Speed dating comes to Madison. Probably popularized by "Sex and the City". I thought it was a good idea when I first saw it. Maybe I'll check one of these out someday and see if it actually is a good idea.
Thinking about event planning a while back, I jotted a note on my notepad that says "event planning via Jabber." Looks like someone else has started down that path, although it looks more like a reminder mechanism rather than a scheduling program. It of course lacks the negotiation and democratic nature that I would build into my scheduler.
Why the hell, as a user of a PC, do I still have to worry about physical hard drives and hard drive letters? This makes creating relative links to files on your computer hard, because if the file is on a different hard drive then I have to specify a drive letter. However, there's a good chance that I'll move that file to a different drive sometime in the future, especially if I get a new hard drive.
When I save a file to my computer, I should just be saving it to my computer and not worry about the device behind the scenes. If I add a hard drive to my computer, I should just have extra storage, not extra drive letters.
Consider the following scenario: there is a piece of information that a web service provides. I have multiple applications running on my PC that are interested in this piece of information. Will my (web services optimized) OS be cognizant of this fact and cache and distribute this information intelligently? Or would my apps operate in ignorance of each other and each have to make a trip to the network if it wanted an update on the information.
Here the scenario that got me thinking about this: Suppose there is a "presence" web service that provides information on when my buddies are online. Also suppose I have two applications running on my desktop that both want to display this presence information- an email client and an instant messaging client. When one of my buddies comes online, would the web service have to send two messages to my machine? One for the email app, and one for the IM app? Or could it just send a message to my device and trust that my device knows which apps are subscribed to this information? This seems much more efficient, especially if we start thinking of networks caching this information in addition to devices. If everyone in my company is running a stock ticker on their computer, and a lot of us are watching the same stocks, why should each device have to go out to the internet to retrieve the information? Wouldn't it be better to first see if my local network is already carrying this information and use the internet as a fallback mechanism?