Month: November 2007

NBC vs. Apple: SNL’s iPhone’Sketch

NBC vs. Apple: SNL’s iPhone Sketch: Either way, you must sit through a 15-second TV-style commercial before you get to the clip — a chilling vision of what the Internet would look like if it had been invented by the folks who run broadcast television. [Yeah… I know ads are big business, but no one is interested in interruption based ads anymore, if they ever were. The entrenched thinking that is forcing ads into the process (again) is wrong. The question is not “how can we shove ads down their throats, we love ads” it’s “how can we make money from this now that the ‘network’ is not relevant.” An example old school ads that work are product placement. Work defined as, I may or may not care what phone, car, cereal, shoes, etc. folks in the movie are wearing, but I may, so especially in an online download, make sure that metadata is there, and feel free to track the click, and make some money from it.]
Source: FORTUNE: Apple 2.0

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian Computing

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian Computing: This isn’t working. We’ve been stuck for years, the backlog never goes away, and we fight the same old fights with a new generation of management. The Enterprise is too complex, too turbulent, too confused, to be a fruitful place to study the craft of software. We don’t know when it’s right. Yes, we sometimes know when it’s wrong, when we can’t even deliver the software. But what is success? Praise from a self-interested manager? An incremental improvement in corporate throughput? A pile of surveys filled in by our students? A nice writeup in The Journal?

I propose that enterprise software is a hard problem that we can understand only after we solve an easier case, one that lies close to hand. Before we can tackle the enterprise, we need to write software for people. Not software for everyone, but software for you and for me. [Awesome piece. Not to be missed.]

A Few Steps For Shoes On A Mac

A Few Steps For Shoes On A Mac:

Will Larson: Stacks are containers that build downward, and flows are containers that build rightward and then downward. Flows are like words in a book. Stacks are like entries in a log file. The main Shoes window is a flow, and a stack or flow can have any number of stacks and flows inside of it.

This blog post here does a good job of getting people around some of the foul smells in the last Shoes build for OS X. I’ve still got to wrap up the video object for Mac before releasing the next build, which I hope will fall into place before the week’s end.

And, well, I could really use some Leopard users on the Shoes list.

[Interesting stuff.]
Source: hackety org

freeconomics

freeconomics: I know they loved it because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops. [You must be careful. The time to be free is when the works have no value. Once you’ve established a market, setting things to zero is a big mistake. I like that folks are willing to take a chance with “pay what you want” but it should again be seen as way of possibly beginning to establish a market for your works, and converting to a fixed price based on the data you’ve gathered. Unless something else is supporting your works (ahh, the joys of patronage) it’s not a smart play.]
Source: gapingvoid

Gmail gets a JavaScript facelift

Gmail gets a JavaScript facelift: As one small example, one team member reverse-engineered jscript.dll to figure out how its GC algorithm worked, and was horrified to find that it had hard-coded, arbitrary limits on how many objects could be allocated before a GC would occur. This led to an insane amount of effort optimizing the code to reduce the number of allocations in core code paths. [More good info in the article and links.]
Source: Ajaxian