Posts

The folks who created Readability have published an open letter to Apple after their app was rejected because it violates the new license terms that require that all purchases made from within applications use Apple’s In App Purchase functionality. Here’s their response: Before we cool down and come to our senses, we might as well share how we’re feeling right now: we believe that your new policy smacks of greed. Subscription apps like ours represent a tiny sliver of app sales that represent a tiny sliver of your revenue. You’ve achieved much of your success in hardware sales by cultivating an incredibly impressive app ecosystem. Every iPad or iPhone TV ad puts the apps developed by companies like ours front and center. It was a healthy and mutually beneficial dynamic: apps like ours get exposure and you get to show the world how these apps make your hardware shine. That’s why we’re a bit baffled here. ...

Donna Dubinsky explains how her family was shut out of the individual health insurance market in the New York Times. Here’s how she starts out: This isn’t the story of a poor family with a mother who has a dreadful disease that bankrupts them, or with a child who has to go without vital medicines. Unlike many others, my family can afford medical care, with or without insurance. Instead, this is a story about how broken the market for health insurance is, even for those who are healthy and who are willing and able to pay for it. ...

Mark Bernstein explains why people shouldn’t be freaking out that Watson the Jeopardy-playing computer means that humans are obsolete: We’ve made machines that answer questions for a very long time. We need better ways to get answers and better answers. When we decided that it was self-evident that all men are created equal, lots of people were worried: Won’t this be the end of civilized life? Who will make dinner and clean up the mess? I think we can manage. ...

For those of you too lazy to read all ten billion words of Lawrence Wright’s New Yorker article on Paul Haggis and Scientology, here’s a list of the things the Church of Scientology denies: He staffed the ships with volunteers, many of them teen-agers, who called themselves the Sea Organization. Hubbard and his followers cruised the Mediterranean searching for loot he had stored in previous lifetimes. (The church denies this.) Scientology defectors are full of tales of forcible family separations, which the church almost uniformly denies. ...

There’s a lot of talk these days about the users of social sites being “serfs” and “galley slaves.” Scott Rosenberg has a good rundown of these sentiments at his blog. What I find interesting is that these writers don’t seem to offer the basic value proposition of sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Posterous, or to an even greater degree, user blogs on sites like the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos. ...

Here’s how an anonymous black hat SEO consultant justifies the existence of his industry: I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial. If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest. ...

Matt Drance bottom lines the Microsoft-Nokia “strategic partnership” with the following headline: “Microsoft Buys Nokia for $0B.” I have absolutely no qualms about calling this new regime at Nokia a puppet government. This is far and away the most brilliant move of Ballmer’s tenure. All the analysts are on the same page on this one — this is a huge coup for Microsoft. It’ll be interesting to see whether this deal turns out to be important in the long run. Can Nokia handsets running Windows Phone 7 carve out substantial market share somewhere between iPhone and Android? RIM seems to be having trouble, and is better positioned than Microsoft/Nokia. ...

Hosni Mubarak has resigned. The best explanation of the long term trends that led up to this is Rany Jazayerli’s piece on the impact of satellite television on the Arab world. Here’s a snippet: For the last 15 years, then, the Arab world has had the access that was denied them for so long. They’ve seen the truth about how oppressive and hypocritical their own governments are, and they’ve seen the truth about how messy and imperfect and yet ultimately how ennobling and empowering Western democracies are. (In the words of Winston Churchill, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.”) And having already opened the barn door to letting the masses own satellite dishes, the governments of the region were mostly helpless to do anything about it. Baywatch, it turns out, was a Trojan horse. ...

Tim Bray offers a good high level explanation of why hash-bang links are a horrible idea and fundamentally break the web. I like this question: So, my question is: what is the next great Web app that nobody’s built yet that depends on the simple link-identifies-a-resource paradigm, but that now we won’t be seeing? I got a few responses to my question yesterday, which was, why are people doing this, and the one that I found most convincing is that it’s a resource issue. Let’s say you’re building a Web application and you want the ability to load items onto the page dynamically using AJAX. You have to pay engineers to build the JavaScript code that does so, and also pay someone to build the services on the servers that respond to the AJAX requests. Paying people to build the equivalent functionality that serves static pages costs even more money. So people who don’t really understand the Web cut costs in that fashion. ...

Scott Gilbertson looks into the use of JavaScript in Gawker’s redesign: The problem with Gawker’s redesign is that it uses JavaScript to load everything. That means that, not only is there no chance for the site to degrade gracefully in browsers that don’t have JavaScript enabled, the smallest JavaScript typo can crash the entire website. I really don’t get this new trend (as Gilbertson notes, Gawker is following Twitter’s lead) toward sites that require JavaScript to load all the content on the pages. If a developer suggested such a scheme to me, I would be more inclined to fire them than to take their suggestion. ...