Nothing To See Here comments

"Exchanging my Kindle for another Sony Reader" by Stephen

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:46:41 EDT

Until fairly recently, i read books on a Handspring Visor platinum, a Palm pilot. The screen is black & white, 160x160 LCD. Twin AAA rechargeable batteries last a week with heavy use per charge and a month of mild use. If they run out and i'm on the road, i could always stop in 7/11 and get some disposables. Or, i could carry spares. I used rechargeables, and the device life was not tied to expensive or non-replaceable batteries. The screen is small, but good readers exist which flip to the next screen quickly. Fonts are limited, but two met my needs - standard and large-bold, depending on ambient lighting. There is a back light, which is really lame, but that means that it works really well for reading in the very dark - for example, in bed. The Palm form factor is shirt pocket. I don't want a big delay in getting to the next screen. Black & White LCDs are better, IMO. They also provide good battery life. The smaller form factor is better. Standard batteries means i can carry spares if i want. Unfortunately, the digitizer is now unreliable, so i'm using it as an alarm clock. No one sells an equivalent. I guess they figure that no one wants black and white, so all Palms are color, despite battery life issues. Feh. One day we might get functional products that meat real needs, rather than the next wizbang glitzy thingy that kinda sorta works. You've used the Sony, and that's a plus. But i still remember Sony's "DRM CDs" - you know, the one with the Windows root kit. If Sony is capable of that kind of big brother BS on music CDs(static content), i'm reluctant to buy a toaster from them. I'm certainly not going to buy active electronics from them. For me, it's not going to go away soon. Sony needs to incorporate "we're not evil" into their operating policies. We as consumers need to act like it matters, else will continue to get more of the same, and worse. I'll be replacing my 11 year old camcorder soon. It won't be Sony. What i really would like is a shirt pocket device with a low power LCD screen - slightly higher resolution, that spans the device edge to edge, maybe 4 AAA batteries for that much longer endurance, and some sort of built in protection so that it can fall out of my shirt pocket repeatedly without serious injury. It should last longer than 3 or 4 years of abuse. And when it does die, it should still be available. It shouldn't matter in the slightest that next year a new one could be twice as fast. Oh, and it should be cheap. My current portable book reader is not ideal. It's a Nokia n800. The screen is color, 800x480 - 200 dpi. It reads PDF, HTML, palm docs, plain text, and so on. There is a VERY good book reader for it. However, the battery lasts about 5 hours on a charge. I have two, but one must do a full shutdown to replace the battery. It's shirt pocket sized. I put most of my content on it over WiFi, but one can also use USB. I consider it fragile, and have put together a padded metal case for it. But i really bought it as a shirt pocket multi-user Linux box. I've got a blue tooth folding keyboard that lets me write stuff like this in a more portable way than a laptop, if i want. Very powerful, but still a bit rough around the edges. For example, it can play movies, but i don't use it for that.

"Buy It Like You Mean It and Vendor Relationship Management" by hurleyit

Fri, 6 Jun 2008 17:08:11 EDT

I saw their presentation at Ignite Boston and really liked the idea. Glad to hear they had such an awesome launch party.

"Bungee Connect: What I learned about platform evaluations" by Aaron

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:03:35 EST

I really like your analysis of Bungee Labs. I'd also like to point out my current project, appjet.com, as another platform that I think gets more of your bullets right. It's still an experimental release, but I thought you might find it another interesting platform example.

"Information Wants To Be Half Price" by Jeremy Brown

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:43:29 EST

Carl --- the success of iTunes as a music store suggests that people are willing to pay for the convenience of a well-organized, legal downloads-store even when it *does* have DRM. Tibbetts --- as Salon is reporting it, I'm actually getting less time with the rental for my $4 from iTunes than I do from the neighborhood store. Even a Blockbuster new release I get to keep for a couple of days, and the mom-and-pop shop will give me 5 days for pretty much everything. Even if its more like the Amazon/Tivo Unbox service --- you can keep the unwatched video for a long time, but once you start watching, you've got 24 hours to finish --- it still doesn't give me what I get from a physical rental. Information wants to be half-price --- and information wants to be at least as featureful as the media it used to ship on.

"Information Wants To Be Half Price" by Carl Alexander

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 16:51:25 EST

I have a half-written essay somewhere, the thesis of which is that the entertainment industry will continue to flail until it recognizes that the only way it can beat bittorrent is by competing with bittorrent. For the vast majority of the stuff I want to watch, I would happily pay a buck an hour, maybe even two, to download DRM-free, nonproprietary-format files at as low as a quarter of HD resolution. Even if I could get the same program or movie via bittorrent: It would be worth the price to me to not have to wonder whether I was downloading a virus vector, or getting a crappy capture, or wasting bandwidth on a file I can't play --- and to feel like at least some of my money is going to the artists whose work I'm enoying.

"OOPSLA 2007: "The Popularity Cycle of Graphical Tools, UML, and Libraries of Associations" - not the workshop I expected" by Chris Lesniewski

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:00:54 EDT

Aren't "associations" just relations? What's new here? Also, a clarification: by "RDF versus fully-relational", do you mean 3-tuples versus n-tuples, or something deeper than that?

"VLDB Keynote: Data Access Patterns in The Amazon.com Technology Platform" by Richard Tibbetts

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:13:53 EDT

The presentation is not yet available online. I'm not sure if/when it will become so. I will try to update with a link if I find it.

"VLDB Keynote: Data Access Patterns in The Amazon.com Technology Platform" by Chris Lesniewski-Laas

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:27:47 EDT

Is the keynote online anywhere? I agree about the core message, but I'm curious about some of the details. I'd guess that most failures at Amazon are basically fail-stop, but that the hard cases are the fail-stutter case or outputting garbage. Do you think we need Byzantine tolerance to deal with garbage-spewing nodes, or can the garbage be constrained to some non-malicious model? What kinds of non-strongly-consistent, non-eventually-consistent models do they use? What are some examples of queries/updates at Amazon that don't need strong consistency? I can think of some candidates, but my own experience using Amazon seems to present a consistent interface. For example, after I add an item to my Wish List, my Wish List is always immediately updated --- I never see a temporary blip due to "eventual consistency". When I make a purchase, it's a pretty good bet that they need to make a real-time (i.e. strongly consistent) validation with the credit-card processor, even if some of their internal systems are not strongly consistent due to failures. So that might be better characterized as some strongly consistent "hard state" combined with some squishily consistent "soft state".

"The Lemons Meme in Software" by Chui Tey

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:07:13 EDT

Information asymmetry also occurs when purchasing mattresses, buying coffee, getting a home loan, buying insurance. Also consider in food, where Country of Origin labelling can help consumers chose products based on reputation. Or whether you milk contains Bovine Growth Hormone. On the other hand, the actual value of a product is partly in how it marketed to you. Women like their diamond rings not because they are ill informed about the utility of a diamond ring, but the value of the ring been framed in ways that are meaningful for them (love, eternity et c). If it's hard to make an informed choice about coffee, it's even harder to hire the right person. Perhaps the only way is to lower the cost or risk of transaction by quickly getting rid of the wrong people.

"Switching to OSX, productivity and development tools" by Jerry

Tue, 8 May 2007 17:31:42 EDT

Very nicely done, I too am going to be moving from Ubuntu to OSX.