Quotations
Filters: Sorted by date
you seem to think i'm random, but i'm only psuedorandom. you would be exactly this way, were you seeded at the very same time and place.
— _why
JavaScript cannot save you. Even if it could, you should not let it, for the price of this short-term salvation is the end of what you like about the web.
rather baffling finding: POST requests, made via the XMLHTTP object, send header and body data in separate tcp/ip packets [and therefore,] xmlhttp GET performs better when sending small amounts of data than an xmlhttp POST
It is amazing how much you can accomplish when it doesn't matter who gets the credit.
Last night I woke up at 2am and realized that there was a fundamental problem with cursor preservation in today’s real-time collaborative applications [...] MobWrite now has what I believe to be the most advanced cursor preservation algorithm available.
When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.
4chan's /b/ forum, which gets called things like the Mos Eisley spaceport of the web when people are being polite, and the asshole of the internet when they aren't, is energetic, anarchic, barely moderated, crude, irresponsible, vindictive if crossed, peculiarly creative, and full of hackers. It inspires loyalty in its core users, and makes everyone else nervous.
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
We all know that there's no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we're paying for them. [...] You want to "fix things in China," well, it's gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it's all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can't even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.
Most journalists have grown up with a fortress mindset. They have lived and worked in proud institutions with thick walls. Their daily knightly task has been simple: to battle journalists from other fortresses. But the fortresses are crumbling and courtly jousts with fellow journalists are no longer impressing the crowds.
Her Majesty The Queen will see the Swan Upping ceremony between Bovney Lock and Oakley Court on the River Thames, on the 20th July 2009. This is the first occasion that The Queen has witnessed the annual event.
I propose that the World Wide Web would serve well as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum. A study of the theory and practice of the Web’s technologies would traverse many key areas of our discipline.
— Tim Bray
Unlike progressive downloads, HTTP Live Streaming actually does stream content in real time, although there can be a latency of as much as 30 seconds. [...] the content to be broadcast is encoded into an MPEG transport stream and chopped into segments that are around ten seconds long. Rather than getting a continuous stream of new data over RTSP, the new protocol simply asks for the first couple clips, then asks for additional clips as needed. This works great through firewalls, and doesn't require any special servers because any standard web server can deliver the chopped up video segments.
CCP often touts this sort of thing with the bland marketing lingo of 'player generated content.' What that actually means is that you get to share a galaxy with Russian aluminum magnates, French-Indonesian nightclub-owning hackers, self-aggranziding 'spymasters,' and people who will cut the power lines to your house to destroy your internet spaceship.
Microsoft was slowing development of new versions of Internet Explorer in the hope that Web-based applications would not be able to compete with Windows applications, and Windows applications would keep people locked in to the Windows operating system. Thus XHTML2 was developed with no expectation that the leading Web browser would ever implement it.
Insofar as it encouraged workaday web professionals to recognize that there are such things as best practices independent of particular browser implementations, I think XHTML can be termed successful. Insofar as it got people thinking about the possibility of a better Web ahead of us, I think XHTML can be termed successful. Insofar as it changed the popular conception of professional web design and thrust standards into the forefront, I think XHTML can be termed successful.
Turns out, a lot of people are saddened by the loss of a spec they don’t understand, and if they did, would not bother using.
There are two meanings to XHTML: technical and marketing. The technical kind (XHTML served using the application/xhtml xml MIME type) is a formulation of HTML as an XML vocabulary. The marketing kind (XHTML served using the text/html MIME type) is processed just like HTML by browsers but the authors attempt to observe slightly different syntax rules in order to make it seem that they are doing something newer and shinier compared to HTML.
Yes, it'd be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don't. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel's Law. Now all of a sudden they're told XHTML is dead. Some wailing and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What's needed is less "boy aren't I smarter than them" snideness, and more Hey, here's what's up.
Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!
You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.
— Jared Spool, via Jeremy Keith
And that is why, in 2009, when developing in Microsoft .NET 3.5 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on a Windows 7 system, you cannot include
/com\d(\..*)?,/lpt\d(\..*)?,/con(\..*)?,/aux(\..*)?,/prn(\..*)?, or/nul(\..*)?in any of your routes.
Let's try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now - as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight.
iPlayer usage, for streaming, peaks about 10pm - just a little later from TV. But interestingly, iPlayer on the iPhone peaks at about midnight. So people are clearly going to bed with their iPhone and watching in bed. And we also see on the weekends, there's a peak of Saturday and Sunday morning usage at about 8 to 10am in the morning on iPhone.
If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.
For the record, I'm a noted privacy freak and I don't pretend to speak for anyone else on this topic. I know that resistance is futile. I continue to believe that there is a great divide on sensitivity about privacy - you've either had your identity stolen or been stalked or had some great intrusion you couldn't fend off, or you haven't. I'm in the former camp and it colors the way I view and think about privacy online. It makes me indescribably sad to see how clearly I and others in my camp are losing this battle.
Right now, pypy compiled with JIT can run the whole CPython test suite without crashing, which means we're done with obvious bugs and the only ones waiting for us are really horrible.
Bring bandwidth and disks. Help me save Geocities. Not because we love it. We hate it. But if you only save the things you love, your archive is a very poor reflection indeed.
Perhaps it's just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.
I used to think Twitter would never catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. Now I realize I was exactly wrong. Twitter will catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. It’s blogging dumbed down for the masses, and if there’s one surefire way to build something popular, it’s to take something else that is already popular and simplify.