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Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes
Romy Maxwell posted a blog piece on Craigslist apparently shutting off access to Yahoo Pipes. Maxwell was working on a project, one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source, for a (non-commercial) Pipes-based mashup. He sent Craig Newmark an invitation to the alpha test, after a few rounds of friendly communication — "...as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes." The apparent response, 4 days later, was for Craigslist to redirect any request with an HTTP referrer of pipes.yahoo.com to the Craigslist home page. Maxwell writes: "It's a sad day for me. I'm not too upset about my own project, as Flippity was already removing Craigslist as a data source. With the likes of eBay and Oodle not only providing open APIs but encouraging and rewarding developers, spending my time wrestling with Craigslist is just plain stupid and exhausting. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have come to that conclusion, and I wish it were different. ... If Craigslist wants to keep its doors shut to the world, so be it."
I understand that Craigslist doesn't want to go out of it's way to make it's website more elaborate, (In fact, I appreciate it) but I don't understand what purpose it serves to prevent others from adding their own features to the site. (In the same way greasemonkey is so great) I wonder what they are trying to do with this move.
Greasemonkey is great... until you get some vague but insistent problem report regarding your site, and after spending significant time trying to figure out why the HECK this particular user insists a particular site function is "broken in Firefox", you eventually figure out he's a Greasemonkey user and has no idea what he's doing.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
#DeleteChrome
Dude, I thought this was the 21st century! If I can't use a cell phone in a bathroom stall why'd I bother getting the damn thing? Oh, right, I didn't get a cell phone. But if I did I'd probably use it in bathroom stalls, this being the 21st century and all.
no it's pretty much the same shit, except instead of angelfire and geocities pages made by idiots with animated gif flames and spinning skulls it's myspace pages with animated gif glitter and spinning rims. though now we have streaming MP3s and flv video instead of MIDIs so things have actually gotten worse.
Remind again how midi's are superiour to mp3's?
You're probably right about the Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0 thing. But the rest of your post is just ignorant.
First, let's consider Moore's law. As it is based on the size of transistors it will come to an end. There is a physical limit to the size of transistors, just think about the size of an atom, for example.
Then your five usage categories for computers, namely calculations, entertainment, information retrieval, image manipulation, and word processing, are just wrong.
Computers can do exactly on thing, calculations. Every other use is derived from this. This aside let's look at your other four categories.
Entertainment - Sure this is one use, but nearly everything can and is used for entertainment. And entertainment was there long before computers so I don't see how this is a category for computer usage. Just think about books, theaters, sports, games and the like.
Information retrieval - You are right here, but you know database management is not the same as information retrieval. Information retrieval is a technology to retrieve information relevant to a specific topic. A database can be used for that, but database management is the technology used to optimise databases. Information retrieval includes crawlers to get the information, generation of an index, searching for relevant content for a given request, etc.
Image manipulation - This is just a subset of signal processing. Signal processing (including generation) comes down to generate and manipulate signals of arbitrary dimensions. If you are using 2 dimensions, these signals could be images, if you are using 1 dimension your signal could be an audio signal. So you are totaly ignorant to image generation, processing, audio manipulation, generation, processing, pattern matching, machine learning, ...
Word processing - This is true, I think.
Also you are forgetting about improving the efficiency in terms of energy consumption, lowering the entry barrier in terms of ease of use and cost, security, robotics, controlling factories, simulation (not for entertainment), autonomous systems and as pointed out before the most common use for computers, communication.
Therefore, as your assumptions are wrong, your conclusion is wrong. It seems you used a computer 20 years ago, never tried anything new and you are predicting the future with no imagination.
In computer science this is known as garbage in, garbage out.