DISQUS

Wow, i would *not* have guessed that. Every so often i'll run into someone who *avoids* a certain brand based on a bad experience with dirty gas at some point in the past, but i've yet to actually hear someone express any sort of loyalty *to* a specific brand.

In fact, it's much more common to find folks driving across town to line up behind the pumps at a cheaper station, most likely burning up the few cents of savings in the process.

Then again, i don't know anyone who buys higher-octane "premium" gasoline either. Maybe i just hang out with cheapskates...

Ha!
After being exposed to "The Space Merchants" as a kid, i was suspicious of tofu for quite a while afterwards. Oh, i knew it wasn't *really* vat-grown meat... but i put that down to mere incompetence on the part of Our Corporate Overlords. Then McDonald's rolled out a "veggie" burger, and i knew i was right...

Meh. If they actually do a good job of standing in the gates of that walled garden, then more power to 'em.

If not, then trojan-horse-SMS-spamming software will be the death of iTunes. Sorry, but writing native apps ain't like coding up web pages. You have real power. And plenty of folks looking to abuse it.

That reminds me of something... Back when i first read the ATOM spec, i though it sounded like a great way to implement two-way communication: GET a list of items, POST new ones, PUT modifications... it all seemed so... nice.

Then i realized that the feed readers out there didn't even bother rendering everything in each , to say nothing of any sort of support for adding new ones. What a waste. Any idea if that's changed...?

One theory i haven't seen floated much yet is that MS isn't actually worried so much about competing with Google as it is about competing with Google *and everyone else*. MS knows how to shut down a single competitor - they have a long, successful history in that area. FUD and lockout aren't any less powerful now than they were twenty years ago.

IMHO, the problem is that if MS picks a battle with Google, Google attacks back, and Y! might actually come out the winner. Or Ask. I mean, why not? It's almost like the political campaigns going on right now - you're better off if you can act as though you sit above the fray, while your opponents tear each other to pieces. With Y! out of the way, there's a much smaller chance that users will flee.

Actually, i don't believe a word of that. But i don't believe for a minute that this move will actually benefit Microsoft, or, really, even hurt Google. MS is finally getting worried - after years of shrugging off competitors on the desktop, the desktop itself is becoming a less important percentage of the whole horizontal-market software universe. Web apps - and mobile apps - are blooming in a way that seemed impossible just a few years ago. And Microsoft's track record in both areas is abysmal. MS is lashing out frantically in every direction, desperate to get their claws into it. Every move they've made in the last 2-3 years reeks of fear: Silverlight, IE8, * Live *, W*, and now this.

Oh. And yeah, we're all gonna suffer. That's just par for the course.

So wait, a buggy Google Reader == The Tyranny of Emailish RSS?
I don't want to think of feeds as emails (and don't use my email program as a feedreader for that reason...), but i fail to see how you've made an argument here...

Anyone else find the "Active" prefix used in the names of Rails components a grating reminder of a certain Microsoft theme from the '90s?

(yeah, yeah, i'm sure Rails has a much better reason for using it than MS did, but it doesn't matter, i'll always associate it with COM BS, the way i'll always associate *Gator with shady adware)

Best post in months. Loved the "shout at the TV channel" metaphor...

I suspect you read more non-technical books than i do. ;)

Kindle / Sony Reader... expensive, slow, single-purpose device designed to simulate the advantages... and many of the disadvantages... of traditional books. Except... I can't flip through forty dog-eared pages in under a second. I can't rip out the blank pages and use them for notes in a pinch. I can't write in the margins (annotating with an on-screen keyboard doesn't cut it). I probably could hit annoying people over the head with it, but it's an expensive way to catch someone's attention.

The coolest part by far is the "whispernet". I really see this taking off: people already pay subscription prices for cell-phone data networks in order to gain the privilege of paying ridiculous prices for downloads - imagine an iPod/Zune device that let you buy and download songs from anywhere, at any time, without having to look for a wifi hotspot or attaching some gharish cell-wireless dongle and paying $40/month + taxes and misc. account fees for a wireless data plan...

Instant gratification wins every time. If anyone still remembers Kindle in a year's time, it'll be because of the whispernet thing.

Hey, now *that's* cool. A non-superfluous shell integration... what a novel idea!

Arbitrary OT question of the day (and i know you're not a Mac developer as such, but there's something i've been curious about...): You know how in Windows, it's possible (but decidedly non-trivial) to integrate the shell into your app such that "objects" in the program (images, email attachments, bits of string, whatever) can easily become objects in the filesystem (or at least, the shell's view of the filesystem) with all the comfort that entails (copy/paste, drag/drop, passing off arbitrary operations to 3rd-party programs or extensions, etc.)... well, does that exist on the Mac? And, does it suck less? I realize i'm building a lot of ambiguity into this question, what with "the shell" in Mac-land and Win-land being two relatively different concepts... perhaps a concrete example would be easier: someone sends me an email with an mp3-in-a-rarfile attachment - do i have to export this to some filesystem location, open it up in my rar-decompressing app of choice, dump the mp3 to some filesystem location *again*, and then open it up in my music-playing-application-of-choice... or can i rely on both my email proggy, rar-proggy, and musics-playing-proggy to understand each other well enough to turn this into a two-click-to-listen operation? And if the latter, does that depend on some specific use of Apple-created software email, decompression, and music... or is it available across the board, a basic understanding among Mac-targeted software that *this is how things work*? Whatabout if my email proggy is GMail and i like to use a different music player for each day of the week?

"I don’t even want my social network to be part of a social network. My network is mine, it belongs where I am, not inside some other application."

Well, that's the key point, isn't it...
I mean, i'm probably the last person on the planet who should be commenting on social networks - i'm social the way the girl behind the counter at the DMV is social. And yet, i belong to at least three "social networking sites" simply because i have family on them and the way they're set up i can't view photos or comment or read birth announcements unless i sign up and sign in. Most of these, i can't use feed readers or any other common tools to aggregate updates, i can't properly bookmark pages...

...but for the people using them, these networks have a lot of advantages. Easy page creation, updates, uploads, simple access control mechanisms, little need to worry about things like comment spam or unwanted images sneaking into your site... Most of the routine annoyances that you might consider just the cost of being on the web are taken care of automatically.

So while my "social network" doesn't fit well into Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, the common case is much simpler: you join whatever network most of your friends are a part of, badger the ones that aren't into joining, play a few games of scrabble with 'em and that's that.

They're popular because they fit the popular needs and wants. Twitter doesn't. Blog services don't. They fulfill other needs, and sure there's overlap, but there are also a lot of conflicting requirements, and being "truly open" doesn't exactly rate when the price of this "openness" is making my kid sister wade through stock touts, rude comments, and herbal Viagra spam in order to post pictures of her new hair style.

The walled garden social network *is* the app. By all indicators, it's a killer app. And unlike the closed system so loved by phone companies, this one is appealing to users not because they don't know better, but because they know all too well the failings of the open alternatives.

If i were gonna recommend an order to someone i wanted to hate the movies, i'd recommend your order.

If i wanted someone to enjoy them, i'd recommend IV, V. If they hate those two, at least they haven't wasted their time on Jar Jar...

I hear that the Russians' online music shops aren't so unfriendly... ;P

You forgot the single best part of using the app: "i just checked ars and there are a lot of visitors today..."

Couldn't it also mean that there are just a whole lot of fairly unpopular blogs out there...?

All true.
That said, the basic technique does work well as a replacement for pop-ups / transient "dialogs" on a page that can still benefit from the context of the page without necessarily benefiting from interaction with it.

Honestly, i'm not terribly worried about *extra-specific* URLs. If it's important that they keep working, and it's important that you change your naming scheme, set up some sort of mapping. Heck, set up some sort of mapping anyway and let multiple sane URLs refer to the same resource. Yeah, i know, that also has problems... Life is grief, eh?

As for being discoverable... sorry, but i think you're gonna have to fall back on some sort of search in order for it to be useful. Whether that search is based on explicit tagging, keyword extraction, an actual full-text index, or just some sort of crazy fuzzy URL matching scheme... correct me if i'm wrong, but are most web surfers really bored enough to sit and manually increment indexes|dates / fudge keywords / guess at tags?

"Mommy! I can see up that man's nose!"

"Just look away, Johnny."

Know what really grinds my gears? Apps, and even system components, that want you to reboot after installation, but only need to update shell components and could just as well have made you logout all users and then update their precious add-ins.

For all the snobbery in Win32 land towards *nix and its "runlevel" system, it does make this sort of thing easy and fairly predictable.

So... you ordinarily use some weird keyboard layout that *doesn't* use Shift+3 for '#'?
Or it just isn't marked as such on the Mac...?

(you're getting sloppy, Paul - that's some terrible image scaling)

I really thought they should have given the reason for the authoritarian Gov't more attention. V points to the public as the cause of the problem, asking them to wake up and do something about it. Evey flashbacks to scenes of her parents trying to do something about the way society is heading. The missing actor - the complacent / reactionary public at large - is alluded to but not shown. This irritated me - it sticks out, as the rest of the movie is not given to such subtleties. Contrast it with the (very detailed, very sappy) reading of the note in Evey's cell.

That said, i did enjoy the movie. :)

So, how long before this "tagging" fad collapses under its own weight?

If you're talking to idiots, use small words. If you're writing for idiots, use simple constructs.
And that's enough about that.

What's even better is that you can return functions. Combined with closures, this results (for me) in a huge reduction in the need for big class hierarchies of simple classes, and drastically reduced the sort of cruft and namespace pollution that made me hate C++ so many years ago (a hatred that only diminished when i learned about templates).