Isn't this more user friendly?

No. Anything that I have to edit that isn't done in my favourite editor, with my own customization isn't user friendly at all. I don't see the gain anyway. In my editor to get to a specific line number, all I need to do is type in the line number and a capital G - or just give the line number as an argument when starting the editing session.

Abigail

How about starting your own locally configured editor? It's not that difficult - you've set the $EDITOR variable, did you?

Relax - this meditation was not for immediate consumption, it was for inspiring your imagination.

One of the cited uses is pair programming. Instead of stuffing two people in front of one computer, you can give each of them their own computer and sit them next to each other. I've never used it, but it looks interesting enough.

A colleague had me help him with a project for his company a few weeks back. He works in a legal practice and management were concerned that the effective output of opinions (the bread and butter of this firm) was falling rapidly over the last three years. The practice manager had done a sampling of all the opinions written over three years and decided that they were no more or less difficult to research and produce now than three years ago.

They had a hunch about what was going on. So using a network sniffer we monitored the amount of traffic used by IM systems. It was amazing! One day IT had a huge problem the router and firewalls happened to start blocking all the IM ports, IRC ports, P2P ports and some IP's belongong to large download sites.

By the end of the week the output of opinions (measured in sheer text volume) was back to only 15% lower than it was three years ago.

They also found that the consumption of CD-R media dropped to 31% of that in the previous week. See, no-one was downloading stuff on the firms bandwidth and time, and then writing it to CD to take home!

Next thing is how to stop the personal emails and unnecessary internal emailing. Then they should be back to just where things were before everybody got net access.

jdtoronto

The two greatest executive timewasters - Spreadsheet prgrammes and Instant Messaging.

Well, I think this is mostly already possible. Things aren't well-integrated, but I can see how you'd want to archetecture it. AOL's official AIM client, at least under windows, registers a goim: URL scheme, which you can use to make a hyperlink to an AIM screenname. Consider the same thing, extended to allow for more services, perhaps converse:service/userid, allowing links converse:aim/theorbtwo, converse:icq/1923898, converse:msn/james@rtweb.net, and converse:yahoo/theorbtwo.

That solves the problem of linking to a conversation with the author of an annotation. Now, consider linking to a specified position in the document. That's easy. It's what the # bit in a hyperlink is for (the fragment identifier). OLE supports a concept called "monkiers" for linking to specific points in a document, if it doesn't allow for hash-links then that's a bug, or at least a should-be-easy wishlist. I suspect other similar systems, such as COBRA and XPCOM support a similar concept.

So, you need to get the editor (which already supports annotations) to have a "hand me a link to the current position in the current document". This link needs to be in some sort of standard form, understandable by any editor that handles the document type (handling abigail-ii's objection).

This does require more human interaction then your usecase, but it's more clear how you'd archetecture this solution.

This link needs to be in some sort of standard form, understandable by any editor that handles the document type (handling abigail-ii's objection).

I think there can be a local wrapper that would translate a generic form to one understanded by the editor.