borismus

Surprised the article has no mention of verbal oaths as a precursor to signatures before widespread literacy. Ivan Illich writes about this in “ABC”

Agree with sentiment but want to nitpick a bit. It’s unclear that the Roman Empire collapsed at all. Many Roman institutions lived on well past the 5th century and were assimilated into gothic Frankish Visigoth etc societies.

if you liked this short story, consider vogon poetry

It’s not necessarily your ears. Could also be the frequency response of your speakers

Not for long

Here I was expecting deep truths: spend time with those you love, don’t squander your time on meaningless drivel that neither enhances the mind nor expands the heart. But all I got were software engineering life hacks!

Maybe by the time you switch to npm, github will come back up?

Still too thick.

Yes, Apple is really good at creating usable, beautiful user interfaces and vertically integrated solutions. Yes, it's very difficult to quantify this, and yes consumers get it. However, Apple isn't the only company focused on getting the experience right.

Once the UX of a competing platform/product is on par (modulo product/company loyalty), Christensen's low end disruption model kicks in. The way Apple can continue winning is to be ahead of the curve, creating new features and product categories that can dominate, until the low end disruption model catches up to them.

Please run the linked JSPerf tests in a later version of Firefox. The charts will automatically update.

(reposted from blog): I don't see how the claim that "Backbone by itself is not sufficient for building complex web apps" is controversial. There is a clear need to go beyond the functionality provided by Backbone, as evidenced by the popularity of great projects like Tim's Backbone boilerplate and layout-manager.

To get a feel for USB web debugging, check out this remote debugging video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4zpL4VBbuU

Great post however many things don't fit the pattern. For example, lacking precognition, your search app can't know what people will search for. There are many similar UI examples, where you can't do stuff until you get input from the user, leading to a fundamentally synchronous (from a user's perspective) transaction.

Yup, I mention that explicitly. Future work :)

Just moved to socket.io-0.8.2, which fixes the issue.

Try in Chrome 13 and below (due to breaking Web Socket changes).

I think he's trying to say that learning is good. Hard to refute that one :)

But... "Would you be com­fort­able going to a physi­cian if you learned they hadn’t read any new find­ings in years?"

When's the last time you went to a family doctor that stays up-to-date with life science research?

Take 3 cameras and you get full 3D. Then project on a 3DTV, and you have a much more immersive video conference!

Disagree.

Some people are leaving to Facebook to get rich, so by offering them more money, Google is setting up appropriate incentives for them to stay.

Fight fire with fire!

I just packaged an HTML5 game today. What do you mean by "reliable" though?

I am totally guilty of buying domains for side projects and then not following through.

I own 17 domains, 5 of which are currently actively hosting meaningful content or webapps. I went through a scrub of the ones that are unused, and realized that I need to let some go.

Here's a list of ones I'm letting expire. If you have a meaningful project idea for one of them let me know.

concoctail.com geogames.org gpsrpg.com istherewind.com jamhunt.com runubc.com

Unintended. Apologies.

It does sound uncanny, but has potential to be awesome. The issue isn't the pitch bend but the synthetic voice. Auto-tune the news is pretty awesome, for example.

You might be in an A/B test.

Steve hates social networking. It's just too messy!

The number of ideas one has is a moot point really. More important is ability to discern quality. Most important is to bring the good ones to fruition!

I like how you can vote for more than one! This makes #3 somewhat redundant.

The Innovator's Dilemma