"Indeed Guido van Rossum of Python has acknowledged that allowing TABs in Python source is a headache for many people and that were he to design Python again, he would forbid them."

Nielsen pulling percentages out of his hat again "If we were starting from scratch, we might improve the usability of a site by 1% or so by having a navigation rail on the right rather than on the left. But deviating from the standard would almost certainly impose a much bigger cost in terms of confusion and reduced ability to navigate smoothly."

For once, Jakob Nielsen gets it spot-on "For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon." -- Jakob Nielsen

If I worked for Diebold and wanted to help republicans win --- I would work harder on usability for machines going to friendly districts

From an on-line Interactive Fiction magazine issue from 2001 ... Dunno how I stumbled over this "If you're writing a story-game, the code should automatically unlock and open doors you walk through if you have the key; it's just tedious if it doesn't. But if you're writing a puzzle game, then the code definitely shouldn't - if a player has had to work like fury to get that key then let them have the satisfaction of getting to unlock the damn door with it. Otherwise it plays like the game is tapping its watch saying 'I've grown grey hairs waiting for you to get on and solve that! Can we hurry up, please?'"

Dan Cederholm invents a buzzword "While chatting with a friend about the recent influx of smarter web start-ups: “smart-ups!”, I exclaimed, patting myself on the back, and thinking I was the bomb.com. Guess you had to be there." -- Dan Cederholm

"The browser should use several easy to collect kinds of data to improve the user's ability to get value out of bookmarks."

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." "Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers."

"After all, if the conventional wisdom was working, the rate of systems being compromised would be going down, wouldn't it?"

Gay hate speech on conservative political web sites isn't "Peacefire created four pages, on free servers such as GeoCities, which consisted of anti-gay quotes copied from four different conservative Web sites: Dr. Laura, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. Using anonymous HotMail accounts, we then sent the URLs of the newly created pages to six blocking software companies, recommending that they block the newly created pages as "hate speech". After the companies had agreed to block the sites we created, we told them that all the quotes on those pages had been taken from the four conservative Web sites, and recommended that they block those Web sites as well. The blocking companies did not block those Web sites and did not respond to our inquiries."