PPT has one big advantage: it is written by the same people who wrote Windows. So it can seize the Windows display and keyboard, and take control over the entire UI. I happen to think that's A Bad Thing™ but I may be in the minority on that.

Of course …

R. Lucente shared an email with me that included Cary Millsap's Volume Theorem.

Theorem:

No human wants to see more than 10 rows. Ever.

Which caused me to wonder why anyone would ever use an RDBMS as a slow, complex, high-overhead message queue. I've seen it done several times, and …

Simple object persistence (i.e., serialization to a file system) is what pickle, marshal and shelve do.

However, here's the next thing of some interest OODB's.

Zope's ZODB . The original OODB for Python, the backbone of Zope.

buzhug : "a fast, pure-Python database engine, using a syntax that Python programmers should …

Here's how to recognize a Faerie Dust request:

1. We have identified a problem. It can be with almost anything: scalability, reliability, auditability, any Quality Measure .

2. We're pursuing a specific technology. Typically, something that has the lowest impact on our architecture.

3. We can't address anything other than this …

"There has been a lot of skepticism about the usefulness--and necessity--of the Ribbon, and I have to admit that I was among the doubters. Why change something that works? Because, according to Microsoft, the current interface has become bloated with too many menus."

Ugh. It's bloated, so we'll add features …

This is the part that helped me understand this: "It was kind of like a miracle drug," [Ruth Samuelson] said. "It's going to do all this stuff and I just didn't think it was possible."

It appears to me, just reading this account, that there wasn't a clearly articulated problem …

Nisley says "Imagine a programming contractor proposing that increasing the average interrupt latency by 10 μs would reduce the module size by 5 percent and improve the error rate by 3 percent. When was the last time you saw precise numeric relations between various aspects of a programming project, before …

Hobbit says:

"Everything in the windows world does not directly work with the "rapidly-evolving" windows api's (for example, c# devs rarely concern themselves with api calls.) If there is such a lack of clarity in these API's causing a "barrier to innovation," why is windows still the easiest and most …

I recently reviewed some end user-authored use cases, and they -- of course -- reflect the way people actually work. The computer system was largely incidental to what they did.

Each use case listed half a dozen actors, had a dozen or more steps, and involved many off-line interactions among the actors …