Hanlon’s razor tells us that we should “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” I’m still unable to figure which is the case with Facebook’s new promo guidelines. Bad linking policies are nothing new — we’ve seen them from Fast Company, NPR, Starbucks and KPMG. But these stories are old, …
Category Archives: tech
Friendster is a click whore, too
If you tell it to, Friendster helpfully reminds you when your friends’ birthdays are coming up. This is handy for calling them, writing them, or leaving them happy birthday comments on their wall Friendster profile. Look at the email itself: What’s missing? The birthday itself. Instead of building trust with its members by providing them …
TiVo needs a migration assistant
When you upgrade your TiVo, you lose everything. Season passes, wish lists, saved thumb ratings, channel configurations — everything. Yes, you can transfer recordings — but only one at a time. It’s a very slow, very manual process. What TiVo needs is a migration assistant. When you get a new Mac, the Mac OS X …
What TiVo can learn from the phone company
I recently purchased a TiVo HD. The TiVo was pre-activated, so I didn’t have to activate it on tivo.com. Before I pass on my old TiVo (a series 2), I want to transfer the programs from it to my new TiVo HD. In order for transfers to work: both DVRs must have active service agreements …
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Gruber, you missed the obvious pun
It’s not Bungie Spins Off From Microsoft, but rather “Microsoft cuts cord.”
Vote for my SXSW interactive panel proposal
My session is Putting the Quality in Quality Web Applications. Here’s the blurb: A misspelled word, stray pixel or errant semicolon can erase your data, confuse your customers or put you on the front page of the New York Times. Learn what’s important when it comes to web app quality and how to make your …
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Your tax dollars at work
Sen. Barbara Boxer is having email problems:
Best recruiter story. Ever.
Tony is a UI engineer. He gets a lot of recruiter spam. Usually it’s related to his skillset. This time, however, the recruiter was looking for a filesystems engineer. They had this hilarious exchange: Recruiter: We’re looking for somebody with 7-10 years of experience writing filesystems.Me: The only person I know with that level of …
The hidden cost of software bugs
If it costs you more in employee time to screen bug reports and mark them as duplicates than it would to actually fix the bug, fix the bug. Now.