Posts

John Battelle has the scoop on A9, Amazon.com’s search engine. The Web shifted a bit today …

Last week, I linked to Tony Blair’s “stay the course” essay in the Observer. I can’t very well now not link to Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) response to that essay. One wonders what kind of verbal punishment Jones could deal out to our President.

That clever Slacktivist fooled me again.

Add national ID cards to the list of proposed security enhancements that wouldn’t actually enhance security.

As it turns out, the guy who was supposed to have quit in disgust (Rich Green) following Sun’s settlement with Microsoft, actually quit for a job at a startup.

Rogers Cadenhead reports on how fraud artists are using TDD services for the hearing impaired to facilitate scams.

Euxx: Eclipse shortcuts for lazy developers

Slashdot reports that the record companies want online music stores to up the prices on downloadable music from 99 cents per track to somewhere between $1.25 and $3. My music downloading habits center around immediate gratification. If there’s a song I want to hear right now, I generally download it. Before the iTunes Music Store, I downloaded songs using Gnutella if I wanted to hear them. Now I buy them for 99 cents. I don’t think the prices would have to go up a whole lot for me to fire up the Gnutella client again (something I haven’t done literally for months). Related: Ed Felten, A Grand Unified Theory of File Sharing. I fall completely into the sampler category of file sharers (actually no category right now, as I don’t use any file sharing clients). ...

I’ve been playing with Gmail for the past couple of days, and the first thing I’ve discovered is that it’s a lot better for mailing lists than Thunderbird, mainly because of the automatic conversation threading and the archiving capabilities. I’m migrating all of my mailing list subscriptions to Gmail right now. If you want to send me email to my Gmail address, it’s address is [email protected]. One thing I’ll say for sure is that Gmail’s interface is about 100 times better than SquirrelMail. Update: after using Gmail for a whole day (or most of a day), I’m really getting a feel for how different it is from every other email client I’ve used, especially with regard to how it organizes threads into “conversations.” Basically it treats all messages in a thread as a single message, and condenses the emails you’ve already read if there are too many to display on one page when you click on a conversation. Really, it’s quite similar to how Google Groups organizes Usenet posts, and makes a lot of sense for handling email in a Web interface. It also hides quoted text so you don’t have to bother with it if you don’t need to. Very slick. Most impressive though is that this is the first email client that I’ve used (maybe ever) that does something completely different with email than the dominant paradigm. I’m glad to see innovation of some kind happening on the email front, and I look forward to having a bunch of email in Gmail so that I can get a better feel for how it’s going to scale. ...

Jim Henley’s current thoughts on the war are definitely worth reading.