Posts

A couple of notes for iPhone users. The first is that Web pages you add to your home screen do not automatically update their icons when the creator of a site changes them. I noticed that Google Reader had a new favicon this morning, and guessed that they’d added an iPhone WebClip icon as well. I opened Google Reader to see if the WebClip icon changed automatically – it did not. However, when I deleted the WebClip bookmark and added it again, Google Reader did in fact have a custom icon. ...

As the mortgage crisis unfolds and expands, you see a lot of blame laid on subprime loans, and more specifically, people who signed up for subprime loans. In fact, subprime was voted the word of the year. People are clearly responsible for the contracts they sign, but simply blaming people who took out mortgages they couldn’t pay back is the wrong way to look at the problem. Last month I talked about the similarity of the mortgage crisis to the junk bond crisis. One of the most important similarities between that implosion and this one is that the entire market was driven not by demand for loans but rather demand for investments. Here’s the question you rarely see asked. Why were banks so eager to sign people up for such incredibly risky mortgages? ...

Alex Tabarrok posts the best short definition of the law of unintended consequences I’ve seen: The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system.

The Mozilla Foundation is celebrating the ten year anniversary of AOL’s having released the Netscape Navigator source code and creating the foundation. Here’s the original press release. One thing I remember is that Slashdot broke the story of AOL releasing the code before it was announced – it was the first really big story Slashdot broke. (In fact, I think I learned of the existence of Slashdot when someone pointed me to the story there.) ...

The Spring Team blog announces that the Spring framework is now a more commonly requested skill for developers than EJB. About four years ago, I started building applications using Spring and Hibernate, even though much of the industry focus was still on EJB. I thought that the approach that I and a number of other people had started taking was correct, I was a little bit scared about neglecting a skill that so many employers were seeking. ...

FP Passport reports that Bill Gates will give a 30 minute speech Thursday at the World Economic Forum entitled “A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century.” He will challenge business and government to do more to address the problems of disease and poverty in the developing world.

Microsoft’s Monday announcement of the new browser compatibility features in Internet Explorer 8 has set of a torrent of commentary. They described their new approach to markup versioning in an article at A List Apart and on the Internet Explorer blog. The basic idea is that Internet Explorer 8 will enable you to specify which rendering engine you want IE to use in a meta tag on your page. So you can tell it your markup is IE7 compatible, IE8 compatible, or bleeding edge compatible, in which case it will use whatever the latest and greatest rendering engine is. We can assume that IE9 will retain all of those modes and include a new IE9 mode as well, assuming that Microsoft doesn’t decide it’s too much trouble to maintain all of the different rendering modes and toss some of them out by then. If you don’t include the special meta tag to turn on IE8 rendering mode, IE8 will default to using the IE7 rendering engine. ...

Here’s Salon’s Andrew Leonard on today’s 75 point emergency rate cut from the Federal Reserve: If Bernanke has been “wrong” so many times, was he wrong Tuesday morning? As of this writing, around 2:20 p.m. EST, the lead headline on the Wall Street Journal declared “Fed’s Deep Cut Appears to Soothe Markets.” After falling almost 500 points at the start of trading, impelled by massive sell-offs on stock exchanges around the world, the Dow Jones industrial average had fought its way back to a relatively minor 118-point drop. What if Bernanke had done nothing, or even waited just eight days until the regular meeting of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors meeting to deliver his rate cut? If Monday, Jan. 21, is already being called the 21st century version of Black Monday, summoning up memories of the crash of 1987, what would Tuesday have looked like without a rate cut bailout? ...

One assertion I’ve seen David Simon make in multiple places is that newspapers blew it by not charging for online access to their content when they could. I think he’s just wrong about that, as does former newspaperman Scott Rosenberg: I always saw print journalism as doomed. I loved it anyway, the way you might love a beautiful old car whose engine leak is too costly to repair. There was no way to know how much longer the old newspapers would run, but — outside of exceptional cases like the Times and the Journal, which face their own struggles — they plainly weren’t going to run forever. When the opportunity to leave for the Web came along in 1995, I took it without hesitation. ...

I’m a sucker for observing behavior in non-software industries that’s analogous to perceived problems in the software industry. This is from a blog post on the 2008 Honda Accord: The day an automaker redesigns a midsize family sedan and declares it to be, “Less roomy, less powerful and less luxurious!” is the day that I expect to read a Rolling Stone “Top 50 Albums Of All Time” story and find “Frampton Comes Alive!” in the top 10. ...