From an article on Microsoft’s new music player, the Zune:
In its quest to catch up to iPod, however, Microsoft has hired an army of musical savants. Like Winn, many on the Zune team come from recording labels, radio stations, or other music companies.
Maybe it’s just me, but these are the people that I [...]
David Brin wrote an article for Salon about the absence of BASIC on modern computers that is wrong on so many levels that it makes my brain hurt. Here’s the argument:
Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none [...]
I’ve been doing a huge chunk of my development in Ruby on Rails for about a year now, and I’ve been quite happy with it. The tools are fine (hello, TextMate and Locomotive), the language is a pleasure to work in, and I generally feel like Ruby on Rails is good for my productivity as [...]
This morning I noticed that the pilot for the new series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is available from Netflix and is, in fact, recommended for me. It looks like the TV guys are getting smarter. I actually pay attention to my recommendations, and putting new shows into the Netflix system is a smart [...]
I just got an email from Continental Airlines asking me to sign a petition urging the Department of Transportation to allow them to add service from Shanghai, China to New York. I have no idea whether it will work, but it’s an interesting use of its loyalty program. I already have miles in Continental’s frequent [...]
In reading this article about splogs, I noted the following paragraph:
For that to happen, though, the companies must identify the splogs they want to weed out – a harder task than it may seem. Take Some Title, the splog that mentioned me. Any human reader can tell instantly, as I did, that the [...]
A friend of mine, Duff, has started a new site for posting and sharing reviews of anything, called Soapbox. It’s a very slick site built by one person (with the help of a designer that I’ve also worked with, Rich at Samedis Design). The basic idea is that you can write reviews and build a [...]
Is it just me or are niche job boards suddenly all the rage? Perhaps I’ll start one for companies that want to hire programmers who find themselves reading newspapers online when they should be writing code.
Aaron Swartz has compiled statistics that show that the bulk of Wikipedia articles are not written by the core community of editors but rather by more casual users. This makes lots of sense, when you think about it. Most people know enough to contribute substantively to Wikipedia articles on a few selected topics, and very [...]
Fred Kaplan on President Bush’s new propaganda campaign:
Here’s the question: Does anybody believe this? If you do, then you must ask the president why he hasn’t reactivated the draft, printed war bonds, doubled the military budget, and strenuously rallied allies to the cause. If, as he said in this speech, [...]