via wilshipley.com/
Avie Tevanian had been working on Mach as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and Steve Jobs recognized he was a star and hired him straight away. (Microsoft countered by hiring Avie's old advisor to work on NT, which is kind of like Microsoft hiring my mom because I'm a good programmer.)
I tried to log in to Apple Developer Connection this morning to find out that my password had been changed and the email associated with my account was now a yahoo.com address that wasn't mine. Luckily, my "security question" was still the same, so I was able to reset the password and email address back.
Based on the emails that have appeared in my .Mac mailbox, this was accomplished by sending this classy one-liner to Apple:
am forget my password of mac,did you give me password on new email marko.[redacted]@yahoo.com
this is a PR catastrophy for sure. I'd guess this will turn into a fire on the net within 48 hours.
In essence, these are bets on which way the oil price will move. Since the real currency of such contracts is cash, rather than barrels of crude, there is no limit to the number of bets that can be made. And since no oil is ever held back from the market, these bets do not affect the price of oil any more than bets on a football match affect the result.
The going after oil speculators resambles just how inoperative the government really is, regarding high oil prices.
via wine-econ.org/
The story is told of a sales call that Ernest Gallo made to a New York customer in the dark days of the depression. He offered sample glasses of two red wines - one costing five cents per bottle and the other ten cents. The buyer tasted both and pronounced, “I’ll take the ten-cent one.” The wine in the two glasses was exactly the same. Clearly, the customer wanted to buy an identity - the image of someone who wouldn’t drink that five-cent rotgut- even if he couldn’t actually taste the difference.
I love this story. It is in many ways verified but also superseeded by newer psychological findings. However, this quote, in a way explains a lot about the 'why' of people acting. Try to transfer this image of buying an identity onto other social acts, and you'll see, there's (still) much, oh so much, to harness.
There are suggestions that elements such as mail, photos and video could be available as an option on Windows 7 meaning customers could buy a version which supports what they want to do, without the loads of extra stuff they won't use or need.
Sure. Everybody will jump for an operating system which doesn't even support mp3 & videos. That's clearly old-style marketing think. Vista's problem is not that it does too much, but that it does it in very ineffective ways (usability and performance wise)
Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress.
37Signals regarding their dropping IE6 support
we’re on the brink of a new era. Everybody is used to creating their own computing for now. It won’t be long until we all switch to cheaper computing and leave our own servers to rust. Bad times are coming for sysadmins and people occupied with server- and hosting-infrastructures. Unless of course you have the ambition to go work for one of the utility-providers, the world will primarily be needing appliance-builders. Design will become way more important as well.
Interesting remark regarding the future of computing. Never thought about it that way.
He notes that the second beta is still prone to unexplained crashes, and goes so far as to say that "Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake."
So linux users are just as die-hard reactionary as their windows-using counterparts.
wondering how the frak they are
Has battlestar galactica coined this?
In my industry, web design, I’ve quickly realized that the fastest way to an unhappy client is an unhappy team member. Morale is far more important than most managers I know realize.
So True
While this is a step in the right direction, the assumption that one can build a car just because they can drive it is uneducated and reflects an ignorance of the intricacies of mechanics. The same is true for video game art.
True, just true.
Programmers are procrastinators. Get in, get some coffee, check the mailbox, read the RSS feeds, read the news, check out latest articles on techie websites, browse through political discussions on the designated sections of the programming forums. Rinse and repeat to make sure nothing is missed. Go to lunch. Come back, stare at the IDE for a few minutes. Check the mailbox. Get some coffee. Before you know it, the day is over
oh so true. actually a rather apt description of how I've worked for years - and still managed to output a lot of valuable software. I wonder what would happen if I were 100% effective.
If blogs, podcasts, and Twitter haven’t made it clear enough, let me make it so here: The aughts are all about documentation—recording every insignificant moment of your life and the lives of those around you—and, frankly, you, like me, have fallen down on the job.
Once your user base has grown beyond a certain point, you cannot take features away from them. They will freak out. Whether the feature is good or bad, once you launch it you’ve married it. This changes the economics of feature additions. If you can’t destroy what you build, each addition holds the threat of clutter. Empty pixels and free space where a new feature could be added are the most valuable real estate on your app. Don’t be quick to sell it, because you can never get it back.
Interesting remark regarding the adding of features to mature applications.
I don't see how it can't change the world ... it has 'Micro' and 'Blog' in the name, and I'll always know where I was when I twittered to tell everyone I was in the john.
Cmdr Taco on Geomicroblogging
I don’t want browser-side storage. That means turning the browser into a fat stateful client, and down that path lies madness – and the negation of what brought the browser into being in the first place.
Tao-of-Mac on browser-side storage.
Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats.
Amazing what competition (i.e. Ajax / Standards Web, see iPhone) can bring
and I have to wonder — with things like AIR starting to be accepted by developers, do we still need the browser at all?
I'd say yes. I'd hardly think that it's feasible to replace the already fragmented world of browsers by a even more fragmented world of 1000s of AIR applications, serving tons of different needs.
via arstechnica.com/
The web is increasingly pummeling its visitors with too much information, and technology like this has the potential to give users a birds-eye view of product reviews, travel recommendations, and even large bodies of factual information.
via arstechnica.com/
The WebKit developers are also innovating beyond the current standards and blazing the way for new ones by experimenting with their own CSS attributes for reflections and RGBA gradients.
via www.tuaw.com/
We're done with a world where radio airplay determines what sells at the record store. These days, consumers are the ones who tell record makers what they want to buy -- it's already in their iTunes playlists.
The second thing is capability. The iPhone, from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it's got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it's location-aware, it's got all of your media on it, it's awake with you, it's always on, and it's always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it's got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.
Neil Young, a former EA Developer about why he left EA to form a new company that concentrates on iPhone (and beyond) game development.
My sense is, in the App Store, you're going to see thousands of applications coming into the marketplace fairly quickly, and it will become very difficult, I think, for developers to differentiate themselves in that landscape. Undoubtedly, some will, and undoubtedly some will create hits.
Apple is a marvellous company, but it is a boutique. We are a giant conglomerate.
Weird understanding of inhowfar Sony is better than Apple