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 Dave Winer, one of the creators of RSS, has always been vocal about his vision of the way RSS ‘should be used.’ He has always been fairly critical of the way that Google Reader shows RSS data. I’d like to equate this to the inventor of the hammer complaining that people use it to actually remove nails in addition to pounding them in.
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Mr. Winer, I fully appreciate the great contributions that you’ve made to the Internet. Your input on the variety of new technologies that have and are emerging are invaluable and I subscribe to many of your feeds. I do, in fact, agree with your perspective of RSS as a river of news, the vast majority of which can and should go unexamined. I must say though, that your ire against Google is significantly misdirected.
In the first place, you assume that the model of email is that it is general practice for users to examine every email that enters their inbox. I can assure you that this is certainly not true for many people. I have no desire to read my 5-6 daily emails from twitter telling me about each individual new follower I have, but they are good to have because I can then go back through those emails and examine for possible followbacks. Email is as much for record keeping and formality as for actual communication. Good email programs help the user prioritize and sort emails into ‘read now,’ ‘read later,’ and ‘just store for reference later.’
Different users have different needs for RSS too. The biggest difference is that RSS is generally public, and widely accessible. As opposed to email which is single target. Users want to be able to sort their feeds into ‘catch every one,’ ‘check frequently,’ and ‘mostly ignore, but scan for headlines.’ Google Reader gives users exactly that kind of flexibility. In fact, I use Google Reader precisely because it gives me the level of granularity of control that I need and provides a great river of news look. Only thing that could make it better would be auto-refresh and the ability to suppress the ‘unread’ on selected folders if I wish to.
 Yaakov Teitel is facing charges in the Israeli court system for, among other things, sending a bomb disguised as a Purim gift to a Messianic Jewish family, injuring a young boy, and putting poisoned bottles of fruit juice by the side of the road near a Palestinian village. Apparently this dude (he confessed) eventually succeeded in killing 2 people, a taxi driver and a shepherd. Not cool, hope this guy gets put away.
Sarcasm: Real bad ass, man. Killing shepherds & taxi drivers. Hardcore.
Researchers at NIST have created a programmable, 2-qubit quantum processor.
Mr. Hanneke suggests that while this is just the first 2-qubit processor, one could combine many such processors by linking them together.
Qubits, are roughly similar to the ‘bits’ used in traditional computing, except that qubits can be both 1 & 0 at the same time. The NIST processor uses ultraviolet lasers to manipulate individual atoms to track such qubit information.
This is a big step towards ‘Quantum Computing,’ which is a new kind of computing that would (it doesn’t exist yet) use stuff much smaller than electrons to process data. This is science fiction slowly becoming reality here. The final product will probably depend on this other research being done on quantum teleportation.
To those of you who think that the rich get away with a free ride in our ‘capitalist’ society:
Personal FinanceSoftware – Mint.com
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