Quotations
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I think the Web community has spoken, and it’s clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON. XML isn’t going away but I see it being less and less a Web technology; it won’t be something that you send over the wire on the public Web, but just one of many technologies that are used on the server to manage and generate what you do send over the wire.
JS had to “look like Java” only less so, be Java’s dumb kid brother or boy-hostage sidekick. Plus, I had to be done in ten days or something worse than JS would have happened.
Why, for a decade of experience, can we not seem to see the IE 8 zombie coming? It’s not like it’s going to be some big surprise that unless we do something different, we’ll still be supporting it in 2015. That’s right: in 2015, you’ll still be thinking about a browser that doesn’t support canvas or video and doesn’t even have a JITing JS engine.
JSON sucks. [...] Every time I need to (correctly) represent a large integer such as 4611686018427387900, I’m forced to do so in a string. It causes me to throw up in mouth a little.
It might seem a folly to want to build a gigantic, relatively puny computer at great expense 170 years after its invention. But the message of a completed Analytical Engine is very clear: it’s possible to be 100 years ahead of your own time. With support, this type of “blue skies” thinking can result in fantastic changes to the lives of everyone. Just think of the impact of the computer and ask yourself how different the Victorian world would have been with Babbage Engines at its disposal.
I think that “bad technology” can kill a startup, but slightly different variations of good technology don’t have much effect. Choose what you know/like best. And Ruby and Python are both in this latter category.
Content management remains an unsolved problem. Untold billions of dollars (and hours) have been spent building commercial, open source, and custom content management systems since the first Web page was pushed to a Web server using FTP, and yet they all still suck.
The Web for me is still URLs and HTML. I don’t want a Web which can only be understood by running a JavaScript interpreter against it.
— Me, on Twitter
While I don’t expect Twitter to master its own destiny as far as the decentralization of the medium goes, I do support the idea, and I hope that Twitter as a business can coexist with the need for the world to have a free, open, reliable, and verifiable way for humans to instantly communicate in a one-to-many fashion.
If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. [...] No one noticed. Not even me. It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.
When all of human endeavor falls under the rubric of the “hack” the word ceases to mean anything. Hack your commute, take public transit! Hack your next dinner party with parlour games. Delightfully clever key hack keeps all your keys on the same ring. Hack Mexican food with a “burrito” sized tortilla! Hack your brain with REM sleep. Hack the sun with a straw hat. Hack hygiene with silver oxide “deodorant”. Hack girls with compliments. Hack your windowsill with a pot of wheatgrass, and hack the sky with the goddamn moon.
My ability to decide how I feel about Wikileaks’ activities is totally annihilated by my ongoing realization that it cannot possibly be real. It’s a plot device in a near-future thriller novel. I mean, seriously, semi-stateless man with an unusual appearance uses an army of anonymous allies to expose governments’ secrets, and posts an insurance file in public with some kind of deadman switch in case he’s taken out by his enemies? That shit does not happen in real life. Julian Assange is a Neal Stephenson character who’s escaped in to the real world.
I’m renaming the book to “Dive Into HTML 5” for better SEO. This is not a joke. The book is the #5 search result for “HTML5” (no space) but #13 for “HTML 5” (with a space). I get 514 visitors a day searching Google for “HTML5” but only 53 visitors a day searching for “HTML 5”.
The easiest way to have no-downtime upgrades is have an architecture that can tolerate some subset of their processes to be down at any time. De-SPOF and this gets easier (not that de-SPOFing is always trivial).
Twitter is an open, real-time introduction and information service. On a daily basis we introduce millions to interesting people, trends, content, URLs, organizations, lists, companies, products and services. These introductions result in the formation of a dynamic real-time interest graph. At any given moment, the vast network of connections on Twitter paints a picture of a universe of interests. We follow those people, organizations, services, and other users that interest us, and in turn, others follow us.
With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system. [...] Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. Flickr helped pioneer “Web 2.0″, and personal data ownership is a key piece of that vision. Just because the wider public hasn’t caught on yet to all the nuances around data access, data privacy, data ownership, and data fidelity, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be embarrassed to be failing to deliver a quality product.
The answers to your Security Questions are case sensitive and cannot contain special characters like an apostrophe, or the words “insert,” “delete,” “drop,” “update,” “null,” or “select.”
If journalism is the first draft of history, live blogging is the first draft of journalism.
Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content
— Ben Ward
The crisis Flash now faces is that Apple has made it clear that Flash will no longer be ubiquitous, as it won’t exist on the iPhone platform, thus turning “runs everywhere” into “runs almost everywhere.” As Web developers know, “runs almost everywhere” is a recipe for doing everything at least twice.
Originally, however, speech recognition was going to lead to artificial intelligence. Computing pioneer Alan Turing suggested in 1950 that we “provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.” Over half a century later, artificial intelligence has become prerequisite to understanding speech. We have neither the chicken nor the egg.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
Good design in computer programming consists of inventing abstractions that don’t leak. Good programming consists of implementing those abstractions in such a way that they don’t leak.
Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.
— xkcd
Twitter is turning itself from a social network into a gigantic tuple-space pubsub platform that just happens to have a big social network implemented on top of it.
Imagine if 10% of the apps on iPhone came from Flash. If that was the case, then ensuring Flash didn’t break release to release would be a big deal, much bigger than any other compatibility issues. [...] Letting any of these secondary runtimes develop a significant base of applications in the store risks putting Apple in a position where the company that controls that runtime can cause delays in Apple’s release schedule, or worse, demand specific engineering decisions from Apple, under the threat of withholding the information necessary to keep their runtime working.
"... the interchange format needed to be able to support future Flash Player features, which would not necessarily map to SVG features. As such, the decision was made to go with a new interchange format, FXG, instead of having a non-standard implementation of SVG. FXG does borrow from SVG whenever possible."
We all think of Java as a boring server-side language now, but the initial idea behind Java was that software developers could write applications in Java rather than writing them for Windows, and that those applications would work everywhere, thus defanging Microsoft’s desktop OS monopoly. Microsoft took various steps to prevent that from happening, but they lacked a tool like App Store that would enable them to just ban Java. Apple has that card to play, so they’re playing it.
Miss Wilson, when she was a resident superintendent in this Palace, had a cat that apparently caught up to 60 mice a night. The corpses were then swept up in the morning. Finally, does the noble Lord recognise the fire hazard that mice pose, because they eat through insulating cables? It would be a tragedy for this beautiful Palace to burn down for lack of a cat.