Jim - Comments + Likes

Jim posted a link

Free Keene » If You Vote, You Can’t Complain

23 hours ago - via Blern - Link

I do plan to vote (for whom I don't know), but I found this article interesting. - Jim

Louis Gray shared an item on Google Reader

Digg.com lacks… it just lacks

Sunday at 10:19 pm - Link

Kol Tregaskes, Jim, Rob Diana and 2 other people liked this

Skeptics Unite!: an entry from The Rogues Gallery

LHC: The End of the World as We Know It?

September 9 at 10:20 am - Link

Jim liked this

Bret Taylor posted a link

Scott Adams Blog: I'm From the Government and I'm Here to Help 09/03/2008

September 5 at 12:32 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jim, Andy Davies, Nikhil Dandekar and Atul Arora liked this

"Whoever figures out a way to cheaply turn seawater into fuel is going to be very rich. I would be surprised if there are any good ideas in the energy field going unfunded at the moment. My guess is that the energy investment environment has already become like the Dotcom era where venture capitalists were (figuratively) randomly knocking on dorm rooms and asking if anyone had any Internet ideas. Someone said government can help remove red tape, or twist the arms of big companies where that needs to happen. But isn't that the reverse of how our system works? It seems to me that big companies are twisting the arms of government. So while we might wish it were the other way, reality is stubborn. And realistically, can we expect government to remove red tape?" - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet

Kevin Rose dugg a story on Digg

I tied a disposable camera to a bench with a sign that read:

August 30 at 4:57 pm - Link

Jim, rijo, Robert DeBord and 16 other people liked this

I'm guessing this was in Canada. - Pete Delucchi

4 more comments

Based on the domain seen in one of the photos (http://theplug.net/28/stranger...), the image was captured in the Atlanta area: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=... - Chris Luckhardt

That would explain why one photo is of three people spelling out 'ATL' using their arms. http://theplug.net/28/stranger... - Matt Leake

That is so cool - Josh Haley

That's awesome. Even cooler since no one stole it. - Robert DeBord

Agreed, most awesome social experiment - tagami

Fun, thanks! (Where I live it would have been taken in seconds.) - Robert Linthicum

Jim posted an entry on Blern Blog

Blern Learns from Mixx

August 29 at 3:56 pm - Link

FWIW, the Mixx developers were very supportive in getting this integration completed! - Jim

Jay Groce posted an entry on Unfocused Content

Democratic National Convention

August 28 at 9:34 am - Link

Justin Hart and Jim liked this

Caleb Elston shared an item on Google Reader

Simple Update Protocol: Fetch updates from feeds faster

August 28 at 11:16 am - Link

Jim liked this

Jeremy Zawodny bookmarked a page on delicious

Memcachedb

August 21 at 7:28 am - Link

The Count Rob, Michael J. Cohen (mjc), Jim and 11 other people liked this

"A distributed key-value storage system designed for persistent" and it's powered by BerkeleyDB under the hood. Nice. - Jeremy Zawodny

5 more comments

Nice? I don't see how this could be useful. Any thoughts?.. - Nikolay Samokhvalov

my question is: what does this offer that mysql in-memory does not? - MikeAmundsen

... or in-memory postgres does not ;-) - Nikolay Samokhvalov

Nikolay: it guarantees O(1) lookup (because you can't do anything else with memcached); it's perfect for semi-transient things like nonce tokens, cookies and icons - Bill de hÓra

What I've always liked about Memcache is it's non-blocking IO. The question is whether Memcachedb managed to preserve it. - Eugene

We tried memcachedb. It's not stable :( - Alex Kapranoff

2samokhvalov: in-memory is irrelevant here. memcachedb is a "memcached" interface to Berkeley DB which is a persistent file-based DB. Also, Berkeley DB is much faster than both mysql and pg (like, say, 10 times or more) doing simple things it's intended to (storing key=>value pairs). - Alex Kapranoff

Louis Gray shared an item on Google Reader

What do you pay for?

August 27 at 12:48 pm - Link

Jim and Allen Stern liked this

The more interesting question, to me, seems to be "What do people expect to get paid for?" - abacab

Personally, I pay for the things I need because I must, I pay for the things I want when I can afford and justify them - when I can't afford or justify them, I go without unless they are free. Finally, I pay for things I could get for free, when I feel that I am morally obliged to do so. - Slippy Lane

Jeremy Zawodny bookmarked a page on delicious

Multiple column index vs multiple indexes

August 27 at 1:33 pm - Link

Michael J. Cohen (mjc) and Jim liked this

some interesting data points - Jeremy Zawodny

Louis Gray posted a link

Tech Confidential: EXCLUSIVE: FriendFeed readying RSS accelerator

August 27 at 1:52 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Daniel Rowley, Igor Poltavskiy, Dobromir Hadzhiev and 65 other people liked this

"FriendFeed Inc. is enhancing its service in order to fulfill a critical requirement on the Internet today: immediacy. The highly publicized startup is weeks away from boosting the frequency of its updates from social networks" - Louis Gray via Bookmarklet

18 more comments

What does SUP (Simple Update Protocol) do exactly, it's more than a http header last-modified check? - Philipp Lenssen

This is a great experiment. Having FriendFeed pushing innovation in feed polling is good for everyone. Impressed again. - Chris Wetherell

If u guys can pull it, it will definitely be a heavy boost - Varun Mahajan

SUP is definitely more cool than RSS - Shakeel Mahate

I'm interested in learning the details, too. my guess is some type of callback scheme that was discussed on ff a while back when ff was (gently) called out for polling flickr millions of times/day. - David Vasileff

whatSUUUUUUUUP? haha - Raymond

also perhaps batching multiple feed requests into a single call - David Vasileff

That's it ... no more hikes in the afternoon! (Sharing .... ) - Charlie Anzman

theory 1: a single "meta feed" which you can poll to get a list of other feeds that have changed recently. (would it cover all feeds on the service, or would FF somehow supply a list of all the feeds they're interested in?) theory 2: a callback/ping/PIMP notification when a feed or feeds change (HTTP? XMPP?). theory 3: a formalization of the "public feed" concept, where you roll every (public) update on the service into a single (rapidly rolling!) feed which FF polls and gets updates for. - ⓞnor

Someone has to talk to someone to indicate a change occurred, so you can't skip that step, be it push or pull. So my guess is it's a way to get a larger aggregated chunk of what has changed and an idea of the size of the change. What might work is a bulk push of what has changed and then a pull of the changes at FF's leisure. - todd

http://blog.friendfeed.com/200... - Paul Buchheit

Providing facts is just cheating. Now there's no room for rampant speculation :-) Add a sequence number and you could know if you missed an update which would indicate polling needed to occur or perhaps a download of the old change notices. - todd

great stuff. imho, when adopted, SUP will be - to the organic growth of services updates - like traffic lights to crowded intersections. or like how gps navigation is to asking people for directions :P - Dani Radu

Sounds like it's a protocol that others will need to implement and support so friendfeed can process feeds more efficiently. alot of the issues could be fixed if if-modified-since was used and rss feeds were treated more like a web service rather then a static html page, most are generated from a db real-time anyway. Read RFC 977, NNTP fixed this issue by setting up an easy way to poll what's new back in the 80's. - Shawn McCollum

WOWOWOWOW...this technology is huge! Disruptive and fantastic!! If I had VC level cash, I'd throw it at FF brainiacs and be rich... this idea is unbelievably SMART! - Susan Beebe

Shawn, we actually already use If-Modified-Since and many sites do properly support it. The key difference with SUP is that it allows feed consumers to monitor many thousands of URLs with a single GET, which is not possible using If-Modified-Since. - Paul Buchheit

If anything, it shares a few similarities with Sitemaps (which enable webmasters to notify search engines of modified URLs, etc.) Great work on SUP! - Aviv

This is one of those simple ideas that one wonders why no one thought of before. It's a good proposal and a required one in the rapidly growing aggregation/Lifestreaming world. I am sure the proposal will be widely and quickly SUPported. Well done folks. - Vinay | विनय

paul, I found and read the ff blog post, and I understand the meta-feed approach. Interesting but I think sup-id storage adds a bit of complexity. Even though the sup-id keeps the size of the feed down, full uri would be better. I think the concern about exposing usernames is a little overdone, I mean it's not going to really stop someone who wants the usernames from getting them. - Shawn McCollum

Love it. We've used a different approach to interface with "friendly" crawlers, one that is based on the ability to fetch older items in the feeds by request. But it requires a public "recent" feed, and does not work solve the private URLs issue. This is so much better. We'll be experimenting with SUP and would love to help it mature into a well defined spec. - Yaniv Golan

Louis Gray shared an item on Google Reader

TiVo's Day of Reckoning Approaches

August 26 at 11:24 am - Link

Denton Gentry, Mo Kargas, Michael J. Cohen (mjc) and 6 other people liked this

Go, Tivo, Go! - Josh Haley

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I'm a huge fan of TiVo and wish them all the best. It seems that their case has merit so it will be interesting to see what happens. - Jim McCusker

The question is... will this be an opportunity to buy/sell TiVo stock? - Louis Gray

Big TiVo user since day one, but I fear for them. They are running out of partners, options, etc. Hopefully they can find a way to survive. - Dean Terry

Huh, I was just thinking about getting a Tivo HD - Jason Carreira

I'd be sad to see TiVo go. Their DVR beats the pants off of Comcast's offering. - Akiva Moskovitz

Louis - Might make a bounce if they win but TiVo still needs better penetration into the marketplace. I love my HD unit with Verizon CableCard, but it's a shame that the CableCard isn't bi-directional yet, thereby making On-Demand and Pay-Per-View impossible. - Jim McCusker

I recorded the entire olympics in HD, on a DISH network DVR, the 722. it rules - Brian Hendrickson

I really liked TiVo and was rooting for them big time. They are in a tough spot though. Top technology that a lot of people don't see as enough better than the generic cable/satellite DVRs on the mass market side and competing with Microsoft Media Center on the higher end. Best advice is to sell to Apple who might have the muscle to market them. AppleTV needs a DVR badly anyways. - Thomas Hawk

IMO, Tivo has a pretty good product, but will die a slow death unless they can either get major traction with the cable companies (ie, Comcast deal) or are able to monetize their IP. Most consumers won't pay the premium to get a Tivo when the local cable co offers an alternative for $10/mo. - Jim

Oh, and I'm getting increasingly irritated with Tivo's inability to ship software that is full of blatant bugs that I encounter _every_ time I use my Tivo... and they refuse to fix several of these, as they have endured several software updates. :( Very disappointing... - Jim

I guess I'm just grateful that our TiVo HD doesn't randomly decide to delete everything we've recorded like our old Comcast DVR did. - Akiva Moskovitz

Tivo needs to become the software provider (as the idea behind their deal with Comcast) ... having seperate hardware that doesn't play well with cable and/or satellite is going to kill them. Oh, and lower prices. I love my Tivo. - Tim Hoeck

That's the thing... I've seen the DVR I can get from TimeWarner, and it's just CRAP. Somebody has to make and sell a good one, and if it's not going to be Tivo, then who? I still think DVR's are in an early adopter phase. I think people will get tired of the DVRs from their cable companies and upgrade. - Jason Carreira

Just shows you how stupid people can be... $10 a month adds up pretty quickly when TivoHDs aren't even that expensive. Refurbs on woot a couple days ago for $160, for example. Normal price at Costco is around $200, iirc. Tivo's even offering lifetime subscriptions on units again, making the service even cheaper. Sure, a lot of this is upfront money and a barrier to buy for a lot of people, but the math is solid... if you have the cash, you're a bonehead for renting. Nevermind non-Tivo boxes are 99% shit. - abacab

(all that said, we have three Tivos in our house--2 Series2s and 1 Series1--and love them. At the same time, though, I'd almost rather just drop cable and torrent the shows we watch. It's not like we watch anything live anymore anyway, so the wait for a good torrent download isn't a big deal at all.) - abacab

Dish has always been a second tier satellite provider, IMO. DirecTV has them beat hands down. I was very sad though when DTV decided to drop Tivo in exchange for their own equipment. I really miss the interface on Tivo and it's recommendation feature. Plus, I felt the search feature was better on Tivo. But, at least the DVR functionallity on DirecTV is nice, unlike what most if not all the cable operators have. - Jason Shultz via twhirl

Agree with Jason - the Time Warner DVRs are truly awful. I've swapped devices, tried getting the "newest" ones (almost all Motorolas) and they are world-record awful. Time Warner couldn't give a shit. Is there an elegant way to use Tivo or other good DVRs on TW that I don't know about? I wonder if Apple will figure out a way to make this work. Although they need to fix this iPhone disaster first. - Anthony Citrano

I've heard that the Tivo HD's with Cable Cards work with TW... anyone who's tried it, feedback would be appreciated - Jason Carreira

Jason - I have Tivo HD and it's amazing. But I use it with bunny ears as a small protest against Comcast and their stupid fees for cablecards. Separately... I thought Tivo and Comcast had a partnership in which the software would update on Comcast boxes "any day now" for some regions? - Patrick Lightbody

I am one of those 100k that unsubscribed to TIVO, after 4 years I decided that breaking up with TIVO and TV in general was a good plan. Both are gone. Netflix+Roku+Web all we've been using since June. - Mark Interrante

@Mark, but that doesn't have current seasons of TV shows, does it? - Jason Carreira

@Mark, Wow, bold move. The best I could muster was to eliminate cable and go w/ bunny ears. @Jason, you can get current TV shows via Hulu and other websites. It works fairly well except that: A) it doesn't display on my TV, and B) it doesn't work for sports events and such, though going to a bar works well enough. - Patrick Lightbody

How's the Roku, Mark? Any complaints or nags about it? - Josh Haley

Great, my kids love bars :| - Jason Carreira

I'm missing this year's shows. Except for the Daily Show which stream all their shows. The rest, I'll watch them when they hit netflix. I love Roku, it has a reasonable selection of back catalog, and they continually add more movies. The Roku was trivial to setup and has wifi and hdmi. Patrick, I know that I have the bunny ears configuration if I decide to get some TV. - Mark Interrante

Jim posted a link

Study: Blogs Love Obama, News Sites Love McCain. But McCain Is Catching Up By Going Negative.

August 26 at 12:01 pm - via Blern - Link

Interesting to watch how politics evolves on the web. Although I think we're barely scratching the surface. I'd love to see candidates get more involved _interactively_ via the web. - Jim

Skeptics Unite!: Tanath posted a link

Decision making myth debunked

August 14 at 10:13 pm - via Reshare - Link

Jim liked this

Skeptics Unite!: Tanath posted a link

Has Couple Found Formula To Win Lottery? - Money News Story - WNBC | New York

August 24 at 2:27 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jim liked this

Louis Gray shared an item on Google Reader

Exactly What Ails Social Media And Next Gen Startups

June 16 at 2:48 pm - Link

Jan Horna, Atul Arora, Mic and 3 other people liked this

Louis Gray shared an item on Google Reader

Four Firsts for Feeds

June 16 at 1:33 pm - Link

Caleb Elston, Mihai Parparita, Robert Scoble and 2 other people liked this

I'm glad Chris took the time to post this. He called me last week saying he was going to do it, and I was absolutely supportive. Of course in my small RSS geek universe, getting a call from Chris is like getting a call from Steve Jobs. I don't think I've washed my phone since. - Louis Gray

Especially liking this because of Louis's comment. - Mihai Parparita

Corvida shared an item on Google Reader

5 tips to accomplish low priority tasks

June 15 at 2:05 pm - Link

Mladen Srdić, Jess and Jim liked this

Louis Gray shared an item on Google Reader

Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next

June 15 at 2:09 am - Link

Jim liked this

Caleb Elston shared an item on Google Reader

Innovation by firing people

June 14 at 7:40 am - Link

Chris Ridenour, Noah Carter, Mark Trapp and Jim liked this

Corvida shared an item on Google Reader

Is Freemium Really the Way to Go?

June 14 at 6:07 am - Link

Jim liked this

Bret Taylor posted a link

Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast - NYTimes.com

June 13 at 11:48 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Nikpay, Kevin Shannon, Timothy B. Taylor and 18 other people liked this

"A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day." - Bret Taylor

7 more comments

I read this story all the time, and it never makes sense to me. Fundamentally, a lot of my job is about interacting with other people. And it ain't just me, it's everybody I know. Somehow this article always gets written with little attention to the essential nature of email/chat to people getting anything done at all, and instead focuses on its minority role as a distraction. - j1m

Good approach to this issue is using 'Getting Things Done' by David Allen - see http://tinyurl.com/6zlpvf - Jeroen De Miranda

Thats what soul tech is about, http://www.sparknw.com/soultec... - Leif Hansen

But the Rescue Time metric is real and when viewed in light of how many average workers cannot discipline themselves to remain on target for on-time collaborative results, it's important to acknowledge that time-motion studies can bear fruit. - Bernie Goldbach

are there any metrics out there which tell us how much time people spend TAGGING the applications and site within Rescue Time???? geez, i bet that takes 10% of my time too! - Ivan Stegic

Just finished reading this in the paper and didn't understand it. Have we become such children that we need others to tell us when it's naptime? I get a ridiculous amount of email and sometimes, yes, it does cause a bit of apnea when looking at the pile. But there are only so many hours in a day. Accept it, answer what's important, and get on with life. - Carla Thompson

I don't work in Tech, but at my job I think it is fair to say that 20% of my emails contain information essential to my work. The other 80% are mildly relevant to just noise. And I can't even tell you the last time I received an email that required a response that couldn't wait 15-30 minutes. My point is I definitely think I could become more productive by ignoring my emails for 30 minute spans and concentrating ont he meat of my job. In fact, I'm going to try it next week. - Andrew Burd

Where I work, people COMPLAIN when they get taken off a thread and ask to be on as many distribution lists as they can. They want to be in the loop and know what other people are working on, etc. Granted, we've got just under 100 employees, so in a larger org this could be overwhelming. I think the problem is more in managing the emails rather than feeling the need to "act" on ever single one. - Jim

Gee! If E-Mail really takes this much time from people, add in Friendfeed and Twitter and it's amazing any work gets done in America! - Kevin Shannon

Louis Gray dugg a story on Digg

Is Google about to swallow up Digg?

June 13 at 10:42 am - Link

∵JPGlockner∴, Susan Beebe, Jim and 5 other people liked this

I hope not. I don't like Digg :) - Svartling

7 more comments

Hmm, seems like we get a Digg acquisition rumor every 6 months. - Mike Doeff

if anything, they should really do something to make Google News more timely / reverent - Andy Sternberg via twhirl

Seems like both Google and Digg fanboys hate this idea. - Pat Hawks

I wonder if Yahoo ever tried? - Mark Dykeman

ake to build a Digg? Google can command an userbase - Lakshman Prasad via twhirl

While in many ways, these seems like a great fit... I'm skeptical of the value here for two reasons: 1) Google has the fanbase, why not build themselves... they could do it and they'd have the users on day one for it to be successful (question: could they manage the algorithms and userbase as "successfully" as Digg has?). 2) Where's the synergy? Would Google really realize some value here or is just another case of plug Google advertising unit into Digg and hope for big returns? - Jim

Bad investment. Digg's business model / concept is now old and has many competitors; not to mention "the rumors" about their algorithms. - Susan Beebe

I disagree that Google could just rebuild Digg on it's own. Anybody use Google Shared Stuff (Not to be confused with Reader Shared Items) or Google Notebooks? - Pat Hawks

Based on recent acquisitions, if Google does swallow, indigestion is sure to follow. - Mark Krynsky

Big Lebowski: Jim posted a link

The Big Lebowski on the big screen in Denver: June 25th, 2008

June 13 at 10:05 am - Link

I might have to come back from San Fran a day early to catch this... - Jim

Jim posted a link

The Cogent Strategy

June 13 at 9:41 am - via Blern - Link

Interesting discussion on why Cogent may (shortly) no longer be positioned as the most aggressive player in the bandwidth market... - Jim

Jeremy Zawodny bookmarked a page on delicious

mySQL DBA: How to pick indexes for order by and group by queries

June 12 at 7:28 am - Link

Satish Thomas, Jim, Charles Nadeau and 3 other people liked this

a pretty good discussion of the topic - Jeremy Zawodny

very cool. i didn't realize re-wording the question could have such an impact... - Jim

Louis Gray shared an item on Google Reader

Smart Social Media Marketing: Caleb Elston and Toluu

June 13 at 12:20 am - Link

Jim, Caleb Elston, Snay Trivedi and 5 other people liked this

Louis Gray shared an item on Google Reader

Five Reasons FriendFeed Is Better Than Digg

June 13 at 1:24 am - Link

Mark Trapp, Nikpay, Dan Hsiao and 18 other people liked this

I stopped using Digg years ago and really don't see why anyone does use it. Maybe it's just my anti-social-ism, but rather than appearing as a site with thousands of contributors, it always seemed like a sited edited by a single, opinionated person that I would avoid in the halls. - Jim

FF is personalized, Digg is for the masses. - Jeremiah Owyang

Jim I still check Digg, just to see if there are any decent stories on the frontpage! - Joe Dawson

I think Digg is quite useful if you have a good friends list. I'm not using it very actively, but check http://digg.com/users/meryn/fr... . Digg would be much better if they'd make this page behave more like FriendFeed. - Meryn Stol

Personal Finance: Morton Fox posted a link

The 13 Commandments of Savvy Consumers

June 12 at 2:29 pm - via Reshare - Link

Jim liked this