The Panic Status Board
Compare The Panic Status Board with Jesse Schnell’s talk at DICE 2010, and see what he meant. Panic’s productivity has gone up due to work being more “game-like.”
“Made, Is Making, or Will Make?”
David Barnard on the sales fluctuations in the App Store, and how hard is it to gauge future success/sales on same.
Apple sues HTC for infringing 20 iPhone patents
Engadget has the documentation. I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of people decrying the use of “user interface” patents. This kind of thing can be pretty vile. For example, one of the patents is for:
“Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image,”
Which is absurd.
Extra Future Shirt HAPPENS
Look at this sexy motherfucker, and be sad that you didn’t get an Extra Future Shirt.
Merlin Mann on Full-Content Feeds
A great rant on The Atlantic’s (apparently it’s a bug) RSS feeds going title-only, but it applies to pretty much anyone selling words for a living.
CitiBank Blocks Company Bank Account, Without Telling Them, For “Objectionable Content” On Company Blog
Seems like we’re going to find out about some real homophobes at CitiBank. I echo Gruber’s sentiment, and repeat: What the fuck business is it of CitiBank’s what a company blogs about? I found nothing “objectionable” on their blog. If anything, it’s significantly less objectionable than this one.
YouTube Removes Most Popular Fan-Uploaded Rickroll
30 million views means a whole lot of dead links. Wonder why they waited 3 years?
AdBrite, Longtime Advertiser on Goatse-Laden Sites Like Boing Boing, Uncomfortable With The Word “Shizz”
Adbrite, the company most known for providing spam pages with endless supplies of 7 Minute Diet and GET RICH NOW banner ads, has apparently decided that those big, bad, grownup words like “shizz” are bad for business. To be honest, it has gotten to be a hassle to deny the 100s of “Weight-loss Secrets of Horny Moms” and “Meet Sexy Singles in the Area We Guess You Live in Based on Our Shoddy IP Geolocation” ads that are the site’s bailiwick, anyway.
Here is the exact message I got from Adbrite, vis-a-vis my ad submission for FRMT.me:
The landing page contains slang terms for profanity, which we can’t allow in AdBrite. Please remove the word Shizz and resubmit the ad.
Needless to say, I won’t be doing that. It’s time to kick them to the curb, and regain a little of my dignity, I think.
“A conversation I have every month or so”
and me. It really shouldn’t have to be said, here in 2010, but shit. Restaurants: Have your hours, at least, in a plain HTML document. I don’t even need your menu.
Notes from John Gruber’s MacWorld Talk
Subtitle: “Apple’s 10 Biggest Problems” and featuring Steve Jobs Mortality, which is a great name for a band.
In Case You Had Any Doubts About Where Microsoft’s Profit Comes From
The Insider’s chart of the day puts your mind at ease. Unless you’re a Microsoft shareholder.
Microsoft Responds to Dick Brass’ NYT Op-Ed
… and it’s hard to imagine how they could’ve done a worse job. As Gruber notes, not only was there no reason to respond, but they don’t even engage the original article in a meaningful way.
Microsoft’s reply is the equivalent of saying “Well, yeah, but… look over there at this other thing.” but with a lot more words.
John Scalzi on the Amazon / Macmillan Spat
In a post titled “All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend,” he goes into short detail along the very lines you might expect.
Amazon so badly mis-handled this situation that one wonders if the entire company wasn’t under the spell of a wizard, or if a very strong sedative was released into the ventilation system.
Conan O’Brien Says He Won’t Host ‘Tonight Show’ At 12:05
It’s good to see that Conan can still write like this. He says, among other things, that moving the Tonight Show to 12:05 will result in what “[He] honestly believe is its destruction. “
Price of The One True Google Phone?
According to this: “$199 unlocked in stores. $100 rebate online if you have an active and old Google account.”
Sounds like the gloves are off.
Bad JooJoo
Sounds like a racial epithet in multiple ways, birthed from a massive controversy on one of the most hated/read tech blogs on the planet, costing $500 with unproven software and hardware from a company nobody’d ever heard of until Michael Arrington started yelling “rip off”.
Google DNS Will Probably Be Fine, Guys
I have a feeling Kottke’s analysis is pretty spot-on: every tenth of a second longer a site takes to load, Google is losing revenue from ads. That might seem nuts to you or I, but Google isn’t exactly in the same ballpark, scale-wise, the stuff you and I work on:
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
For the Google behemoth .5 seconds is a serious problem, and with Google DNS they’re trying to whittle that down as much as possible. Do I trust them? Not really. Do I need to? Not really. I can change my DNS whenever I want, and so can you, and Google’s DNS privacy policy seems, as Gruber put it, utterly reasonable.
Tim Quirk: “My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement”
This is super interesting for a music industry outsider like myself, but the central question he asks applies to everyone who likes music: Are the labels just dumb, or are they actually hiding (potentially lots of) money from artists by using old, busted, opaque, accounting practices?
Or both?