conversation (these were conveyed by verbal chatting, and not a formal white paper, though I have gotten them to confirm that the gist of this post are accurate in regards to what we discussed), are as follows:

• Google is rolling out a data center strategy to support nationwide - and eventually world-wide - pseudo thin-clients. This will be technically facilitated by geographically distributed computing centers, as well as by an extraordinary dark-fiber bandwidth capacity that Google will bring online.
• Google has been developing a completely new thin-client protocol (for the purpose of brevity I'm going to call it G-Windows for the rest of this entry, though that name is entirely of my own making) - a hybrid between the high-level document layout of HTML, the vector capabilities of SVG, combined with the best attributes of X, Remote Desktop Protocol, and even DirectX/GDI. Clients of G-Windows will be rich enough to manage the high level abstractions (e.g. like HTML), while still allowing side-by-side and completely integrated server-side rendering with integrated streaming raster graphics.
• Purportedly G-Windows will be published and open once version 1.0 is released.
• Google has been proceding with a cross-platform implementation plan for a fork of Mozilla/Firefox that supports G-Windows (no mention of Internet Explorer, but presumably a plug-in for IE would make sense as well).
• Google has been in talks with an unnamed large set-top box vendor (think PVRs) to provide a thin-client media center box that natively supports G-Windows.
• Google will roll out side-by-side, but more interactive and feature rich, G-Windows applications to compliment their existing web apps.

This could make for some very, very exciting times, and it might provide a more feature rich programming model and user interface than the current duct-tape of technologies delivers.

Ray Ozzie has been pushing his agenda at Microsoft, one of his suggestions being that Microsoft should pursue more of an advertisement-supported revenue model (Google is doing it, so everyone should. Right?). Apparently some at Microsoft are buying this line, which is incredibly sad: Microsoft has been one of the few remaining customer-focused technology companies out there.

Advertisement supported content is wrong on so many levels.

First is the fact that you're still paying for it (unless you're a hermit. I wrote about this in regards to content on the web about 4 years ago), but instead of directly paying fair value, you're indirectly paying far more through countless middlemen and vested interests, grossly inflating the actual cost.

Whether it's sneakers that are made by a company that spends twice the amount on marketing than they spend on their products, or cars that have thousands of dollars hidden in the price to sponsor the next outing of Survivor: Advertising costs to support supposedly-free content are coming from someone, and that someone is you.

Of course, some awareness campaigns are necessary to educate the public about the advantages of certain products, yet as a consumer there is tremendous danger in utilizing advertisements to make purchasing choices. For instance, we often hear about how advantageous Google ads are because they're context specific (e.g. "They're good because they're actually useful to me! I'm looking for X, and what do you know - Google is showing me an ad about X!"), but really they're terrible: They aren't placed based upon merit and applicability for your purpose, but rather based upon how much they paid to appear there. If you buy a product, or even give it more attention than its competitors, because it "conveniently" appeared in a Google ad, you're buying based upon nothing more than the marketing budget of the source company - It may be the absolute worst product in its genre, but it got a little namespace in your head because of an advertising budget. This sort of market supports the continuation and success of mediocrity, where marketing trumps merit.

In an era of instant communications and endless online resources and communities to learn about products and solutions, obviously biased advertisements shouldn't be a credible source of purchasing information.

Second is the fact that when something (a magazine, a newspaper, a television program, a website) is substantially funded by advertisements, it answers to a different master. An obvious example would be the network television channels (e.g. NBC, CBS, ABC). These networks have been spitting out the same middle-of-the-road tripe for years, building their programs around ample opportunities for product placements, and for content so inoffensive that their break-away sponsors won't demand changes. Their programs are made for their sponsors as much as they're made for their audience, which is why you see the terrible challenges on shows like the Apprentice, with each episode featuring 15 minutes of overt commercials to pound home the message of the other 44 minutes of covert commercials. Contrast this with some of the innovative, award-winning programming that have come from the subscriber-sponsored channels like HBO (where the viewer really is the master). Compare the incredible documentaries of PBS to the latest pander-to-the-sponsors regurgitation of the same sitcom script that has been playing for decades that you see on "the networks". In the print medium, how likely is it that the newspaper or the magazine are going to slam a dud product from their primary sponsors?

Thirdly, haven't we been through this during the first .COM bubble? Did no one learn? Really - does no one remember?

During that bubble it seemed that every business model was based upon advertisement supported content (even "free" PCs if you subjected yourself to continuous advertisements), until the final, ridiculous climax when there were software products that actually outright paid you (or at least your macro-engine) to "watch" advertisements. Of course we know how that turned out, but here we go again.