Scripting News

What is an asshole?

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:17:14 GMT

An asshole is someone who says Obama is like Hitler because he wants everyone in the US to have health insurance.

These people are so stupid they need to be slapped in the face to wake them up. They need to have their mouths washed out with soap and be sent to bed without dinner. They need to be sent into hard labor and allowed to die of starvation.

Hitler gassed my people and incinerated them in ovens. Hitler came very close to wiping us out. Hitler was a monster. Hitler was the human race going insane on a mass level.

If you think Obama is Hitler you deserve to meet with others who agree with you, starving and freezing and dying in a cattle car, sitting in each others' excrement, on your way to a concentration camp and its ovens and gas chambers, along with your children.

You will not be allowed to bring your assault rifle.

How to fix URL-shorteners, part II

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:17:41 GMT

Last Wednesday I wrote a piece that explained how to fix URL-shorteners. Today, with the help of Joe Moreno at Adjix, I implemented it.

Here's how my new URL-shortener works.

1. Joe is running the shortener at adjix.com. It's the same one he's always been running, but it's got a few new features.

2. In the prefs for Adjix, I told it that I wanted to use my own domain, c.oy.ly. I also told it to write copies of all my shortened URLs to a bucket at Amazon, which I had given his app permission to write to. By using my own domain, one which I control the DNS for, and retaining a copy of all the data, I am fully protected against his service going away. And I can decide at any time to take over hosting of my own short URLs by directing the c.oy.ly domain to s3.amazonaws.com instead of partner.adjix.com.

3. When I create a shortened URL, I do it by calling an API routine that works exactly as the APIs of the other shorteners. I give it the long URL, some identifying information so it knows to associate it with my Adjix account, and it returns a token, which I smash together with http://c.oy.ly/ to form the shortened URL.

4. All this is done with a bookmarklet communicating with a web app on one of my servers. It then takes the title of the page I'm linking to and adds the full URL from step 3, and redirects me to twitter.com, where I can edit the tweet before clicking on Update.

5. Then, every few minutes I call the Twitter API and ask if Dave has posted any new tweets. If so, I parse them, store the long and short versions of the URL in my database (by dereferencing the URL). Then I call a second API on Adjix to ask it to give me the counts for the most recent 50 links created by Dave. I then update the counts in my database, sort them, and prepare the familiar Top-40 report.

Bottom-line: I am now using URL-shorteners in a way that does not make the Internet suck. I have done my good deed for the day!

Dear Disqus: Can I have the old interface back?

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:25:56 GMT

Near as I can tell there are no new features in the new interface. Things were just moved around and everything is way way slower. The UI was always bizarre, but I figured most of it out. Now you're telling me I have to learn it over again? Why? What's the benefit?

All I know now is that my bookmark to the dashboard broke, and to get to the unapproved messages or spam messages, the maintenence I have to do on a regular basis to keep my site working, I have to wait minutes for the page to load. I don't have any idea if there are any new features in this to justify the pain.

I would really like to go back to the way it worked this morning. You know, when it actually worked.

How to get Lessig to blog

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:23:04 GMT

It's sad that Lessig is "hibernating" his blog, but there's always hope. It's easy to say goodbye, but what's he going to do when he has something that has to be said right now. Wait two years to write and publish a book? I sure hope not!

In his supposedly last blog post (heh) Lessig points to his first post, which was a response to something I wrote in response to something he said. In 2001 and 2002. It's interesting to recount the exchange, because only seven years later things have changed a lot.

1. First Lessig tells a story of Hemingway and source code, an analogy that I feel is flawed. And I say so, very strongly, but hopefully not in a personal way.

2. Then in August 2002, I expanded it, and on re-reading it -- I said some things that were a bit too much. A difference of opinion between two learned people shouldn't involve throwing people out and "up yours."

3. This got Lessig to write his first blog post! So there is a silver lining.

Now the hindsight.

1. In 2002 I said in five years every member of the US House will have a weblog and will be communicating directly with the electorate. I'd say that's been realized now, only they're using Twitter and Facebook and blogs, and they have to communicate directly with the electorate because the news industry is crumbling.

2. The controversy betw Lessig and myself in 2001 and 2002 was over whether software developers should be required to release their source code to get copyright protection (at least that's how I interpreted it). I was vehement in saying no, that we were already putting our ideas out there and that putting the source code out there too would give us nothing to sell. I still believe the logic of that, but since then I gave up on commercial software and in 2004 I released my main work under the GPL. There was no parade, no new respect or even thanks from people outside the community that already used the software. Did it inspire any young would-be designers? Time will tell, but it's looking doubtful. Just saying it's harder to influence the future than it should be, or maybe not -- who knows.

3. I like to think that Lessig and I have now become friends. Just goes to show that when there's a spark between two people, it may express itself in a variety of ways. I admire Lessig, I've come to see him as an open-minded, generous person who really listens. All good things!

4. I don't believe for a second that he's given up blogging.

Urgently need an Intel build of OPML Editor/Mac

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:15:51 GMT

I thought about writing a more creative headline, but opted instead for a direct request for help.

1. Yesterday I pre-ordered a family pack of Snow Leopard. As I understand it, the new version of the Mac OS will run PPC apps only with special software loaded, the way earlier versions of the OS ran Mac Classic apps.

2. The OPML Editor for the Mac is a PPC app.

3. It is also an instance of the GPL'd Frontier kernel, which I understand has been converted to be an Intel app.

4. I can build the Windows version of the OPML Editor. However, I cannot build the Mac version. It's been a long time since I worked at the C level, last time I did was with THINK C on the Mac in the mid-90s. I've tried to build the Mac app on XCode, but I always hit a problem that I don't know how to work around, and honestly I don't want to struggle at this level. I'm going to stick to developing in the OPML environment. When I can do a kernel build on both Mac and Windows, I may look at working inside the C codebase.

5. I need someone to get a build of the Mac OPML Editor together asap and to do some basic testing to be sure it works with the current opml.root.

Resources: The Frontier Kernel project website. Source download of the OPML Editor from August 2008.

Thanks in advance!

What's in the next release of River2

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:18:54 GMT

The first release of the River2 aggregator was all about CSS. I wanted to be sure this new aggregator would be buzzword compliant and user-configurable. I wanted the design community to have their way with this tool.

The second release has a completely different set of goals, they relate to the subscription engine, realtime processing of updates, and podcast support. Specifically...

1. Dynamic reading list support. A reading list is an OPML file that contains a subscription list that is read every time the aggregator scans its feeds. Any new feeds are subscribed to, and any feeds that are no longer in the list are unsubbed, assuming they aren't in another reading list or were independently subscribed to. This feature has been in my aggregators but not in most others. Google Reader, for example, does not support this feature, but imho it should. I'm putting this out there to help lead the market.

2. Fully rssCloud compliant. If you subscribe to a feed that has a cloud element, and you aren't behind a firewall or NAT, River2 will request notification, so that updates are received in realtime.

3. A podcatcher that's not from Apple. The market needs more than one podcatcher. So if you subscribe to a feed that has enclosures, it will download them into a folder of your choosing. This works for photo feeds as well as feeds with audio and video.

Tying it all together, here's a reading list that contains podcast feeds, one of which is cloud-enabled.

This release is not ready for download yet. Because I got a bad cold, and was sidelined last week, the project was set back by a week. But developers are moving ahead with their rssCloud implementations, and will need something to test against. That's one important role of River2, it represents a reference implementation of the client side of the rssCloud protocol.

What's next after this River2 release? More cloud-enabled feeds. An editorial tool that produces cloud-enabled feeds.

Yahoo embracing Twitter?

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:25:17 GMT

Silicon Alley Insider has an interesting piece about Yahoo's obsession with all-things-Twitter. And at the end they have an even more interesting strategy. "Yahoo should work to be a better place to use Twitter than Twitter.com."

This sounds a lot like the winning strategy Yahoo used to best CNN and MSNBC in web news in the 2004 timeframe. With My Yahoo they became the place to go to find out what's new on CNN and MSNBC, and of course on Yahoo.

This kind of embrace is a perfect prelude to competing with Twitter. First, develop a base of people who use Yahoo as their interface for Twitter, and then gradually add features that only work Yahoo-to-Yahoo.

Twitter could add those features too of course, but they might not, since they believe (incorrectly, imho) that the 140 character limit and URL-shortening are part of the magic of Twitter.

Yahoo, or anyone else who adopted this approach, could capture the users who would like to have a bit more space to express their ideas.

Courage and cowardice

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:34:42 GMT

First courage...

Arthur Frommer, the famous travel writer, writes on his blog. "I will not personally travel in a state where civilians carry loaded weapons onto the sidewalks and as a means of political protest." He's talking about the event where people openly carrying guns, one carrying an assault rifle, gathered outside an event where the President spoke.

Arizona can say that people have the right to openly carry guns of any kind at any time, and we can choose not to spend time or money in such a backward place. Perfectly appropriate way to react to an obvious attempt to scare people.

Now cowardice.

Last week I wrote about how Republican Senator Charles Grassley from Iowa, one of a very small number of Republicans who, imho, was honorable -- took the coward's route and threw grandma under the bus, doing his part to confuse the electorate on the issues in the health care decision we will soon make. Paul Krugman follows up, now Grassley has the gall to blame first President Obama and then one of his constituents for his cowardly deception. He's 75 years old. Is winning another election so important that he wants to be remembered as a dishonorable liar and coward?

In all the debates about health care reform, the real issue isn't getting talked about. It's about the people who don't have coverage. Some of the easiest cases are people who have the money to buy insurance, and would buy it, if the industry would sell it to them. But they only want to insure healthy people. So we're in the ridiculous situation here where the people who most need care can't get it. Someone should tell Grassley that some of those people are our grandmothers, and grandsons and granddaughters. Nieces and nephews and mothers and fathers. Don't go claiming the compassionate high ground, when you're selling us out. Shame. (And it could be that some of his own family are screwed by the insurance industry. If not, why not?)

Of course there are the cases where people pay premiums for years, then get sick, and the company denies coverage, disputing information on their application, or claiming a pre-existing condition, long after accepting the premiums. What recourse do we have? We can sue the companies, but that takes huge money, money they have and we don't. And what difference will it make if by the time the case is decided the patient is dead? The whole idea of pre-existing conditions is one that we need to get rid of, completely. Everyone who wants insurance must be able to buy it. Period. No exceptions.

Because these problems concern millions of Americans, everyone knows someone who has been put through the ringer by the insurance process. These stories about angry people (what are they angry about exactly and what does it have to do with health care) are drowning out the tragic stories of people who die because they aren't covered.

One more pointer.

The Democrats aren't blameless because they aren't selling health care reform.

George Lakoff explains how it must be done. Not with lengthy explanations of policy, but with stories that fit into the experiences of all of us, and connecting the values of universal health care with what it means to be an American.

7 years plus 70 days

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:52:28 GMT

7 years ago today: "Tomorrow is Day 70 of No Smoking Dave. Ten weeks. A non-smoking story at the Bowie concert last week. As I'm walking out I see people lighting up everywhere. Smell of smoke all around. It smells good. I really want one. In my mind I outline the steps it would take to be smoking and the amount of time it would take. I would ask someone if they could spare a cigarette. If they said no I'd offer them $1. Oh hell, just offer $1 to begin with. Whoo, where would I get a match. I'd ask for a light. Take a drag. Estimated time, 15 seconds to one minute to first nicotine rush. My heart started beating faster. I felt scared like you feel on a NY subway platform as a train is entering the station and you're standing on the platform and in the instant before it passes you think how you could end your life by leaning forward. I never actually jump, and that night I didn't smoke, and it's good that inside I equate smoking with death so deeply that it invokes my subway nightmare. Do I have it beat? No way. I am still an addict, I expect I will be for life. But I'm an addict in recovery, who is not taking the drug. Even better, I am becoming a constant evangelist for a nicotine-free lifestyle for nicotine addicts, illustrating the old adage that you teach what you most need to learn."

Wish I could send a message back in time to that Dave, seven years ago. I'm sure at some level I'm still a nicotine addict, but I no longer go through this torture when I see someone smoking. Quite the opposite. I smell it and it repels me. Given enough time, you go into remission. Maybe never all the way, but pretty close.

My #blogpostfriday post

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:00:18 GMT

I've had a non-productive week, I've been fighting a cold -- but I made a commitment to the web to write at least one post every Friday, so here I am keeping my promise.

I'm worried about the web.

We pour so much passion into dynamic web apps hosted by companies we know very little about. We do it without retaining a copy of our data. We have no idea how much it costs them to keep hosting what we create, so even if they're public companies, it's very hard to form an opinion of how likely they are to continue hosting our work.

A few weeks ago an entrepreneur said to my face that he was the one who made the money and I was the one who worked for free. My chin dropped. I knew most if not all of them secretly believed this, but I had never heard one say it out loud.

I know others who told me their business model was to patent my work.

Shaking my head. This can't work.

This system is terrible. It's a bubble, like the real estate bubble. It's going to burst, and when it does, it will take a lot of our history with it.

But not this blog post if I have any say about it. It's stored as a static file on a Windows XP server running Apache. It could just as easily be stored on a Linux machine running anything. Or even an iPod or iPhone. Text files are the ultimate in stability. The same text file you could read on a mainframe 40 years ago could be read on a netbook today.

I'll post a link to this piece on Twitter, that probably won't last very long. But -- the backup I'm making of it is being stored as a static text file on Apache. So it may well be around for a while.

I'm really obsessed with creating a historic record. I want to feel that our writing has a future. I also don't want to work for people who are as openly greedy as the typical entrepreneur of 2009.

Anyway -- time to go to lunch. I've taken my vitamins on behalf of the web.

From the 'It Seems To Me' Department

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:02:19 GMT

Sometimes 140 characters is enough to express an idea.

The FCC loves RSS

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:20:20 GMT

It came through in a tweet today, and I gotta say it's great news.

"We discovered RSS! More to come soon."

Coool! Can't wait to see what's coming soon.

RSS is totally an FCC kind of thing. It's a package of net neutrality. A level playing field in a box. It's mom and apple pie, baseball, hot dogs, and (do they still make Chevrolets).

If anyone at the FCC is listening, if you liked RSS, wait till you see rssCloud. It makes RSS updates happen in an instant!

I was a sixth grade communist

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:56:06 GMT

A cute story about my 6th grade class.

My girlfriend in sixth grade, Gail Schneider, who I still see from time to time, will tell you that I haven't changed in the 42 years since I was a 12-year-old boy growing up in Queens. I always thought it's funny how women, even when they are little girls, think they can peer into your soul and see the real you, but in this case I think Gail is right. (BTW, that might be a picture of Gail, a few years later, at Woodstock.)

My mother accumulates things, it's her curse. She wishes she traveled lighter, in the George Carlin sense, with less baggage. She keeps shedding stuff, but then a relative dies and she ends up with another closet full of stuff that's too precious to throw out. Anyway, she had been holding on to my sixth grade autograph book, and gave it to me on my last trip to NY, and I've been reading it. This one was worth keeping!

Some observations. Well, men never know what women are thinking. There were a couple of girls who had a crush on me, all the girls knew it, but I was clueless at the time. The trail is right there in the book.

And (finally I get to the point) along with a couple of friends, Clifford Hable and John Monterisi, I was part of a club of sixth grade communists. Of course we weren't really communists, we were just kids, but we read the news and knew the adults were freaked out by the commies, and we thought they were silly (don't all 12-year-olds think adults are silly). So we had a club, and in that club we were communists. That's all over the autograph book too. Hammers and sickles, comrade this and comrade that. It still makes me laugh how we adopted the symbolism and language of our most feared enemy.

I wrote to the Chinese mission to the UN asking for literature about their country, and boy did they send stuff. Color magazines and posters mostly in English, a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, a huge wall-size poster of Chairman Mao. I loved reading the stuff the way I loved District 9. It was science fiction, but it also bore some semblance to reality. It was forbidden and terrorized the adults. I liked it!

So today when a Republican Twitterer from the Deep South called me a commisar and said I should communicate with the Kremlin and said dasvidaniya, I smiled, and almost thanked him. As if it were Clifford or John, complimenting me on some daring or noble revolutionary act in defiance of Mrs. Dori, our sixth grade teacher.

On reflection, I realized this is the new Republican macho. Call anyone who criticizes a Republican a Nazi or a Commie. Can't call me a Nazi (I have relatives who died in Hitler's camps) so go for commie. Except the Cold War has been over for almost 20 years. It's really sad that it has come to this.

BTW, another woman who could peer into my soul was Mrs. Dori, who was one of my two favorite teachers. She wrote in my autograph book: "To David, a boy who really cares." I don't know if she wrote that for everyone, maybe she did. But in my case, it was true.

How to fix URL-shorteners

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:10:38 GMT

First a few notes as a preamble.

1. URL-shorteners are bad for the Internet. They centralize linking, and make it more fragile, and more controllable. Wait till the Chinese govt finds out about them.

2. When bit.ly breaks, it will be an outage that may be bigger than Twitter going down. Not only do we lose the present, but we lose the past too. One big URL shortener that dominates the others is itself a dangerous thing.

3. Twitter could and should obviate the need for URL-shorteners. Yes I know SMS messages are limited to 160 chars. So shorten the URLs at the SMS gateway and leave them long for communication over pathways that are not so limited. Any engineer could see this obvious solution.

4. For now URL-shorteners are a fact of life.

End of preamble. Now to what is needed in URL-shorteners to work around the various issues they present.

It's not so different from the problem with Feedburner, and the solution they used, and implemented quickly once it was known.

1. CNAMEs. It must be possible for the user to own and control the domain his or her URLs live at. Technically, this means I register the domain name, and map a sub-domain to the URL-shortener site with a CNAME record. Anyone who knows how to use Godaddy can do it. I would be happy to write a howto that explains.

2. Shared data. The URL-shortener and the user share a space where the data is stored. Joe Moreno at Adjix, who I have been working with, has figured out how to do it on Amazon S3. I have mapped a domain to an S3 bucket, and given his software permission to write to that bucket. Here's the key point. At any time I can revoke the permission and my URLs still work. Or Adjix could disappear, and the shortened URLs would still work. With this method the only way there is linkrot is if S3 goes down.

Here's a URL that links to a Flickr picture:

http://tmp.loose.ly/jmxe

Obviously the sub-domain, tmp.loose.ly, is temporary. But if you're a techie, I encourage you to do a DNS lookup on tmp.loose.ly. You'll see it's a CNAME to s3.amazonaws.com. And get the contents of the file to see how it works. It's static. Yet it still gathers statistics. Yes, it's unusual. That's why Joe was the only one to crack this nut. He's a creative guy.

It's such a clean implementation that if I decide later to move the files to an Apache server on Linux, no problem.

I think basically Adjix has solved all the problems with URL-shorteners. I hope other engineers poke at this and verify my conclusion or disprove them.

Wednesday links

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:22:38 GMT

Not uncommon that an intensely productive week is followed by an unproductive one. Fighting a cold. Probably just my spirit saying Slow Down Davey. I've learned to accept these things, not fight them.

Great new domain, ou.rs, suggested by Mike Wheeler -- no doubt we'll find a use for it. One thing Twitter has taught us is how to be creative in fewer characters! BTW, don't assume that ou.rs will be a URL-shortener. It might be like Andrew Baron's mag.ma, a site that was born after Twitter, and has the short URLs designed-in.

l've wanted to have Google index all the script code in the OPML Editor's root file and tools. That's where most of its personality is defined. So I wrote a simple script that visits all the scripts and does a web page listing each. I think this will possibly interest one or two people other than myself. But I'm linking to it here so Google thinks it's important enough to index.

I found an review the NY Times ran about ThinkTank in 1983. It predates any coverage from the tech industry. At the time it ran I was totally out of money and was going to shut the company and find a job. Instead, we were able to quickly raise money and a company started, leading to a Mac product and a PC product, and lots more. Now here's the scary part -- that was 26 years ago. A long friggin time already! Yow.

Went to see District 9 yesterday. No spoilers. But it's fun, thoughtful, interesting, well-acted movie with lots of B-movie scifi cliches, all done masterfully. Lots of twists, and one or two places where you go Oh Yeah! because you know what's coming is really coooool. Good movie to take your inner-adolescent to.

Chuck Grassley

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:40:40 GMT

I used to think Chuck Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowa, was an honorable man. An exception to the spineless liars of his party. Now he's spouting the "death panels" lie, like all the rest. This pitch hypocritically confuses and hurts the very people they claim to care about, the people and families of people who are dealing with serious illness or imminent death.

Grassley: "We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

It seems unlikely that Grassley, who is 75, has not dealt with death in his family. If they're like other Americans, they got help from the medical system preparing for it, or dealing with its aftermath. At least they were offered the help. Being educated about this subject not only saves hurt and grief, it also saves lives.

There is no more sensitive subject. No more private place you don't want the government to mess around in. And btw, the Republicans are sneaky -- they are government. Grassley is a US Senator. Doesn't get more government than that.

Saying the Democrats want to euthanize your grandmother is beyond despicable, I can't think of a word that describes how low it is.

It's time for the Republican Party to die.

I'd sign up for that death panel.

tr.im goes open source, community supported

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:13:44 GMT

Marshall has the announcement.

I think it's great. I know that Eric Woodward wanted to move on from tr.im and this gives him the opportunity to do that, but allows the community that's gathered around tr.im to continue.

I am part of that community -- having build an application that gets a lot of use, and one that a lot of people want. To match Eric's generosity, I will release the app behind the 40twits site as open source.

It's the app behind these sites:

http://dave.40twits.com/

http://jay.40twits.com/

http://nieman.40twits.com/

It builds on the tr.im API.

Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Programming wisdom

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:18:52 GMT

Three bits of wisdom I keep forgetting to write up in a blog post.

1. The second time you write a piece of complicated code it will work much better than the first time. Especially if there are a few years inbetween and the original code was in production and you had to live with its flaws. Sometimes you have to write it a third or fourth time to really get it right.

2. Every year or so, re-read the docs for your programming environment. You'll always find a feature you didn't quite grok the importance of the last time you read the docs. It may make your code simpler, or enable you to approach a problem you previously though unsolvable. (I did this the other day for Amazon S3 and sure enough figured out a way through a tight bottleneck.)

3. This is the most important one. If you're planning on competing like a mofo in the tech industry to make billions of dollars, and then give it all to charity when you're middle-aged, instead, find a way to contribute to the ecology of the web while you're young, and make a bit less money (I suspect you won't actually make less money). We have much higher leverage on our home court and can do more good for the planet than we can, later, in medicine or politics. Obviously I'm thinking about Bill Gates, but I'm also thinking about Evan WIlliams and Biz Stone who are already worth huge money, and on their way to making a lot more. Guys...

Deal with the URL-shortening issue now. It's an Exxon Valdez waiting to happen. You won't be able to make excuses that you didn't see it coming, cause I'm telling you now.

There are already protocols in place that allow web apps to tell you how to shorten urls that point into their space. Wordpress.com took a huge step this week, doing their part. It would take about one hour of programming, if that much, for Twitter to look for the metadata and use it. If I had a Twitter client, I'd support it in a heartbeat. If I were Twitter, same deal.

Shortlink: "URL shortening that really don't hurt the Internet."

But for some reason the business types at the companies never want to do anything good for the web. They just take for themselves and eat up the seed corn others put into the formats and protocols. At some point we're going to get through. These guys are supposedly people who care about the planet. Like Bill, when they retire, they'll spend huge money to try to prove it. Why they don't care about the ecology of the web now, when they have the most power to, I'll never get it. I have to assume they don't understand. It would cost nothing to care for the web. Not like carbon offsets, these aren't even hard problems. You just have to care enough to actually do something about it.

It's been a big development week in RssCloudLand

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:10:47 GMT

The beta release of the Twitter Subscriptions List app for your desktop.

Next thing up on my release plate, a version of River2 that fully supports rssCloud.

Lifehacker: Backup and Search Your Friends' Tweets with Google Reader

Educer: "Google Reader is almost a full fledged Twitter client."

Twitter clients -- time to start thinking about two-way RSS support.

Two-way RSS support in Twitter clients means they read real-time RSS feeds, and they generate them. A backup against Twitter's failure.

The $299 Walmart laptop

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:30:07 GMT

The tech industry keeps wanting to think that netbooks are a mistake, but they are not.

Here's a CNET article about a $299 laptop being sold by Walmart and BestBuy. They're cheap, big and run Vista.

I'll go over the specs in a minute, but first a story.

I just took a trip to New York with my new 13.3-inch MacBook Pro, which is a lovely computer. But the next trip I took, a two-day trip up north, I brought my Asus 10-inch and was much happier because: 1. Much longer battery life. 2. A lot lighter and smaller.

The Mac doesn't even have a replaceable battery. The Asus does. When I travel with it I bring an extra 6-cell, and it's still much lighter than the Mac, and it goes for 12 hours without plugging in. That's a huge important difference.

And the smaller size meant I could make the trip with just one bag instead of two.

People who think there is no reason to get a netbook simply don't have one, I conclude. That's fine for ordinary people, but if you make your living as a tech analyst, that's just plain irresponsible.

Now to the specs.

2.2GHz Intel Celeron processor 900, 2GB of memory, DVD-RW/CD-RW drive, 15.4-inch screen, 160GB Serial ATA hard drive (5400 rpm), 802.11b/g wireless, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic Edition operating system.

It's all good till you get to the wireless. I like 802.11n. Much faster. And the OS -- sorry -- I don't do Vista. I have a funny feeling that Microsoft is behind all of this. For some reason they can't handle the idea that people still want their 10-year-old OS. All the R&D that went into Vista, well that's Microsoft's problem, not the users'.

They don't say how much it weighs or how long the battery lasts. Heh. I bet it weighs a lot, and I bet the battery doesn't last very long. Is the battery removable?

In any case, I'm not surprised the $299 "craptop" sells. But -- I'd also be surprised if they do anything to slow down sales of netbooks. They're in a different class. And it's valid. Get used to it, netbooks here to stay folks. And the big, heavy, Vista class? Well they're probably here to stay too. (And I still love my Macs, and wish they'd make one that was really in the netbook class.)