This is hilarious — a spoof movie which runs the audio from the launch presentation of Windows Vista over illustrations drawn entirely from Mac OS X. A neat way of making the point that what Apple does today, Microsoft will also do — eventually.
F’s the letter when it comes to reading web pages
From Jakob Neilsen’s Alertbox) newsletter…
F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.
In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:
Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.
Obviously, users’ scan patterns are not always comprised of exactly three parts. Sometimes users will read across a third part of the content, making the pattern look more like an E than an F. Other times they’ll only read across once, making the pattern look like a rotated L (with the crossbar at the top). Generally, however, reading patterns roughly resemble an F, though the distance between the top and lower bar varies…
Help!
A window in a Cambridge street.
The road just taken
On the way from Kenmare, last Monday. It was one of those magical days when the rain-rinsed Irish air is so clear that you have the feeling that a layer has been peeled off your eyes.
Cheep, cheep
Happy Easter from two little twerps patiently awaiting their moment of glory as cake-decorations.
The Chinese attitude to IP
This morning’s Observer column…
The one phrase you hear very little of whenever China’s economic potential is discussed is ‘intellectual property’. This is because China is world champion in every branch of piracy known to man. I don’t think there’s a CD, DVD, computer game or software package that is not illicitly available for a dollar or two in virtually every town in China.
That’s why the top executives of Western technology companies are – to a man or woman – agreed upon one thing: that while they are more than happy to have their products manufactured by Chinese labour in Chinese factories, they will never, ever entrust their intellectual property to any Chinese organisation…
Quote of the day
For the poor, globalization is not an accomplished fact but a condition that remains to be achieved. The irony of the current phase of globalization is that it universalizes the demand for a better life without providing the means to satisfy it.
John Gray, writing about “The Global Delusion” in The New York Review of Books.
StopBadware.org
An interesting new initiative by the Berkman Centre, Oxford’s Internet Institute and Lenovo. In an interview with MIT Tech Review, Johathan Zittrain described the motivation for the initiative thus:
Machines clogged with “malware” — the catchall term for code that infiltrates PCs to steal data, send out spam, or produce pop-up messages — are already costing billions annually and testing everyone’s tolerance.
And a single destructive virus could prompt harsh regulations and cause millions of people to seek safe, closed networks.
To help fight back, Zittrain and fellow academics have just launched a new antimalware effort (www.stopbadware.org) funded by Google, Sun Microsystems, and Lenovo (the Chinese firm that acquired IBM’s PC division).
Iceland comes first in broadband access
Who’d have thought it? BBC News Online: Iceland comes first in broadband.
According to the [OECD] Iceland has 78,017 broadband subscribers and South Korea 12,190,711.
TOP FIVE BROADBAND OECD COUNTRIES
Iceland: 26.7%
Korea: 25.4%
Netherlands: 25.3%
Denmark: 25%
Switzerland: 23.1%The leading countries in broadband use per capita all had more than 25% of their net users subscribing to such a service. Iceland led the field on 26.7%.
By comparison, the UK was ranked 12th with 15.9%, just behind the US with 16.8%.
The importance of sex
No — not what you think. It’s the headline on a fascinating Economist editorial on the importance of women in the workforce. Here’s a sample:
EVEN today in the modern, developed world, surveys show that parents still prefer to have a boy rather than a girl. One longstanding reason why boys have been seen as a greater blessing has been that they are expected to become better economic providers for their parents’ old age. Yet it is time for parents to think again. Girls may now be a better investment.
Girls get better grades at school than boys, and in most developed countries more women than men go to university. Women will thus be better equipped for the new jobs of the 21st century, in which brains count a lot more than brawn. In Britain far more women than men are now training to become doctors. And women are more likely to provide sound advice on investing their parents’ nest egg: surveys show that women consistently achieve higher financial returns than men do…