Jul 7, 2010 0
On My Radar: Prince, .NET, Ghetto Lit, CSS Prefixes & Gender
Prince says ‘the Internet is completely over’
The web is abuzz regarding the Daily Mirror interview with Prince in which he discusses his new album 20TEN, religion, and “new ways to distribute my music” which do not include the Internet.
“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.
“They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”
Prince goes on to show a disconnect from the reality of today’s music industry. As Jason tweeted “the advance thing is just wild.”
From an artistic POV, I also have an issue with Prince releasing his album as a covermount. It’s purely monetary. What sort of fan/audience targeting is that (especially when you consider the state of print news)? It’ll be interesting to see how the torrent community responds.
As we say in the South, “Bless his heart.”
.NET Culture Shock: Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups
It’s somewhat tragic for the .NET community too – because the perceived lack of sex-appeal on the surface doesn’t match the reality of what the platform is capable of.
Just take a brief moment to peruse through CodePlex for more than a couple minutes and you’ll find thousands upon thousands of examples creative open source projects all built in .NET.
And in the startup space there actually are a number of .NET-based startups making it big, including this week’s Hacker News / Social Media darling Woot. But why oh why isn’t there a louder .NET voice in the startup community? Why aren’t there developers from Woot working with developers from StackOverFlow (also implemented in .NET) to encourage more startups to use the extensive .NET stack to create new and exciting products and services?
And most importantly, why aren’t there more startups adopting .NET?
Their Eyes Were Reading Smut
Because Nick Chiles’ (infamous) New York Times article is related to my post…
I’ve heard defenders say that the main buyers of these books, young black women, have simply found something that speaks to them, and that it’s great that they’re reading something. I’d agree if these books were a starting point, and that readers ultimately turned to works inspired by the best that’s in us, not the worst.
But we’re not seeing evidence of that. On Essence magazine’s list of best sellers at black bookstores, for example, authors of street lit now dominate, driving out serious writers. Under the heading “African-American Literature,” what’s available is almost exclusively pornography for black women.
Prefix or Posthack
Eric Meyer argues for vendor prefixes (-webkit-, -moz-, etc.) and against a unified prefix (e.g., -beta- or -w3c-). In fact:
I believe so firmly that vendor prefixes are a good thing that I’m prepared to take the next logical step: Vendor prefixes should be made more central to the standards process. They should be required of newly implemented properties and should be the mechanism by which interoperability is declared.
A word’s worth
A kickass post by Ivan E Coyote on gender identity
For years I have secretly yawned and answered the ubiquitous gender pronoun preference question with a noncommittal shrug, thanking the asker for asking and then answering that they could basically call it like they saw it, that I didn’t really have a preference. And for years this was mostly true. Mostly.
[...]
My name is Ivan. You can call me she. For the first time in my life, this really feels like the truth. And the truth fits, and I am going to wear it.
[via Cecily]
