Quotations in 2010
Filters: Type: quotation × Year: 2010 × Sorted by date
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.
We've got a rule of thumb inside Stamen that issue names must read like imperatives: "improve variable names", "delete blah functionality", "fix broken jimmy-jammers", etc. Nothing focuses the mind of the reporter like being asked to specify what exactly they'd like to see done, and it's much easier for a developer to scan a list with actual tasks right in the sentence construction.
The operations team is the one place with access to data and traffic that is "real-time enough" to detect business issues before they manifest in significant monetary loss. Traffic anomalies, chargeback rates, visitor retention… all these translate into money. This is what ops does; they make things work; they make the business work. And they spend a lot more time trending, investigating and analyzing than they do replacing hard drives and network cards.
Each speaker gets five minutes to explain their research, with a human metronome banging a waste bin with a big stick after every minute. After five minutes, an eight-year old girl (last night, actually two twins) walks across the stage and says "Please Stop, I'm Bored" and repeats it until the speaker does indeed stop.
If HTML is just another bytecode container and rendering runtime, we’ll have lost part of what made the web special, and I’m afraid HTML will lose to other formats by willingly giving up its differentiators and playing on their turf.
We spent $860,000 rebuilding our intranet. The most popular page on the intranet is still the cafeteria menu.
I'm not worried about guys like us. There will always be machines for us (powerful, complex, etc.). Why? Because if for some magical reason there wasn't all of a sudden, we're the type that would just make one.
No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, "blocked" in the W3C HTML Working Group -- not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video -- not by me, not by Adobe. Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5. Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?
At this point all I could honestly tell you from the point of view of the editor of several of the HTML5 documents being held up is that the W3C have said they're won't publish without the objections being resolved, and that the objection is from Adobe. I can't even tell what I could do to resolve the objection. It seems to be entirely a process-based objection.
My email contacts list is not a social graph. It is not a group of people I have chosen to follow, but is instead full of people with whom I have a (sometimes very tenuous) professional relationship, as well as my family and some of my friends. Interestingly, my best friends don’t email me very often, so they do not show up as a part of my Buzz following list.
The Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed. You have to make the effort to figure out which key people are really on top of what you care about, so that you can start listening to them. Plus, you need to deploy some saved searches. Once you’ve done these things, then when you turn your computer on in the morning, it’ll tell you if anything’s happened that you need to know about.
— Tim Bray
Glitch is built in an entirely new and different way for a game. The back end (java at the lowest level, with game logic scripted in Javascript) is designed for maximum flexibility and ease of deployment. That means we'll be able to push new content — new items, new places, new characters — on a daily basis. It also means that we'll have lots of APIs with which the game can be expanded and extended.
— Glitch
As has been pointed out by the community, there is an existing crash bug that was reported by Matthew Dempsky in the Flash Player bugbase (JIRA FP-677) in September of 2008 that still exists in the release players. It is fixed in Flash Player 10.1 beta, and has been since we launched the beta in early November 2009. [...] So what happened here? We picked up the bug as a crasher when it was filed on September 22, 2008, and were able to reproduce it. Remember that Flash Player 10 shipped in October 2008, so when this bug was reported we were pretty much locked and loaded for launch.
— Emmy Huang, PM for Flash Player
Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today.
32.38 percent of visitors to DF last week did not have Flash.
If Apple is really successful, it’s likely that other companies will be more emboldened to forsake openness as well. The catch is that customers won’t accept the sudden closing of a previously open platform, that’s one of the reasons Palladium failed. But Apple has shown that users will accept most anything in an entirely new platform as long as it offers users the experience they want.
If you’re ever debugging a problem and you see the number 42-mumble-mumble-mumble-7295 you’ve run out of 32-bit storage. If you see 2-mumble-mumble-mumble-647 (2147483647) you’ve run out of signed 32-bit storage. 167-mumble-mumble-15 (16777215) you’ve run out of 24-bits and 65-mumble-mumble-35 (65535) you’ve run out of 16-bits of integers.
A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting. A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.
Since we moved to EC2, the number of unique users has gone up 50%, and pageviews are up more than 100%. To support this growth, we have added 30% more ram and 50% more CPU, yet because of Amazon's constant price reductions, we are actually paying less per month now than when we started.
What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise.
— Tim Bray