Posts

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is going to offer free-form online storage in the next few months. They already provide specialized storage for email, documents, and pictures (via Picasa), so it’s no surprise that they’re moving into offering storage for everything else digital. To go meta a bit, I wonder whether Google leaked this information to the Wall Street Journal, and if this is more evidence that Google is managing its product life cycle in a more traditional way. Back in the day, you found out about new Google products when they launched. Now we have announcements like Android, and here’s an announcement by leak. Is this an attempt to get people to wait for Google’s offering rather than use Amazon S3 and other similar products? ...

James Governor, riffing on Tim Bray’s blog post On Communication, coins the idea of a Cambrian explosion in forms of communication. Both posts are very much worth reading. The question at hand is whether or not it’s difficult to decide which form of communication to use for a particular message. I think my answer would be, “at times.” Generally speaking, a lot of factors go into those decisions, but they rarely take me long to make. ...

Back in April I talked about how I like the convention of using Command/Alt-n to navigate between tabs in an application. What I’ve learned is that Apple is not with me on this. Safari maps Command-n to the bookmarks in the bookmark toolbar. Yuck. In Leopard, the Terminal application supports tabs, but unlike iTerm, the Terminal application maps Command-n to terminal windows, rather than tabs in the active window. Everybody who’s used to tabs in a terminal has been using iTerm, so why go against that existing convention? Spite? (Generally speaking, the Leopard terminal privileges new windows over new tabs in a lot of ways. That’s kind of a shame.) ...

You know, I expect a certain level of idiocy from half-baked ad blocking shareware, but you’d hope for more from a big company that sells software bundled with millions of PCs. When it comes to Symantec, that’s not the case. Tony Spencer ran into a little problem with his classified ad application: After getting several more of these I became concerned and managed to get a few users to send screenshots and HTML source. We were all stumped. The page was fully loaded except the links to the classified ads were missing. There were no errors in the logs. ...

URL shortening services have been much discussed this week because TinyURL blew up. Twitter uses TinyURL to reduce URL sizes, so most of the URLs people were putting in their tweets were broken. This is bad, and if Twitter continues to gain popularity, it’ll be worse. Plus there are the larger issues of putting an intermediary (TinyURL) between users and content. If users pass around the shortened URL, and that eventually goes away, it hardly matters if the actual destination URL lives forever. It’s all inelegant. ...

The big news of the day is that Amazon.com has officially released Kindle, its electronic book reader. The device sells for $399, and the default price for books is $9.99 apiece. You can also subscribe to newspapers on the Kindle – the New York Times is $13.99 a month, and the Wall Street Journal is $9.99 a month. Here are a few things that struck me: Wow, the device is ugly. Really ugly. What’s with the angles? What’s with the ugly keys? I imagine it’s probably pretty nice to use once you have it in hand, but in photos it looks awful. I can’t wait to see the screen in person. What do people think of the $399 price? That’s the same price as the iPhone, and the Kindle is a much more limited device. (I can read the New York Times on my iPhone for the price of $0 per month.) The EVDO-based networking capabilities look really interesting, especially given that there’s no monthly service charge. I assume that the free networking is the reason why there’s no email client on the Kindle. They make a point of saying no syncing is involved in using the Kindle, but how do you get the notes you enter about what you’re reading onto your computer? Amazon was smart to include a blog reading client in the Kindle. The fact that they feature Michelle Malkin’s blog specifically on the Kindle product page is incredibly galling. I can’t wait til somebody I know gets one so that I can play with it, but I don’t see myself buying one. ...

Food author Michael Ruhlman on the three biggest differences between home cooking and restaurant cooking: Amazon.com: Aside from a heavy hand with butter, what are the top three things that set restaurant cooking apart from home cooking? Ruhlman: Proper use of salt throughout the cooking process and fresh stock are THE main differences. Neither are difficult to do or to learn. I’d say the next one is getting your pan to the right temperature. ...

There’s been a lot coverage of the total cost of the war in Iraq this week, mainly due to the $1.6 trillion estimate of the war’s costs through next year, released by Congressional researchers. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has written a piece on the subject that gets beyond crude dollar amounts. Here are some costs he lists: The human toll of the war is dreadful: more than 3,800 U.S. soldiers dead and more than 28,000 wounded, plus more than 1,000 private contractors killed and many more injured. It’s harder to know how many Iraqis have died; some estimates claim that the war has caused a million or more Iraqi deaths, and even if that’s an overstatement, the toll is still very high. But it’s not just the lives that are gone; we’ve also lost the contributions that these people would have made to their families and to humanity at large. ...

It just so happens that this week, both Robert Scoble and I had problems with our Macs. I’m not sure what was wrong with his Mac, but in my case, I tried to install the OS X 10.4.11 update on my MacBook, and it didn’t take. When the installer was done, the Software Update application showed a little red X instead of a little green check, and then bad things started happening. Not knowing what to do, I restarted the Mac and found that it wouldn’t boot. Some Googling revealed that holding down Command-V while the machine rebooted would turn on the Unix boot console. I did that, and found that there was some kind of problem with “launchd.” A bit more Googling revealed that my machine was basically hosed. I could either try to manually apply the software update or I could reinstall OS X. ...

The New York Time technology blog, Bits, has an update on the Netflix prize. No team has made the Netflix recommendations engine 10% more accurate, which is the number required to claim the million dollar prize. However, Netflix has awarded $50,000 to the team that has made the most progress. The group that won the prize has spent around 2000 hours on the project so far, and is made up of researches from AT&T Labs. There’s no word on whether the team worked on the prize during work hours or in their off time. Either way, their compensation comes down to about $25 per hour, which may be a lot to pay for lawn care but is an incredible deal for the services of ordinarily well-compensated computer scientists. All of the other teams that submitted entries weren’t compensated at all. ...