djehuty

I intend this as constructive criticism, so I hope you understand that and take it as such: please hire a designer. Email is an app one stares at all day, it has to look good. Not fancy, but restful and pleasing to the eye with function dictating form.

It's 15 hours now. They have some very irate customers.

Rackspace bought them a year ago and have been migrating accounts to their own servers, but this huge outage doesn't reflect well on Rackspace management either.

Already April 1st in the UK.

Humans haven't stopped evolving in the 8000 years since grains were cultivated. It would seem logical that changes allowing grains to form an effective part of the diet would have occurred. Take the example of milk - humans in heavy cattle dependent parts of the world (ie: most everywhere except north east asia) produce enzymes allowing its digestion into adulthood. So can we now digest grain effectively?

For comparison: a mutation in one gene giving a 1% increase in survival chance will reach 50% saturation in a population in an average of 100 generations. For humans that's 2500 years or so.

What I'm saying is that if you don't have a genetic disposition to gluten intolerance you're likely to be perfectly ok with grain.

Huh! 37Signals has all this other stuff that I never scrolled down to before. Interesting.

Free music is infeasible? Tell that to people jamming with their friends, or buskers, or radio.

Is it feasible for free music to make big money for the majors? Different question, but we know the answer: "who cares?"

I get the impression that moving away from COBOL, "Big Iron", and such dinosaurs has, after the initial wrench, made companies more productive. All of which makes me wonder what part the army of salesmen that go with these things play in their continued existence. (And the executive-ego-stroke of having an impressive room dominated by a bond-villianesque monolith.)

To all the commenters here saying "it's not a bug it's a feature":

Ok, but how did the other michael sign up with the non-period name? That's the bug, surely?

There can be very good reasons for "punishing" them. The development time required to cater to IE6's idiosyncrasies may simply not be justified if the site's target market is not business or people during work hours. Providing a substandard experience is often worse than no experience (look at it later when you're not at work).

Then there's the activism angle - only by applying pressure, one site at a time, can the IE curse be gradually eliminated. The total wasted man-hours catering to its quirks is exceeded only by the hours wasted producing weapons and religion. sigh

Kissinger, Begin, and Sadat all won it in the 70s. It's had zero credibility since then.

Which is a pity, because the clear purpose is to encourage rather than necessarily always to reward, and Obama's intentions definitely seem to be good.

The elephant in the room is that the quality of 99% of journalism is so low that no one in their right mind would pay for it. Murdoch is a major purveyor of this rubbish.

Will I pay for warmed over wire service I can get in the original elsewhere? No. Would I pay for well researched investigative reporting? Maybe. But Murdoch would be changing his whole approach if he actually engaged in that.

Do some real reporting, and make us care.

It's mail in bed that's the issue for me. I can't be the only one who wakes up, reaches something like full consciousness, and then reaches for the iphone to see if anything urgent or interesting has appeared in my mail.

The properties of the outcome of a limit function or an infinite series are known to be, often, different to any finite part of that series or limit. Check the SEP under "supertasks"

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-supertasks/

The study mentioned seems to say "iPhone isn't making the profit you might think" even though the thing is spun in the story as "iPhone making a loss for carriers."

But bearing that exaggeration in mind, Strand Consult is three guys in Denmark, and they're not going to make a name for themselves saying "iPhone is great." What I wonder is, if it's not worth having, why O2 and Vodaphone and others are so keen to extend their iPhone operation into other countries?

iPhone is the beginning of a trend that's very negative for mobile carriers - heavy data use (for limited returns and big burden on networks) taking over from heavy call and SMS use (which have enormous profit margins.) There's nothing the carriers can do to prevent this, but it's not going to be good for their mobile spectrum cash cow. So don't blame iPhone, it was too good to last indefinitely anyway.

Talking loudly on a cell phone, oblivious to the tranquility you destroy around you -- that will come pretty close.

I'd like to think restaurant patrons and mass transit commuters had consideration for others (and the presence of mind to talk quietly) but they often don't. Jamming is probably not a good solution, though.

Tethering is free (and currently available, I tried it out) on Optus in Australia. I don't know the situation with the two other Aus iphone carriers.

I think your information's out of date. I use Optus 3G on an iPhone in an area which was in exactly that position, but they upgraded a week before the iPhone came out. I think that upgrade happened nationwide. (Not that it's relevant to this thread, I know, but...)

I'm sure that's AT&T. I'm in Australia and there's been no such problem personally or from anything I've heard.

You'll find that with only a little practice using tap gesture for button press becomes second nature. From there it's only a 5 minute learning curve to double-tap equals right button. So if you're serious about putting Linux on there, and frankly I think that's just silly, don't let the touchpad put you off.

I'm perfectly happy with Coda for web development, although I wish it had function collapsing.

For what it's worth, I agree. Survey's show only 40% of new users returning after a month. But Facebook was more like that, and it's not dead yet. There's the Stephen Fry | Sockington style Twitter mediated humour, and that's fine but it's not enough to make me put up with the inane "I'm drinking coffee now! OMG!" drivel from so many people I vaguely know. Question is, what proportion of people enjoy that? I suspect that if I worked in a cubicle my need for displacement activity would make me an avid twitter user.

I think there's a reasonable argument for using the Kelly criteria, but leaving that question aside, the author misses a most important factor: the marginal utility of the money. If I am a millionaire, the upside of extra money is low, and the downside of losing all my money is high. If I am choosing between a cup of coffee and a lottery ticket, the upside (even divided by my chance of winning) is high and the downside low.

There's no doubt you're right about the profiling. I don't know how much they generate from the ads but they're context sensitive. Is it better or worse than ads next to a search? It would be interesting to know.

"Why does Google give away products like its browser, its apps, and the Android operating system for mobile phones? Anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google, Varian says. And since using the Web without using Google is like dining at In-N-Out without ordering a hamburger, more eyeballs on the Web lead inexorably to more ad sales for Google."

Very silly. Google's browser generates searches in the title bar for free which Google pays Firefox and the others for. Mail, Talk and the apps are vehicles for showing ads to people. The extra internet use is just not the primary purpose of these things. What confuses people, even Wired, who should know better, is that not everything Google does has an immediate payoff every time. They're willing to develop something, like maybe Android, which can make them money later, maybe.