Files, files, files… people seem obsessed with the desktop metaphor. Might as well make it complete:

In all honesty, I think the biggest achievement for computing over the next 50 years will be finally retiring the start menu. I’m not getting my hopes up though…

Slate has an article detailing how women are more likely to cave under pressure than men. The evidence is that women make more unforced errors when playing tennis as the score gets tight; men do not show this effect.

Other interesting evidence: men perform better when competing against anyone, but women only perform better when competing against women. In competition with men, women perform the same as if doing the task alone.

The article does not address whether this is due to innate sexual differences, cultural training or something unique to professional tennis players.

Apple has had some great advertisements recently. I love Vista — it is a major step forward compared with Windows XP — but that doesn’t mean I cannot recognize flaws; LUA (Limited User Access) is one of them. Both Mac OS and Vista have a variety of scenarios where you must give applications authorization before they can perform tasks that may compromise your computer’s security. However, Vista — due to the flawed architecture of Windows (especially the registry) — requires this authorization almost every time you want to do anything remotely interesting. Apple (rightly) pokes fun:

They also have a great time talking about the advantages of the built-in iSight inside every iMac and Apple laptop, one of my favorite features of the Apple platform:

Microsoft also has a long way to go with their movie authoring application:

Apparently Nintendo fans have their version of the ads:

Slate thinks at least 419 people have been wrongly executed during the 20th century. We presently execute between 50 and 100 people per year. Assuming the present rate of executions was the same throughout the last century, between 5% and 10% of executions are erroneous. The majority of those executed are poor and/or minorities.