January 2011
21 posts
Robert Scoble takes his Quora and goes home →
Robert Scoble, “Why I was wrong about Quora as a blogging service”:
I’ve seen a LOT of discussion about Quora in the past few weeks since I wrote it could be the biggest blogging innovation in the past decade. Turns out I was totally wrong. It’s a horrid service for blogging, where you want to put some personality into answers. It’s just fine for a QA site, but we already have lots...
If you choose not to decide, you are Apple's...
John Welch pointed (in disgruntled fashion) to a post from Adobe’s John Dowdell, “Non-standard bodies,” which essentially argues that the WHATWG is Apple’s lapdog, as opposed to the happy openness of the W3C:
The W3C reaches group decisions with a large variety of participants, and ends up producing something which works for all. The WhatWG is four browser vendors...
Visiting Macworld
I’ll be at Macworld, probably on both Thursday and Friday. Because I am cheap I only have an exhibition floor badge. If you’re looking for me, I will probably have a Hawaiian shirt on and, oh yes, a big name badge with my name on it.
My only plan for the convention so far is to make the half-mile walk from the show to 83 Proof one evening or the other, because I have learned that a...
Music industry loses 3% of value, blames piracy →
ReadWriteWeb’s Audrey Watters:
It’s a familiar refrain from the music industry: revenue is down and piracy is to blame. “While record companies are innovating and licensing every viable form of music access for consumers,” says IFPI chief executive Frances Moore, “the music industry is still haemorrhaging revenue as a result of digital piracy.”
Being RWW,...
It's official: Duke Nukem Forever will ship before... →
C’mon, Apple users, you know you were thinking it too.
HTML is the new HTML5 →
Since the W3C has endorsed using HTML5 to mean “anything that’s a new web standard,” the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) has announced that what they were referring to as HTML5 is now just HTML.
Next week: CSS3 becomes just CSS, Javascript becomes just Script, and Ajax and Comet are superseded by Industrial Strength Lysol.
Google is still an advertising company →
Google’s 2010 fiscal results—like their 2009 results—show that over 96% of their revenue comes from advertising. While I haven’t been blogging here long enough to do the “blast from the past” link day a few others are doing, it’s worth going back to March of 2010 for “You Are Not Google’s Customer.” I doubt today’s game of...
An Analysis of MacScan →
Ryan Govostes, a senior at RPI and cofounder of their computer security interest group, is not impressed by “The Premier Anti-Spyware Software for Mac OS X”:
Unlike most other anti-malware products, however, MacScan’s spyware signatures are entirely based on file creation and modification dates, and in some cases, outmoded Mac OS creator codes.
Nokia cancels launch of X7 in US →
Christopher Lawton of the WSJ: “The X7 would have been the first Nokia smartphone launched exclusively with a U.S. carrier since former Microsoft Corp. executive Stephen Elop took over as Nokia’s CEO last September. The unexpected cancellation leaves Nokia further behind in its effort to correct a major strategic weakness—its poor showing in the lucrative U.S. market, where it...
“So, you ask, why do I use Facebook? The answer is obvious: Because other folks...”
– John Scalzi
The W3C's HTML5 Logo →
Web developer Jeremy Keith says “I think it looks pretty good” but nonetheless refers to it as a “Badge of Shame”:
What we have here is a deliberate attempt to further blur the lines between separate technologies that have already become intertwingled in media reports.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind if marketers and journalists use HTML5 to mean...
Netflix removing "Add to DVD Queue" from streaming... →
This makes sense why, exactly?
Steve Jobs and Wendy's
In light of today’s story about Steve Jobs taking another medical leave, I can’t help but muse briefly on the obvious yet roundly ignored truth that Apple and Steve Jobs are not identical.
I can’t think of any other company where people routinely talk as if the CEO personally approves everything. Yes, we know he’s very “hands on” and has a lot of input into...
Blue Hawaiian
I’m playing bartender at a friend’s party tonight and for thematic reasons (don’t ask) I wanted to make a blue drink. As it turns out, this is not easy. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of blue drinks, but there are a lot of bad blue drinks.
I went back to what might be the original—the Blue Hawaii. As with a lot of Fruity Rum Drinks, this has changed over the...
...For Certain Values of Open
Over at TechCrunch, MG Siegler looks at Google’s recent announcement of dropping support for H.264-encoded video from Chrome and acerbically asks, “So Google, you’ll be dropping support for Flash next, right?” In the comments, many people are arguing that the two aren’t the same at all. Here’s “Keith”:
The Flash file format is open and anybody is...
iPad Magazines Go to ’11 →
Khoi Vinh:
It’s bordering on obstinate to think that something you care so much about can be salvaged by doing more or less the same thing that has failed magazines so consistently until now: continuing to ignore the fundamentals of digital user experience design and how they diverge from analog print design.
I have a friend who works for Wired who always chides me for not having...
Who's Afraid of the Verizon iPhone?
There’s not a lot to say about the Verizon iPhone that wasn’t said months ago at this point, which is oddly fascinating in its own way. Objectively, this should not be a big deal, right? Nobody wastes much ink (or many pixels) speculating about what the next Blackberry or Android device means for a carrier, except to the degree that the next Blackberry or Android device is being touted...
The Mac App Store and Upgrades
The Angry Drunk wrote a good little piece on “The Death of Upgrade Pricing” in the new Mac App Store, essentially arguing that what developers can do is to adjust prices so that they don’t need to charge less for upgrades:
Bob’s Nifty App 1.0 is currently priced at $39.99. Bob releases 2.0 also priced at $39.99, but he offers discount pricing to the owners of version 1...
A good cold-weather cocktail
I’ve been lax in keeping up the cocktail part of this blog. You didn’t think the tag line was a joke, did you?
When I was invited to a friend’s for Thanksgiving, I wanted to bring something along besides just a green bean side dish. (They had no other vegetables, people. What was I gonna do? Stuffing is not a vegetable and potatoes are only a vegetable on a technicality.) So I...
“Detroit Lives” →
Daring Fireball linked to the Guardian newspaper’s slideshow “Detroit in Ruins,” and it’s quite striking. But it’s pretty easy to find stories that use Detroit as a symbol of decay and ruin and the death of the American Dream—it’s rare, and welcome, to find stories that show Detroit as a living city rather than merely a symbol. This documentary—oddly...
“I don’t think anyone is going to be able to have a truly sane discussion...”
– John C. Welch, “Not Dealing with Reality”