Can you tell what’s missing from this Intel Mac Mini wannabe?

Yup. OS X. Doesn’t matter what the box looks like if they don’t have the OS to go with it now does it?

And speaking of not caring, the new Segway models are here.

Chris Pirillo seems a tad annoyed that people refer to RSS feeds as “XML” feeds. This is a distinction that almost nobody will make–ever. Why? First, an RSS is feed is comprised of XML isn’t it? This, in my book-of-the-real-world, makes it an XML feed also. Second, no…one…cares. Half the people you meet still call IE “The Internet” ferchrissakes.

David Heinemeier Hansson writes about Ruby on Rails as “disruptive technology”

“…Rails is able to deliver incredible improvements for the majority of projects that are currently being over-served by J2EE/.NET by sacrificing a whole herd of golden calves. The sacrifices are condemned by the high priest exactly because of their status as high priests, which means they work on the most complex projects and hence cast all decisions on technology in that context. Would this work for the 5% most difficult projects? If not, then it “doesn’t scale.”

The pieces linked to from his post are worth a read also.

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I’m totally bidding on this

What happens to Rotten Tomatoes now that Google is in the game

DFW Goes on about Television, postmodernism, meta-fiction and even more stuff that I don’t really understand.

From this…

“it’s too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV’s ruined readers. Because the U.S.’s television culture didn’t come out of a vacuum. What TV is extremely good at–and realize that this is “all it does”–is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since there’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV’s going to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy.”

to this…

“Minimalism’s just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem’s still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end up empty. Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes “it” the subject of the text. Minimalism’s even worse, emptier, because it’s a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there “is” no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.”

Sorry to keep harping on this, but the following quote from this 43Folders post is worth repeating…

“An email auto-check set for every minute means 60 potential distractions every hour, or almost 500 per day. Look back at a week of your emails and ask yourself: how many distractions was that really worth? How much crucial, instantly actionable email did I receive to make it worth shifting my attention over 2000 times?”

Merlin, based on much chatter, offers Five fast email productivity tips. I think most folks would benefit from following any three of them.

Aw crap, first MD5, now we can’t hash anything using SHA-1. All it takes is what, 2⁶⁹ operations to find a collision?

I’m kinda glad I don’t understand cryptography.