The 'there weren't cost-effective alternatives at that time' as an excuse for at the very least inaction (morally condemnable) and at most criminal litigation-worthy propaganda, lies and damages, I find it, in all due respect, quite poor.
As an excuse on the part of the oil companies, I completely agree. But that point was directed at the supply/demand situation from the perspective of the world's consumers and not from the oil companies. So any effects emissions have had on the environment can't be placed squarely on the shoulders of the oil companies but the market (world population) as a whole.
> The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
The newsfeed was copied/acquired from FriendFeed. Messages was Beluga. Instagram and WhatsApp got on FB bandwagon too. FB just had the cold hard cash laying there and just had to put it in front of these people. Cold hard cash and no morality when it comes to selling people personal data, but, in their defence, we put that data there in the first place, it's the fuzzy binding contract that's made when one joins Facebook—look at all these social tools for you to share and connect, for the mere price of letting us exploit you and your data and enrich us and our investors while doing that. It's a power structure, really.
He has some (funny) info on Pinboard About page (https://pinboard.in/about) regarding 'the technology', perhaps he was mentioning that...
> Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, Beanstalk as a message queue, and a combination of storage appliances and Amazon S3 to store backups. There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!
This is the kind of thing that made it easy for me to justify $39/year (for full page archives). Boring technology isn’t going to excite anyone, but it sure as hell will keep ticking along so long as someone’s at the wheel.
I would cancel any broadband contract of any ISP that did this when providing me a service. We need to stand up to these sort of things. (Disclaimer: I live in Europe though.)
Cool, I always enjoy clever git visualisation tools. While you are immersed in code it's hard to get a good grasp on what are your routines, or on what you've accomplished, and these tools give you a nice picture of that - and I've found them rather useful on retrospective or post-mortem moments.
