Is there *really* a question that having a perfectionist has helped Apple? Would we still be talking about the iPhone if it was, you know, pretty cool, not bad, really? What, exactly, is the argument that less intensity would be better? And what is the evidence?
It would be great to add wireless, and huge screens, and magical pixy dust, too. When your battery burns out in three hours, or the device itself is the size of a brick, I wonder how much your enthusiasm will last. Apple instead went for better battery life and larger storage in the same package.
I wonder what your enthusiasm level would be when your battery runs dry...
In discussions such as this, there is a frequent meme "use the right tool for the job", which is supposed to be an equinimical, even-handed attempt at "let's not fight, children." I tend to think what it actually represents is "Don't tell me my language of choice isn't as good."
Language preference is a personal thing, and the reactions of programmers, positive or negative tend to be emotional. I understand this, but do not support it. You may disagree with the author's assessment of the various LAMP aspects (I tend to find MySQL is easier for designing applications, and more tolerant of change.) If so, you say so. But pulling up choruses of "Use the right tool for the right job" doesn't work here. And they're *not* just tools. This is our work. If you were working on the Indy 500, you'd want the best of everything. The best tires, the best chasis, the best driver. The Best. Why should programming be any less prioritized?
We're talking about LAMP, and LAMP means web. PHP is a web-app language. If the nature of PHP makes a programmer less productive, then it's not "just a tool." It's costing you and your business money.
I don't see any reason one should feel equinimical about that. I like ruby, and if you said bad things about ruby, I would be bothered. But that's a terrible attitude to take toward technology, and an excellent path to stagnation. Criticisms of any technology need to be held up, so they can be considered and, one hopes, acted upon. If there are truly better alternatives to ruby, I want to know about them. What possible reason is there to use anything but the best?
Now, one could suggest that this article substitutes detailed particulars for vague "I hate it" statements and "It's buggy" (In my experience, all software is buggy.)
But for god's sake, they're not just tools. They are the life blood of our work. Show a little respect.;-)
Having worked extensively with PHP, Java, and Ruby, I find these sort of arguments puzzling. Perhaps my experience is unique, but I find I run into ruby problems and java problems at about the same rate. The difference is, all the ruby problems show up in the same place. In Java, some of the problems show up at compile time, while some show up at run time. All that extra typing seems a strange fixation if it only saves you from a subset of potential problems. More damning: The feedback loop on a scripting language is much shorter. With Java, I while away my days waiting for ant to run, and Tomcat to redeploy. In ruby, I fix problems in minutes. There's no wait. For a large enough problem, the time spent me end up being the same. But the stress level is so much lower. And it's fun! It's funny that these arguments seem to hinge on the universe of ideals, rather than the universe of actuals.
Apple didn't design the phone. Apple wrote the software. Motorola made the phone.
Apple doesn't want to make phones. Apple wants to make ACC the defacto standard for music. All Apple did was make a phone that plays ACC files. Is this so hard?
I've enjoyed reading through the "AJAX" sucks posts. I find the arrogance expressed interesting. "You'll never port Photoshop to a web app".
Folks, what, exactly, is the difference? It's all just pixels on the page. You click on things. You move them around. It saves data to some manner of file. It's true that the toys aren't there, but every passing day, this becomes less and less true. The tools are being built as we speak.
Sneer if you want, but web if the best you can do is "you can't make photoshop", you're in trouble. Number one, most people don't use photoshop, and number two, you can't make photoshop yet.
Sneer while you still can, guys.
Rigid is the key word here. As someone who has developed both PHP and Java, I can tell you I find the rigidity of java mysterious and stifling. Actually, I find PHP a little much at this point, so enamored am I of python and ruby. PHP _is_ flexible, and that's why it's popular. PHP is able to handle the work of a professional like me, but also to handle the simple little bits of a designer like my girlfriend. I can't imagine saying the same for a java system. PHP et. al. feel more natural, more like pseudo code. I've failed to understand how people find rigidity so appealing. In my experience, there is no substitute for good programmers. An anal language will only help an anal person.
We don't need typed variables. We need coders who know what they're doing, which is more work, but more payoff. And also, that I've seen, more fun.
Because there is a freedom in constraints. If I sit down to write a story, and I can do anything, write about anything, my brain tends to lock up. There are just too many choices. By applying constraintns, I give myself a workable whole in which to work. Put simply, humans don't do well with infinity. So by reducing the problem space, there is more energy on what is actually in play. Which leads to the obvious question: Why should style _ever_ be in the problem space? Why should style be a choice? In what way does writing my french brackets on seperate lines instead of with the first on the same line as the declaration make any difference to whether my strings get concatenated properly? The answer, of course, is that they don't.
I balked at first, but the more I use it, the more I appreciate usinng python, and not having to bother with style. I can focus on solving problems, and that's as it should be.
That and I hate emacs.;-)
I don't know. I'd generally say "Screw best practices. I'm doing what works." I find the XML easier to read. I wouldn't consider nesting tags. That's what the attributes are there for. If XML police want to come arrest me for that, I'm going down fighting.:-)
We use XML for our JS data sending needs, and have no performance issues. We use attributes as in the above example, so our XML is lean. I hate to say it, but this looks like re-inventing the wheel. Whatever floats your boat, though.
Actually, browsers weren't designed to show web pages. They were designed to show research papers. None of these image things. None of these forms things. It was just supposed make it easy to get from one article to the articles it references. Oops. Now we have all these email apps and shopping carts, and no one seems to be complaining. Of course, the telephone was designed to transmit orchestral concerts long distances. Oops. When you release a technology, much as when you release a work of art, the creation becomes the property of its audience. Web browsers will become whatever we make them. I welcome the day when my files are all online, and a web browser grabs whatever I need. But even if you don't relish the thought, it's a mistake to think XForms and other XML technologies are to be trapped in browsers forever. For an example, look at Apple's upcoming Dashboard, which literally displays web pages in floating blobs. This is only the beginning. Some day, we'll look back and say "You mean we used to write software, and you had to have a separate copy on each machine!?! And I say let that future roll in.
"...because [x] is not Word's domain."
That's a lovely attitude. "Users should want what the developers provide." If plain text and HTML are not Word's domain, it should not offer the features. Of course, the features are there because people want them there, and if people want them there, it becomes Word's domain. Companies serve the people, not the other way around.
Re:Scalability and Maintainability go hand in hand
on
On PHP and Scaling
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
PHP only becomes unmaintainable if you don't know what you're doing, or if you don't plan well at the onset. The thing about PHP is that it doesn't force you to do anything, which means it doesn't force you to do anything the right way. This is not a fault. I wouldn't be a PHP developer today were it not for the ease with which I learned to write some very, very bad code. Of course, there's room to grow. The result is that the onus is on the developer, and not the language. So you're right, PHP doesn't scale. Not it's job. PHP provides the opportunity to scale, and the toolset, which are more than adequate, and improving over time.
This is particularly funny coming from a perl developer. Perl can become unmaintainable on a small project.
Most of our technology today is designed and contstrained by the fact that computer voice recognition has a long way to go. Same with phones. If we had rock-solid, near-zero-error voice recognition, phones wouldn't need buttons. Hell, maybe computers wouldn't need keyboards, though I hope they will. I'm fond of my typing.
Of course, all this hangs upon real voice recognition, which isn't close yet. But it's only a matter of time.
"Apple has shown that it doesn't require a Hurculian effort to make a usable desktop on a UNIX variant."
I'm sorry, it doesn't? Have you any idea how long OS X has been in development? And we should remember that OS X as it is is just now becoming a truly solid system. It took many years. And also note that OS X comes from NeXT, which began development a long, long time ago. Perhaps we should ask some NeXT and Apple just how easy their accomplishment was. And of course, a lot of the ideas in X came from classic Mac OS, which has been in development and refinement since the early 80's.
Easy indeed.
Actually, Apple does make a profit on the iTunes Music Store, but it's not a big one. Apple has said making money off songs isn't a priority, but they are making a small profit. It's just that selling iPods is the point, just as selling Macs is the point of the Mac OS.
the themes and ideas it presents have already been exhaustively discussed in PHIL 101.
You say this as though most people have taken and understood the philosophy they encountered, yet even in the small liberal arts college I attended, with cadres of philosophy majors, I saw lots and lots of people tune out. Most of philosophy, the way it's taught, can be alienating. Of course, if you translate the issues, people usually say "Yeah, I've wondered about that." So mainly, there's a translation/communication gap. I think it was clever for the Wachowski brothers to use an action movie to bring such issues to light, because most of the people who were turned off by PHIL 101 go to action movies. I mean, the kids in my church's youth group were talking about what the hell the ending of Reloaded meant. So we were talking about the spiraling downwards one encounters when one starts thinking about the "what is real?" question. Sure, they could probably get a more detailed, thorough discussion at their local college, but some of them aren't headed that way.
Besides, you could argue that Philosophy is self-important and a parody of itself. Of course, you could also argue that about slashdot posts. Or even this post.
Why, oh why did I choose the red pill?
When the iTMS first came out, before you could really do anything else, you had to get the latest version of Quicktime, because it is quicktime that handles AAC, and iTunes uses Quicktime, a point that seems lost here. Perhaps in the Windows World, the situation is a bit different, but QT for Windows exists, and I would imagine if it doesn't already, it will support AAC promptly. So all any application, mac or PC, has to do to handle AAC formatted files is support Quicktime, which is a good idea anyway, because Quicktime plays nearly everything. In fact, the blurb in Software Update for QT stated that the point of this upgrade was so that other programs than iTunes could handle AAC. So basically, this means that any program which does not support Quicktime and AAC does so because it doesn't want to, for whatever reason. As Microsoft Office (at least on the mac side) supports quicktime, this all sounds like a piss-poor argument from a piss-poor company. The tools are all out there, and Apple would be happy to help anyone make their devices/software compatible. Microsoft just wants to score marketing points sans facts, but I suppose I'm preaching to the choir on that point.
I must confess to enjoying the feel of fresh pen on paper. And I have printed countless copies of nearly identical sections of writing, just so that my pen can run across the paper. Of course, when visceral pleasure runs out, practicality must take over, and it's easier to manage a large digital collection of scraps than a large pile of scrap paper. And so I have turned to DevonThink, a mac-only program that I am thrilled with. It makes it terrifically simple to edit many little scraps, and organize them into useful groupings. I will always relish the pen, but when work needs done, DevonThink does the trick.
Market share matters as much as market share matters. I don't much care whether anyone else uses macs as long as I can continue to use my mac. That depends primarily upon Apple's ability to make money, and they've been very good at making money lately, even amid the slump. Of course, a certain amount of market share is important, but Linux can have all the market share in the world. As long as Apple is making money, I could care less. It's true. You'll pry my macs from my cold, dead fingers. So Go Linux, I say. And Go Apple too!
email near-useless because of spam? Are you nuts? email is the universal language of the net. Sure, there are ads, but only if you aren't careful. I am circumspect about passing certain addresses around, and *surprise* I don't get spammed. When I do, the filter nabs them. Email is my communication life blood.
As for usenet, what, are you surprised? Who the hell in the general public would have any conceivable use for usenet? For christ's sake, slashdot is Usenet squared! And the web controlled by big money? Newsflash: the people who use the corporate sites wouldn't have (and didn't) go to the old web anyway.
The beauty of the internet is that it is not controlled. It was designed to be flexible, and continues to do so. I mean, look at stealing music. The big guns shoot down one service, another crops up. At no point in the last few years have I been unable to find a song I want, despite the RIAA's efforts. The internet, like much in the world, is what you make of it, whether you're a grouchy slashdot user, or Walmart. So instead of the lament, how about making it something better?
I think it's worth noting that this music store is exactly the sort of thing Apple does well, and which makes being an Apple denizen such a joy. Xerox makes the GUI, Apple turns it into a product. Airport was already around. Apple made it easy. And there were many many MP3 Players out there. Apple didn't even write iTunes. They just morphed Sound Jam into it. And here we are again. As a mac user, I've come to smile whenever I hear Apple will enter a new market. I know they'll get it right, or close enough. It took three versions for iTunes to win me over completely. Wait till the Music Store grows a bit. For now, it is a frighteningly easy to use system. Apple is a company that excels at packaging, and that has made all the difference.
I suspect the only point being missed here is the point of this article. It's a joke, kids. Do let it be a joke. Did everyone read the whole thing? There was a mixture of disdain, and tenderness. There was indeed a time when people just sucked up domain names willy-nilly (myself included). They were heady times. But now we are in different times, on the brink, it seems, of a little more maturity about the internet, and its uses. In the meantime, people did some stupid things, but there is a sort of irresistible humanity about stupidity, a certain Forest-Gump charm about thousands of people purchasing domain names for their current sweethearts. So awful, so wonderful, such is the human.
The best thing about Slashdot is that it lets anybody with keyboard say anything they want.
The worst thing about Slashdot is that it lets anybody with a keyboard say anything they want.
Of course, the above statements go equally well for the internet as a whole, and that, I would argue, is the real point of the article. There was something very human in lapsed domains. So as we leave those times behind, we take a humorous back at that foolishness with a sense of fondness but relief that those days are passing, and not (I would hope) pretend that we're somehow superior to those attitudes, which some posters on this forum seem inclined to do. BuyClamsOnline.com is funny. JanLovesJim.com is sweet. IamCarbonatedMilk.com is curious. Leave them that way.
We are passionate, silly things. Let's laugh at eachother.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there *really* a question that having a perfectionist has helped Apple? Would we still be talking about the iPhone if it was, you know, pretty cool, not bad, really? What, exactly, is the argument that less intensity would be better? And what is the evidence?
Nobody gets to call something an iPod killer until it, you know, kills some iPods.
It would be great to add wireless, and huge screens, and magical pixy dust, too. When your battery burns out in three hours, or the device itself is the size of a brick, I wonder how much your enthusiasm will last. Apple instead went for better battery life and larger storage in the same package. I wonder what your enthusiasm level would be when your battery runs dry...
In discussions such as this, there is a frequent meme "use the right tool for the job", which is supposed to be an equinimical, even-handed attempt at "let's not fight, children." I tend to think what it actually represents is "Don't tell me my language of choice isn't as good."
;-)
Language preference is a personal thing, and the reactions of programmers, positive or negative tend to be emotional. I understand this, but do not support it. You may disagree with the author's assessment of the various LAMP aspects (I tend to find MySQL is easier for designing applications, and more tolerant of change.) If so, you say so. But pulling up choruses of "Use the right tool for the right job" doesn't work here. And they're *not* just tools. This is our work. If you were working on the Indy 500, you'd want the best of everything. The best tires, the best chasis, the best driver. The Best. Why should programming be any less prioritized?
We're talking about LAMP, and LAMP means web. PHP is a web-app language. If the nature of PHP makes a programmer less productive, then it's not "just a tool." It's costing you and your business money.
I don't see any reason one should feel equinimical about that. I like ruby, and if you said bad things about ruby, I would be bothered. But that's a terrible attitude to take toward technology, and an excellent path to stagnation. Criticisms of any technology need to be held up, so they can be considered and, one hopes, acted upon. If there are truly better alternatives to ruby, I want to know about them. What possible reason is there to use anything but the best?
Now, one could suggest that this article substitutes detailed particulars for vague "I hate it" statements and "It's buggy" (In my experience, all software is buggy.)
But for god's sake, they're not just tools. They are the life blood of our work. Show a little respect.
Having worked extensively with PHP, Java, and Ruby, I find these sort of arguments puzzling. Perhaps my experience is unique, but I find I run into ruby problems and java problems at about the same rate. The difference is, all the ruby problems show up in the same place. In Java, some of the problems show up at compile time, while some show up at run time. All that extra typing seems a strange fixation if it only saves you from a subset of potential problems. More damning: The feedback loop on a scripting language is much shorter. With Java, I while away my days waiting for ant to run, and Tomcat to redeploy. In ruby, I fix problems in minutes. There's no wait. For a large enough problem, the time spent me end up being the same. But the stress level is so much lower. And it's fun! It's funny that these arguments seem to hinge on the universe of ideals, rather than the universe of actuals.
Apple didn't design the phone. Apple wrote the software. Motorola made the phone. Apple doesn't want to make phones. Apple wants to make ACC the defacto standard for music. All Apple did was make a phone that plays ACC files. Is this so hard?
I've enjoyed reading through the "AJAX" sucks posts. I find the arrogance expressed interesting. "You'll never port Photoshop to a web app". Folks, what, exactly, is the difference? It's all just pixels on the page. You click on things. You move them around. It saves data to some manner of file. It's true that the toys aren't there, but every passing day, this becomes less and less true. The tools are being built as we speak. Sneer if you want, but web if the best you can do is "you can't make photoshop", you're in trouble. Number one, most people don't use photoshop, and number two, you can't make photoshop yet. Sneer while you still can, guys.
Rigid is the key word here. As someone who has developed both PHP and Java, I can tell you I find the rigidity of java mysterious and stifling. Actually, I find PHP a little much at this point, so enamored am I of python and ruby. PHP _is_ flexible, and that's why it's popular. PHP is able to handle the work of a professional like me, but also to handle the simple little bits of a designer like my girlfriend. I can't imagine saying the same for a java system. PHP et. al. feel more natural, more like pseudo code. I've failed to understand how people find rigidity so appealing. In my experience, there is no substitute for good programmers. An anal language will only help an anal person. We don't need typed variables. We need coders who know what they're doing, which is more work, but more payoff. And also, that I've seen, more fun.
Because there is a freedom in constraints. If I sit down to write a story, and I can do anything, write about anything, my brain tends to lock up. There are just too many choices. By applying constraintns, I give myself a workable whole in which to work. Put simply, humans don't do well with infinity. So by reducing the problem space, there is more energy on what is actually in play. Which leads to the obvious question: Why should style _ever_ be in the problem space? Why should style be a choice? In what way does writing my french brackets on seperate lines instead of with the first on the same line as the declaration make any difference to whether my strings get concatenated properly? The answer, of course, is that they don't. I balked at first, but the more I use it, the more I appreciate usinng python, and not having to bother with style. I can focus on solving problems, and that's as it should be. That and I hate emacs. ;-)
I don't know. I'd generally say "Screw best practices. I'm doing what works." I find the XML easier to read. I wouldn't consider nesting tags. That's what the attributes are there for. If XML police want to come arrest me for that, I'm going down fighting. :-)
We use XML for our JS data sending needs, and have no performance issues. We use attributes as in the above example, so our XML is lean. I hate to say it, but this looks like re-inventing the wheel. Whatever floats your boat, though.
Actually, browsers weren't designed to show web pages. They were designed to show research papers. None of these image things. None of these forms things. It was just supposed make it easy to get from one article to the articles it references. Oops. Now we have all these email apps and shopping carts, and no one seems to be complaining. Of course, the telephone was designed to transmit orchestral concerts long distances. Oops. When you release a technology, much as when you release a work of art, the creation becomes the property of its audience. Web browsers will become whatever we make them. I welcome the day when my files are all online, and a web browser grabs whatever I need. But even if you don't relish the thought, it's a mistake to think XForms and other XML technologies are to be trapped in browsers forever. For an example, look at Apple's upcoming Dashboard, which literally displays web pages in floating blobs. This is only the beginning. Some day, we'll look back and say "You mean we used to write software, and you had to have a separate copy on each machine!?! And I say let that future roll in.
"...because [x] is not Word's domain." That's a lovely attitude. "Users should want what the developers provide." If plain text and HTML are not Word's domain, it should not offer the features. Of course, the features are there because people want them there, and if people want them there, it becomes Word's domain. Companies serve the people, not the other way around.
PHP only becomes unmaintainable if you don't know what you're doing, or if you don't plan well at the onset. The thing about PHP is that it doesn't force you to do anything, which means it doesn't force you to do anything the right way. This is not a fault. I wouldn't be a PHP developer today were it not for the ease with which I learned to write some very, very bad code. Of course, there's room to grow. The result is that the onus is on the developer, and not the language. So you're right, PHP doesn't scale. Not it's job. PHP provides the opportunity to scale, and the toolset, which are more than adequate, and improving over time.
This is particularly funny coming from a perl developer. Perl can become unmaintainable on a small project.
Most of our technology today is designed and contstrained by the fact that computer voice recognition has a long way to go. Same with phones. If we had rock-solid, near-zero-error voice recognition, phones wouldn't need buttons. Hell, maybe computers wouldn't need keyboards, though I hope they will. I'm fond of my typing.
Of course, all this hangs upon real voice recognition, which isn't close yet. But it's only a matter of time.
"Apple has shown that it doesn't require a Hurculian effort to make a usable desktop on a UNIX variant." I'm sorry, it doesn't? Have you any idea how long OS X has been in development? And we should remember that OS X as it is is just now becoming a truly solid system. It took many years. And also note that OS X comes from NeXT, which began development a long, long time ago. Perhaps we should ask some NeXT and Apple just how easy their accomplishment was. And of course, a lot of the ideas in X came from classic Mac OS, which has been in development and refinement since the early 80's. Easy indeed.
Actually, Apple does make a profit on the iTunes Music Store, but it's not a big one. Apple has said making money off songs isn't a priority, but they are making a small profit. It's just that selling iPods is the point, just as selling Macs is the point of the Mac OS.
Your mother can use I-tunes, but can she use iTunes?
the themes and ideas it presents have already been exhaustively discussed in PHIL 101. You say this as though most people have taken and understood the philosophy they encountered, yet even in the small liberal arts college I attended, with cadres of philosophy majors, I saw lots and lots of people tune out. Most of philosophy, the way it's taught, can be alienating. Of course, if you translate the issues, people usually say "Yeah, I've wondered about that." So mainly, there's a translation/communication gap. I think it was clever for the Wachowski brothers to use an action movie to bring such issues to light, because most of the people who were turned off by PHIL 101 go to action movies. I mean, the kids in my church's youth group were talking about what the hell the ending of Reloaded meant. So we were talking about the spiraling downwards one encounters when one starts thinking about the "what is real?" question. Sure, they could probably get a more detailed, thorough discussion at their local college, but some of them aren't headed that way. Besides, you could argue that Philosophy is self-important and a parody of itself. Of course, you could also argue that about slashdot posts. Or even this post. Why, oh why did I choose the red pill?
When the iTMS first came out, before you could really do anything else, you had to get the latest version of Quicktime, because it is quicktime that handles AAC, and iTunes uses Quicktime, a point that seems lost here. Perhaps in the Windows World, the situation is a bit different, but QT for Windows exists, and I would imagine if it doesn't already, it will support AAC promptly. So all any application, mac or PC, has to do to handle AAC formatted files is support Quicktime, which is a good idea anyway, because Quicktime plays nearly everything. In fact, the blurb in Software Update for QT stated that the point of this upgrade was so that other programs than iTunes could handle AAC. So basically, this means that any program which does not support Quicktime and AAC does so because it doesn't want to, for whatever reason. As Microsoft Office (at least on the mac side) supports quicktime, this all sounds like a piss-poor argument from a piss-poor company. The tools are all out there, and Apple would be happy to help anyone make their devices/software compatible. Microsoft just wants to score marketing points sans facts, but I suppose I'm preaching to the choir on that point.
I must confess to enjoying the feel of fresh pen on paper. And I have printed countless copies of nearly identical sections of writing, just so that my pen can run across the paper. Of course, when visceral pleasure runs out, practicality must take over, and it's easier to manage a large digital collection of scraps than a large pile of scrap paper. And so I have turned to DevonThink, a mac-only program that I am thrilled with. It makes it terrifically simple to edit many little scraps, and organize them into useful groupings. I will always relish the pen, but when work needs done, DevonThink does the trick.
Market share matters as much as market share matters. I don't much care whether anyone else uses macs as long as I can continue to use my mac. That depends primarily upon Apple's ability to make money, and they've been very good at making money lately, even amid the slump. Of course, a certain amount of market share is important, but Linux can have all the market share in the world. As long as Apple is making money, I could care less. It's true. You'll pry my macs from my cold, dead fingers. So Go Linux, I say. And Go Apple too!
As for usenet, what, are you surprised? Who the hell in the general public would have any conceivable use for usenet? For christ's sake, slashdot is Usenet squared! And the web controlled by big money? Newsflash: the people who use the corporate sites wouldn't have (and didn't) go to the old web anyway.
The beauty of the internet is that it is not controlled. It was designed to be flexible, and continues to do so. I mean, look at stealing music. The big guns shoot down one service, another crops up. At no point in the last few years have I been unable to find a song I want, despite the RIAA's efforts. The internet, like much in the world, is what you make of it, whether you're a grouchy slashdot user, or Walmart. So instead of the lament, how about making it something better?
I think it's worth noting that this music store is exactly the sort of thing Apple does well, and which makes being an Apple denizen such a joy. Xerox makes the GUI, Apple turns it into a product. Airport was already around. Apple made it easy. And there were many many MP3 Players out there. Apple didn't even write iTunes. They just morphed Sound Jam into it. And here we are again. As a mac user, I've come to smile whenever I hear Apple will enter a new market. I know they'll get it right, or close enough. It took three versions for iTunes to win me over completely. Wait till the Music Store grows a bit. For now, it is a frighteningly easy to use system. Apple is a company that excels at packaging, and that has made all the difference.
The best thing about Slashdot is that it lets anybody with keyboard say anything they want.
The worst thing about Slashdot is that it lets anybody with a keyboard say anything they want.
Of course, the above statements go equally well for the internet as a whole, and that, I would argue, is the real point of the article. There was something very human in lapsed domains. So as we leave those times behind, we take a humorous back at that foolishness with a sense of fondness but relief that those days are passing, and not (I would hope) pretend that we're somehow superior to those attitudes, which some posters on this forum seem inclined to do. BuyClamsOnline.com is funny. JanLovesJim.com is sweet. IamCarbonatedMilk.com is curious. Leave them that way.
We are passionate, silly things. Let's laugh at eachother.