A lot of people have been speculating lately that Microsoft may be eclipsed by Google. I'm sympathetic to that view, and I do think that Google poses a threat, but there's a dark horse in this race: Apple Computer Inc., which has quietly put together quite a run for itself.

I recently switched email programs. I had been using Thunderbird, pretty much for a single feature: its client-side Bayesian spam filtering. Now that Laszlo is using a new mail server and we're off of god-awful Exchange, I can run spamassassin against my IMAP account. Spamassassin is awesome, but even better is my new mail client: Pine.

After my last post, I started thinking about how often I've run into a situation where the notion of "groups" complicates what would otherwise be a simple process. The classic situation is is that the user wants to perform an action on an element, but that action is group-associative, not element-associative. So, in order for the user to do what she wants to do, she has to stop mid-process and create a new group.