smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

It appears the previous design is still considered by some to be a ‘clone’ of Gruber’s Daring Fireball, despite sharing absolutely no similarities under the hood.

Whilst flattering, it is none-the-less a distraction that cannot possibly end up on a positive note.

Design regressed, the topic is now closed. Thank you.

Jesper takes another cracking shot at why stuff keeps staying broke, despite constant development marching forward:

“Okay, stop. Guys working on larger capacity hard drives, flash drives, cheaper memory, better power supplies, fundamentally different CPUs and cures for cancer, you can keep going. The rest of you, spend five years fixing the fundamental issues.”

The problem is that fixing issues just isn’t sexy. Oh, sure, you can make debugging sound sudo pseudo-sexy, Joyent’s constant spruiking of dtrace to all who will listen is proof of that.

Fixing problems has always been the Achilles Heel of any software or hardware platform, because it’s often easier — both up-sell and manage — to build something new than fix the old one. The entire software and hardware industry is entirely geared up to consume and burn, not rebuild.

And that won’t change until the consumer and the market embrace the concept of “green” re-use and re-cycle concepts. Ironically it’s just as much our fault — for demanding change over improvement — as those controlling the product cycles. Makes you think, doesn’t it.

I still find this to be an amazing source of inspiration, both in the sense of showcase of design, and the often beautiful typeface selections.

Mr Mullenweg outlines what the WP.com Marketplace concept entails:

At the end of the day, it’s just a market. I’m sure styles, pricing strategies, and more will develop over time.

Themes would be on sale to wordpress.com users, free to self-install users (care of the GPL) and would split income to both developer and Automattic alike. Although it’s hardly surprising people are a tad polarised on the topic.

Given there are a number of add-on options already on sale, themery will merely add to the existing pay-per-view line-up strengthening the .com brand, via strong value add — hardly a malicious act in of itself.

A recent entry over at The Blog Herald by David Peralty, seems to be polarising views somewhat:

Creating such a marketplace, to me, is basically saying that no themes can make money, unless Matt is getting a cut of the proceeds, and that doesn’t seem right.

It’s really not about the money, even if Matt sends occasional mixed signals. Nor does the latest yet-to-be-launched product out of the Automattic stables, have anything to do with theme sponsorship.

Rather it is clear that Matt is very strongly committed to product and brand control. Recent trends towards the strong commercialisation of wordpress.com and the GPL’d self-install Wordpress itself to an extent do illustrate that clearly.

Michael Gartenberg opinions the following on the recent HD DVD pricing plunge:

Notably the fact that we’re seeing HD-DVD players at much lower prices, as low as $99. At that point, it’s not a competition between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray, it’s a competition (correctly so) between HD-DVD and DVD.

The format war is going to be won in the retail sector. The feature count, or potential benefits of one over the other really ceases to gain traction when market forces take over. This will spill over to affect Blue-ray sales if that format can’t deliver similar cost reductions, despite suggestions this is just a HD-DVD versus DVD battle.

Blue-ray may find it’s the next Betamax. A superior format to VHS that simply lost out in the inevitable price war.

Glenn Wolsey on supporting developers:

Twitterrific 3.0 can be used completely free of charge if you wish. Registering simply eliminates advertising from the tweet timeline.

I’m with Glenn on this one. Although not a full-time Mac user, I have and continue to use Twitterrific, whilst I may not necessarily pay for the privilege of posting to twitter given the number of alternative softwares available, I have absolutely no issue with the developer adding vetted, quality advertising via The Deck.