Ellen Ullman, a software engineer, has a nice op ed piece in the New York Times about Microsoft’s development of the “Attentional User Interface,” software that thinks it knows when you’re free to be interrupted for reminders to perform various maintenance tasks (save, backup, clean your desktop, and other machine interrupts) and how the general trend towards blinking, winking, crawling, popping up, and chiming in, might not be good for those of us who like to attend on our own time, not the machines, and certainly not Microsoft’s. [Login requires annoying password]
[Thanks, Kate!]