CNet has a great lead paragraph on the story about the Cube being abandoned by Apple. “Apple Computer’s Power Mac G4 Cube has achieved in death what
eluded it in life: demand.”

Wired.com reports on AMD barely beating Wall Street’s lowered expectations for its second-quarter earnings and gave
a “grim outlook for the current quarter.

Chief executive Jerry Sanders said Thursday he believed, however, that business will pick up significantly in 2002.”

From The Register: “South Australian charity PCs for Kids – which hands out second-hand PCs to poor
and disadvantaged people — has apparently been receiving calls from MS’ lawyers
insisting that they cough up the Au$200 Microsoft per-PC tax aka software licence.”

CNN.com has more information on the Linux-powered wireless security analyzing tool.

“On 8 November 2001, the Netherlands Unix User’s Group (NLUUG) will
hold its annual Autumn conference. You are invited to submit abstracts
for tutorials or presentations that discuss new developments in the
area of the UNIX desktop and/or UNIX multimedia applications. We are
also interested in presentations on user experiences with UNIX
desktops and multimedia applications.” The rest is at LWN.net.

InformationWeek examines Linux competing in the handhelds market. “Playing the underdog is familiar territory
for Linux, but now the open-source
community prepares to go up against PDA
leaders Palm and Microsoft. To make inroads in the market, Linux will
need to provide a standardized platform for business applications.”

From PRNewswire: Lineo, Inc., a leading innovator in
embedded systems, real time and high availability solutions, today announced
the availability of Lineo Availix Vertical Clustering 1.0, an innovative
solution to provide Internet data centers, large Internet service providers
and access providers with high scalability and performance for non-stop access
services.

Posted at LWN.net: “Only two short months after its release, the media has awarded EnGarde
with high marks in the areas of security, performance, price and features!

Each review shows an interesting perspective outlining EnGarde’s strengths
and weaknesses. We thought that you may be interested taking a look at
what they had to say.”

Kelly McNeill writes, “According to this osOpinion news piece, it appears as if the remaining 17 others states involved in the suit against Micrososoft for anti competative practives are on schedule to press on against their suit against Microsoft with no intention to settle, this despite New Mexico setteling with Microsoft earlier this week. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller went so far as to say that they have both the resources and resolve to see this matter through. This is conforting considering how Microsoft’s new strategy appeared to to be pick off one state at a time.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Whether or not you believe your computer has a mind of its own, it is true that applications speak to us and expect us to interact with them. Sometimes there’s a distinct communication gap. The Interface Hall of Shame points out some hilarious GUI goof-ups; I hope you will enjoy browsing them as much as I did.The Interface Hall of Shame hasn’t been updated for about a year. But the examples here are not only timely, they are entertaining, and useful to those who are or will be engaging in the design of graphical user interfaces. Open Source programmers especially should heed the lessons here so that the applications they create can continue to be superior to closed source.

The Hall of Shame is sponsored by Isys Information Architects, a company that spends every day creating interface designs and usability engineering services for its clients. With the Interface Hall of Shame, they’re poking fun at those unfortunate interface designers of fewer talents by pointing out “how software should not be designed.” Let’s go see.

A big focus of the site is the review of the QuickTime 4.0 player GUI. The review begins: “One look at QuickTime 4.0 Player and one must wonder whether Apple, arguably the most zealous defender of consistency in user interface design, has abandoned its twenty-year effort to champion interface standards.” The review continues on in fairly technical and detailed terms and proceeds to rip the QuickTime interface to shreds. Fairly interesting, but not the best part of this site.

The rest of the site is divided into collections of different types of deficiencies: controls, “stupidity,” visual, color, terminology, errors, tabs, metaphors, and globalization. There’s also a section full of more in-depth reviews along the lines of the QuickTime decimation.

Each of these sections houses a collection of screen-shot examples from various applications, some well known, others obscure. When you read these, you will laugh. You will wonder how programmers could be this stupid — and then you will wonder how so many software companies get by with no quality control. What about beta testers?

Perhaps software users are so accustomed to being treated as lesser creatures by companies like Microsoft that they simply accept inferior quality as their due; or, like some people I know and get irritated with, they refuse to immerse themselves in technology. “Old way works better,” they say. Gaffes like these are surface evidence to justify that position, at least to them.

But hey, we don’t want to get all serious and depressing. And we can afford to be jolly. I didn’t see one example of Open Source software in the whole bunch; not only that, but it’s Friday. Have a look at the Interface Hall of Shame, shake your head and let go with a few belly laughs. It’s good for the soul.