Posts

Blackfriars Marketing speculates that Apple may be restricting third party developers from deploying apps on the iPhone out of fears that their apps will use too much power and run the battery down. (Via Andrew Shebanow)

Did you know that the government keeps track of every prescription filled in the United States? Me neither.

The New York Times has an article on “free offers” on Web sites that turn out to be something else: I could picture my husband buying tickets online. I could imagine one of those annoying direct-marketing offers popping up. I could even picture him clicking on it. But I couldn’t see him entering a credit card to subscribe. It turned out he didn’t have to. Tempted by a $10 cash-back award offer (“Good for your next Fandango purchase!”), he had typed in his e-mail address. ...

eMusic now has over 300,000 subscribers, and is the second largest online music service, after the iTunes Music Store. Aside from the occasional CD purchase, it has become my sole source of new music. When I first subscribed, I wondered how much music the site offers that I’d really want, but I never have a problem finding 40 tracks I want to download each month.

Stephen O’Grady used Yahoo Pipes to solve an actual problem. Seems promising.

Today Tim Bray asks how many people are really members of the a club that’s hard to succinctly describe: In March, I gave a keynote at Web Design World in San Francisco. Frankly, it did not go that well; in particular, the crowd didn’t laugh at my jokes. Here’s one of them, more or less: “Being a Web Guy at Sun is a little intimidating. At high level strategy meetings the Chip Guys talk about what they’ll be shipping in 2009, and both the OS Guys and Java Guys talk about things a year or two out. As for us Web Guys, well… three weeks ago, I didn’t know that Twitter would become the Hot New Thing.” ...

I was just reading about a Dreamhost customer whose hosting account was compromised by search engine spammers. They gained access to his account, altered all of his files to include an iframe that linked to some kind of search engine spam, and uploaded a bunch of other files to his account that were also obviously related to spamming search engines. Such attacks only make sense if they can be performed in an automated fashion on a large number of Web sites. It looks like one of the links they added to his site also goes to a Web site that attempts to infest your computer with some kind of malware (kozirodstwo.com). He only found out about the problem when Google notified him that he was being delisted from the index because his newly modified pages violate their guidelines. ...

Teresa Nielsen Hayden on the blogger Code of Conduct: You can’t have a good online discussion without moderation. She’d know, too. Making Light is one of the most healthy and interesting online communities you’ll find. For what it’s worth, I do delete comments. I delete anything that looks like spam, and I don’t tolerate the pointlessly obnoxious. Fortunately, I get very few pointlessly obnoxious comments, so I almost never choose to delete anything aside from spam. ...

Alex Tabarrok reports on a couple of polling trends that explain a lot about how the public comes to support wars: The public’s opinion of past wars improves as a new war approaches. Thus, after Vietnam most people thought the war was a mistake and this held true for decades until the beginning of the Iraq war when the opinion of war in Vietnam suddenly improved! Even more dramatically, a majority of people thought that World War I was a mistake until World War II approached when the percentage thinking it was a good war doubled. This is especially perverse in that any rational response has got to see WWI as a bigger mistake the more probable is WWII. ...

Humorist Gene Weingarten takes on President Bush. First, the setup: Once upon a time, no one criticized George W. Bush. That was about five years ago, when questioning the president was unpatriotic. Then, gradually, liberals began to voice grievances, then moderate Democrats, then liberal Republicans, then moderate Republicans, and now we’re seeing uber-conservative hammerheads such as Bob Novak and Rich Lowry using the I-words: “inept” and “incompetent.” Foreign heads of state have started to take potshots at Bush when he’s standing right next to them, during photo ops. ...