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Linked List: March 21, 2008

Friday, 21 March 2008

Paul Graham:

Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they’re transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they’ve grown several inches taller. Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I’d describe the way lions seem in the wild.

“Both more worried and happier at the same time” perfectly describes my experience writing DF full-time.

Jens Alfke: ‘The iPhone Has Blinders On’ ★

Another one from the I-don’t-agree-with-it-but-it’s-well-worth-reading dept.

For what it’s worth, I believe the number one reason why the iPhone OS doesn’t allow background processes is RAM. Battery life, CPU sharing, bandwidth — all of these are factors, too, but I think RAM is foremost. The iPhone has just 128 MB of RAM and no swap space. A good chunk of that 128 MB goes to the OS itself and the built-in apps that do run in the background — Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod. There really just isn’t much left over. If Apple were to just allow background processing now, what would happen is that background processes would often wind up getting killed by the OS at some point when the frontmost app needs more memory. From the user’s perspective, it would seem as though background apps inevitably mysteriously fail and stop running. You can argue that you’d rather have that than no third-party background apps at all, but it’s clearly a reasonable trade-off for Apple in terms of consistency and obviousness in the user experience.

Wait a few years for iPhones with 1 GB of RAM and it’ll be a different story.

And on the Other Side, the Angry Drunk ★

Darby Lines on the Safari-for-Windows software update nano-scandal:

Second, bitching that anyone is a “bad” Windows citizen is the rhetorical equivalent of arguing that one turd in a sea of shit is particularly stinky. Microsoft is a bad Windows citizen.

John Lilly on Apple’s Windows Software Update ★

Mozilla CEO John Lilly on Apple’s Software Update for Windows offering Safari 3.1 to iTunes users:

That’s a problem because of the dynamic I described above — by and large, all software makers are trying to get users to trust us on updates, and so the likely behavior here is for users to just click “Install 2 items,” which means that they’ve now installed a completely new piece of software, quite possibly completely unintentionally. Apple has made it incredibly easy — the default, even — for users to install ride along software that they didn’t ask for, and maybe didn’t want. This is wrong, and borders on malware distribution practices.

Thank God My Server Held Up ★

My thanks to Valleywag for sending an amazing 93 referrers to Daring Fireball over the last 24 hours.

Paul Mison on Apple’s Software Update for Windows ★

I have to say, I’m with Mison. I don’t understand the supposed outrage over Apple’s Software Update app for Windows offering to install Safari 3.1. Seems par for the course on Windows, and even on Mac OS X Software Update asks me if I want to install apps I don’t use.

Sony Now Offering Crapware-Free Vaios — For a Price ★

If you pay $100 extra for Vista Business Edition, you can then pay another $50 not to have the machine pre-loaded with crapware. Sign me up. Update: Sony has thought better of this, and are dropping the $50 charge. You still have to pay $100 to upgrade to Vista Business, though.

Vote for Virtualization ★

Craig Hockenberry:

A Macintosh developer’s ability to produce world-class products is inhibited by the lack of desktop virtualization.

Mail Attachments Iconizer ★

My thanks to Lokiware and Adam Nohejl for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Mail Attachments Iconizer is a $15 plugin for Apple Mail that gives you explicit control over how Mail displays file attachments. Don’t want PDFs to be rendered inline? With Mail Attachments Iconizer you can set them to display as file icons. See Dan Frakes’s write-up for Macworld for more.

Through March 24, get 30 percent off using coupon code “DARINGFB”.

Expelled ★

If you like to laugh at creationists, you’re going to love this story.