Consumer:

Cook's Illustrated (for access to Solid Tested Recipes)

NetFlix

Consumer Reports (big purchases)

Mozy (Online Back Up)

used to pay for WSJ but dropped that due to News Corp content degradation.

Work pays several Online Journal and Library Access fees for me.

This was actually harder to come up with than I imagined because several of these only bill yearly or every two years and so the pain of paying virtually disappears...

Post to Craigslist personals to drive traffic.

People hitting up the personals likely have funny stories to share.

I understand promiscuously spreading the disks around but crashing it onto a comet?

How are we ever going to get that one back when we need it?

Obviously, you just wait for an itinerant hero to be played by someone who wants to finish all of the collection quests before they beat the game.

A good question to be sure but, I don't think that we should consider that disk as a backup intended for us. FSM forbid that something terrible should happen to us, perhaps another intelligent species may find it long after we're gone.

even if we survive Languages are dieing off so fast that who knows how many will be left 3k years from now.

Things will have degenerated to the point where only an offshoot of English exists. However, this will have a vocabulary consisting only of the word "like."

Station!

Word

I guess it will be more - like - Chinese?

This is built on an open platform. You can now target the TV instead of just the browser.

http://www.intelconsumerelectronics.com/Consumer-Electronics...

Among other things Pandora is good at is getting good PR when needed to help in it's Washington Lobbying.

This is at least the second time they've threatened to pull the plug to get positive legislation passed.

I agree they are a great service. It's nice to see even small tech companies take the fight to Washington (instead of ignoring them ala Intel, Microsoft and Google)

I know for a fact that Microsoft does quite a bit of lobbying. I would be surprised if Intel and Google weren't also in that game.

why would I want to share internal business decisions with an external site?

How is this any worse than having your email or bug tracking on an external site?

Agreed. It has come to the point that groups must either concede that their work will be exposed to external entities, or miss out on such tools.

actual work conversation from last week...

me: "Yes, but will this new software reduce the time it takes folks to do their jobs."

them: "I don't know."

me: "Do you know how long it takes them to do it now?"

them: "umm... no."

you hit the nail on the head in that the people making the buy decisions don't consider usability.

You can reduce the time it takes someone to do something, without knowing how long it takes them to do. That's what I'm working on right now.

If you make everyone's computer 100% faster, you know that you're delivering a net benefit, even if you're unable to quantify it (it's certainly not 100%).

Not sure about you, but I learned to code by writing psuedo code.

I routinely start with comments that psuedo code my idea and then add the sections of the code.

If I can't remember how everything is supposed to work while I'm writing it, what hope does the intern 2 years from now have in adding a new feature?

Yeah, sometimes if I'm doing a complex logic block I will just put the conditionals in and fill them in with a short description of what will be there. Generally, since I've already written them I just leave the comments in after I fill the real code in.

I've noticed that my Javascript is usually very readable and doesn't require commenting for the most part. I think using MooTools has a lot to do with it, those libraries all encourage good naming practices.

if a code is changed comments need to change too! Too many times I have seen out dated comments adding confusion to the code. If my code requires great deal of explanation, I go back to my drawing board and redesign the logic.

Very applicable point. I keep on noticing this happen and I would prefer no comments to outdated comments.

a silcon foundry uses serious games to control the flow of small one off products through their factory. Each customer can set their own price bonus for running their lot. High price, faster velocity, product available sooner. It is an open market where you are competing against all the other lots in the fab. the indivduals running the lots can then decide if it's more worth their time to wait for the 1 really valuable lot or run 10 cheaper lots.

Another option is that traditional media has caught up with the bloggers and is using Digg to drive traffic to their online sites.

NY Times and Guardian both seem to be providing much more "usable" online content that shows up here, on reddit and digg alot more often.

yeah almost all of them added social networking links to each of their stories, so people are more likely to submit/confirm a new story, and it goes to the top faster compared to a nobody blog that gets 20 diggs a day

Of course. Digg is mainstream.