Does Anyone Seriously Regret That Apple and Google Are Competing in the Smartphone Industry? Matt Yglesias discusses the stupidity of the patent litigation between Apple and Android licensees. As he points out, the competition has been good for Apple, good for Google, and good for people who use mobile phones.
You might also have noticed that I removed the AddThis buttons from the blog posts. Nobody was clicking on them, so they were just taking up space.
Proud. Scott Cawley writes about performing in the Olympic opening ceremony
For the past little while, I’ve been experiencing a fair amount of Tumblr envy, and this weekend I decided to do something about it. For whatever reason, this blog, like many others, has progressed toward longer and heavier posts over time. That has been accompanied by a reduction in the number of posts I make as well. The main reason for that is, I think, a migration toward posting short thoughts and links on Twitter, or just saving interesting articles to Instapaper or Pinboard and not really sharing them at all. That seems like a waste. ...
Real-time interactions happen as they happen. Timely ones, on the other hand, happen as you need them to happen. Some real-time interactions, like breaking news about an earthquake, can be timely. But not all timely interactions are real-time. I’d argue that most are not. And where the Fast Web is built around real-timedness, the Slow Web is built around timeliness. Jack Cheng explaining The Slow Web. More on this subject later. ...
IDE Project Files In Version Control - Yes or No? Of Course, Not! Answering the age-old question. My short answer is, use the simplest approach that delivers consistent results given the tools used by the team. Keep in mind that at a certain team size, requiring people to use the same tools becomes counterproductive. Traditionally, that team size is 3.
This week, I had the opportunity to watch Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures give his talk on the threats to a free and open Internet. These issues have been near and dear to my heart for many years, and I’d encourage you to watch it. He points out that the current threats to the Internet arise from the fact that the Internet is a network of networks, and those networks are often threats to established hierarchies. Established hierarchies don’t go down without a fight, that’s true whether we’re talking about cable companies, record companies, or government agencies that want to be able to wiretap anyone, anytime. They are willing to spend big bucks to preserve their businesses for as long as they can. That’s not news to anybody who’s been paying attention. ...
Why can’t companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft find ways to spend the tens of billions of dollars they have in the bank? That’s the question Peter Thiel asked of Eric Schmidt at a recent event. The fact that these huge sums of money are being parked by the biggest companies in technology is a problem for US productivity and employment and it’s a sign that the pace of innovation in tech is not where it needs to be. ...
I read two blog posts on Friday that made for an interesting contrast. The first was a post by Mike Loukides arguing that the problem with the economy is not a lack of qualified candidates, but rather a lack of flexibility on the part of employers when it comes to who they hire. The other post I read was by Carlos Bueno on how to get hired at Facebook. He references an earlier post by Steve Yegge on how to get hired at Google. ...
Most days I think Git is the worst tool I use, but I don’t feel the same way about GitHub. John Norman explains why GitHub is really important: Today, the announcement of a new project would happen by a number of means, but the beginnings of the code project would exist at GitHub. GitHub puts the social exchange at the very center. I suspect that GitHub’s servers now contain the world’s largest corpus of commentary around intellectual production. As I see it, the production of code has been wildly accelerated since the advent of the open source model; but the emergence of GitHub has been like throwing gasoline on that fire. ...