20 minutes into the future, Mardi Gras will be replaced by "Sky Fall", a week-long festival where this year's space junk is intentionally grounded by remote control to crash into the sea or burn up in the atmosphere.

Google's Picasa is another system where though it can track photo albums through folders, that is only a staging space for a public presentation that is utterly folder-less (Picasaweb, via the "Albums" view in Picasa).

While at first I didn't have a problem, when I started to upload the heavy stuff (photos from vacations in Disney, UK, Italy, California), the need to subdivide became obvious, yet my main front page remains this huge mess (at least it is a huge *chronological* mess, making it better than flickr's photostreams). Back-dated photos from older trips are almost never seen simply because I can't group the N albums of "Italy 2008" into a single entity.

If I had the time, I'd have already written my own front-page using the rss and webdata API's, but, well, I work for a living.

Even if they tell you to your face exactly what their intentions are, you can only ever speculate if they are telling the truth.

Agreed, and this is ever more true in (classical) music than in literature. Stravinsky's commentary on musical aesthetics and his own works are full of contradictions, both to the popular view of his works and to his own past commentary.

1 most television sucks, and will continue to suck even if you were to tape or tivo it and watch it later
2 the tv that doesn't suck is on DVD almost before the season is over, or for cable shows, is repeated so often you manage to catch it anyways.
3 HULU - on-demand watching already provided by the networks for at least some shows
4 TV Episode sales/rentals on iTunes approved by the networks for at least some shows
5 you can't take it with you. Your TiVo-taped programs, unlike a videotape, dvd, or something on the ipod, is stuck in the TiVo, and in fact the media producers ("Hollywood") went overboard on keeping the TiVo "crippled" in that way even more than the RIAA attacked the iPod (which is why it is such a pile of suck for your iPod when you get a new computer).

the issue, as i write below, is all about flash video. by not supporting it, even though technically it is possible, it is producing a device that pleases the content makers, but not the general public that is as much interested in a tool that supports their growing social media habit (youtube, blogs, facebook) as it does their occasional needs to read/watch commercial content.

the problem with not providing flash on touch devices has nothing to do with all of the "flash programming" and "navigation" issues around the flashy hovers/mouseovers we're all used to associating with flash. a gui is a gui, and if current flash developers think the touch-screen is a step backwards, they are the ones with the closed minds. things change with technology, so adapt or be left behind, but quit blaming the new technology (even if it really is more than 25 years old) for your own lack of imagination.

on the key problem, the issue is simple: flash video, as served by youtube, is the de facto standard for open video linking and embedding on the web.

remove flash support (even with youtube adding apple's proprietary format to a percentage of its content), and you are explicitly removing support for the majority of the video on the web, especially as linked by blogs and facebook.

apple is intentionally crippling their device for the web in order to drive more users to iTunes for video content. while that works to a point for the damned phones, for a larger device trying to find its raison d'etre as a potential replacement for netbooks, telling your potential userbase that the $200 netbook does more (and for free and with real freedom) than your $500 table with its appstore costs and restrictions, is NOT a good selling point.

apple is selling itself as a device for commercial content makers, but at the cost of not realizing you can't sell a device to the general public today if word gets out it is a bane to social networking. without full youtube and facebook video support, it is exactly that.

and the point of many others on the pro-php side is that there would be far MORE errors if it was written as a c++ application, due to what they see as that language's inherent complexities and lack of readability. I quit C++ for pretty much that very reason 13 years ago. Modern C++ is, in my opinion, self-obfuscating.

Now, PHP is also obfuscated now, for much the same reason - supporting multiple programming techniques (procedural, fake OO, and now real OO), large numbers of old deprecated libraries with different coding standards, and examples that poorly separate concerns (MVC) leading to bad mixes of logic and rendering until one goes out of their way to learn a template engine (and there's zillions of those, too).

But I don't have time for the mundanities of memory management and crap like that, especially when trying to figure out what the policy is for some library and how it is different from the next library I use, and for that matter, just how many libraries for C++ are out there, open-sourced and actively supported and maintained?

If FB was rewritten from scratch, to the design it is now (keeping in mind this is now effectively the 4th major iteration of it), then a C++ implementation would certainly be more efficient, if still more expensive from a developer resource perspective (C++ programmers are rare and expensive, 'cause nobody wants to work in it anymore because of all that tedium). But once written, it would be frozen because C++ produces generally far less maintainable code in my experience because of its difficulty and lack of readability.

Web applications in non-critical fields (and social networking is certainly non-critical) have to evolve, often and easily, and c++ does not provide that - it is better for a web app to risk a little instability than it is to provide 99.99% uptime but be impossible to change.

there's also the whole question of "what is the bottleneck". hint: it ain't the php servers, its the database (and its mirrors). this is true for any web app - most of the "power" of such a huge database app is in transaction handling and the like, and in that, the underlying php code is itself written in C++ - these servers will be doing the same amount of work (for this part of the process, 80/20 rules and all that) no matter what the rest of the http/html processing code is doing.

So look for a new job with less of a PHB and on the day you quit, leave a copy of the book on his desk.