Major League Baseball and Net Neutrality
Fast lanes would serve only one purpose: for Broadband ISPs to receive an economic windfall. American consumers would be worse off as the costs of fast lanes are passed along to them in new fees or charges where there were none, or higher fees or charges where they existed.
The FCC and Net Neutrality
The FCC is heading down a dangerous path, potentially handicapping growth and flourishing economy on the Internet.
It seems that the FCC and other portions of our government believe that this growth and economy are due to innovation by ISPs like Verizon and Comcast. If they think this, they are mistaken. Growth occurs at the edges of the network. ISPs are simply the infrastructure needed to support this growth. The Government needs to be careful to not believe otherwise, despite what ISP and telco lobbyists would have them believe.
To continue to support growth on the Internet, we need fair and open access to allow new entities at the edge to compete and flourish in a fare market. ISPs should concentrate on making Internet access more available, fast, and less expensive. The reality is, with little competition within a regional market, there is little incentive to do this. All ISP innovation has been to squeeze more money from their customers, and now content producers, while keeping the Government at bay. I am not a fan of over zealous government regulation. However, given the monopoly/duopoly ISP status quo, something must be done to ensure fair and open access to the Internet for all Americans.
Mac OS Human Interface Guidelines and the Web
But the features from the best programs were seldom if ever present in others— each program tackled interface problems in pretty much its own way. A keyboard combination that saved a file in one program might delete a word in another. You couldn't even quit a program in a standard way. Every time a user purchased a new program, he or she had to scale a fresh learning curve.
— Levy, Steven (2012-01-16). Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that changed Everything (p. 134). Kindle Edition.
This quote is describing the state of application UI on the Apple II. It strikes me that this is very similar to the current state of UI on the Web. Later, Apple rereleased the Macintosh and the Human Interface Guidelines to describe the common interface elements that all Mac applications would share.
I wonder if a similar consolidation of common UI elements will happen for the Web. There are various frameworks or boilerplates that provide this, but nothing that is truly common. For this to happen, I think browsers will need to include more common UI elements beyond what is currently available in HTML & the DOM. If I had to bet, I'd put my money on Chrome heading in this direction.
Java 8
I'm irrationally excited that Java 8 has finally been released. For years, I felt like Java 8 was a mythical beast: people would claim to have tried some of the new features but it was nowhere to be found in the wild.
Now, we can all see it for ourselves.