msg

I don't buy any of these at all.

#1 and #2 say that you need a piece of paper to be a journalist. It's not true, as you can see from independent bloggers in eg Arab states covering the various revolutions.

#3 through 5 says that you need to have "standards" to be a journalist. Again there is no one to bell the cat. If your rush expose has numerous misspellings, do you lose your status? How closely must you check your facts? How much conflict of interest must you disclose? "Disclosure: the author loves Apple products." Similarly for keeping notes and being up front with your sources. If you don't do it we might call what you're doing "bad journalism". But it's not "not journalism".

#6 says that aggregators are not journalists. To a degree I think this is true; see below.

#7 says that unless you provide fair views or equal time, you're not a journalist. I put this together with #3 to #5.

As a thought exercise, see which of your favorite journalism organizations pass the filter on any given day.

Now that that's out of the way, what is journalism? It's broadcasting an eyewitness account, or original ideas derived from an eyewitness account, to the public. And that's it. This is why I might exclude aggregators who don't add independent content.

Freedom of the press means freedom to publish and be read without censorship. We are all publishing all the time. This doesn't mean that we need to somehow narrow the field of journalism to exclude the unwashed masses, as this judge's opinion strains to do. We might need to specify the definition of "journalistic activity" if we need to carve out special protections.

Accept that the judge was BSing and this part of the decision makes much more sense.

You could use the same logic to criticize a listener for not buying a bad album from their favorite band.

Heck, even I waited until the price drop on Amazon MP3 to buy The Roots' new album today. (it was $8 last night)

There are many many candidates who make it to the phone screen who can't Fizzbuzz. Also it can be difficult to separate out people who actually did significant work on a product on their resume from people who were just "on the team" and didn't contribute effectively.

Time is limited and resumes are full of lies and BS. But you can't BS your way through a program and make it run.

And that is where I stopped.

According to this inflation calculator for US, you would lose about $1000 just from inflation if you deferred your bonus for the five years from 2005 to 2010.

"What cost $10000 in 2005 would cost $11067.95 in 2010."

http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

Samuel L Jackson swore so much he crossed the line from emotion to a parody of himself doing it. Also, he got to read "Go the ---- to Sleep".

You're debasing the most expensive currency in your wallet. Every word is costly, that's why Strunk and White tell you to get rid of them.

I swear once per quarter or so at work. I reserve it for the worst decisions, organizational maneuvers, designs, and code. And when I do, people notice.

If you use these words regularly you've got to find some way to really swear again, when it's called for. You could raise your voice or start mixing in some inappropriate animals.

Be the first to tackle this voxel-based, old-school-gone-new platform shooter. Jump into the Voxatron alpha and shoot your way through twenty challenging areas filled with blocky baddies, destructible toys, and palliative powerups.

Get Voxatron's future content and gameplay updates. As a customer of the Humble Voxatron Debut, you'll receive access to all of Lexaloffle's future updates to Voxatron: levels, characters, and more!

Level editor included, with monster creation tools on the way! After conquering the alpha adventure, check out the “BBS Levels” for instant-access to user-created content. Want to make your own voxel masterpiece? Voxde -- the Voxatron level editor -- is included with every purchase, granting you the ability to create mind-blowing new environments to share with the world. And soon, Lexaloffle plans to add monster creation tools for designing your own blocky bad guys to populate your creations.

The current market provides some evidence.

http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-sma...

70% of the smartphone market is in iOS and Android, two very similar smartphone experiences. RIM's distinctive experience is at 20% and falling fast (it was at 27% in March). WP7 is an also ran at 5%. Symbian is at 2%. Palm is not in the chart.

If you believe those numbers, the contest is all but over. Every non-iOS non-Android experience is failing in the market. It may not be just because of their designs, but I think you have to believe on other grounds that UX/design is the major selling point for all smartphones. The second contender might be applications, and iOS and Android are the leaders there too, by a wide margin over the field.

I think Google decided to beat Apple at its own game. Whatever you believe about how they used Apple's patented material (or not) or how valid the patents are (or not), clearly at some point a decision was made to compete with Apple not just on features, but also in UI polish and look and feel.

And somebody probably looked at Apple and said, how can we top that? When they couldn't, they kept it as similar as possible for a variety of reasons: the patents were too broad to be enforceable, they could justify deriving the same concepts in a vacuum because they come from well known UX principles that predate the patents, the design elements were universals that all phones should have, they should lower switching costs from iOS to Android.

I agree with you that Google could have gone its own way when designing a phone experience. But I don't know that that would have been a path to success. You would only have to believe the preceding paragraph to imagine that a think-different UX could have been worse for consumers.

There are a lot of narrow physical constraints operating in this market: the size of the human hand, the size of a fingertip, the range of human vision, the distance from the eye to the screen in terms of arm's length. There are other technology givens like the resolution of a screen that fits in the hand and the precision of touch technology. There are cultural givens to pull something apart to stretch it or push it together to make it smaller, or to advance a view by turning a page.

The more you think about these problems, the more you realize how narrow the space for innovation was in them, and in fact how many of Apple's innovations were anticipated by the market. Apple got there first with the whole package and reaped the benefits in mindshare. But they shouldn't be able to seek rent on a solution that experts would create in a vacuum.

If you look at people counts, the NEA has about 3.2 million people. Goldman has about 36,000 employees. Two orders of magnitude more contribution per person.

As a smaller business, their interests in the law are more targeted. And their lobbying is also very effective.

You can speak freely to politicians, but getting them to listen is not free. You buy their ear with campaign contributions and you hold the hammer of future contributions as you make polite suggestions about how the law should be changed in your favor.

I don't think it's fair to put politicians under that pressure. There's clear evidence that our system has failed in that way and we need to change it to move forward.

FTFY

Seriously though, limiting it to STEM majors would goose academia in the right direction.

It appears to be discussing the merits of transitioning to slow burning wood but does not mention how to get the right distribution of hot coals, or how to clean up the ashes.

What is it Evan, propane or charcoal?

All in all I think the author needs to learn more ways to make fire.

(As an extended metaphor, this article isn't.)

So first, take that stuff Steve said about extensibility to heart. He has another blog somewhere, oh here it is

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.ht...

about software that is alive because it's extensible. That is true of your startup too. You don't want to be a "site", you want to be a "service". And that means you want to be an authority for a unique kind of data, that you want your users to create and use.

I think the Google+ data is pretty unique and cool. I like the user experience. But you can't call it a service, which is bad news until they get their crap together.

I'm a strong believer that flowing data puts pressure on software to work correctly. You want a public API because you don't assume that you and your team are world class geniuses who have exhausted the search space of valid use cases for your data... but your customers can, close enough. (A very Amazon virtue: start with the customer.)

You want to have a well-designed interface for yourself and your users because it's so painful to scale, migrate, control security, etc. without it. So sure, I would say start with it as early as you can stand. Make it public as soon as you can. Allow your users to contribute and build on your data and service.

You'll probably treat your public-facing interfaces with different levels of scrutiny than internal-only ones. This is convenient, but it might be a mistake. You don't want to put off security or user data integrity until it's too late.

Having multiple services means that you can scale them independently. This costs some overhead but you'll be able to right-size your hardware, say with appropriate fleets in EC2.

Sorry that's all kind of generic, but that's about as deep as I would go without a real-world example to talk about.

The High Scalability blog is one I would recommend at the leading edge of this thing. I see posts on the front page alone that cover all I've been talking about and more.

http://highscalability.com/

As many people said, there's a wide variability in experience at Amazon depending on the team. And I would say even more, depending on where you sit in the graph. The bottlenecks at the center have more clients, higher TPS, more stringent latency requirements. And their support burden is worse and the engineer's life is worse. It's hard to move everyone forward together. Once you add enough constraints the problem gets too hard to solve. But like working at Microsoft, you pay these prices in order to have high impact, a high number of customers, and high influence. A big question for large service federations like Amazon is how to smooth out these bottlenecks. Like Stevey's rant about code size though, first you have to admit you have the problem, service size.

I joined with a team that was not service oriented. It was like a collection of cron jobs that ran single threaded applications directly updating the DB. It was painful and very hard to alter these stateful applications without breaking things.

I moved to a team that ran a collection of services and it was so much better, like night and day better. The path forward for us became obvious when we started thinking about how to migrate between APIs and decompose our services still further (and by the way, our support burden is comparatively low).

What makes service oriented architecture at Amazon great is that it is cheap. The other two Amazon advantages Steve mentioned are not coincidences, they are what you need to make service rollouts low-friction. They are what makes it possible to shoot first and rollback later. With rare exceptions they are used by the entire company.

Remember Sinofsky's "don't ship the org chart"? It is a lie. You cannot avoid it. You always ship the org chart. So the real question is, what is the org going to look like so that we ship something good-looking? That's the real purpose of Steve's rant. No matter how much politicking or boosting you do for this important service-oriented architecture, it doesn't work unless you have a service-oriented org chart. And Google does not, apparently.

The big big question for the internet and decades in the future is, you say you're going to organize the world's information. What is the organization going to look like? I think it'll be more interactive. The API will be there, there will be writes. It will be less centralized, with the appropriate authorities owning data and providing an interface to their small piece of the world's information. I think that's eventually going to mean you own your identity and provide as much interface as you care to. The arc of the internet is long but it bends toward decentralization (assuming we keep it out of the hands of the fascists).

For me Amazon is a microcosm of that future, and it's going to be interesting to lead the way there.

DRY is for every discipline, not just software.

Like William Gibson said, he now writes novels about the present because the present has caught up in many ways with science fiction. Not that we have flying cars or heroic robots, not that we have the future they predicted, but every week in the New Scientist you can read about stuff that would have been pure sci fi fifty years ago. We are inundated with magic.

I think the space program stood out more because it was channeled through the media that way. Everyone was watching the same thing and the same scientists. Today we have as much science to admire as we have viewing options on the internet.

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: User XXXXX already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections in /home/XXXXX/techcompanypay.com/find.php on line 8 Could not connect to mysql server.

"[For dogmatic people] there's no distinction between [acclaimed artist/thinker] and [Bible-thumper/wanker]. [but there is for me]"

You might have the causation exactly backwards for friends. I've heard of cases where the causation is backwards for geography too (Mormons move to Utah, evangelicals move to Colorado, Muslims move to Dearborn).

In general, sure, faiths are correlated with original geography and race and class and what have you. That isn't, however, a well-formed argument against their ultimate truth or untruth. It might be a well-formed argument about how they spread.

The customer wants one interface to rule them all, not to care about the leaky parts within.

For the next trick, sawing the millions of babies in half...

I lost a few brain cells on this one.

There is a whiff of desperation about it.

"If you want to start a great company, you are probably passing through Kleiner."

Is this really still true?

2) It's ugly.

If you ever need a semantic naming convention for closely related variables that are crucial to use correctly (encryptedCustomerInformation vs decryptedCustomerInformation), make up your own ad hoc.

Perhaps, as Chesterton said, GP is being "as narrow as the universe".

When I read your essay I immediately thought of the negative way, which is the strain of Christian philosophy that denies affirmative statements about God, and denies to some extent settled knowledge.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology

There is also an equal and opposite affirmative way that takes God as knowable not literally, but by analogy.

And this to me is the missing element in the essay. This egoless vehicle that we are cleaning so carefully, where are we to drive it? What shall we use to measure improvement? How will we understand progress?

Nothing requires their company to be ideologues against patents.

(except for "Don't be evil")

-- signed, an EFF member