Word: functional
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...alas, you don't get this glorious form without a few blood sacrifices at the altar of function. Take the on-off switch. There's no button, just a purple-glowing touch-sensitive circle. Very year 2000. And very irritating if you happen to brush your hand over it, as I did on more than one occasion, only to discover I had turned the machine off. This is why touch-sensitive keyboards never went mainstream. We humans prefer the certainty of pressing buttons...
READY, AIM...FILE! America Online saw its ubiquitous AOL Instant Messenger software (AIM for short) hijacked last week by a new and fiendishly clever program called Aimster. Aimster takes AIM's popular buddy-list feature and adds a file-swapping function a la the controversial Napster. To date, AOL has made no move against Aimster, but it's clear that the would-be future parent of Warner Music (and of TIME) will have some tough choices ahead. Aimster is available at www.aimster.com at least...
...very readable history of House leadership. One of their conclusions was that many of the most effective Speakers rose to power by taking an obscure post within the institution and making it important. Cheney did just that with the House Republican Policy Committee, a moribund operation whose chief function when he reached it in 1980 after only one term in Congress was to crank out explanations to members of the G.O.P. position on various issues. Cheney turned it into an internal party forum, where a rising generation of G.O.P. bomb throwers led by Newt Gingrich could gain a hearing from...
...calcium channel involved in the communication between certain neurons, shedding new light on how the mind works. Another toxin extracted from Spider Pharm venom in 1995 by Kenton Swartz at the National Institutes of Health (named hanatoxin after Swartz's daughter) is being used to probe the function of proteins that are located on cellular membranes and have been implicated in diseases ranging from diabetes to epilepsy...
Ever since the iMac was released two years ago, Apple as a company has been as much about design as about technology. Is it in danger of putting form ahead of function? Same difference, says Jobs. "Our identity as a company is to stand at the intersection of technology and humanism." Yeah--that, and to make cool toys...