American girl in Rome. #fb (Taken with Instagram)

I’m a TextMate user, which means I’ve written every one of my significant academic papers with a program that had basically been abandoned years before.  I’m also a Sparrow user, for the moment, but my TextMate experience makes me not too worried.  The current version is likely to be serviceable far into the future.

This is basically the natural life cycle of such a product.  There’s a small, enthusiastic market for Apps that are a little nicer than what’s out there for free (GMail, emacs, Apple Mail), but it’s not really a growth business, and making these things is marginally profitable.  The endgame is always going to be just either abandoning working on it full time or the dev’s enhanced status leading to an acqui-hire exit.

If you could see anything in this picture, it would be a picture of an abandoned cold war era radar station in the middle of Grünewald that they use for parties now. (Taken with Instagram at Abhörstation Teufelsberg)

What about the fact that we have no real shortage of space, unlike München or Frankfurt?

America and France had the right idea about kings back in the 18th century.

Ora warns us about the the curse of apps, but I am not so sure.  I’ll want for the full version, but:

• The non-game apps on my iOS devices seem to integrate nicely with back-end service that themselves work with iftt and other such things.
• This argument seems to assume that apps aren’t concrete manifestations of specific jobs that include social performance and other things not in the inputs and outputs. For example, Facebook Messenger is a different “uniform” you and your phone put on than either Twitter, email, Skype, or iMessage would be.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the whole thing.

Canada shows how you defend kids’ rights at publicly funded schools: you just do it. Kids don’t have much choice about where their parents send them to school, so if the state is paying, there is an obligation only to pay for things meeting minimal standards.

This is what capitalism by upper class twit looks like: legacies, cronies, and somebody pliable the person doing the appointments met at a museum gala.