Sol Young

This is a very poorly thought out plan. When you delete an app you’re asked to rate the app, where a dialog is popped that gives the option of selecting between 0 and 5 stars.

At first thought, there will be lots more app ratings and this will help Apple kull (my favorite word this week) poor applications. On second thought, why would you give a good rating to an app you wish to remove? And how about an app you never remove? There will be many bad ratings applied to apps, without getting an equal response from those who like the app and keep it… The users who love the app will never be prompted for their rating.

An analogy I like to use for the economy and bailout(s) is a busy freeway. We’re all out there driving, going our own speeds, choosing our lanes. Sometimes you’re in the fast lane, sometimes the slow.

Traffic is always there. You can hop lanes and try to beat the overall flow, but the speed of others affects your progress.

Accidents happen. A lane or two gets blocked as a result. Cars following in the same lane as the crash are stopped and require a merge. Cars in the other lanes are still moving, but their flow is impacted as the blocked lanes attempt to merge (and rubbernecking at the carnage).

If you’re a driver in the lane of the accident, you’re stuck until you can merge to a lane of moving traffic. Your forward progress requires a merge to an adjacent lane.

The drivers in other lanes are performing microbailouts. They’re letting you in so a portion of the freeway doesn’t stagnate.

Mike, our IT coordinator dropped this on my desk this morning. It’s still shrinkwrapped. 1991. We have a USB 3.5″ drive, but unfortunately we don’t have an earlier version to get this installed. Would Boot Camp support it?

Amongst the highlights:

• “Online Help from the shell or command-line interface…” - Online help has come a long way.
• “Undelete utility helps you recover critical files…” - Control+Z and “Undo” were born.
• “Unformat utility…” - What?
• “MS-DOS QBasic replaces GW-BASIC…” - Many a coder’s first language.
• “… freeing up at least 45K more conventional memory…”
• “Is network ready” - Remember “net use“?
• “Although we test with a wide variety of system manufacturers, it is your responsibility to confirm with your personal computer manufacturer that this product correctly supports your computer and peripheral devices.” - So, ummm, is it REST or SOAP?

Click through on the images to Flickr - the pics are high enough resolution to read the full the text.

Amazon released CloudFront to public beta today. It’s a simple way to get free content publicly available to the edge of the network (closest to the recipient downloader).

From the AWS announcement:

Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.

Here’s how it works:

1. Upload your content files to S3.
2. Call the CloudFront API, specifying the S3 bucket.
3. Use your S3 bucket’s already created domain and filename in your website (no change here).
4. When a customer clicks a link the closest file is automatically routed.

UPDATE:
So, uhhh, what’s special here? From AWS’s description, CloudFront is simply setting a flag for your S3 bucket that means it’s to be distributed around the cloud or remain in a single location.

This should be an addition to the S3 service, not a separate service. The added step of having to let CloudFront know you want the edge network coverage is an unnecessary chore. It would be better as an attribute for the S3 bucket. This would make S3 a stronger brand, keep it clearer for those navigating AWS, and simplify the process of pushing content (1 less step).

Here’s how much it costs:
[Read more →]

Maybe it’s Winter preparedness, or maybe it’s a slow news day… But I’m reviewing the blogs I follow, deleting the old, and subscribing to new. I was breaking well over 300 and realized many were dead (in my opinion, a blog that isn’t updated for 6 months is dead).

It’s cleaning time. I’m under 200. Bring on the cold.

Boston-area school or charity that needs a 300-gallon aquarium?

Philip Greenspun is giving away his tank to charity - pretty nice, and he’s paying for the moving expenses…

The tank is complete with filters, lights, cover, etc.  I will pay for delivery, including a crane if necessary, to the school.  The tank is about 8? long by 2?x2?.

Twitter down for DB maintenance…

Twitter is currently down for database maintenance.

We expect to be back in about an hour. Thanks for your patience.

I wonder what kind of hell will break loose when it comes back up and sucks in the queued SMS updates… My phone is gonna go nuts.