No caveats now: Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It’s a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it’s out of the mobile game for good. It is supposed to ship around Christmas 2010, but anyone who gets one will prefer a lump of coal. I really mean that.
We had a lot of fans when Warner were paying for radio play, and people would say to us ’you fell off our radar’, which actually meant ‘I only pay attention to what people tell me to pay attention to’. I don’t need those people. I need the people for whom this is valuable to the point of necessary.” — Kristin Hersh
I don’t think you can devalue real music, but it was only a matter of time before the CD itself was devalued – it’s just a piece of plastic. It’s not a valuable object in itself, because music can only be measured in terms of its impact. I embraced that by giving music away, but many people want a shareable, tangible object they can hold. For me, it has to be intrinsically valuable, and a book still can be.” — Kristin Hersh
And so continues one of the biggest constants in software development: the unerring sense among developers that the level of abstraction they’re current working at is exactly the right one for the task at hand. Anything lower-level is seen as barbaric, and anything higher-level is a bloated, slow waste of resources. This remains true even as the overall level of abstraction across the industry marches ever higher.
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.
I really should write something, or something.