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Pay Too Much for everything
Have you ever inherited something that's really old? When you held it, did you notice that it's different than what you can buy at the store today? Chances are your grandparents saved up for quite some time to buy it, and that’s why it’s lasted until now. Often something that costs twice as much doesn't
Lies, Damn Lies and LIBOR
I've been hesitant to write about the LIBOR scandal because what I want to say goes so much further. We now know that Barclays and other ma...
Thunderbird: Stability and Community Innovation
Thunderbird provides an open-source, cross-platform email alternative for those of us who still use stand-alone email clients (and I am one). It’s trust-worthy, it’s under your control, and it’s built to reflect the Mozilla mission. Once again we’ve been asking the question: is Thunderbird a likely source of…
Software Inventory by Joel Spolsky
Imagine, for a moment, that you came upon a bread factory for the first time. At first it just looks like a jumble of incomprehensible machinery with a few people buzzing around. As your eyes adjus…
The True Story of the Amazon Door-Desk
Several years ago, I said I would no longer publicly comment about my time in 1996–1997 as Amazon.com's catalog manager. Why? Because my knowledge and memory were so out of date, and I did not keep a journal during that period. It would be silly for me
ESR: Cisco provides a lesson
In my last blog post, I made a public stink about language in a so-called Declaration of Internet Freedom , which turned out to be some libertarians attempting to expand and develop the ideas in this Declaration of Internet Freedom . Mostly they did pretty well, except for one sentence they got completely wrong: “Open…
The Google Nexus Q Is Baffling
David Pogue tests the Google Nexus Q home entertainment device and finds himself bewildered.
Tarsnap outage post-mortem
When the Tarsnap EC2 instance came back online about an hour later, I found that the abrupt loss of power had resulted in filesystem corruption. As I explained in a blog post in December 2008, Tarsnap stores all user data in Amazon S3, but keeps metadata cached in EC2 . While I could not see any evidence that the…
ACTA killed in EU parliament: 478 votes to 39
Today at 12:56, the European Parliament decided whether ACTA would be ultimately rejected or whether it would drag on into uncertainty. In a crushing...
Apple ignores bug report
Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games. This problem was new; it was introduced with the iOS 4.2.1 update and wasn't present on older iOS versions.
Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read
On Amazon.com there are… …over 2,000,000 books on “Business” …over 750,000 books on “Technology” …over 500,000 books on “Design” …o…
Mobile is Where the Growth Is
If you look at any of the top web properties on comScore, Quantcast, Alexa or any other third party reporting service you will see that they all have been fairly flat over the first half of the year. You might think that all these big web services are flatlining. We have seen this in our […]