cerement › Comments

and some of them involved with Linux at work! ;) - A.T.

So what comes after Gentoo now that it's too easy and too mainstream? - cerement

I liked the simplicity of Twitter. The other similar services all try to tack on way too many bells-and-whistles. Simple is good. And Twitter integrates with FriendFeed so nicely ... - cerement

I think microblogging is here to stay. The community size will likely to grow, but there will be more consumers than producers. - Harry Chen

Twitter will grow, but I doubt it will become mainstream. The average person will be more inclined to use social network status updates than a dedicated microblogging service. - grag

Ben, Good question and I wasn't quite sure what to think. After doing a few quick searches it appears that Twitter has 2 million users (http://twitterfacts.blogspot.com/2008...) while Technorati is tracking 112 million blogs (http://technorati.com/about/). So, that is only 2%. Reading those stats makes me think, IMO, that microblogging will expand to at least 8% (or 9 million total users.) - Czar

I also think it is here to stay. These services create a whole different angle of social networking - Neal Jansons

I don't know how viable it will be on Twitter, but Plurk is gaining fast in popularity because of the simple fact that you can have comments like this (friendfeed). With Plurk you can know instantly if your announcement "registers" with the audience. And there is instant feedback. - Telemill

I think what we all need to realize is that Twitter is not about microblogging (broadcasting yourself), it is about conversation (same as FriendFeed where conversation is even easier which explains its rapid growth). And I think in a year from now we will only see this trend sharpen: people will stick to the services that allow for a more efficient conversation instead of pushing your ideas and thoughts to people without expecting anything in return. - Svetlana Gladkova

I disagree, I think micro-blogging (broadcast) greatly differ from the bi-directional / conversation we see here in FriendFeed and blogs. So the twitter's and IM products are here to stay. They have a unique and distinct user base. - Susan Beebe

I think instant messaging is the target of micro blogging (and I agree with Svetlana when she says Twitter is about conversation) - Romain Péchard from twhirl

I just wrote a blog post partly connected to this. I think microblogging will survive - but not in and of itself. I think it will survive in concert with other services that integrate with it. It seems that everything is becoming more inclusive - therefore services that try to cause divergent behaviour (e.g. commenting directly on blog posts within the blogs) will probably fail. It's exciting to be around while this is shaking out though... - Jonathan Beckett

I don't think of microblogs as replacements for traditional blogs, to me they're human-readable endpoints for publishing data feeds. - Andy Murdoch

I think there's a benefit to microblogging - smaller attention spans. I don't anticipate its near death as people start to multitask more often and find that saying less means more. - Tamar Weinberg

I think it's a little early to predict the death of microblogging. It's only now just starting to pick up speed. - David Cohn

@Susan: I have never meant to predict Twitter would die - it's just that I don't see anyone values microblogging in itself - people tend more to use it as a conversational tool which has 2 part involved at least. So I don't care about Twitter as a microblogging platform, I care about it as a social network where lots of people I find interesting discuss things (same and even better goes to FriendFeed). - Svetlana Gladkova from twhirl

I don't think microblogging will die, but I do think it's telling that this conversation isn't also on Twitter. And if Twitter is about conversation, then FF is more Twitterish than Twitter. It's easier to follow a conversation here, and thus easier to converse. - Brian Carter

@Stuart Forsyth agreed. microblogging is trending in the direction of other "micro interactions" - speed, efficiency, brevity - for better or worse. - Dean Terry

I don't think microblogging will replace blogging, anymore than blogs replace books or TV replaced movies- I realize they are on different platforms, but take the metaphor- there are different media of different lengths for different purposes- some blog posts give me detail I need that I can't get on Twitter or FF; some are so long I print them out- some are too long and I never get around to finishing them- but I read books that are longer in less than a week... - Brian Carter

I think micro blogging in part was just permission to create content that was more immediate and unfinished - with the idea that we create together. And it certainly will continue and grow. - Tony

i use and like tumblr - Javier Valiño

posterous for my english blog and tumblr for my german :-D - Dieter Schwarz

tumblr is the sexiest blog / micro-blogging app out there. - Tony

Tumblr, because it's nice to have the extra features (regardless if I use them.) - Czar

Now if we could just convince FriendFeed to recognize video and photo links in either and post previews ... - cerement

We really need to convince tumblr and posterous to provide feeds in Media RSS format. That way pictures, mp3s and videos would appear automatically. - Andy Murdoch

I'm a Tumblr fan. Just started my blog recently - http://www.spammr.org :) - Tamar Weinberg

Wishful thinking, James. Even as friendly as Ubuntu is, the vast majority of the world isn't ready for Linux on a desktop. - Bradley McSpinn

that's not the same. Firefox is leveraging the platform, Linux is a much bigger jump. Also, Firefox isn't winning just because it's open source. Quite the opposite: as it is open source, it's much better in terms of feature vs Explorer. For Linux to do the same, it must really step change the way we use our OS. I don't see this happening. The OS is now a commodity, web and mobile are the new platforms, and maybe that's where Linux can play a bigger role. - Simone

If by "the vast majority of the world," you mean China, India, Latin America and Africa -- there are a lot of Linux desktops being used today. And what do you mean by "ready"? - Mike McCallister from NoiseRiver

Yes, there are absolutely a lot of them deployed. The 1% is still a very big number. I still don't think that the 99% is necessarily wrong, though. Their Win or Mac boxes do exactly what they want them to do, so they have neither reason nor desire to switch. - Bradley McSpinn

The vast majority of the world can't afford Windows. ;-) I think we'll see distros like Ubuntu starting to beat Windows or OS X in developing countries first due to economics. While that's taking place, the distros will continue to become more and more end-user friendly and sport prettier UIs. - Joanmarie

@Joanmarie - A good point. There's also the major brand + linux aspect. Buying a Dell with Linux on it can certainly lead to increased affordability. I honestly wish that Linux were more of an option for me, as I'm a big fan. But with some of the programs that I use, there's simply not that option. - Bradley McSpinn

James, are you related to Michael Robertson, who just threw in the towel on "Lindows?" http://www.informationweek.com/news... :-D - Karim

Maybe because Linux doesn't really have giants behind it like Microsoft and Apple? - Cem Catikkas

"Beat" is subjective (as is everything) it all depends on what the end user really wants from their soft/mach, no? - thecolor

I prefer in many cases to just save doe on the OS all together. - thecolor

I believe the mainstream end user doesn't care what platform he runs. How many iPhone users know what's running under the hood? - simonpure

I can't agree - at all - that Linux adoption is smaller than Windows or Mac OS adoption. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty much convinced that Linux is "better" or "readier" to the desktop than Mac OS, and certainly than Windows. There are LOTS of others things playing around - and that's the big issue for its adoption. You can't forget you're comparing "Microsoft's OS" and "Apple's OS" with "an open source OS". If you see the huge amounts of money spent for user awareness of Windows and Mac OS you'll see... - Marcos Marado

EEE PC is a great example for this. Most people prefer the Linux version to the Windows version, and would choose it even if they were the same price. That happens - of course - because people don't really see it as "a real computer", so they don't have that weird idea that "PCs have Windows", and so they look at that machine as "a tool to do stuff": read mail, web, IM'ing, video conference, word processing... the kind of stuff they use their "real computer" too, anyway. - Marcos Marado

Remember as well that there is a lot of open source software under the OSX hood. They are using the mach kernal developed for the NeXT, but the rest is based on Free BSD. The proprietary stuff is mostly eye candy. - Brad Collins from twhirl

yeah, a nice example of how the only thing needed to boost Linux (or something like that) is just a huge marketing effort... Of course that Windows is so bad that it makes competing easy (that was probably the most important key for OS X's success...) - Marcos Marado

What's needed is for Linux to be preinstalled. I've an eeePC, and it just works. Few home users ever install an OS. Platform neutral tech like Google Docs and AIR will help. - David Sim

Linux is so easy to use nowadays. Plus, you can even run Windows-only apps with it, much safer then in Windows. To win more grounds it just needs to be pre-installed and maybe prettier. - Danilo da Silva

"Linux still hasn't beat Windows or OSX on desktop" - *cough* when Win or Mac still can't what Linux could do a year ago - http://www.youtube.com/watch... - cerement

Sigh. OS Flame wars. *Hide* - Yuvi

ok, lets forget about what os optimistic.is better. the reason linux cannot win is because to win it would need to change its own principles in order to do so and because there are 10 mayor linux distros, 5 for enterprise (but that are also good as workstations) and 5 other for consumers. from the ones for consumers you got 5 to 10 versions of each distro and in the case of ubuntu you... more... - Avatar X from feedalizr

i mean, can someone really imagine a world with 15 different distros and 100 versions being the rule? - Avatar X from feedalizr

oh and for those that said: people would choose linux if presented with a option and the Eee pc running linux sells more than the one with windows: both accounts are wrong. there have been 3 commercially available Linux PC`s at wall mart for 100,200 and 300 dlls. all 3 failed and were retired from the market. and Asus only reason to launch with linux was because they launched with a... more... - Avatar X from feedalizr

I am not ready for Linux on the desktop, and I consider myself to be firmly in the "rest of the world" camp of luddites. Am I missing something, or is there a reason why I should be anything less than completely satisfied with Mac OS X on a shiny Macbook? - sage brennan

@Mike Mcallister: Microsoft Windows still dominates China in overwhelming fashion, due to the massive head start it got from the software pirates. The Microsoft OS/MS Office software is still *almost* as free as Linux is, here in China -- except for a small minority of people who buy desktops with legal software bundled-in. Linux is gaining from a very small base, but has many, many miles to go before it sleeps. - sage brennan

The biggest chance for Linux is the growing trend of applications being hosted online. If it can adapt to this model it has a good chance in the enterprise - because if you can run the web stack (Firefox/Google Gears/Adobe AIR/Java/etc) you may as well be running a solid, free and open local OS. - Ben

It's not linux itself that's the problem. It's the people. - Yuvi

There's a reason why Linux has never overtaken Windows or OS X. Casual users don't want to deal with that many things. - Cyndy

I used to run Linux and/or FreeBSD as a desktop for many years until I realized I spent more time tweaking the system than I ever did doing any actual 'work'. What worries me is that it's taken them nearly ten years to essentially crawl from where they were when I ran it in the late 90s to where they are now. Innovation needs to happen far more quickly than that for it to ever truly be viable and it seems the only major thing they've managed to do in a decade is to make the install mostly painless. - Akiva Moskovitz

Watch out for Linux on Mobile.. The time shall come. - Muthu Ramadoss

Using Linux is one of those perfect world scenarios. When you start you have that warm fuzzy feeling, but it quickly evaporates as you come to the conclusion that peripheral support is sparse and, incidentally, perfect worlds don't exist. - Blake Robinson from Alert Thingy

Robert, I got to hand it to you. You are the master of dropping conversation bombs. Windows + Linux in the same sentence = fur flying. Personally I go for OSS almost every time. EXCEPT.... I run XP ;) - john conroy

Blake puts it perfectly I guess. Linuxers (and perhaps Vista folks) must read Raymond Chen's blog. - Yuvi

Can't open the Link. Just main interface... - Ansgar Wollnik

Holy Cow....it is bigger than flikr.....scarry - Matt from twhirl

540 terabytes doesn't seem all that big. - Louis Gray

It may be bigger than flickr but the pictures are actually used on flickr rather than being locked up to a profile and a few hundred friends. - Rahul Das

it's a lot, especially considering they downsample images. i.e. your 1.2mb jpg gets reduced to 128kb on FB. The original resolution is lost. So 540 TB is a lot of downsampled images! - Mark J. Feldman

AFAIK photos on Facebook can be seen by anybody - http://radio.weblogs.com/0127028... - Brian Sullivan

Flickr has about 2.5 billion images. - Ole Begemann

I suspect that Gmail has both more images, and more image data. Email is still what many "regular" people use for photo sharing, amazingly. - Paul Buchheit

540TB is puny for 30B images. 19.3KB/photo average. SmugMug has more storage and only ~325M photos. - Don MacAskill

Facebook limits photos to 5Mb each and 50 photos per album, though. - Prolific Programmer

again, I'll pay my yearly fee for Flickr. sorry Facebook. - Andrew Feinberg

Is that photos or images in total? Could be lots of 1-20K png and gifs for apps - Cris Pearson from twhirl

The ratio on comments on my Facebook photos to comments on my Flickr photos is probably about 20:1, despite the ratio of number of Facebook photos to number of Flickr photos being about 1:10. Comments are nice, especially for hacks like me that aren't going to get any attention -- deservedly so -- from the folks on Flickr. - Kirk Kittell

But do you trust Facebook? - Andrew Feinberg

@Andrew: Do I trust them to host my photos? Is that what you mean? Or is that a more general question? - Kirk Kittell

I mean do you trust them to host your photos and not use them without your permission? Their TOS lets them use your information for promotional purposes and sell to advertisers. Flickr lets you choose how your photos are licensed. Think about it. - Andrew Feinberg

I use a non-commercial license on Flickr. However, it's a minor issue to me how Facebook handles the photos. The primary reason I use Facebook to share photos is because I will get some reaction from my contacts. I'd trade that aspect for losing control of a few photos any day. If I wasn't a hack, I might change my stance. But I'm a hack. If I don't share on Facebook, I have no reason to think anyone sees my photos, and that's a loss, I think. - Kirk Kittell

@Andrew Feinberg: I think that's an excellent point, but I think you'd be shocked at how many people just don't care. First, the re-use of their photos isn't important to them, second, they think their photos aren't worth re-using, and third, they think of it as a cost to pay for the free service. I don't get it, but tons of people think that way. - Don MacAskill

Photography for me is a hobby, so I don't care what anyone does with my pictures. Indeed, all on flickr are CC-licensed. - Prolific Programmer

Mine are CC also and have been used by some high-traffic blogs and others. But, the choice to allow that is mine alone. Facebook has enough money and user data, they don't need anything else from me. - Andrew Feinberg

@Andrew - I'd trust Facebook over Flickr, since it's not Flickr's policies you should be worrying about, it's Yahoo's - and they definitely have not been playing nice with Flickr users since they took over ... - cerement

@Prolific Programmer The limit for photo's is 60, 3 pages of 20! - Joe Dawson

coool! - Susan Beebe

Aviary is one of the coolest online tools I've ever seen. - Robert Scoble

I use Photoshop for graphics manipulation and Aviary's Phoenix tool has a long way to go to compete with it. But I love the Peacock pattern generator (that I made the image above with). I really like the "Yahoo Pipes-style" interface for it. Awesome stuff!! - Lindsay is in 20-ten

When I'm on a computer with no photoshop... aviary is my first stop. Love it - DC Crowley

I'm most interested in seeing Horus component get developed. That one looks like serious fun. - cerement

@cerement - I'm interested in Horus too. In the mean time, have you seen FontStruct (http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/)? In Aviary, I am also looking forward to the Pigeon tool... that might be another addiction if it works well. - Lindsay is in 20-ten

nano-blogging - oh my, what's next?!! - Kimberly J

I haven't followed adocu at all since i shared it a couple weeks ago: have they added discovery, feeds, or an API yet? I'm at http://adocu.com/itafroma - Mark Trapp

plurk rules because they have thread feature, and yes, not because of their timeline - Toni @ NavinoT

one word is Adocu's rule for English messages, but Chinese characters just broke the rule. see this: http://adocu.com/jansen - Jansen Lu

trying... http://adocu.com/czar - Czar

Adocu needs a FAQ and some work on their site. Probably not something I will ever use, given the existence of more feature-rich sites like Plurk/Twitter... - Maki

Seems like they borrowed code from Twitter: "I regret to inform you that our current host’s database crashed and they did not recover our database to it’s full size." - cerement

Onewordstatusupdatesarecrazy - Robert Sanzalone

ACETYL­SERYL­TYROSYL­SERYL­ISO­LEUCYL­THREONYL­SERYL­PROLYL­SERYL­GLUTAMINYL­PHENYL­ALANYL­VALYL­PHENYL­ALANYL­LEUCYL­SERYL­SERYL­VALYL­TRYPTOPHYL­ALANYL­ASPARTYL­PROLYL­ISOLEUCYL­GLUTAMYL­LEUCYL­LEUCYL­ASPARAGINYL­VALYL­CYSTEINYL­THREONYL­SERYL­SERYL­LEUCYL­GLYCYL­ASPARAGINYL­GLUTAMINYL­PHENYL­ALANYL­GLUTAMINYL­THREONYL­GLUTAMINYL­GLUTAMINYL­ALANYL­ARGINYL­THREONYL­THREONYL­GLUTAMINYL­... more... - Joe Dawson

That is a word as well and it appeared in the American Chemical Society's Chemical Abstracts. Apologies if I have made this a 'hide' post :$ - Joe Dawson

Take a look at FF vs. Twitter on Google Trends. What's most interesting to me is not that FF has a fraction of the searches, but that twitter's has been declining significantly. http://www.google.com/trends... - Tom Landini

Oh, but we are in early days. At one time, cassettes had a lot more pull than CDs as well. - Louis Gray

you rarely like things or comment on them. Plus your items aren't very conversational so what did you expect? That we would drop everything to comment on your stuff? - Robert Scoble

I've never used twitter myself, other than just following some people, but I find FF with be so much easier to keep on top of that I never even bothered signing up for a twitter account. - Mr. Gunn

Chris, Robert has a point on this. Look at the comments on his page http://friendfeed.com/scoblei... or mine: http://friendfeed.com/louisgr.... With engagement, this could be you. This is not a passive platform. - Louis Gray

*Hide* - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Completely opposite for me. Twitter never really functioned for me, but FF made sense in 30 seconds and now I'm hooked. - AJ Kohn

*Hide* :) - Bwana ☠

considering the typical reader that Chris has and probably relates to how he sees a community I'm not surprised as this at all - Steven Hodson

Chris, Friendfeed is like a pet. You must pet, feed and care for your FF feed, i.e. give it lots of attention and thought, then it will purr for you! (virtual Chia Pet!) Louis and Robert are correct... you have to *engage* your audience to *participate* in your Friendfeed otherwise ...silence. - Susan Beebe

I'll add that I use Twitter a lot, but purely as a communication/messaging medium, very different from FF - Deepak Singh

FriendFeed just needs some more time. There are still a lot of people out there which never heard of it - Benjamin Kohler from twhirl

and if you think about the asynchronous viewing of your friend's Twits on FF, especially if you follow many people on Twitter, plus the longer comments you can do as response to the Twits...FF is the tool... I know, the Twitter is supposed to be for random, short status updates... but The Life Scientists we have turned it to a gathering / social discussion mechanism of random bits of consciousness stream, posted on Twitter by the followers of the ... cult ! (eh, the FF room) - Ntino

Susan said it all! I also believe FF is great and whether it has the reach that Twitter does, it still is a medium for people to talk about your content. - Mark Frost from twhirl

I say we all head back to Jaiku. The originator of threaded comments with the Twitter style. Can't go wrong there, and I'm seriously considering it. - James Mowery from twhirl

I'm with Deepak. It really depends on the community. I get far more comments here than on Twitter and I have way more people following me on Twitter. - Corvida

Susan has some great points - love the analogy, agree completely. - Jesse Stay from twhirl

I think Robert makes a decent point: FF is a two way street + you already have a strong community so FF may never really compete with what you have in terms of comments on a post. - Duncan Riley

Actually using FriendFeed is a very good way to get traffic to your blog. Before FriendFeed, nobody read my blog. Now, it's ballooned to 300+ visits a day. I am a FriendFeed success story. :D Another bonus of FriendFeed is that I get more blog post ideas, so I've been posting more, which means that people that have subscribed to me, but have not read my blog before are more likely to find it. Since Chris already has a popular blog, This doesn't really apply to him as much as it does to me. - Rishabh Mishra (p248)

(Hit max comment size) However, participating more on FriendFeed will make him a more important and well-respected figure in the community. Your brand will be more well known and so forth. - Rishabh Mishra (p248)

I like A better than B, because B seems to be better than A, though I see A's potential, B is the one for me. I'm sticking with B, and maybe trying out C. - Why do I feel like I've seen this many times and many places? - Vince DeGeorge

Vince, because...you have? ;-) Chris seems to have had the expectation that merely by flowing his existing streams into the FriendFeed river that he'd see lots of ripples. For reasons Susan and other illustrated brilliantly, it doesn't work that way. Not here on FriendFeed or anywhere else. On the other hand being a contrarian and talking smack about FriendFeed on Friendfeed seems to have worked very well! - Robert Seidman

Also, not following up on comments makes a difference. You can't expect a new community following to happen, if you don't engage it. Followers will follow you, not the other way around. And just to poke at Twitter, can you really have conversations on there? Are you sure you are getting it all? How bout when @replies is down :) - Tim Hoeck

I dunno, Chris .... looks like a lot of comments to me ; -) - Tom Landini

Don't hurry:) - Igor Poltavskiy

i've found friendfeed to be far more useful than twitter is atm. Twitter has become a sea of "eating Noodles" or "good night" that it doesn't provide me the stuff I really want, a discussion. Sure the purpose of twitter is what are you doing now, but no one interprets that its the straight forward what they are doing. Friendfeed is discussions on things i like. I guess its just how you look at noise and information in the end, but give it time chris. @scoble: great comment - BCK

Chris's FriendFeed subscriptions = 745. Twitter subscriptions = 14,042. Assuming he's got comparable numbers of subscribers...well, he's right. FriendFeed doesn't have the pull for him. How could it? Twitter subscriptions dwarf his FriendFeed subscriptions. - Hutch Carpenter

You yanked their chains with this one Chris. Nice job! :-) Friend Feed is even more of an echo chamber than Twitter. - Leo Laporte

twitter is suffering from the inverse of rapid viral growth - rapid viral decline, where every loss exponentially lowers twitter's value. friendfeed is likely on the climb side of the equation? - Justin Long

N00b! ;-) - Noah Carter

They are philosophically different tools and I think everytime we compare them; we are trying to draw a parallel between skewed planes... Yes, they are in the same space; No; they aren't parallel. Twitter is just about microblogging; Friendfeed an aggregator. Yes you can use both of them for some great discussions and discover some great content via each but there is much more to both that diverges from just this. Compeltely agree with @Scoble and @Hutch. - Parth Awasthi

Comparing apples with oranges. Friendfeed is not about short messages, Twitter is not about aggregation ... - cerement

Contrarian posts certainly do get attention don't they? I like FF whether or not it gains my "followers" "friends" or "subscribers". It all comes down to how the user wishes to interface with the application and its inherent community. Twitter is great for short little informational bursts be they serious or just "noise". I am also using it as a means to re-connect with the pulse of my hometown of StL. Friend Feed which jumped out to me in week 1or 2 of Twitter use seemed like the logical progression. - Mathew A. Koeneker

(Yikes, too long a post for FF.) It serves as aggregator, place to continue ideas and conversations in a more threaded pattern which appeals to my brain. The perk is that you get all of these other streams from folks when you start looking at one thing which in my case has led me happily deeper into quite a few concepts. - Mathew A. Koeneker

Chris, what are your thoughts on all this? Curious what your response will be... I am glad you're on FF and posted this. Now you've gotten LOTS of comments! So this is a perfect case in point... it worked! =) - Susan Beebe

We all -- ALL OF US -- need to do a mass exodus from Twitter to SOMEWHERE. Plurk? FF? Jaiku? Pownce? I don't care. But Twitter's been spending its time fighting the crashes, meanwhile other services have been innovating like mad. - Tod Maffin

Good point =) - Karen Padham Taylor

Yeah, but those are Canadian dollars, so it's really only like US$8/gallon. - Paul Buchheit

it hit $1.30 per litre just down the street - Steven Hodson

'Like' Paul's comment - April Buchheit

I paid $48 today to fill up my Honda Civic. Yes, I said Civic. - Ryan Kuder

LOL! US$2.37/litre in Germany! - Daniel

@Paul - you haven't been paying attention to how badly the US dollar has been tanking lately, currently its about 1 to 1 (USD is worth just as little as CAD) - cerement

cerement, read my comment more closely :) - Paul Buchheit

I find comments like this funny, in the UK we are paying roughly $10 a gallon (I think that conversion is right) so anything less is cheap and the $4-$5 price is really cheap! - Arthur Guy

welcome to reality check - Europe had been doing that for ages... - A.T.

ehm, 1.53 euro for a liter in italy... :( - Luigi Centenaro

Finland: average prices EUR per liter in capital area, 95 -1.547; 98 - 1.580; Diesel - 1.428 (tax included, naturally) source http://polttoaine.net/index... - A.T.

I wouldn't mind seeing $10 a galllon myself. - Piaw Na

This is exactly what the gas companies want you to say. - Admiral70

You only think gas prices are high because your “set point” is lower. If gas had been $20/gallon all your life, and was now $5/gallon, you'd think it's “cheap”. Retail stores will put out shoes for $150 and then put them “on sale” for $100. That $150 is set in your mind as the value of the shoes, and then $100 seems cheap. The gas companies could do the same thing, so that when it's $3/gallon, it'll seem cheap, even though that used to seem expensive. - Amit Patel

Well, I've seen $10 a gallon gas in Germany, it hasn't halted their economy at all. On the contrary, people bike more, walk more, and take transit, and enjoy their life at a slower pace. Seems like a good trade to me. - Piaw Na