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Let's take another look at the basic principle that determines which programs show up in the Start menu: Each time you launch a program, it "earns a point", and the longer you don't launch a program, the more points it loses. If you stare at this long enough, you might see a hole in this principle: What about a program that you launch once and ...

In the initial designs for the Start menu, the list of most-frequently-used programs on the Start menu would be completely empty the first time you opened it. This was perfectly logical, since you hadn't run any programs at all yet, so nothing was frequently-used because nothing had been used at all! Perfectly logical and completely stupid-looking....

Not just "super exciting" but "super-super-exciting". (But at least he's not super super super excited.) I don't consider this super encouraging. Episode 1.

We already saw that programs in the pin list are pruned from the most-frequently-used programs list because they would be redundant. Another fine-tuning rule was introduced after the initial explorations with the new Windows XP Start menu: Programs with specific "noise" names are removed from consideration. Many "noise" programs were showing...

After the initial explorations with the Windows XP Start menu, we had to add a rule that fine-tuned the results: If a program is pinned, then it is removed from consideration as a frequently-used program. For example, if you right-click Lotus Notes and select "Pin to Start menu", then it goes into the pin list and will never show up in the d...

There's a second subtlety to the basic principle that determines which programs show up in the Start menu: Each time you launch a program, it "earns a point", and the longer you don't launch a program, the more points it loses. Since programs earn points and not shortcuts, a program can earn points even if you don't use the Start menu to run i...

The first subtlety of the basic principle that determines which programs show up in the Start menu is something you may not have noticed when I stated it: Each time you launch a program, it "earns a point", and the longer you don't launch a program, the more points it loses. Notice that the rule talks about programs, not shortcuts. The "points...

The principle is that programs you've run most often recently are the ones that show up on the front page of the Start menu. At least, that's what we started with, but it turns out that some fine-tuning was needed in order to get the experience to be more "natural". The basic rule is that each time you launch a program, it "earns a point", and the...

I see this all the time. People have a problem and have already decided what technology they're going to use to solve it, and then they hit a roadblock: The technology they picked is unsuited to the problem! How do I put my laptop into standby mode from VBScript? How do I change the user's mouse acceleration from a batch file? I changed the ...

I just made up that term now because I needed a word to describe the situation where some manager is put in charge of a feature but is not given a staff to implement that feature. This happens more often than you might think, since there are many features that are "horizontal", i.e., features which affect all teams throughout the project. So-called...