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Category Archives: Business

“Astroturfing” Is Fraud, Prosecute It

I read something tonight about how some telecom lobbies were sending automated “public comments” to regulators as if they were actual individuals represented by the government the regulatory agencies belonged to, and are starting to switch to LLM-generated text to try to evade detection. How is that not fraud? (Wire fraud if electronic, mail fraud […]

Five years!

As of today, I’ve been with Apple for five years, working on developer tools. It’s been great and I look forward to many more years of improving the experience for people creating great Mac and iPhone software!

DDJ vs. Backyard Poultry

Eric Sink has a post talking about the sad state of developer publishing, specifically discussing the declining readership of the venerable developer magazine Dr. Dobb’s Journal, as compared to that mainstay of American newsstands Backyard Poultry. After reading the article and the replies, I just had to throw in my two cents about magazine publishing […]

Copyright canonical form

One thing that’s nagged at me lately has been the series of applications I’ve seen lately with copyright statements that appear to be from the Bizarro universe. I don’t mean that they have weird license restrictions; rather, they have a copyright statement in their standard About panel that’s formatted strangely. It’s a minor pet peeve […]

“Enterprise” thought leadership?

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails at 37signals, takes James McGovern — some Java/J2EE author — to task for his über-lame rant against Ruby in the Enterprise in a great post titled Boy, is James McGovern enterprise or what! > So by Enterprise, Architect, and Enterprise Architect standards, this gent must be the top of the […]

Joel Spolsky’s Bionic Office

In the latest installment of Joel on Software, Joel talks about his new office. I like a lot of what he’s done with it. It’s largely the kind of space I’d design. I might or might not have private offices, now that I’m starting to buy into XP more, but I definitely like a lot […]

I knew it wasn’t all puppies and rainbows!

[Joel on Software][1], “[Local Optimization, or, The Trouble with Dell][2]” > Unfortunately, the dirty little secret about Dell is that all they have > really done is push the pain of inventory up to their suppliers and down > to their customers. Their suppliers end up building big warehouses right > next to the Dell […]

Platform Futures

On Windows, many developers seem to want to run as fast as possible away from Microsoft Visual C++ and embrace Microsoft’s C# and .NET platform for new development. Most Windows developers that I’ve seen seem downright enthusiastic about these technologies. It’s disconcerting; I’m not used to seeing Windows developers (or users) be enthusiastic about their […]

Joel still doesn’t get it

A couple days ago in [Joel on Software][1], Joel claimed that in order for it to make economic sense to develop a Macintosh product, you had to be able to sell *25 times as many* copies as you would a Windows product. **Bullshit.** First of all, you can’t just assume that the relative market sizes […]

Joel Climbs Into the Trunk

Joel is smoking the good stuff! Or is he drinking the purple stuff? Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software is actually claiming “.NET appears so far to be one of the most brilliant and productive development environments ever created.” He goes on to say “ASP.NET is as big a jump in productivity over ASP as […]