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jtwb's comments

jtwb | 14 years ago | on: Time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation

Publicly held corporations are greedy by definition. The objective of such a corporation is simply to make as much money for its owners as possible.

Our laws create an environment where intellectual property abuse has proven to be a profitable venture.

The solution is not to redefine corporations as non-greedy entities.

jtwb | 14 years ago | on: If this then that

Using (input channel, output channel, title) to summarize Recipes makes code search a breeze.

Traditionally, code search is done via fulltext indexing of verbose textual function descriptions. ifttt succeeds in using a channel-signature model, not unlike Hoogle's type-signature search, to provide code search without asking authors to write any description at all. Very nice!

http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%28a+-%3E+b%29+-%3E+a+...

jtwb | 14 years ago | on: If this then that

On the contrary, I feel that the large representation of a Recipe conveys a sense of accessibility and simplicity. It says, "this is something you can understand, it will not boggle your mind, stress you out, or confuse you."

Compare this with Yahoo Pipes, which provided a similar service with an interface intimidating to non-technical users.

jtwb | 14 years ago | on: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

We forget the value of curation.

Why can a boutique shop sell a $50 dress for $200? Taste. One could simply walk into that boutique, confident that 20 minutes later a cute, fashionable and well-fitting dress would be acquired.

Why can top universities charge so much for tuition? Every year, %s University generates a curated list of individuals, and many hiring processes (not to mention ad-hoc interpersonal filtering processes) emphasize individuals in that list. Like boutique shopping, this is an expensive strategy that often excludes superior talent, but is fast.

Is it worth $200,000 to have one's name on that list? Apparently.

Is it worth application fees and an iron publishing agreement to have one's paper published in Nature. Apparently.

jtwb | 14 years ago | on: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

Software as a service renders the manual organization of information obsolete.

A great deal of human labor in general is spent organizing information. Every industry from construction to tourism. Every scale, from villages to corporations.

It is fundamental to the very concept of "work", and it is being rendered obsolete very quickly thanks to high internet penetration rates and mobile computing.

jtwb | 14 years ago | on: Why Comcast Should Be Sued

Deceptive marketing? Yes. Inflated prices? Yes. Lack of competition? Totally.

But using law to impose your "moral perspective" on a pricing structure is not a solution.

The problem is that there exists no plan with reasonably-priced, reasonably-fast non-capped internet access, while there is a demand for it.

This is a market failure caused by a lack of competition in the market.

We should seek out and advocate for solutions which increase competition in the consumer broadband marketplace and ignore foolish non-solutions like this.

jtwb | 14 years ago | on: Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps

"Current and previous major releases" is a peaceful approach. There is no discretion involved - at no point was an active decision made to cut off your IE 7 users.

Plus, your FF 4 users will know exactly when FF support will be dropped - the day FF 6 is released. Simple.

jtwb | 15 years ago | on: The one second war: Finding a lasting solution to the leap seconds problem

Maybe the most awesome part of being a human being today is recycling solutions from the past to the solutions of today.

Once upon a time, written language was represented in computers by arrays of characters. Manipulating non-english user content in this model was big pain. Today, effective software dealing with written language uses UTF-8 Characters and the Grapheme abstraction. The problem was solved by separating the concepts of Bytes, Characters and Graphemes, which were previously conflated.

Clearly, it's ineffective to use the same abstraction for "elapsed time" and "time of day" due to the variable length of the day. Representing both concepts with one value leads to the problems described in this article. The concepts should be separated and a new abstraction created: Earth Position (EP).

Statements about the time of day, day of the week or lunar month of the year are really statements about the Earth's position relative to some other entity: the sun in most cases, but sometimes the moon in the case of lunar dates.

Given that "Unix time" is widely understood as "the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1, 1970", it would be convenient to let it only represent Elapsed Time and define Earth Positional values in terms of Elapsed Time.

The leap second concept should only affect applications interested in Earth Position queries (time of day, etc) and not have any representation at the Elapsed Time level.

jtwb | 15 years ago | on: Name.com: Another Unscrupulous Registrar

Here's how to clean the ads from your domain.

Name.com's DNS editor won't let you remove the DNS record that serves the ads. You need to switch to a real DNS provider.

CloudFlare is a free DNS provider - generally people use it to hook up the CloudFlare security and auto-CDN system, but you just need it for DNS hosting.

1 Create an account and add your domain: www.cloudflare.com

2 Disable the orange cloud icons

3 Follow the steps that tell you to switch your name servers - that makes CloudFlare your DNS provider

4 Go to "Edit DNS Settings"

5 Find the "A * (some IP)" record, and remove it

That's it. No more parker ads. DNS and name server changes can take a while to propagate to the whole web so the change can take up to an hour to affect everyone.

Edit: this is the "*" record you need to remove: http://i.imgur.com/jc48t.png

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