Subscription media consolidation gets started

There are rumors that Amazon is interested in buying Netflix. I like the idea, though it’s just one step toward the sort of subscription media consolidation that I outlined a while ago. ..

Pandora’s trying to change my tastes

I got nothing against Jon Secada, but that ain’t what I’m listening to, Pandora. ..

Is Wolfram Alpha too clever by half?

An excellent and exhaustive survey of Wolfram Alpha by Mencius Moldbug. I think he thinks like I do: an engineer that looks at user interface analytically. ..

The iPhone needs multi-tasking, stat

Joshua Topolsky offers a very funny and insightful take on the iPhone’s very fundamental flaw: it is designed for doing one thing at a time. […] my work requires that I use a bunch of web tools, look at lots of news sites, and have a feed reader open… basically, things that would require some level of multitasking. Imagine the frustration of having to constantly break the connection in chat to go look at a site or work on a post. It’s frustrating, let me tell you. The idea of jumping into and out of applications — of having to actually quit an app to move to another one — is an incredibly outmoded and foreign idea in 2009 […] Funnily, the Safari experience provides better multitasking than the phone itself. ..

A prediction of EU hypocrisy

Google’s search market share in Europe is over 80%. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — the target of repeated anti-trust charges by the EU — hovers under 50% in Europe. ..

Can Google Chrome OS get traction?

Google has pre-announced the “Google Chrome OS”. It’s intended as a lightweight operating system built primarily for hosting a browser. ..

The new wave of self-shorteners

So, my previous bit on the attraction of shortening one’s own URLs seems to have some traction. Obviously it wasn’t original to me, but I see that sites like Ars Technica and Flickr have begun doing their own URL shortening. Check it out: ..

Why is a Social Security Number considered a secret?

Identity theft boggles my mind a bit. It’s no mystery why criminal enterprises attempt it. It’s a mystery that we have systems where public information is used for security. ..

Use case: the metric system, or, all that useless beauty

Ah, nothing gets international rivalry boiling like soccer football and the metric system. One wonders why the metric system hasn’t taken off here in the US. I posit this: it doesn’t offer any advantage to end users, ie, regular citizens. Let’s do the use case. ..

More about {less}

Raena Jackson Armitage offers an interesting exploration of LessCSS: I have a confession: I think parts of CSS suck. It’s repetitive, tedious, and … well, kind of dumb. ..