morrow's comments

morrow | 7 years ago | on: How does Hammacher Schlemmer survive in the age of Amazon?

I say it survives by providing the same benefit that Amazon does: a reduction in cognitive overhead.

With Amazon, the reduction comes from the streamlined buying process - you provide your name, address, billing info, shipping info up front, thereby eliminating the overhead of that task from future purchases. It's also a one-stop shop, you don't have to think if they will have an item you want, as 9 times out of 10 they carry a version of what you are looking for.

With Hammacher Schlemmer, the reduction comes from not having to do really any research about products before purchasing. They offer a limited selection of tested products, so you do not have to consider alternative products, sellers, shipping methods, reviews, and are not susceptible to accidentally ordering a counterfeit product. The catalog format is also approachable, you can pick it up and read it and "window shop" without knowing exactly what you want or need.

So I would say not really laziness, just a shift in cognitive overhead from the product purchasing process to the product research process.

morrow | 8 years ago | on: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

I have done a few flash to HTML5 conversions without source code, and the method I've gone with is just to use the flash as a guide and write the HTML5 app from scratch. You end up with cleaner, more maintainable code that way than if you were to throw it into a converter and try to sort out what comes out, and it can end up taking the same amount of time as trying to fix whatever the converter came up with in the end. Do you have any links to the flash products? Might be worth putting what you have in a GitHub repo and see who can contribute. Maybe try https://www.codetriage.com/ as well. If you end up doing either, let me know and I'll try to help :)

morrow | 14 years ago | on: Man Supposedly Flies With Custom-Built Bird Wings

It's quite obviously fake -- given that we are 11 days from April Fools, it's probably either an April Fools joke discovered prematurely, or set-up for a bigger one. Maybe something similar to the tale of icarus.

morrow | 14 years ago | on: Aziz Ansari releases DRM-free standup special for $5

Disagree completely -- the world has plenty of office workers scared to try something so bold, we need better filtering tools and more people trying rather than believing that the current system works to capture, foster, and utilize talent properly.

I think we do way too much stifling as a society as it is, and a lot of that has to do with people who gave up on their dreams for a safe existence justifying their decision by ridiculing others who dare to take risks.

morrow | 14 years ago | on: Woz supports Mike Daisey's message and says you should too

I thought he did a good job too, but I think that lying at all, even about little details in order to have a more coherent, compelling story about an important topic poisons the whole thing, because it brings into question the author's credibility. You have to decide for yourself when he's finished lying and is now telling the truth.

In this particular case, I think it's safe to just take his story as fiction (even though some of it is true), since there are plenty of other journalists covering the same topic. It's just a shame that he felt he couldn't just tell Ira from the beginning what was storytelling and what was reporting, since his piece was so well done, and he really did not need to mislead or lie in order to be compelling.

morrow | 14 years ago | on: W3C Proposal from MS, Google, Netflix for adding copy protection API to html5

I think the penalties associated with using plugins is simply the price DRM advocates should have to pay. I don't think it's the job of the W3C to make it easier on them to maintain this practice. The short-term gain of getting large media players on-board is outweighed by the long-term prolonging of the life of DRM and delaying the advancement of social norms and business practices for media distribution, consumption and ownership.

Looking at the companies that control media today and trying to mold the environment of the web so that they survive is exactly backwards. Instead, I think the W3C should focus on creating the best environment for an open web possible, and let the companies that exist now adapt to it or be replaced by those who can.

morrow | 14 years ago | on: Regretsy Issue Resolution

I've used stripe and it's definitely a breath of fresh air, but as I understand it, most people won't bother switching away from paypal to something without international support. Stripe's working on that: https://stripe.com/global but otherwise there isn't a good international alternative to paypal at the moment.

morrow | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: 300x288 pixel clock using HTML5 canvas and Javascript

Not to get too analytical or philosophical, but I think it's because clocks normally represent time cyclically, as a repetitive process counting and displaying a sub-set of an ethereal infinite time set. Whereas this clock visualizes time spatially in known, limited, diminishing quantities.

The depressing part is either that this forces you to realize or reminds you that time is, in fact, limited -- or that it tricks you into thinking time isn't infinite, depending on your philosophy.

morrow | 14 years ago | on: New Color.com

You have to wait to post replies sometimes, depending how many levels down the conversation is. This is a safeguard against threads full of knee-jerk back-and-forth responses, I suppose.
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