Category:
rants
Something interesting has been going on. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s becoming cheaper and easier for anyone to distribute content these days. This inconvenient truth is leading to the death of the newspaper industry, and the fantastically overeager power grab from media moguls is causing technical folk to openly declare war. But with all […]
I’ve been getting caught up on Fringe lately. They are kinda notorious for encoding (fairly easily-decodable) messages into the shows, and famously their glyphs have been solved through machine-assisted cryptanalysis. As the series has developed, a group of beings called The Observers have become more and more important to the storyline, and they have always been depicted […]
One of the remarkable things about computers is how quickly things change. Of course, all good computer scientists get drilled into their heads at a young age that Moore’s Law will not fix a poor algorithm and may very well run out. Even so, the idea that something can double for any amount of time, in any observable period, […]
The startup community operates in a world of “get out of the building.” Of “write more specs“. Of asking “should this project even be built“? This converges on a culture of “everything except the code.” Have meetings about the featureset. Write documents about the featureset. Argue with other developers about the design. Think about the […]
Cory Doctorow gave a talk recently about how we are descending towards a dystopian future, which was based on an earlier talk with largely the same premise. I doubt it. The premise is sound enough: TPM is here to stay, and it’s important that we have TPM that is controlled by actual people, and not […]
Everybody’s weighing in on the Sparrow acquisition. Marco says if you want great indie developers, pay them well. Eleza says “that’s what I did!”. Selligy says that Apple should do something. Matt says everbody should stop whining. It’s time for some sticker shock. Matt has the right idea when he says: Thanks for that $10. […]
Okay, somebody needs to say it: Eric Raymond just said something really stupid: That’s wrong. Open systems are better, always. Cisco has just provided us with a perfect lesson in why that sentence is completely backwards, and why we can never trust closed-source software vendors not to do evil under the cover of their code […]
This is a real support request: Hi developer, I really hate how you have to pay for more minutes I was wondering if you could update to do surveys also as a way of paying? The mental model of this individual is astounding: How do I eat a survey, or use it to buy computing […]
Jason Gormon wrote a post against software movements: The problem I perceive is that this kernel of useful insight tends to become enshrouded in a shitload of meaningless gobbledygook, old wives tales and sales-speak, so that the majority of people jumping on to the bandwagon as the movement gains momentum often miss the underlying point […]
Something that’s occurred to me recently is that there seems to be a pretty big disconnect between how hackers see the world, and how many others (reporters, market analysts, investors) see the world. When non-hackers look at a company, they might measure it by the quality of the furnishings, the prestige of the office building, the market […]
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