Posts

In an Ars Technica article on the Palm Pre, Jon Stokes explains the benefit the app store provides for the iPhone platform as well as I’ve ever seen: Even so, you might think 1,000 apps should be plenty to fit everyone’s needs, but then you misunderstand how the iPhone’s App Store contributes to Apple’s success. In short, 100,000 apps is a really, really long tail, and in that tail everyone can find one or two goofy, niche apps that they really like. And when they find those apps—my dad loves the bubble wrap and the Bible translations, my wife loves the koi pond and the kiddie apps that entertain my daughter, and I like the IRC clients—they show it off to friends and family. And when one of my dad’s non-iPhone friends sees the bubble wrap and the six different Bible translations, that person doesn’t say to himself, “my God, it has bubble wrap and Bibles. I must buy this phone.” Rather, he says, “if it has bubble wrap and Bibles, I bet it has something really cool for me, too. I must buy this phone.” ...

Researcher Yochai Benkler explains why broadband Internet access is cheaper in other countries than it is here: Last year my colleagues and I did a study for the Federal Communications Commission showing that a significant reason that other countries had managed to both expand access and lower rates over the last decade was a commitment to open-access policies, requiring companies that build networks to sell access to rivals that then invest in, and compete on, the network. ...

Back in August, I made the argument that the individual mandate was the linchpin of health care reform. It wasn’t my idea or anything, I’d just read a lot of blog posts and articles on health insurance that led me to that opinion. I’m still sure that I’m right about it. In a column Friday arguing that Congress should pass the health care reform bill, Paul Krugman succinctly explains the necessity of the individual mandate: ...

He lists a lot of good reasons to be against software patents, but here’s his favorite: I am against software patents because it is not reasonable to expect that the current patent system, nor even one designed to improve or replace it, will ever be able to accurately determine what might be considered legitimately patentable from the overwhelming volume of innovations in software. Even the most trivial of software applications involves hundreds, potentially thousands of design decisions which might be considered by those aggressively seeking patents as potentially protectable inventions. If even the most basic elements of these are patentable, as they are currently, the patent system will be fundamentally unable to scale to meet that demand. As it is today. ...

I have never agreed with anything so wholeheartedly as I do with this Matt Welch piece calling the media out for its obsession with “narratives”.

So copyright giant Viacom is suing YouTube for failing to take the necessary steps to prevent copyrighted material from being distributed through the site. But as it turns out, ViaCom has been secretly uploading its own content to the site for marketing purposes, using third parties and fake names to cover its tracks. Here’s the kicker: Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself. ...

Dojo developer Alex Russell continues to look out for view source: If HTML is just another bytecode container and rendering runtime, we’ll have lost part of what made the web special, and I’m afraid HTML will lose to other formats by willingly giving up its differentiators and playing on their turf. Who knows, it might turn out well, but it’s not a vision of the web that holds my interest. I linked to his previous warning on this subject back in January. ...

The big question I’ve had this week with regard to health care reform is, “Why is it taking so long to vote?” The path forward is that the House will pass the Senate bill, and then the House and Senate will pass a small bill that amends the Senate bill by way of reconciliation, so that it can be passed with a simple majority in the Senate. My impression was that the holdup was due to the Democrats having insufficient votes to pass both bills, but that’s actually not the case. ...

As you may or may not know, the NCAA Tournament starts this weekend, and people around you are probably doing their best to predict the winners of all of the games in the tournament. Most years I join one (or more) pools, but I don’t watch enough college basketball to make educated guesses about who will win each game. This year, I wrote a program to do it for me. ...

Here’s Tim Bray (now officially part of the loyal opposition) on the iPhone: The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it. I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient. ...