Disqus - Latest Comments for eas

Re: The FPhone

eas — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:00:25 -0000

It's funny that you have no interest in your iPhone, because my friends with iPhones, and I, are still surprised that we seem to be using the damn things to do things that could be done more easily and effectively using the computer that is usually only a foot or two away.

Re: Future-safe archives (Scripting News)

eas — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:12:10 -0000

As Dave points out, Archive.org is incomplete. There are various reasons for this, including the fact that some people don't want their sites archived because they loose control of their data, but that gives me an idea.

What if those who cared could communicate a policy to archive.org. Maybe they could say "archive this, but don't make it publicly available for 5 years from the date you archived it. Or, archive this, but "hide it from public view until 10 years after it disappears from the web."

Re: Fear bombs of 2008 (Scripting News)

eas — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:28:57 -0000

Yanky doodle ( a term of derision used by the British, coopted by the revolutionaries).
Lenny Bruce.

Its time to take the power of the word away from the republiks.

We could all adopt it as our honorary middle names.. We can force it on Karl Husseiin Rove, John Hussein McCain, Rush Hussein Limbaugh, Matt Hussein Drudge.

Re: A new reason to hate Comcast (Scripting News)

eas — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:35:27 -0000

I don't know where you live, but the $1,500/month they quoted you is pretty ridiculous and well beyond T1 pricing. Speakeasy (among others) will provision a business class T1 for $350, including telco charges) in a lot of locales.

Re: MacBook Touch coming soon!?!? (Scripting News)

eas — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:00:23 -0000

I've seen some crazy speculation from other people about the "product transition" mentioned in the Apple earnings conference call. I think you are on the right track. The MacBook Pro could use a major update, and wacking some weight/bulk out of the package is the first place I'd start.

I would like to see a Mac mini-tower for gamers who want to dual boot into Windows and be able to upgrade their video cards frequently.

Re: An Accidental Interview with Lieutenant Phil Dreyer | The Cosmic Tap

eas — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 04:03:40 -0000

"You are between two buildings, housin' communications equipment."

Sounds like the cop just gave away "sensitive information" to someone he regarded as a potential terrorist.

Re: PureMobile selling unlocked iPhones on its Web site

eas — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 01:32:33 -0000

Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. Even if they do manage to unlock it, you can be sure that not everything is going to work right, particularly the Visual Voicemail.

Re: WordPress Plugin - Textile 2.0

eas — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 22:33:55 -0000

Thanks for writing this plugin. I'm writing to note an issue i'm seeing with text I marked up with Textile for use in my MT blog which I'm importing into Wordpress.

It seems that the Textile2.5 plugin fails to create a block quote when the first thing following it is a textile encoded link:

==
bq. "Wordpress":http://www.wordpress.org
==

Also appearantly the MT plugin has some innovations like extended blocks, that I found really handy. I could enter ===bq..=== and it would blockquote everything until the next block idenfitier (usually a ==p.==). It would be very cool to be able to use this in Wordpress too.

Re: WordPress Plugin - Textile 2.0

eas — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 22:50:51 -0000

Hmm, I'm not so sure I'm right about what's causing the blockquote to fail.

Re: Unlocked iPhone

eas — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:26:40 -0000

I'm eager to see them succeed, but I'm even more eager for Apple's exclusive with AT&T to expire.

I suspect that Apple will be releasing updates to the iPhone on a regular basis for the next year with the following dynamic:
1. The updates will deliver compelling new functionality, so people will really want to install them.
2. The updates will not work on a hacked iPhone system, so people will have to do a clean reinstall.
3. The clean reinstall will block the attack vectors previously used to unlock the system.
4. The hacking teams will have to find new ways in, but by the time they figure it out, a new update will be coming in for a landing.

Finally, interest will wane, on both the side of the hackers, and the consumers of their hacks. The dynamic has already played out to a large degree with iTunes cracking (though some people have been carrying the torch forward). It also seems to have happened among people making it possible to run OSX on generic PC hardware.

Re: Rapid development serving 500,000 pages/hour

eas — Thu, 24 May 2007 18:46:56 -0000

Cool. I remember you guys were having a lot of problems when you first deployed.

Unfortunately, I cant get the the technology page right now. I keep getting a 500 error.

Re: What Powers Curse

eas — Thu, 24 May 2007 18:56:36 -0000

Excellent. I finally managed to get through to the page on the curse site and was bummed not to see the hardware specs.

It's great that you published this info. You've got the highest volume Django installation I've heard of.

Re: Zune Sighting

eas — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 16:38:41 -0000

FYI, Zunecomplaints.net has copied pretty much your entire post.

Re: Zune Sighting

eas — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 16:38:41 -0000

FYI, Zunecomplaints.net has copied pretty much your entire post.

Re: Zune Sighting

eas — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 02:40:19 -0000

They are basically stealing other people's content and placing Google ads along side them. Sleazy.

Re: Zune Sighting

eas — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 02:40:19 -0000

They are basically stealing other people's content and placing Google ads along side them. Sleazy.

Re: 2006/12/01/zoodango-launches-social-networking-at-starbucks/

eas — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:10:29 -0000

Zoodango sounds like something that is probably illegal in all 50 states.

Re: 2007/04/20/myspace-porn/

eas — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 23:48:43 -0000

As Jamie Zawinski wrote, anyone creating social software should have an answer for "How will this software get my users laid?"

I guess these new stats show that it's better to offer the promise of sex, than a simulation.

Re: 2007/04/30/evite-socializr/

eas — Tue, 01 May 2007 12:31:49 -0000

What a bunch of BS. My wife probably has half a dozen rolls of Christmas wrapping paper similar to both of those designs.

This comes at a timely juncture though, I just set up my first eVite last night, and it was such a poor experience, I wanted to try an alternative, but I couldn't think of the name.

Re: 2007/05/22/youtube-national-geographic/

eas — Tue, 22 May 2007 12:18:57 -0000

NatGeo has also had a channel on Joost for a while.

Re: 2007/06/07/yahoo-lgbt/

eas — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 19:43:14 -0000

I'm glad to hear it, especially after Yahoo quickly caved in to religious right pressure groups a few years ago when they banned businesses selling adult products from yahoo shopping.

Mike, you are so cute when you get visibly homophobic.

Re: 2007/06/17/glam-number-one/

eas — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:28:38 -0000

Bummer for my friends who are still plugging away at Oxygen Media.

Re: 2007/07/05/iphone-o2/

eas — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:09:08 -0000

Does anyone know the real scoop about O2's 3G coverage in the UK, and T-mobile's coverage within Germany? It's hard to get the real scoop, because a lot of Europeans seem to like to use 3G to take digs at the US mobile industry, and a lot of American's like to use poor 3G as a reason to bash AT&T.

From what I've been able to tell though, both carriers may actually have extensive EDGE installations. This may mean that the first European iPhone's will, in fact, be EDGE, which would also help explain why the current iPhone sold in the US is a quadband phone.

I have been watching this for the past few days. Until yesterday, everyone thought Vodafone was a lock, perhaps for most/all of Europe. However, the earlier rumor/news about T-mobile getting the contract for Germany along with this latest rumor/news about O2 suggests Vodafone, whose biggest strength was the breadth of their subscriber base across Europe.

It also suggests that Apple's European carrier strategy is similar to their US carrier strategy of partnering with someone they can exert more leverage over, which gives them more strength in negotiations to extract things like a share of services revenue. Given Vodafone's reach, they might have thought they had more leverage with Apple than they apparently did.

More updates and analysis about this on my blog.

Re: 2007/08/31/social-network-patent/

eas — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:08:49 -0000

Hmm. LiveJournal started in 1999. I'm not sure when all their various privacy and friend network features were rolled out, but I'm pretty sure they were all there when I started checking it out in mid-2001.

Re: 2007/08/31/blogday/

eas — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:49:57 -0000

Lately http://petprojectblog.com has been finding it's voice

Re: 2008/02/28/google-project-care/

eas — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:15:59 -0000

This is an interesting story. I hope the comments don't get threaded with a bunch of ignorant "what does a homeless person need with something like grandcentral [they don't have a phone, need food more, etc]" comments.

Among other things, this augments the programs that give people loaner cell-phones so they can schedule job interviews. Now they have a phone # they can use any time.

Re: 2008/03/05/flash-slow-steve-jobs-poll/

eas — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:20:22 -0000

The longer I go without flash on my iPhone, the less I care.

Besides, I find that flash is a CPU hog on my Windows laptop, with a processor that runs at many times the clock speed, has more pipelines, speculative execution and access to 10x as much memory (and Flash supposedly runs better on Windows than MacOS).

So, why do I want that dragging down the snappiness and battery life of my iPhone?

Re: 2008/04/23/live-mesh-simplified/

eas — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:44:06 -0000

Meh-sh?

Re: 2008/06/27/familybuilder-anniversary/

eas — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:34:53 -0000

I wonder how many users are actually behind those >15M profiles.

Re: 2008/07/08/google-lively/

eas — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:10:02 -0000

Windows only.
Booo!

I'd heard that they spun this out into a separate company, and then decided to reabsorb it (and it may have originated as an acquisition).

Re: My Top 10 iPhone Apps: Currently Using and Desired

eas — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:52:41 -0000

I find the Google App to be rather odd. For one thing, it doesn't look very iPhone like. For another, most of the other app icons don't look very iPhone like, and their functionality gets launched in Safari (it doesn't even do the embedded browser thing).

I think it is really an Android app running on the iPhone.

Re: 2008/07/15/app-store-prices/

eas — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:42:37 -0000

Yeah yeah yeah. Honestly, none of the quoted prices sound outrageous as long as there the apps are of good quality. I agree that $2 for a novelty like iBeer is silly, but then again, it is only $2, the cost of two music tracks, or a couple of good doughnuts.

Re: 2008/07/29/plentyoffish-us-uk-comscore/

eas — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:19:00 -0000

I think maybe the quote meant to be $1M/year for each hour he puts into maintaining the site per week?

It's true that there are more committed people at a pay site. Plenty of Fish wouldn't be making as much as they do if there weren't good reasons to use a pay dating site, since most, if not all, of PlentyOfFish's ad inventory is for other dating sites.

Re: Dave Winer was right about river reading

eas — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 01:00:18 -0000

First time I checked out Google reader, I wasn't excited, but I've been using them for the past month since they did the river of news thing, and I'm pretty happy with the basic experience.

I hope they'll go above and beyond the other readers out there, but that's a blog post I need to get to this week.

Re: When will Google crash come?

eas — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:03:04 -0000

I think the assumption that Google will crash is a dubious one. They have caught hold of a major disruption in business models, just as Microsoft did.

I remember in the early 90s people saying that Microsoft's growth couldn't justify their stock price. I remember people in the Mid 90s saying it too. Take a look at what Microsoft's stock price has done since the mid 90s. Yes, it's well off it's peak in 2000, and it's not going anywhere, but its still 4-5x it's 1995 price.

As Scoble notes, there are still lots of existing advertisers who haven't joined the transition, and there are lots of organizations (or parts of organizations) that never advertised before who are starting to take advantage of the ability to narrowly target advertisements and measure/track performance.

Maybe Google isn't the ultimate beneficiary of this shift (though they seem to have the strongest position right now). Still I think it's dubious to assume there will be a major crash in the sector when looked at over the next 10-15 years.

That doesn't mean that there couldn't be hard times over smaller time frames though.

Re: When will Google crash come?

eas — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:30:28 -0000

BTW, people complained about Microsoft not making "real products" too, just bits in a box!

Re: The hot new development framework

eas — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 00:09:53 -0000

"Its been hell getting Django installed on Windows"

I haven't deployed on Windows, but getting it running with the dev webserver is really easy, and I've had no trouble turning around and running the stuff I've developed on Windows under mod_python on webfaction's hosting.

I don't know about screencasts, because, I don't find screencasts to be very useful, anyway. The pace is always off they are either too slow, or they breeze over something important, and I have to go back over it 10 times to try and make out what happened on the screen. Give me a well written tutorial any day.

Re: Steve Ballmer still doesn’t understand social networking

eas — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 23:46:57 -0000

I think, if anything, Ballmer has signaled to Zuckerberg that he and the company he leads are as clueless as IBM was in the early days of MS-DOS. That partnership worked out very well for MS.

Re: Is Steve Jobs lying about Flash not working on iPhone?

eas — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:18:20 -0000

I find Flash to be a CPU hog on my laptop. I'm not missing having it drag down the performance and battery life on my iPhone.

Re: Why I’m buying a Tesla sedan

eas — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:31:17 -0000

Interesting. I wonder when toyota will ship a plug-in hybrid.

Re: The Silicon Valley VC Disease

eas — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:33:04 -0000

Liam, I'm not impressed by other companies attempts to compete with the iPhone. Honestly, I really expected more, sooner.

When (if?) they catch up, I can imagine that they'll be suitable platforms for mobile web apps. To the extent that native apps are important though, I have my doubts that they'll be able to catch up with Apple.

The other smartphones were around before the iPhone, and their sales were growing at a healthy rate, and yet mobile application sales were stagnating. How are they going to turn that around?

They might be able to turn that around by taking a page out of Apple's book, but they are already at a disadvantage. They'll have to negotiate with the carriers if they want to make application acquisition as seamless as it is with the iPhone. They don't have the presence on end-user desktops that Apple has with Macs and iTunes to use as both a lever for dealing with the carriers, and to provide a desktop compliment to the mobile user experience.

Let's face it, developers may want options so they don't become too dependent on a given platform, but they don't want too many options. The personal computer world used to have and incompatible Apple, Atari, Commodore & Tandy, not to mention various CP/M systems, before the IBM PC (and MS-DOS) came along and provided the critical mass to create a virtuous circle that lead to mainstream adoption.

We can quibble whether we've hit that inflection point in the mobile space yet, but I think most will agree, it's not far off. So, is there anyone with ambitions in the space who isn't going to bet on Apple? My guess, almost everyone bets on Apple, but their other bets are split among multiple contenders.

Re: Lifestyle business? Google or Microsoft could eat your lunch

eas — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:01:00 -0000

I have serious doubts that anyone at Microsoft could release a reasonable clone 37 Signals' products before they fell victim to bloat.

If some group managed to sneak out a version without bloat and managed to dodge reorgs long enough to find users, it would get sucked into Information Worker or some other big product group.

It would languish there for a couple of years until they finished their next bloated version of Sharepoint, or Office Live, or whatever their new vision is for iWorker collaboration. At that point, they'd try and get everyone to move over to the bloated service and then shut down the original service 8 weeks later.

Google could probably pull off the simplicity, but after getting burned by their decision to put Google Notebook out to pasture, I wonder if it wouldn't get dropped or neglected.

Re: TreeHugger Picks: Prototypical Energy Types for the Future

eas — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 03:04:03 -0000

Shadow7988, actually, I think uranium packs more power per pound than coal.

Re: Survey: Incandescence vs Fluorescence ?

eas — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:13:47 -0000

So far, I haven't seen a CFL that I could stand having in my livingroom or bedroom, but I haven't really checked in the last year or so. Perhaps it's time to take another look, because I'd really like to find something more efficient.

I don't see why LEDs are going to be any better. The white ones work via florescence too.

Re: Chevy Volt: An All-Electric Gasoline Hybrid?

eas — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 17:03:39 -0000

Back 20-30 years ago, GM had concept vehicles driven by gas turbine engines. In theory, they were more efficient and lighter weight. I think the reality was that they needed a continuously variable transmission to work in their optimal range.

What I'm wondering now is if they'd be an efficient powerplant for this sort of all electric hybrid.

Re: Zap! and Lotus Team Up to Create the Zap-X: 350 Miles and 155 Mph on a 10 Minute Charge

eas — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 15:12:53 -0000

Interesting that Lotus seems to be going to go-to firm for boutique electric vehicles. Remember that they provide the body/chassis for the Tesla roadster.

Re: No Child Left Inside: Economist on National Parks

eas — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 11:42:13 -0000

Seems to cut both ways. Some of the national parks are so oversubscribed that its hard to imagine having a transcendent experience in nature there.

Re: Hybrid Truck Unveiled by Kenworth

eas — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 14:33:35 -0000

Seems like this would also help a lot with reducing pollution from diesel soot, which seems to be produced in greatest quantity when engine load and/or RPM changes suddenly.

I'm also curious about whether heavy trucks like this can potentially capture more energy from regenerative breaking than hybrid cars. They rely heavily on engine breaking, though this is often banned in urban areas. Also, given their high payload capacities, having two or even 3x as many batteries to capture more breaking energy would have a much smaller impact on overall weight (and volume) than they would in a passenger car.

Re: The Schmaltz-Mobile Is Coming, One Chicken-Mile At A Time

eas — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:21:01 -0000

It would be great if stories like this made the point of noting that the US currently consumes about ~50-60 billion gallons of diesel a year, which means this is really just a drop in the barrel, meeting less than 1% of demand.

Re: Aluminium To Kick-Start Hydrogen Cars

eas — Mon, 21 May 2007 18:54:51 -0000

Mike, most aluminum production, in the US, at least, uses "cheap" electricity from hydropower, not fossil fuels.

Still, the point that aluminum production is energy intensive still stands.

Re: Sycamore Ceiling Fan: Works Smarter, Not Harder

eas — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:18:24 -0000

In the US we call them maple ceiling fans.

Re: Wal-Mart's Environmental Chief "Reassigned" -- Hmm

eas — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:54:02 -0000

Being the head of the private label strategy for a company like WallMart sounds like a big job. It may not be as glamorous sounding to the TH crowd as his old job, but it sounds like it could be a real promotion and a reward for a job well done.