Quotations
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There's a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.
I've always said that setting up a web site for most folks is scary and intimidating - but myspace, with all your friends there, lends itself to a helping culture. Everyone shares how to do whatever with their circles of friends... they get by with a little help from their friends.
I believe this tribe is, over time, growing farther away from the rest of the world. That's happening for an interesting and important reason, which is that the tools we are building and using are accelerating our ability to build and use more of these tools.
My "why move away from SGML?" reason is the way that every time I have to explain to someone that their Mozilla bug in invalid because HTML is actually an SGML application [...] I finish up by saying "if you want to see the actual spec that I've been told says that, you can buy a copy for 230 Swiss francs."
In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it's really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.
— Tim Bray
The promise [of J2EE] was that of infinite scalability based on tooling, which assumes that designing scalable systems is a general case problem. I now firmly believe that this is flawed reasoning. Frameworks don't solve scalability problems, design solves scalability problems.
We declined to participate in the XHTML2 Working Group because we think XHTML2 is not an appropriate technology for the web.
— Maciej Stachowiak, Apple
None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
— Alex Payne, Twitter
There are some ideas that are broken, but attractive enough to some people that they are doomed to be tried again and again. DRM is one of them.
Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.
If you're designing social media systems, you should be keeping an eye on the $2B industry that sells links from your site to their clients.
The problem is a lack of respect for the consumer. The manufacturers don't act as if the computer belongs to you. They act as if it is a billboard for restricted trial versions of software and ads for Web sites and services that they can sell to third-party companies who want you to buy these products.
Thankfully, because of the accountability that is built into the web itself (the URL structure is fundamentally accountable), I believe that while the vulnerability of the live web to spam is real, it is managable.
XSD is more flawed than most technologies that roam the earth. I was on the committee that created it, and that was back when I made my money explaining complicated technologies to people for money, and man, I could hear the cash registers ringing in my ears.
— Don Box
If you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.
Most Apollo applications will likely be repurposed web pages running inside a specialized environment. [...] Imagine your heavy, always-open web apps leaving your browser tab and creating an application-like presence in your taskbar.
I just cut my thumb opening the clear plastic Fortress of Solitude in which you've packed the cordless presenter. [...] You forced me into stabbing your product with a carving knife. Is that really the sort of "initial user experience" you were hoping for?
When I write a new book [...] I plan to throw away something like the first 30 or so pages. And, because I know I'm going to do it, it doesn't worry me. I no longer have writer's block.
A binary compatible wire call is still a binary compatible wire call, no matter how much XML you put on it.
The best reason to always build out APIs for your product is that it makes it easier for the rest of the world to extend your product or service rather than start competitors.
On any given Web page, users will either click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or click the Back button on their Web browser.
[...] I'm a fan of the virtual machine future. We should treat our operating system like a roll of paper towels. If you get something on it you don't like, you ball it up and throw it away, and rip off a new, fresh one.
Despite it being a best practice, currently only a handful of OpenID Consumer sites support the association of multiple OpenID identifiers to a single "account". This is important to create redundancy to make the loss of an identifier less catastrophic.
I don't do test driven development. I do stupidity driven testing... I wait until I do something stupid, and then write tests to avoid doing it again.
The upshot is that HTTP does not have everything that REST indicates should be present, and there is the additional problem that while HTTP is the first, and best, implementation of REST, the two are not the same and yet are often confused.
OpenID is particularly appealing to OLPC, because it can be used to perpetuate passwordless access even on sites that normally require authentication [...] With an OpenID provider service running on the school server (or other trusted servers), logins to OpenID-enabled sites will simply succeed transparently, because the child's machine has been authenticated in the background
We don't yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we're actively working on it. That roll-out is likely to be gradual.
— John Panzer, AOL
The bright side: web spam is an evolutionary force that pushes relevance innovations such as trustrank forward. Spam created the market opportunity for Google, when Altavista succumbed in 97-98. Search startups should be praying to the spam gods for a second opportunity.
Please, fanboys, don't send me dumb notes averring that Apple's failure to police this use of its mark will lead to the end of its ability to stop manufacturers from producing rival MP3 players and calling them iPods. That's a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their kids when they want to reassure them that they'll have a healthy college fund.
Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.