whopa

> Startups should be very risk averse. One misstep can mean death.

That contradicts a lot of sentiment on HN.

> And Microsoft can afford to take more risks than Facebook, etc.

Where is Microsoft making more risks than Facebook? They are quite conservative about the cash cows. Windows has a lot of complexity to maintain backwards compatibility going back decades, and that complexity has a very high cost when it comes to making a stable and secure product.

That's the weird part. Twitter is often held up as a darling of startups, but they don't act very startup-like. They move very very slowly and seem very risk averse.

In contrast, Facebook has over 10x the people, and 10x the user base, but does major UI shakeups regularly, tries out new features often, and isn't afraid to tweak or remove them if they don't work out. They also are doing interesting things technically (e.g, Cassandra, Scribe) and open sourcing them, some of which Twitter deploys themselves (e.g., well, Cassandra, Scribe).

Facebook definitely seems to fit the startup ideal much more than Twitter, yet Twitter is much smaller. What gives?

Weird list, as Las Vegas and San Jose already have free wifi. Perhaps others too?

Great that SEA gets it though.

But one of the points of the article was that people who have the potential to be the next Einstein or Berners-Lee are disincentivized to pursue that potential, and instead follow a path that makes more money, but doesn't add value to society.

The Internet in general is not as narrowly scoped as Twitter's feature set, so that is not the same.

"Twitter is what you make of it."

If what most people make of it is banal posts and celebrity watching, is it deserving of all the hype?

"Anyone can become a broadcaster" also counts for blogs, mailing lists, usenet, etc. People still have to opt in to tune into you, so why is Twitter more interesting than all those other options?

> It's somewhat depressing that FIOS is available in the boonies of Indiana but not in most of the Silicon Valley.

That's because there are government subsidies to bring broadband to rural areas, but none to bring fiber to Silicon Valley. Verizon is just following the money.

> How is Mac version holding back Chrome in terms of adoption when mac represents roughly 9-10% OS market?

Because Mac usage among early adopters and other tech influencers is a much higher percentage, and they're the ones who recommend software to use to the less savvy. That's how Firefox's marketshare got its initial big boost.

> Noscript is used by a very small niche users

Again, Noscript usage incidence is higher among that same market.

> I think most of the early adopters of Chrome are fairly tech savvy users

Most alpha geeks I know (including myself) use Firefox as their primary browser rather than Chrome, mainly because it's not quite there on Mac/Linux, and/or favorite extensions don't exist. Nearly all Chrome users I know are Windows users, and don't care about extensions, and like the perceived speed compared to other browsers. Nearly all alpha geeks I know use Chrome on Windows, when they have to use Windows, which isn't very often.

Get more of those alpha geeks using Chrome as their primary, more recommendations trickle down to their less geeky friends. That's what happened with Firefox, and that's what will happen with Chrome once a stable Mac port and support for the popular extensions show up.

To be fair to Google, they tried to contribute to Firefox back in the Firefox 1.x timeframe, but they realized that Mozilla is rather dysfunctional open source project. It is incredibly hard to get feature work into Mozilla as an outsider, so they decided to go their own way. In a way they got what they wanted in the end, now with Mozilla copying stuff from Chrome wholesale now that someone else has made them look bad.

The main things holding Chrome back adoption-wise is a stable Mac version, and extension hooks to support popular functionality like AdBlock and Noscript. With those you'll start seeing geeks and tech influencers switch, which will probably start eating at Firefox's market share. It's a testament to the power of Google's brand that it's got as much market share right now as it does, which is mainly at the expense of IE.

Online advertising doesn't compete against traditional broadcast advertising on a level playing field. You can directly measure a lot of the effectiveness of an online ad. That's much harder to do with traditional ads, so everyone uses statistical models for pricing. Except those models are probably mostly garbage.

Likely online advertising meets or exceeds the actual performance of traditional ads, but people have yet to admit out loud that the emperor has no clothes. That's only a matter of time though, and the result won't be any different than the current reality: to maintain the production levels people are used to, business models are going to have to change, whether it's subscriptions like Hulu is going for, or something else entirely.

Realistically, disk filesystems have to be linked into the kernel (FUSE isn't going to cut it: too slow, and can't be used on boot), and Apple isn't going to link GPL code into their kernel. All the stuff you listed is userspace.

btrfs is GPL, which is an automatic no-go for Apple legal.

I'm curious, where does the Apple/Oracle bad blood speculation come from? I don't remember seeing any references to it before, so was Gruber just grasping at things? The NetApp lawsuit seems way more plausible.

It still boils down to switching costs. If Google pulls shenanigans often enough, some users will notice, and they switch to Bing or some other search engine with very little effort. Google doesn't want to lose those users, so they have incentive to not be evil.

On the other hand, AT&T either has a physical monopoly or is part of a duopoly of broadband in many markets. If AT&T pulls shenanigans often enough, even if users do notice, they can't switch to some other provider easily. So AT&T can be evil, and people have to accept it, because there isn't much other choice.

If the capital costs of becoming a broadband provider were as low as being a search engine, regulation wouldn't be necessary. But since the landscape isn't competitive due to physical limitations, and AT&T has a history of being evil, regulation seems necessary.

And as I said in my original comment, you can't rely on user education. If we've learned anything about the psychology of phishing, it's that.

Except the phishing aspects make it worse for inexperienced users, since an arbitrary website can redirect to a page that asks for a potentially more sensitive username/password, and that's actually considered normal flow.

I don't understand how anyone can promote OpenID in good conscience with this glaring hole in the design. You simply can't rely on user education.

Low tweeting is a big issue, since it negates some of the Twitter narrative. The whole "pulse of the planet" realtime search thing isn't really valuable if most of the users aren't contributing to the corpus.

Also, if it's just a handful of the users creating the value, then the switching costs are much lower. You'll go to "where the celebrities are" (which may turn out to be Facebook, or something else) and not the harder to move "where are your friends are".

Got a source for Stephen King's royalty rates being significantly above the standard rates for other authors? Everything I've found says royalties range from 10-15% for hardcover, like http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_adv_royalties.htm: "hardback royalties on the published price of trade books usually range from 10% to 12.5%, with 15% for more important authors"

You talk about simple market economics, but the publishing industry seems to be a cartel, and authors are on the whole largely shafted. The music industry is the same way...

> Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command higher royalties. So, the price to the publisher is increased (via higher royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content.

Is it really true that different authors can have wildly different royalty rates? I thought the range only spanned a few percentage points.

Advances don't really count, since they are paid out of future royalties.

Sure, but citing an outlier as an example as something that could happen isn't really meaningful, since it is so improbable.

Maybe with the current economy the bank and credit card leads don't pay out as well? And the mortgage stuff is still in total downturn.

Perhaps between the crappy economy and whatever Yodlee is charging for their data, Mint may not be anywhere near profitable. They may have acquired a lot of users, but they have to pay Yodlee for all those users' data, and cover the costs by the fraction of those users who go for the bank/credit card stuff suggested.

During the time I used Mint, none of the financial offers presented were better than my current ones, so I never bit.

Being able to target ads well doesn't do you any good if you don't have the ad inventory to make use of that advantage. That's Facebook's problem: their users aren't apt to click on ads while on the site, so they don't convert very well, hence a lot of advertisers don't bother and their inventory sucks.

I've never seen an ad on Facebook that highly targeted me. I think that beyond a few niches (like engagement rings) Facebook's targeting works out to be a wash. That's why despite having 300 million users and billions of page views they are only barely profitable.

Apple is an outlier. Intuit is not.

Yes, I am a C coder. The variable names use awful Hungarian notation, but are often otherwise tersely named beyond that. It could use more whitespace to signify logical blocks instead of running all the logic in a function together. It's well commented except for the confusing parts, like the concurrency logic and the memory management, which seems rather backwards.

By contrast, both the Linux kernel and WebKit are far more beautiful codebases than SQLite, and also deal with far more complexity. If SQLite's the best you've seen, you haven't really seen much...

Well, the internals of SQLite are far from beautiful or clean. I do agree that the external interface is very nice to use, and the docs are actually useful.

> Tax revenues are now above those levels (after adjusting for inflation and population growth).

Got a source for that?

> Do you really want to argue that CA isn't spending enough money?

No, where was I saying that? CA has a problem where it's spending money it doesn't have, not that it isn't spending enough. There's certainly plenty of spending cuts that could happen too, but the Republicans and Democrats can't seem to agree on much of that either.

Uhm, this is patently false. California is gerrymandered to hell, there are safe Republican districts which elect some rather far-right representatives, to both national and state legislatures. It's actually very hard to be a moderate Republican in California. You're not right-wing enough to win the Republican districts, and still have the Republican stigma in the Democratic districts. It's only in full statewide elections that being a moderate Republican works, hence the governorship trending mostly that way.

It's actually the far-right Republicans who are part (but not all) of the problem with regards to the budget issues. They are mainly unwilling to compromise, any sort of tax increase is anathema, even the idea of bringing tax rates back to to late-1990s levels.

Huh? They don't have that many projects, they only officially support 3 platforms, most of the localizations are done by volunteers, and there isn't a whole lot of innovation going on.

The only real project is Firefox. There's some support projects like addons.mozilla.org, but it's fairly badly run and slow moving. Most Mozilla Labs projects are dead, Jetpack seems to be only one with legs. Weave is taking forever and nowhere near production ready, and Ubiquity is a power user feature than 95% of Firefox users won't use.

Most of the new stuff they're talking about is catching up to Chrome, catching up in the mobile space, or already speced out HTML5 features. Hardly any substantial innovation.

They've got a lot of fat really. The actual browser engineers on the ground do want to improve the web, but they've got a lot of ancillary folks who don't really do much, and a bunch of cultural baggage which prevents them from being an effective open source project. It's still insanely hard to get any feedback on feature suggestions, they still mostly do their own thing and largely ignore the external developer community.

"Mystique" is a good word, since they have this mystique about being this egalitarian, community driven organization, but in reality, Mozilla is a fairly badly run open source project. The 40% number in the article counts localizers, doc writers, and other ancillaries, so it seems high, but the vast majority of core code changes are done by Mozilla Corp. employees.

The project is really quite insular. Straightforward bug fixes may go in smoothly sometimes, but try to get any feedback on feature suggestions, and you'll often find deaf ears, even if you're willing to do the implementation. Or may submit a patch to bugzilla for a bugfix, and it'll just get ignored. But then a year later someone at MoCo runs into the same bug doing Firefox work, comes up with roughly the same patch, and it hits the tree within a day.

There's also significant components where nobody in the organization actually understands how they work, so if you submit a patch to say, XPConnect, it won't ever go in because nobody feels confident enough to review it.

WebKit is actually more vibrant in terms of non-Apple code contributions than Mozilla.

> Maybe 3.5 will change that though.

Doubtful. The new JS JIT is only turned on for web content, so extensions don't benefit at all.