Apparently movies are disappearing from iTunes and Netflix because of a licensing arrangement between movie studios and broadcasters called release windows. Basically, once a network (premium or otherwise) pays for exclusive rights to air a movie, they can demand that customers no longer be allowed to view it over the Internet.
I couldn’t help but chuckle when I read this:
To the old-school reporter, “listen to the customer” is assumed to be code for one of the following: (a) cave to the politician; (b) coddle the advertiser; (c) pander to the ignorant; or (d) give credence to the crazies.
This mentality has served newspapers poorly, and it serves developers poorly too, but it’s very difficult to overcome.
jQuery creator John Resig warns developers away from libraries that hide JavaScript behind other programming languages, and makes a great point about relying overly much on abstractions to make your life “easier”:
When you use a pure-JavaScript library (such as jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, Yahoo UI, etc.) you are still programming using the JavaScript language. In the case of jQuery a large number of users, who have either never programmed JavaScript before or never programmed before, acquire a good grasp of how to use JavaScript – accented by the use of the library. A pure JavaScript library makes annoying tasks simple, the largest of which being cross-browser support. It does nothing to dilute the quality of the JavaScript-authoring experience. In fact I would argue that JavaScript libraries do much to give JavaScript a particular style and feel. Code written with Prototype feels very different from code written with jQuery – and this is fine since it’s giving the user the option to develop in the JavaScript language how they best see fit.
In the case of these language abstractions you are gaining none of the benefit of learning the JavaScript language. When a leak in the abstraction occurs (and it will occur – just as it’s bound to occur in any abstraction) what resources do you have, as a developer, to correct the problem? If you’ve learned nothing about JavaScript then you stand no chance in trying to repair, or work around, the issue.
This is a problem I often run into with developers who rely on persistence/ORM frameworks. They’re great, but if you’re dealing with relational databases, you really need to know SQL. These frameworks make a nice supplement, but they’re no substitute.
Update: Be sure to read the comments for a well thought out counterpoint.
You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader. You can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it. And without leadership, command is a hollow experience, a vacuum often filled with mistrust and arrogance.
Quoted from Eric Shinseki’s 2003 speech when he retired from the Army. Shinseki is Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Honda is selling off its Formula One team and getting out of the business of supplying other F1 teams with engines to save money given their poor fortunes in the current economy. Much attention has been paid to the suffering of America’s inept automakers, but it’s also true that all of the auto manufacturers are doing very poorly right now. Anyone think that Japan, South Korea, and Germany are just going to let their car companies bite the dust? I doubt it.
One of the reasons people hate politics is the hypocrisy of it all. Politicians excuse behavior from their allies that they are eager to rebuke from their opponents.
Perhaps the most shocking recent example of this was the Republican effort to eliminate the filibuster when they had the majority in the Senate and House until 2006. After decrying the filibuster as an unconstitutional travesty for years, the Republican minority in the current Senate has used the filibuster more than any other Congress in history.
Now we see Democrats who were unequivocally against torture equivocating. The only way to prevent this sort of thing is to make people aware that it’s going on, and for voters to let politicians know that principles shouldn’t change regardless of who’s in the White House. So that’s what I’m doing.
Andrew Leonard on Eliot Spitzer’s new column at Slate:
But fundamentally, I’m just flat-out impressed. What do you have to do in this country to absolutely, completely, ruin your long-term income-generating potential? Americans are a forgiving bunch.
I’ve always been fascinated by the floor on how far people tend to be able to fall in our society, although I find the phenomenon more remarkable in business than in politics. A Slate column is not the same as being the governor of New York. But in business, once you’re in the CEO club, you’re in for life. The same goes for vice presidents, directors, managers, and so forth. In my experience, no failure is too spectacular to disqualify you from getting a job with the same title as you’ve had in the past.
My oversimplified theory of the financial crisis is that the economy has gone in the tank because the lending practices of the credit card industry came to be accepted in the mortgage lending industry. As I’ve pointed out many times, the now-infamous negative amortization mortgage was, essentially, buying a house on a credit card. Stated income mortgages made it possible to qualify for mortgages the way you qualify for credit cards — there was no verification of actual income. And the list goes on. The housing bubble was fueled by lending people more money than they could afford to borrow so they could move into houses that they could only pay for as long as houses continued to rapidly appreciate. This basic mechanism is what made it possible to create all of the other financial instruments that led to easy profits for a time and that are crushing banks, insurance companies, and just about everyone else right now.
Joe Nocera prints an anonymous letter that indicates that these bad practices will soon come back around and ruin the credit card issuers themselves. Here’s an example he provides:
I recently had a client apply for a credit card. She is a homemaker, with no personal income. The house she lives in is in her husband’s name. She would have asked for a $3,000 credit line, just to pay miscellaneous expenses and to establish some credit on her own. So the computer is told that her household income is $150,000; her mortgage/rent payment is zero. The fact is that her husband’s mortgage payment is $7,000 a month (which he got with a no income verification loan). She had a good credit score, but limited credit since she has only lived in this country for the last three years. The system gave her an approval for a $26,000 line of credit!
I’m not sure the focus on preventing credit card companies from sending out so many pre-approved offers is the right plan, but I think he’s correct in predicting that the banks are going to be coming back to the federal government for more bailouts when the unemployed fill up their credit cards and start filing for bankruptcy.
As long as I’m blogging about mobile technology, here’s a snapshot of what’s selling in the iPhone app store after five months. I’ve downloaded a number of apps, paid for just a couple, and almost never use any of them. I use the phone for voice, texting, email, and to a lesser extent, Twitter. Every once in awhile I play dice poker if I’m bored.
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Web site CPU usage
Brent Simmons says that developers should profile their Web pages to see how they affect the CPU usage on end user computers. My wife uses an iMac G5, and I can tell which Web sites she’s using based on how loud the fan is. There are plenty of Web sites that keep the fan running all the time, even if she walks away from the computer. This is an area of Web development that has been ignored but should not be.