have you ever tried to reposition a firefox or chrome window that is full of tabs?

what happens when the window manager uses BeOS style titlebars?

what happens to my webex/remote-desktop overlays when there is no empty space for them to live over?

somewhat related: have you ever tried to resize a window that does not have obvious resize control handles? or have you ever tried to *not* resize a window when the non-obvious control 'areas' take your click instead of the drag-to-select-text that you intended?

and don't get me started on scrollbars that appear and disappear depending on where you put your cursor instead of what the content is.

take a look at the green eye from brultech, or a less-capable unit from smart energy groups. if you want more of a do-it-yourself kit try the hardware (and software) from openenergymonitor.org. there are many power monitor systems on the market, but imho these three are making the most progress for the home/maker market.

pedestrians simply walk around the roundabout (in either direction) until they reach the desired street. a crosswalk at each street that enters the roundabout (where incoming traffic must stop or yield anyway) makes this obvious.

is that a calculator that you hang around your neck? :)

i imagine a set of 'wifi-vision goggles' or, more generally, non-visible electro-magnetic spectrum goggles. when you look through the goggles, you see the normal world with overlays of different colors representing different parts of the non-visible (to humans) electromagnetic spectrum, with the brightness proportional to the signal strength.

if 3d edge detection is possible, then render a surface as well.

you could filter individual wifi channels, or filter for other bands such as vhf/uhf television, am/fm radio frequencies, microwave ovens, etc.

alas, too many projects and not enough time.

> Yeah, it would nice nice if Firewire was there. However Firewire has always been associated with
> "Professional" and it has become an artifact of days gone by. Apple sunk FW themselves when they
> pushed USB to the forefront on iMacs and even with iPods now.

it's not just about "consumer" versus "professional". how about so-called "professional" features on a small form factor? the problem is that someone at apple is dictating what categories their customers must fit into. and if you do not fit into a category, too bad.

apple must do this, to some extent, since they are constrained by manufacturing processes and technology. it would be wonderful if they could do the ultimate build-to-order: specify a form factor, then add in the ports you want, cpu speed you want, battery size you want, screen gloss/matte, etc.

unfortunately they cannot.

however, even more unfortunately, they create artificial barriers such as "illuminated keyboard only on non-entry-level models". so one must pay for a faster cpu and bigger hard disk even if all one wants is an illuminated keyboard.

dell's web site reflects this kind of attitude as well: "home" versus "small business" versus "business". does anyone else out there cringe at such web sites? i want a computer, i do not want to pigeonhole myself into someone else's taxonomy just to find the product i need.