Posts

Matthew Yglesias has a different take on the question of personal responsibility that I wrote about the other day. Here’s his argument: But if I look at America today, what I see undermining any meaningful notion of work ethic is a kind of run-amok ethic of moneymaking. The old Calvinist idea about money, as I understood it, was that hard work, discipline, and prudence were moral virtues. They were also things that are more likely than not to lead to personal prosperity. So prosperity shouldn’t be stigmatized as ignoble, it should be rather seen as something likely to flow from virtuous behavior. But this equation assumes that morally speaking what matters is the hard work, the discipline, and the prudence. Cutting corners, lying, cheating, or stealing to make a quick buck doesn’t fit the bill. ...

Lots of thoughtful posts are cropping up about the new restrictions Apple plans to implement for OS X applications that will be distributed through the App Store. The occasion is, I suppose, the news that Apple is pushing back the deadline for all applications distributed through the App Store to be Sandbox-compliant from the middle of this month to March 2012. For a basic rundown of the new rules and what they mean, check out this post from Pauli Olavi Ojala. ...

Today’s must-read blog post is by Will Wilkinson, musing on the differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of how they view personal responsibility. Here’s how he describes his own view, coming from a libertarian background: I find all of this especially interesting because my own drift from right-leaning libertarian to libertarian-leaning liberal has a lot to do with issues around the conditions for robust agency and the role of broad socio-economic forces in establishing those conditions, or not. I’ve come to accept, for example, that diffuse cultural forces, such as racism or sexism or nationalism or intergenerational poverty, can deprive an individual of her rightful liberty without any single person doing anything to violate her basic rights. This takes me a long way toward standard liberalism. But I find that my gut nevertheless leans right on issues of personal responsibility. ...

Former Google Reader product manager Brian Shih runs down the problems with the new Google Reader. Sometimes linking to something feels like signing a petition. This is one of those times. Via Tim Bray, an excellent essay entitled Your code should be as boring as possible by Emmett Shear of Justin.tv. Yet another example of the brilliant stuff that’s appearing on engineering blogs from tech companies. Ars Technica asks, how much data does Siri use? ...

This weekend, Tim Bray posted a link to an article at Seldo.com that argues that ORM is an anti-pattern. If you don’t know what ORM is, you probably won’t find this post very interesting, but I’ll provide a brief definition. ORM (object-relational mapping) is a layer of abstraction that stands between your database and code and allows you to treat entities in the database as native objects in whatever language you’re using. The advantage and disadvantage is that it substitutes native calls for SQL. ...

Here’s the minimum you need to know about the E-Parasite act that was recently introduced in the House. In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act went into effect. In order to give copyright holders immediate recourse in fighting copyright infringers, the bill gives those copyright holders the right to send takedown notices to service providers who are hosting allegedly infringing content. If they speedily comply with these notices, the service providers can avoid legal liability for copyright infringement by their users or customers. This is referred to as a “safe harbor” provision, but it’s basically extortion. ...

Tim O’Reilly declares October 30 Dennis Ritchie Day. I’m in. Italy’s cheese-making traditions are being maintained by immigrants from India. Stephen O’Grady says that asking whether open source is innovative misses the point, and concludes thusly: Innovation is a function of incentive, not the software development model. You could do worse than to heed the advice of FAKEGRIMLOCK.

When Apple entered the mobile handset business, one of the biggest breaks they made with tradition is that they retained control of the software update process for the iPhone. Regardless of your carrier, which software runs on your phone is between you and Apple, and Apple does a very good job of maintaining support for old handsets with their software updates. In many cases, with Android, it’s up to the carriers when your phone gets new software, and they have not broken with their long tradition of being very conservative when it comes to distributing software updates. A couple of weeks ago, I was able to update my 27 month old iPhone 3GS to iOS 5 the day it was released. Many people buy Android handsets and never get to run the most recent software, as shown on this chart. ...

Rob Neyer explains why intentional walks are bad for baseball. For all the talk about small business, an over reliance on small firms is bad for national competitiveness. As Matthew Yglesias points out, what countries need is a steady supply of small firms that are growing into large firms. Brent Simmons, the original author of NetNewsWire, explains why people who count on Google Reader to sync RSS readers may soon be disappointed. Lately I’ve just been using Google Reader directly. ...

Marco Arment speculates on what an Apple television might be. He talks about the beauty of on-demand television, and the fact that DVRs are a poor substitute: Cable TV customers have attempted to gain these benefits with the DVR, but it’s a bad hack. Even the best results are more like an automated VCR than true on-demand video, and almost nobody reliably gets perfect results. The way to escape the dysfunction of broadcast TV isn’t to record it and play it back later. ...