When I was in college there was a big class event in the gymnasium where a hypnotist was brought in and was going to entertain us with some antics. He had people up on stage hugging and crawling around the ground and stuff so there has to be some truth to what he was doing. Right?
Has anyone else been to or seen the effects of a hypnotist? I know someone who was so afraid of the dentist that she had to be hypnotized into going, and it worked.
The ad is sick but I'm surprised they didn't put the $199 price point up at the end. They said "half the price" in the ad but it seems like that price is a bigger selling point than it simply having 3G, at least to potential iPhone buyers.
I've been a Bloglines user for many years now and it's what I use to read RSS feeds every day. Can't get by without it.
A lot of things are moving over to "The Cloud" which makes the type of computer you use not matter as much anymore. With data storage happening on a server you can't see and your main business functions potentially occurring within a web application, for many businesses the type of computer you use is mattering less.
After reading this clip about how difficult and costly it is to deploy a J2ME application in the United States, things are finally starting to click in my head regarding why Google built Android the way it did.
The high-level concept behind Android development is that the syntax is Java but it doesn't use a Java virtual machine to make the applications. There's a great article about this and here's a quote:
Android uses the Dalvik virtual machine, which is a register-based VM whereas the Java VM is stack-based. Neither a specification nor the source code for Dalvik are available yet, but it’s clear that the bytecodes are quite different from Java bytecodes. There is a translation tool from JVM bytecode (.class files) to Dalvik bytecode (.dex files) but it is a build-time tool only. JVM bytecodes are never loaded onto an Android device.
Google chose Java syntax because of its familiarity with developers — if you're developing apps for a mobile phone then you're probably already using Java. However Google was incredibly smart in that they didn't want to deal with all the hassles that are involved with licensing the Java virtual machine. What are those hassles?
Well, for starters the deal cycle can take about 12-18 months. And not only that, you have to convince the operator that it is even worth talking to you... And while I hate to admit it, it's quite reasonable... Operators (or carriers as they are called in the US) get a huge amount of noise from companies wanting to launch their services. Content managers there have more hits than Google has... So, even if you're a start-up with a brilliant solution, they will have a hard time getting you in unless you have some proof of getting revenues or an impressive userbase or an impressive brand etc.
Oh, and the worst part?
[...] and there's also the fact that they will take about 50% of your revenues...
So Google wanted the code to be familiar but total control over the packaging, deployment, and future revenues. By using Java syntax but writing their own virtual machine to execute it, they got the best of all worlds.
Interesting if you like Windows Mobile and clunky Palm handhelds. Oh, in other news, a badass iPhone is coming out next week. Sorry, Palm.
Get it while the getting's hot. Actually if you're on a Mac and are not using WebKit Nightly Builds then shame on you and download that first.
For the past few days there have been articles about this and every person that answers the call has come up with a faster version. This is the fastest yet. Only read if you know C or are extremely geeky.
Have fun on the vacation :)
Rebuilding woes aren't that upsetting unless you have many hundreds of blog entries under your belt, then it's a pain. The pain can be lessoned by being smart about what is in an include file and what is in the template, but sitting there and waiting does take a few minutes. I always thought about it like my "blog was compiling".
Cool, Gnorb, hope it works out for ya.
Mr. Fox is among a small group of Google employees who keep a watchful eye on the vital signs of one of the most successful and profitable businesses on the Internet. The number of searches and clicks, the rate at which users click on ads, the revenue this generates — everything is tracked hour by hour, compared with the data from a week earlier and charted.
I'm sure a lot of startups are upset at this announcement as it seems Adobe is dipping into their pool, but Adobe just launched their new web office named Acrobat.com and it seems they've got a pretty decent offering. Here's what it offers:
Buzzword is aimed at the multitude of web-based writing apps, most likely Google Docs which was previously Writely. Connect Now can be seen as a competitor to WebEx and also 37signals' Campfire team chatting software. Adobe is offering chat, video conferencing, file sharing, and collaborative whiteboarding for free so some companies might be freaking out a bit right now.
The interesting part of this is that Adobe is offering these apps as an AIR download, which means you can run them on your desktop instead of in your browser.
First they launched web-based Photoshop Express and now Acrobat.com. If anybody thought that Adobe wasn't serious about web-based software then I'm sure they're convinced now.
FUCK IT! WE'LL DO IT LIVE!
Oh and "I'll create a GUI interface" means:
I'll create a graphical user interface interface
The stupidity here is exponential.
Thank god I don't watch this piece of shit show or else I'd be writing a letter to the episode writers about how stupid they sound.
Sorry Mike, nothing comes to mind. Sounds like it might have to be coded by hand.
Tyme may be the only person I know who's used every major blogging engine on a site. I don't think anybody could adequately compare all the different blog platforms as well as she could.
I don't see myself ever using MT for anything but I can see specific projects where I might pick EE over WP.
The next blog that I start from scratch will be with Movable Type. I've never liked WP, mainly because the things that I need to do (directly access data without having random HTML elements thrown in, have complete access over templates, etc.) are just easier to do in MT than WP in my opinion. I don't have to mess with any kind of caching or plugins in MT as it publishes statically off the bat, and the MT admin interface has been far superior to WordPress for a few years. In fact the MT admin interface from 2004 beats the shit out of the WP admin interface in the latest release. I'm a designer so that kind of stuff matters to me.
Tyme, I also read somewhere else that they built Twitter to be a content management system, not a real-time messaging system. It seems like all the infrastructure and technology decisions they've made since the beginning were slanted towards a CMS but then people didn't use it that way.
Ev did say something useful and that was that "fixing" Twitter isn't a money issue, it's not a scalability issue, it's essentially an HR issue. They have to find the best architects -- right now -- and get them hired and up to speed yesterday. That's a lot of pressure. But then again, they should have been thinking about this all along and not after months of problems.
Alex, I'd venture to think that people who consider the new WP admin screen as "beautiful" are saying it in direct comparison to all previous versions of the WP interface which looked like the bottom of my shoe after I stepped in dog shit. The sparse and smartly-designed look of Chyrp is far superior to WP's design, and you're just one person working on the project for months, not years. Automattic and WP have absolutely no excuse for letting the codebase of WP and the interface of the admin application get covered in weeds over the years. It's embarrassing that one of the most widely-used web applications in the blog world happens to be one of the most unkempt as far as the visuals are concerned.
One I hear a lot--but don't know that much about--is that WordPress calls the database too much. Because a default installation doesn't cache anything(?) a reasonably high level of traffic can easily slow it too a crawl or take the site down completely.
David that's completely right, and that's WP's downfall. That also happens to be an area that has kept Movable Type still relevant if you're dealing with super-large blogs as MT caches everything by default and has no problem dealing with large traffic spikes. There are very good caching plugins for WordPress but they're not turned on by default which is a huge mistake. The "Digg effect" was basically coined because WP-based blogs that got on the frontpage of Digg would go down immediately. I used to run a fairly popular Movable Type-based blog that has had its fair share of Diggings and it never went down, not once, under heavy traffic. That's something that WP simply cannot claim.
WordPress sucks because if you're creating a new Page, like a "Contact Us" page, and you happen to have a textarea element in the content, once you save it and go back to that page, WP interprets the closing /textarea tag as the actual end of the MAIN textarea you use to type into, and everything below it spills out into the WP interface completely botching whatever you had saved as the content for that Page. It's been documented as a bug but was closed due to it being an "edge case" or some bullshit. Most annoying bug ever, and it's even more annoying to know that nobody cares about it. The bottom line is you just can't have any kind of form inside of a Page.
Oh and since it's Friday and I'm generous, here's another reason why WordPress sucks. When they released the version of WP that swapped out categories for the tag taxonomy stuff they COMPLETELY fucked up any sites that had WP and bbpress installed at the same time as they had conflicting function calls with all tag-related functions. The two latest versions of WP and bbpress were released and were completely incompatible with each other. This took 9rules.com down for about a day and had us (Scrivs) coding like mad to fix it. Thanks a lot WP.
If you're using WP to power a site that has anything more than a blog on it, stay the hell away because it's evil.
I've been thinking a lot about Twitter recently, but not about its place in my life and how people are using it. I've been thinking more about the business issues associated with its server problems and just what the outcome will be.
Pownce never took off beyond its initial launch and it was one of the closest potential Twitter-killers out there, but it fizzled. Michael Arrington wrote an article about how Twitter's uptime issues no longer matter because its users now need Twitter more than Twitter needs its users. This presents Twitter with an interesting situation: fix what's broke or don't fix anything. They certainly have enough money to fix it but are they going to? Do they care?
What if they never fix it and just perpetually have downtime issues. What will happen? Will users get pissed off? Yes. Will they leave? No, because where will they go? No viable competitor has emerged with enough firepower to lure Twitter's users over to a new service. This doesn't mean such a competitor won't pop up, but they certainly haven't yet.
People have said that FriendFeed is a Twitter-killer but I completely disagree. FriendFeed needs Twitter to survive else its utility is lessened. FriendFeed really only exists because Twitter exists, and the vast majority of its content will vanish if Twitter is killed.
I think this is one of the most interesting scenarios I've watched unfold since I've been in the tech industry. Twitter has the money to fix what's broke, but it's all on them to actually do it. Blaine Cook is out and maybe someone with more experience will step in. Or, a new service will pop up and make the right moves to capture Twitter's audience and Twitter will fall from a height that few companies have fallen from since the dotcom bust.
Exactly what Scrivs said.
Moderator Scrivs says: Mike couldn't pick one so he gets to pick none.
My feelings about Twitter are no secret. In short, I think it’s unremarkable, practically useless and will never realistically go mainstream.
But putting my beliefs aside, I don’t think it takes more than a simple analysis of “Twitter by the numbers” to add a dose of perspective to all of the Twitter hype.
@RightOn: yes sir, that is the how we envisioned it.
What can we help you with Jen?
The only thing you have to change is change itself.
Does it have to be one or the other?
I don't know, but let's test that theory.
Wow very nice, this will probably get hit by a ton of people searching for this on Google.
Have you seen this compression technique that puts code into a PNG image where each pixel is a range of 255 ascii values? I just read it the other day and it sounds really cool, but not totally practical yet.
Have them send you an instant message when they do it.
Wow, black looks hot on the Asus. Very nice.
iPhone is my best gadget, but that's the cliché answer. My old Nokia 770 was pretty high up as far as gadget status, but I sold it.
I've used GTK+ in the past and it's pretty nice.
I like Objective C's elegance and syntax now that I've been using it for about a month or so. Code looks beautiful.
» The Next Great Gaming Platform: Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch ... Last Reply: 7 months ago by Scrivs.
Apple has said that certain downloads that are larger than 10MB will need to be made at your computer and then side-loaded into your iPhone, so I see no reason why you can't "deauthorize" your old iPhone and "authorize" a new iPhone once you have it, just like you can do to iPods and music purchased via the iTunes Music Store. I really don't think there will be a lock-in scenario.