October 2011
2 posts
My Tribute to Steve: Two Days Not Building an MVP
Like many techie types, I’ve been reflecting on Steve Jobs and how he moved me and influenced me at various times in my life. I started writing down these thoughts in a blog post: the fierce competition at my junior high school (yes, that’s what it was called back then) for the two Apple ][s we had; sneaking into my dad’s closet in the Fall of 1983 to read the manuals and...
Siri is Awesome, But Not for Apple
Update Oct 5th, 2011 (evening)
RIP Steve Jobs, aesthete extraordinaire. You made the world a more beautiful place.
Update Oct 5th, 2011 (morning)
Having received some stiff but fair criticism on Hacker News for this post, I’d like to clarify and summarize a few points:
Apple is not a fashion company. Yet the value of their brand is clearly not just about utility. Apple’s products...
September 2011
1 post
Dear Netflix, Catalog Churn Sucks
Dear Netflix, Yes, I understand that you are getting squeezed by the content companies. I can live with a smaller catalogue—although the availability of long-tail content was the original reason I fell in love with Netflix. I can also live with your rates going up. It’s the churn that’s killing me. I watch several episodes of the Atheism Tapes. It’s awesome. I want to show one to a...
May 2009
1 post
March 2009
1 post
Does Amazon Want the Canadians to Freeze to Death?
Strangely, Amazon.ca sells no clothes. In fact, they sell little more than books, music, and software. Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de have rich inventories, comparable to the US Amazon site.
That’s very strange, given Canada’s cultural similarity to the US, proximity to the US, and NAFTA. I wonder what the back-story is here?
December 2008
3 posts
Posthumous Email
When I reflect on the growth of the Internet as I have experienced it as a user, a few personal landmarks stand out: my first email, the first time I played a networked game, the first flame war I got sucked into, the first web page I created (a list of links of course!), the first time I surfed the web from a public bathroom, etc.
This morning, for some reason, I recalled the first time I...
Numbers are Powerful Brands
The goal of ISN/Freenum was never to promote numeric brands. Instead, the goal was (and is) to break free from the contraints of E.164 and ease the transition from 12-digit keypads to alphanumeric voice addresses. We may, however, never abandon numeric addresses altogether. From numerology to ZIP codes to significant dates, numbers are powerful brands and, according to a piece in the Wall...
Disinformation: "Bittorrent Declares War on VoIP,...
The Register has published an alarmist piece of disinformation on how BitTorrent’s move to UDP transport is going hurt VoIP and gaming and cause the Internet to collapse. This is the exact opposite of what we intended for the Plicto transport protocol (now uTorrent’s uTP). Our intent was to be as gentle as possible to the network, yielding to competing TCPs and non-adaptive,...
November 2008
1 post
September 2008
1 post
Days Numbered for DirectX and OpenGL? →
Interesting prediction that multi-core will obviate hardware supported graphics APIs.