Posts

Someone needs to do a study to figure out what the response time for a Web application has to be to prevent people from double posting comments on weblogs. It’s unfortunate that it’s not easy to make submitting a form, processing the form submission, and returning a response an atomic transaction so that if people resubmit or hit stop, the transaction is aborted. Either way, my feature request for Movable Type is that a configuration option is provided that enables people to be warned that they’re posting a duplicate comment before their comment is published. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard to do that sort of thing, and it would prevent some of the massive comment duplication that I see on certain weblogs. ...

Paul Graham: The Hundred-Year Language. I finally got around to reading this, and was shocked at the end that Graham didn’t propose that Lisp was already the hundred-year language. Also worth reading from Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters (link via Tim Bray).

I just wanted to say that I love it when smart people agree with me. I’ve read lots of articles about the Bill Bennett humiliation, but it’s only in the world of weblogs that I’ve seen the “slot machines and video poker are pathetic” angle expressed.

Adam Engst has written up a detailed piece on the iTunes Music Store. At first, when I read a shorter summary of the DRM applied to the tracks purchased through the store, I referred to it as “heinous.” Looking back, I realize that was too harsh. My personal feeling is that all DRM is heinous, but as far as DRM goes, the system applied by Apple isn’t too restrictive. Of course, the fundamental problem with DRM is that five or ten years down the road, the tracks that you paid hard money for could be members of the dead media collection, depending upon industry developments. Obviously if you burn them all onto CDs you’re probably still in good shape, but the bottom line is you’re buying music in a closed format that is inevitably doomed to obsolesence. This won’t bother everyone, but it does bother me. ...

The Washington Post has an article today about the current situation in southern Iraq. It’s as you would expect – near anarchy, no public services, and no clear plan for moving forward. I don’t blame the US or British for this, I didn’t expect any different. It hasn’t been very long since the old regime was ousted, and it takes a long time to even figure out what’s going on, much less to start fixing things. The problem is, of course, pretending like somehow this occupation was going to be different from every other occupation in human history. We made a bunch of promises to the Iraqis about how much better things would be once Saddam was gone, and now they expect us to deliver. ...

It’s official, the IT job market still sucks. The good news is that theoretically it sucks as badly as it’s going to suck, and may at some point start sucking less. I think we’re supposed to take solace in that.

Dell is changing its name from Dell Computer to Dell Inc. The question I have is how much they paid a naming consultancy to come up with the new forumation.

Tim Bray has a nice piece that explains how GAAP is misused in accounting for expenses.

I have only one comment on the Bill Bennett, gambler story that’s making the rounds. The most damning thing to me is that Bennett has blown millions of dollars on slot machines and video poker. That, to me, is pathetic. If the guy were blowing his fortune on high stakes games of Texas Hold ‘Em, I’d have some respect for him. Losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single trip doing nothing but plugging chips into a high stakes slow machine tells me that you really are just addicted to the most base cravings served by gambling, not any of the other thrills involved. ...

Looks like the White House is now admitting that we lost to North Korea. We aren’t going to be able to keep them from going nuclear. The focus now is going to be on making sure they can’t do for others what our good buddies in Pakistan did for them, that is to say, enable them to join the nuclear club. Of course, the fact that North Korea is now going to have a nice big nuclear deterrent to protect itself and the horrific deeds of its leaders is going to provide just the marketing push they need to get potential customers for nukes to line up. Anyone care to make a list of countries that would like to discourage outside meddling? ...