Boredom

Dan McKinley wrote a great blog post about choosing boring technology. It’s worth reading, but the tl;dr is that by adopting new and exciting technology you introduce additional risk and instability, which limits your ability to innovate on your product. I agree with pretty much everything he said. There’s another dimension to the boredom question …

The Problem With Democracy

The problem with democracy is that the people of a country lose the right to consider themselves independent of government policies. If a government does or says awful things then the people of the democracy have to bear responsibility. Citizens of totalitarian regimes can’t really be held responsible for what their governments do. I don’t …

Streaming royalties: taking over, but what are the details

So TechCrunch posted that Kobalt, a company who collects digital music publishing revenue for artists has announced that Spotify revenue has overtaken iTunes revenue by 13% in Europe. That’s interesting, not surprising given the trends but is missing answers to a few key questions: What are the overall revenues – does this represent an overall …

Horse Meat

I like horse meat. It’s delicious and healthy. And not so different from beef. I’m really enjoying watching the unfolding European horse meat scandal. Even countries like France where horse is regularly eaten are outraged that they’ve been lied to. The scandal has exposed the complicated supply chain in the European cheap meat trade. It’s …

2012, The Year of the Linux Personal Computer

2012 Q3 PC sales: 87.5M 2012 Q3 Android sales: 122.5M For sure, many would-be PC buyers were waiting for Windows 8 and refreshed models that were waiting for Windows 8 to be released, but that still means that last quarter 1.4 times as many Linux computers were sold than Windows computers. You might try to …

Cloudy with a chance of downtime

AWS went down again last Friday. I wouldn’t normally care, I only run non-critical toy projects out of their infrastructure, but I know that it disrupted a friend’s wedding and that’s just not cool. Amazon’s public statement about the event is fairly detailed and fairly believable. In one of their northern Virginia datacenters “each generator …