Spun like a frog. I really like choice, but I have to remember that some people don’t. SpiralFrog is a “choice”, an alternative to P2P and iTunes, although not an interesting one. It’s already spun as a success story, focusing on the 60m of non-iPod devices (in other news, a declining 20% of the market), and the line of advertisers (all two of them). A year from now, it will be portrayed the way Napster 2.0 and Microsoft put a smiley face on their failures. Meanwhile, there goes another year of record labels not giving consumers the choices they want, and harassing everyone they can find. Sigh. They’re just buying up time, but we’re paying the price.
The floodgates are open. Recently I started seeing more and more links and posts to, let’s just call them, off mainstream languages. It started with Lisp (we were first and we will prevail), followed by the return of Smalltalk (check out Seaside), some Haskell (monads are a great idiom), Erlang (can this be a usable pi-c?), IO, today I’m reading about Oz. I’m wondering if it’s the result of the cracks in the Java hegemony that’s bringing us back to one language per person? Or the sudden rise to fame of Ruby that’s igniting the competition? Languages are vested interests, after all. Or maybe I’m just reading too much reddit?
First dead 3.0? YapTA (say that three times with a straight face) is just the app we’ve all been waiting for, and better than most. Details are still sketchy, but we do know it’s Web 3.0. And we do know people will be using YapTA like a verb. The future is here, it’s just that YapTA got the lion’s share. “A job description asks prospective software engineers if they ever wished they were on the development teams of Skype, RealNetworks or iTunes.” Ok. If you have to define yourself by the success of others …
… you’re obviously not reading this.
Kickboxing. Paul Brown adds another one to his Devil’s dictionary: kickboxing, n. A programming language idiom whereby a kick is converted to a Kick.
Proxyscale. Jason Hoffman over at joyeur is putting proxy engines and load balancers to the test to see how much traffic he can pipe with a Rails app. This will be interesting to watch.
And interesting to read, Jason knows his stuff and knows how to explain it to others. Thanks Ludo for the link. (This blog is hosted by TextDrive, I live backup to StrongSpace, all three part of Joynet).