Got a great idea that is good for humanity and better for the environment? Enter it in the the Buckminster Fuller Challenge:Each year a distinguished jury will award a single $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems in the shortest possible ( Read more... )

The Singularity Project intends to build a prototype 'dependable' operating system. From the technical report:Singularity is a research project in Microsoft Research that started with the question: what would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability? Singularity is working to answer this ( Read more... )

NewsCloud is an interesting news navigation system based on keyword frequency. However, the UI is a bit opaque and I suspect most people won't find it compelling enough to do more than click around a bit.

(Hat-tip Flutterby.)

Steven Berlin Johnson has an article in Discover about software to cut through the data smog:Strategies for dealing with infomania-a term coined by those researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry-involve variations of pulling the plug. Some people detox by retreating to a cabin with old-fashioned print on paper for a week once a year (Bill Gates ( Read more... )

Jakob Nielsen asks if WYSIWYG user interfaces are finally over?Unfortunately, we've now reached the limits of the current GUI paradigm. Displaying commands in menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes works with a limited number of elements. But Microsoft Word 2003 has 1,500 commands, and users typically have no clue where to find most of them ( Read more... )