radiant.matrix

An article over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog titled “One in five use iPod at work” got me thinking. Especially this bit:

at least one productivity expert warns that listening to music might cause people to work less.

It’s these kind of broad generalizations that lead to Dilbert-esque policies like the “30% of British firms [that] have banned the use of iPods in the workplace.”

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So, what exactly am I supposed to do? I wonder if it would stand up in court: “But I didn’t know which sign to disregard, so I guessed!”

Whatever you think of Mr. Bush, this report ought to make you giggle:

You’ve done it before. You hit a link in your bookmarks, and it isn’t there; the site exists, and the document you’re looking for is still on that site, but its URL has changed. Why? It’s usually one of a few reasons, and at first blush all of them seem perfectly acceptable:

1. Documents on the site needed to be moved in the filesystem. URLs often map to the physical filesystem, so the URLs changed when the physical move was made.
2. Documents needed a new logical organization. Perhaps the site grew and information was hard to find, so the documents were reorganized in a more meaningful way.
3. The software operating the site changed. The names of application components and parameters are often in the URL, so when the software changes, the URL may change.

Of course, none of these is really an acceptable reason for a site’s URL to change. The tying of URLs to the specifics above is a matter of convenience; an exposure of the mechanism by which the resource is being delivered. Exposure of these mechanisms in the URL is the equivalent of exposing code in the GUI for an application — convenient for programmers, but worse than useless for the majority of end users.

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