As sort of a successor of a previous entry , here isa thesis:

Increasingly, people use Microsoft Windows not because they want tobut because they have to.

(There's various reasons they have to: they're forced to by theiremployer, they need to use programs that only run on Windows, such asIE or Microsoft Office or various computer games, or even because thealternative costs too much.)

This is a problem for Microsoft, because customers that are only usingyou because they don

Partly because I couldn't easily turn up any good pictures ofthem on the Internet, here's a picture of an Ethernet splitter in its natural habitat:

(Full sized version here .)

The grey thing with the scratches in the background is the side of myoffice bookcase. Since this is a university, it is a dun metal one,hence the shade. (It may technically be some species of green. At acertain level of dull colouration, it becomes hard to tell.)

You will

It's surprising how many little things about web usability you discoverywhen you write your own version of things like blog software; thewhole experience can be very educational. Unfortunately, I've mostlydiscovered these issues by stubbing my toes on them.

For instance, consider the usability issues of weblog URLs. Take whatappeared like an initial and obvious idea: having an entry's categoryappear in its URL. It turns out that this is a really bad idea, andI can boil why down to this