(no subject)

Met the missionaries this morning on the bus. They were going to Stade for a Tausch [lovely missionary Denglisch :)].

I asked Elder Su'a how long he had left and he said only two more weeks. And he also said it's now 24 °C in Kansas City, MO where he comes from -- wow!

And on the topic of Denglisch -- this week I went to the doctor because of a painful area on my eye. He said that it was a "Bindehautentzündung" and when I heard that word my first association was the English translation "conjunctivitis". Then he said that the medical term was "Konju---" and I joined in saying "Konjunktivitis". He seemed a bit surprised that I knew the term and asked me whether I had heard it before. I said no but that the English word was "conjunctivitis" so it wasn't that hard to guess what word he was talking about :D

I've seen that before -- Latinate words which sound really pretentious in German are often fairly common words in English. So a Germanophone trying to impress me by using a Latinate word often fails if I know the English cognate and it's a simple word there.

(Which also reminds me of when I was on my mission and I sometimes explained an English word to French or Italian missionaries by giving a Romance-derived synonym; Americans asked me how translating an easy word such as "cliff" with a hard word such as "precipice" would help them, but of course it's the cognacy(?) that does it. Similarly, an Italian elder said that it took him a while to understand what a "shot" is that you get at a doctor's, while "injection" would have been perfectly clear to him.)

Windows Uptime

The Netcraft survey this month said that

This month is the first time that a Windows 2000 site has appeared in the 50 top sites which have the longest period of time since last reboot. www.byteandswitch.com has been running continuously since November 2000. When we first started graphing web servers uptime in the summer of 2000, many people were skeptical that a Windows machine would ever make the top 50. Perceptions change, and although two years is exceptional, several Windows 2000 sites have run for more than a year without a reboot.

And a co-worker of mine brought up the following relevant snippet from a web forum:

> Hat schonmal jemand WINDOWS auf einer echten 24/7 Umgebung gesehen?

Aber ja! 7 Stunden Uptime an 24 Tagen im Monat;-)

Or, translated:

> Has anyone ever seen Windows running in a real 24/7 environment?

Sure! 7 hours of uptime on each of 24 days in a month ;-)

New window or not?

We were talking at work recently about the behaviour of external web links. A co-worker said that he expects that all site-internal web links open in the same window but that all site-external web links open in another window. I expect all links to open in the same window by default, since that gives users a choice: most browsers allow a user to select "open in this window" or "open in a new window". Forcing the link to open in a new window removes one of those choices since both options become equivalent.

My co-worker argued two things: (a) every click is a click too many: people are lazy so make the default action require as little as possible, and (b) the default action should be to open external links in a new window so that they can easily return to the site they just left -- since you want to try to keep them on your site as long as possible.

I'm not sure; after all, in theory "the customer is king" and you're supposed to serve him so the way to keep them on your site is to make the content easily accessible and interesting, not by browser gadgets such as popping up new windows.

What do you think? Should "exit links" open a new window or not? What do Internet users expect from clicking on a link?