Thank you for the feedback. It appears that I chose a title for my article that struck a nerve with some of you. It was not my intent to encourage readers to rashly quit their jobs to start their own poorly thought-out businesses; though in hindsight, I can see how it got interpreted that way. It was my intent to describe the intrinsic connection that your fledgling business shares with your current and past employers and the importance and benefits of honoring that connection. To clarify this point, I have renamed the article to "Quitting Your Job to Pursue Your New Company" and rewritten a portion of the first paragraph. I hope that this new title causes less confusion.
I think that people use "covering (negligible) costs" as a euphemism for trying to businessify their side-project. Covering these low costs would be the first, modest goal in trying to convert the project to a business anyway. If they instead told their friends or web-colleagues that they're trying to grow their web-trinket into a viable business, they'd probably be criticized and made fun of and ultimately talked out of the idea. So instead they talk about "covering costs," and it's pretty much a low-investment, no-risk way of experimenting with making something a business.
I think it'd be sweet to have some kind of wishlist feature. Not like the Amazon wishlist where you link to items that are for sale, but where buyers can declare what they are looking for with the hopes that sellers will fulfill it. Nothing fancy, just maybe something that sellers could access when working on submitting their inventory.
My understanding is that last year (2007), while everyone was salivating over the iphone and contemplating the its ramifications on the high-end phone market, Nokia sold the rest of the world budget phones and posted record profits. So I don't think they're really banking on the smartphone market -- at least as we've defined "smartphone" in the US. Especially when their high-end phones are selling for double or triple the price of the too-beat offering (iphone).
"Some Web frameworks use session state to track and hold information about the user throughout their journey through the site, however they go against the RESTful principles and should really be treated as a bug."
I'll bet this guy's not fun to be in design meetings with.
I think that Damien's point is that he doesn't get the "self-evidence" or Good Thinginess of using REST as a _developer_ of a web application. I see it over and over again in development situations: As soon as the topic of webservices comes up, someone starts crying, "REST! REST! OMG, REST!" And that's usually before they've even heard what the web service will do.
It's funny: When REST advocates are pressed about how REST might not be the best choice for every, single development effort, they either:
1. Simply regurgitate REST's tenants
2. Deny that they are regurgitating REST's tenants, and then go on to regurgitate REST's tenants
I think that everyone can acknowledge the good of using REST as a _user_ of a web application -- which is what the REST literature addresses anyway. But is REST going help app developers deliver features in a timely manner? Is it the most agile way to develop? Not necessarily.
<controversial>If you follow REST to its purist implications, you probably wouldn't have a dynamic web application at all. Instead, you'd have a interlinked mesh of of hand-written HTML pages that cover every representation of the application. Hello, Early Web!</controversial>
So anyway, if REST works for you, awesome; as long as you've designed your resources and interfaces intelligibly, you're helping to make the waters of the internet easier to navigate. It SOAP/RPC isn't working for you, maybe you should try REST. But if SOAP/RPC is serving you just fine, don't let this topic rock your boat.
I think they need to decide whether they want to be a personal blog for Arrington's uninformed self-injection or real journalism. Right now, I think they're pretending to the latter while operating as the former.
Boards of Canada, Brian Eno, and other ambient stuff. Stereolab is also good. There's also this 13 minute ambient song by American Analog Set that is awesome for work: Late One Sunday.