Thursday, December 15, 2005

Paralysis

Upon reading the post on Slashdot about Microsoft's IE7 RSS team settling on using the orange RSS icon used by Firefox, I considered how awkward the situation must be for them. Here they are years behind Mozilla on features like RSS, tabs, security, standards implementations/compliance, usability/extensibility, etc. Do they look at the source or not? If they do, then would they feel guilty of cheating? What level of innovation would they be satisfied at attaining to be able to say, we peeked, but now ours is better. If they don't look, are they wasting their time reinventing the wheel?

I would be quite stuck deciding on whether or not to look at the source. Now, if you've heard the story about MS studying the Macintosh source to "make Word better" before releasing Windows, you'll know that some at Microsoft have absolutely no problem with standing on the shoulders of giants. Isn't progress what the open source community is all about? Let's see if they release the source of IE7.


That was all just a really long introduction to the big question that today paralyzed me with indecision: how do you dispose of those pesky envelopes with see-through windows? Everybody likes to use them! Everytime I go home, I find my credit card statements and donation solicitations in a corrogated cardboard box, but I look through them and procrastinate against their disposal. I'm not sure what regular people do, but I find it hard to just throw them away in either the trash or the recycling bin. If you throw them away, they'll just be piled into some landfill. If you recycle them as is, would they be rejected because of the little window?

Now, ripping out the window is surprisingly difficult as the plastic tears like tissue paper. The only alternative I have is to carefully remove the window along with parts of the envelope the glued to the plastic. This results in UNRECYCLED PAPER that gets added to the landfill. On one hand, I can leave the junk mail to pile up in our personal landfill, their fate undecided. On the other hand, I can guarantee that some of them get recycled, but consign the others (at the cost of my tedium) to the same fate as the plastic.

If you can help me, please go to Yahoo! Answers and answer my question!
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