"Season 2 puts Don Draper (Jon Hamm) in his undershirt in a doctor’s office, where he is chided for his blood pressure, two-pack-a-day habit, five-drinks-a-day lifestyle and other forms of dissipation." I have a weird relationship with this show. I almost don't like it because I don't like any of the characters, but I am fascinated by it and keep watching it. - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet
It's weird how little advertising agencies have changed :) - leigh himel
I'm working my way through Season 1 right now, and I didn't realize that I didn't like any of the characters either, but now that you mention it -- I don't! :-) - Dave Winer
One of my favorite shows right now. As far as I can tell (no way I was alive, let alone my parents!) but it looks like everything (cosutumes/sets/dialog) is really consistent and accurate - Clint Ecker via twhirl
I'm the same age as the kids in the show. Everything about it is authentic. - Dave Winer
love this show... my favorite summer shows are 1) swingtown 2) madmen --- love retro. - Jeff Sandquist
Season One is coming to HULU. check out the hint from Aug 1, at http://www.hulu.com/summer . I think that hints about that!! - Paul
On a scale of 1 to 10, from awful to great, I would give The Sopranos a 10; Mad Men a 9; Dexter an 8; Deadwood a 7; and Swingtown a 6. Mad Men is pure magic, perhaps primarily because it recreates a particular time, place and culture with amazing vividness and grace. - Sean McBride
A beautiful, meticulous show. Exposes the underbelly of our consumer society the way sci-fi often illuminates current issues by placing them in the future. This show does it by placing them in the past. Racism, sexism, consumerism, advertising & PR are all shown in an unapologetic state so that we recognize their negative presence in our current lives more clearly. - Dean Terry
It's fascinating to do a Friendfeed global (everyone) search on Mad Men and peruse the results: http://friendfeed.com/search?q... One surveys these pages of items and muses, they are begging to be data mined and massaged. There are valuable patterns buried in there that need to be brought to the surface. (The comments are also valuable as they stand, arranged in reverse chronological order.) - Sean McBride
I will check Hulu for Mad Men. I was born in 1950 it feels just like I remember. I''ve watched Swingtown twice.... it makes me uncomfortable. - Russellreno
Funny how this show was outside my awareness until a recent media tour that must have finally hit all my haunts -- I think I heard a couple different interviews with Matt Weiner. I was hooked instantly, watched it on Comcast OnDemand one right after another. I was born in 54 and find it eerily familiar too. Only anachronism I've noticed is didn't the Twist show up more like 63? - Amyloo
"Ross, one of our three summer interns, had his last day today. We were sad, and decided to drown our sorrows in burgers, cake, and candy-filled piñata-goodness. It seemed to be an appropriate send-off for someone who made the office so much fun." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet
Liked the day and photos. Un-like that it's Ross's last day. - Dan Hsiao
Why it took them so long. I've got that improvement (packed w/ 20 others) from Better GMail 2 FireFox extension. My favorite improvement is Folders4GMail - label/sublabel get organized as folders. - Nenad Nikolic via twhirl
Nenad: There are good reasons due to SSL performance costs, specifically latency and to some extent concurrency. You can negatively impact user experience by using SSL naively. Security-conscious users like yourself won't care about the added performance cost, but the other 99.99% will. - Steve Weis
I wonder what Gmail is using for their SSL acceleration - AJ Batac
"don't always use https"? that doesn't make sense! now if they said "Use https every time" and "60% of the time use https every time" that would be much easier to understand... :) - David Vasileff
It should be a checkbox. As for why not use ssl -- browsers are really dumb about caching with ssl, so for people with slow, high-latency internet connections, it could be really painful. The actual computational cost of ssl isn't that big of a deal -- it's not the 90s anymore. - Paul Buchheit
@Steve I fully agree with you. It may be the case that Google neede to scale up their infrastructure prior to making HTTPS widely available as "set-and-forget" option. This will definitely increase a number of SSL users by (at least) two orders of magnitude. Maybe they deployed SSL server farm based on quantum cryptography? ;-) - Nenad Nikolic via twhirl
N: I doubt this will increase the number of SSL users significantly. Most people (rightly) have no idea what SSL is and will never know this option exists. Everyone reading this operates in a bubble, so we're not a typical demographic. When G enables SSL by default, that's a different story. (ps - Quantum? I'll have some of what you're drinking. ) - Steve Weis
I thought the slowdown with SSL is not the encryption itself, but that each connection requires lots of overhead to negotiate. - Gabe Schaffer
@Gabe, for persistent HTTP connections, the overhead would be in encryption / decryption, right? Of course, I have no idea exactly how much that is quantitatively. - Ashwin Bharambe
@David, "Use https only when typing your password" wouldn't fit. - Bruce Lewis
If they wanted to make it easy, always https should be default. - Colby Olson
Paul, does Gmail use persistent HTTPS connections? How often are new connections made for things like new windows, attachments, graphics, etc.? - Gabe Schaffer
No store bought dill pickle comes even close to my home made using Grandma Vina's recipe. - Sheila Taylor
@Sheila...I agree...your version of Grandma Vina's recipe is delicious! - Skye Miller
@Tom: I guess it depends how you define pageviews and what is being compared (generic ketchup or Heinz ketchup, viewing or consumption). In 2003 Heinz made 291,000 gallons of ketchup per day, or about 100M 10 ml servings/day (tinyurl.com/6dn68z). Even if that has doubled since 2003, that's about 200M servings/day. Coca Cola sells 1.5 billion servings/day (tinyurl.com/ok9ma). According to Comscore (not great accuracy), Yahoo gets about 1.1 billion pageviews/day (tinyurl.com/6erf66). - Simon
@Simon: Wow, nice researching! In that case, let's shift the game from pageviews to unique visitors. Let me know if ketchup, mustard, and/or pickles still lose and I'll shift the competition again. =) - Tom Stocky
to be part of a crowd makes you feel secure. no matter how frightening dumb you are. hitler and goebbles knew that very well, but it will be valid forever and it has been valid for every lifeform since the beginning. what i want to say is: just make sure to have a good understanding as an individual what your leader shapes you into. (btw: connected individuals=BORC > leader/sheep) - krz9000
this is a mark cuban school - release the movie in all formats at the same time at varied costs to appeal to all types of consumers and you'll cut off abuse! - Kevin
"REST is Newtonian physics. XMPP Data Services: Quantum Mechanics & General Relativity" - ⓞnor
From the slides: FriendFeed's crawler sent 2.9 million requests to Flickr in one day to get updates for 46K users. "Polling doesn't scale." - Bret Taylor
Nice :). Polling scales just fine though -- it just isn't very efficient (regardless of scale). A good public feed would work just as well for us though, and it would be a lot simpler than xmpp. - Paul Buchheit
"We're spending a huge amount of resources ... for what is really a small trickle of data. we thought about calculating kilowatt hours, and dollars spent on electricity. But we didn't get to it" - let us know if friendfeed ever gets a bill. :) - David Vasileff
Paul - "polling doesn't scale" is definitely a generalization. But, at least in the case of FriendFeed's API, it does present opportunities for incomplete/non-contiguous data streams, which may be problematic for some API consumers. We've been discussing this on the API google group :) - Patrick Lightbody
very good :-) (but ... can't wait when frf has an ability to add an arbitrary service (user-generated catalog of services available)) - Nikolay Samokhvalov
what about the facebook status updates? I hope that's coming... - Rahul Das
Nice work with the status, I would like to see DailyMugshot introduced! - Joe Dawson
Great! Just added identi.ca; configuring brightkite too. - Parth Awasthi
Paul, given Identi.ca uses the Twitter API it would be nice if we could respond via Identi.ca in the same way you can with Tweets. I presume implementing it wouldn't be overly hard (where as Plurk of course is another matter) - Duncan Riley
@Rahul FB status would be cool, but there is no public RSS feed. There is a feed, but it requires a key, which would require you to type in your username/password. - Hao Chen
@Duncan +1. i was thinking the same thing - Trent Olson
Integrated identi.ca via RSS feed before. OK, now it's there but it's not that big deal to me. - Ansgar Wollnik
Thanks for the identi.ca support ... Excellent work ! - Christian Farley
AWESOME!! Ok, I might be using Identi.ca again!!! Yippee! Thanks FF team!! - Susan Beebe
Why are the updates called Dents, I'll Dent you later :S - Joe Dawson
i love "status-blogging", but i still think that it destroys the flow of my friendfeed - i also blocked every twitter update from everyone here at ff... - Dieter Schwarz
Yay, more services to add to my profile! ;P - Aaron Myers
I am getting ready for Identi.ca Twitter going down the drain! - Igor The Troll
seems like i need to go get my identi.ca id before its taken ... - Raza
Well, I must confess that I haven't seen any official comments on the API groups for a while. I hope things will change soon. - Alex Popescu
Alex, thanks for the feedback. We haven't been monitoring the group effectively, and we will improve our behavior. - Bret Taylor
Bret - my experience with open source is that if the project leaders (ie: FriendFeeders) can help seed the initial community, it can begin to take on a life of it's own. So it might just take a little upfront work engaging folks like Karim/directeur, Alex, and me and we can probably take it from there :) - Patrick Lightbody
Patrick is raising a very good point and I much agree with him. Even if it may sound as self promoting, both Patrick and me have managed couple of open source communities before. - Alex Popescu
"About three years ago he began steering his partners toward an emphasis on alternative-energy projects, or "green tech" in Kleiner parlance. The new eco-focus has attracted plenty of hoopla, most notably late last year when Doerr hired his pal Al Gore as a Kleiner partner.
Yet the firm's shift toward energy investing is only part of the story. As important is Kleiner's steady drift away from the industry that made the firm what it is today: the Internet. Kleiner's investments defined the Internet's first generation. Without Kleiner there was no Netscape, and without Netscape there was no cash-gushing dot-com boom. " - Ana via Bookmarklet
Kleiner Perkins has an entrepreneur in residence at NREL right now. I bet if you could use the internet or similar technologies to track where the power you consume was generated, they would be all ears. - Clare Dibble
Ana, it just involves shipping a package, it's not that bad :) - Sanjeev Singh
Yeah, once I read the request, I discovered as much. Sanjeev, I just wouldn't have expected you to use the phrase "pretty please"... made it seem like it was going to be a lot worse :) - Ana
What also bugs me: People who offer you food, prefaced with "This tastes kind of funny to me, I don't really like it. But, here, you might like it" - Jason Kaneshiro
How about "Sweetness Please " ?? :)- - Peter Dawson
LOL. Been there, done that (Petstore.com - we didn't like that dang puppet.) Shipping heavy pet food isn't a great business plan unless you have B&M stores to back it up. - AJ Kohn
Gabe, having watched that bubble, this comment scares me because I agree it's likely to be truth. Ack! - susan mernit
Gabe, are you going to be covering BubbleTech08? - Edward Vielmetti
"The nephews of Adolf Hitler are alive and well in Long Island, New York. The only American descendants of Adolph Hitler are living quietly under assumed names. In about 40-50 years, barring death by unnatural causes, this bloodline of Adolph Hitler will be severed for all time. The brothers have reportedly entered into a pact that none will marry or have children. This will put an end to the irony and curse of the Hitler legacy in the United States." - Cee Bee via Bookmarklet
I saw this too. I thought they really have guts to have this decision. - Judy Jones via twhirl
awww...thanks! steven, if you're asking me, i grew up on the north shore of nassau county near east hills - Cee Bee
"The only American descendants of Adolph Hitler are living quietly under assumed names." How are these considered descendants? - Jim Norris
jim, the link above gives the full story - Cee Bee
@Jim They are not direct descendants, but collateral (kinsmen). - Anne Bouey
they still believe in Adolph's genetic bullshit if they think that killing off his gene pool will change things - Noah David Simon
No children? For what their uncle did? If that works for them. But I don't agree with that. They are their own persons. - Hutch Carpenter
yes... but you still have free will. you might have a skill that other's might not have, but you still have the free will to do the right thing. Genetics have nothing to do with that. Hitler might of seen that he was a perfectionist and attempted to be a craftsman instead of a world leader. free will... who knows what he might of done with the same DNA? ....I will never be a ballerina... I admit it. My sister has that DNA.... but I still can be a great human - Noah David Simon
a lot of contemporary problems would be solved if we can accept that DNA "DOES" decide certain things. It is not bigoted of me to say that being Jewish gives me access to certain DNA that does certain things. Mark Davidson is wrong! DNA is like twitter... is twitter's architecture evil? No... only if you get hysterical about it and start bullying people about what they can do with their feeds and start talking about grounding your follows.... etc. the inherent architecture of twitter is fine. - Noah David Simon
if the admin at twitter really knew that the architecture could only work with so many people then they should of licensed the technology instead of hoarding it. the architecture was fine... the human element of tyranny took over. http://xrl.us/okmm2 - Noah David Simon
if twitter had licensed the technology out to other's from the get go... none of this would of happened and twitter would be profitable. now they have a network with a black eye. - Noah David Simon
if there were multiple twitters then I would not of minded getting thrown off of one. I would not of come back and been with the same people. there never would of been a problem. - Noah David Simon
"A 75th-birthday bash for wrestling icon Capt. Lou Albano turned into a real-life "Wrestlemania" event when "The Sandman" allegedly got drunk and went berserk - and "The Zombie" and "Pitbull" struggled to restrain him as a SWAT team was called in." - hunter walk via Bookmarklet
Wow, I spent many a romantic evening at La Lanterna when I lived in NYC. Funny to think what the place was like after The Sandman ripped through it... - Jennie Lin via fftogo
CAPS LOCK IS LIKE CRUISE CONTROL FOR ASS-KICKING - Ken Norton
"The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.
In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in § 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”[1] Perhaps, the agency has conceded, some “new, unforeseen technology” might warrant an “exception” to this formalistic test, but in the agency’s view, no such technology has yet emerged so there is no reason currently to use a more inclusive standard." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
The author of this blog clearly thinks that getting rid of software patents would be bad and would somehow hurt Google. However, I believe that the existence of software patents is a much greater risk for Google (and other innovators) than benefit. Google is about a lot more than Pagerank (and competitors already have comparable if not the identical algorithms). Meanwhile, the thousands of patents that they don't own effectively form a giant minefield that could hurt them at any moment (see RIM). - Paul Buchheit
Like = trying to figure out the issue. Some software probably should be patentable, but the standards are too murky to sort out. Probably the PTO wants to wash its hands of the mess. - Sean McBride
Looks like it's time to go the 'trade secret' route instead of the 'patent' route. It's kind of nice: If it's something that's obvious from the user experience it should be harder to patent, but if it's something that, even when the service is public, can still be hidden, then third parties shouldn't just be able to copy it. One-click shopping shouldn't be protected, but O(1) search algorithms should be. (Wait, what? If there were an O(1) search algorithm it'd change everything! I contradict myself.) - Kevin Fox
I like the "physical transformation" argument. Computer technology has boomed in spite of software patents, not because of them. - Gabe Schaffer
I admire the ironically pro-competition and social progress roots of patents. I also respect the efforts of many to equitably apply those antiquated laws on the violently innovative realm of software and the Internet. Nevertheless, I will be so happy to see the USPTO concede the futility of these patents and pull the plug. (Though, depending on what kind of plug and how they pull it, they may owe someone royalties.) - Sacca
Patents are a tax on small bazaar innovation in favor of big cathedral innovation. In some fields maybe that makes sense. But despite all the patents I've filed for, the things that had the biggest impact on the world weren't patentable (and shouldn't have been). Patents fetishize the "inventor" and the "invention" at the cost of actual progress. - Daniel Dulitz
