… by which I mean that if you buy a Xoom and want all its whiz-bang features, you’ll have to wait a while until the future catches up.

The Xoom has an impressive list of features that will only come to work by way of future upgrades.

1. 4G LTE support, which will require you to ship the tablet back to Motorola for over a week.
2. The microSD slot is not functional (they blame this one on Google).
3. Adobe Flash isn’t there. Wasn’t that the “big thing” that made this better than an iPad? Hmmmm?

Oh, and you can’t charge it via USB.

I can’t wait … to order an iPad 2.

Unless you live in a hut in the Sahara somewhere, you probably already know the iPad 2 is coming in a week. I keep running across articles that bemoan this or that feature that they hoped for but didn’t get. Some of it really makes me roll my eyes.

Retina Display

This would be awesome. And I bet Apple would do it, if people would pay $699 for the base model. So… no. Check back next year.

Stereo speakers

Really? You’re confused about this? Let’s review how stereo works. You have a right channel and a left channel. You use them to create an illusion that is targeted to the right and left ears of the listener. Let’s review how the iPad works. You hold it in any orientation as you see fit. Now, where exactly do you suggest we put the “left” and “right” speakers?

Thunderbolt

Oh, sure. 10gb/s I/O wouldn’t kill the battery at all. Especially because, like USB, it can power connected devices.

4G/LTE wireless

Really? Okay, so people in the ten square miles of the US with 4G/LTE coverage would be happy, and everybody else would think the iPad sucks.

Paul Graham on college education (from 2007):

A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.

For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up. What was I? A student. To do that well meant to get good grades. Why did one have to get good grades? To get into a good college. And why did one want to do that? There seemed to be several reasons: you’d learn more, get better jobs, make more money. But it didn’t matter exactly what the benefits would be. College was a bottleneck through which all your future prospects passed; everything would be better if you went to a better college.

A few weeks ago I realized that somewhere along the line I had stopped believing that.

What first set me thinking about this was the new trend of worrying obsessively about what kindergarten your kids go to. It seemed to me this couldn’t possibly matter. Either it won’t help your kid get into Harvard, or if it does, getting into Harvard won’t mean much anymore. And then I thought: how much does it mean even now?

It turns out I have a lot of data about that.

News from the Front - Paul Graham

Perhaps you’re one of those people who declares: “I’m not rate-limited! I spend all my time in design and almost none of it entering code!” I hear that all the time.

You’re wrong, though. Programmers type all day long, even when they’re designing. Especially when they’re designing, in fact, because they need to have conversations with remote participants.

Here’s the industry’s dirty secret:

Programmers who don’t touch-type fit a profile.

If you’re a touch-typist, you know the profile I’m talking about. It’s dirty. People don’t talk about dirty secrets in polite company. Illtyperacy is the bastard incest child hiding in the industry’s basement. I swear, people get really uncomfortable talking about it. We programmers act all enlightened on Reddit, but we can’t face our own biggest socio-cultural dirty secret.

Stevey’s Blog Rants: Programming’s Dirtiest Little Secret

Paul Graham, on our obsession with material possessions:

Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless.

In fact, worse than worthless, because once you’ve accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around. I know of one couple who couldn’t retire to the town they preferred because they couldn’t afford a place there big enough for all their stuff. Their house isn’t theirs; it’s their stuff’s.

Not long after I bought my first home in 1997, I was talking to the next-door neighbor and mentioned that I was envious of his basement. My house didn’t have one, but I had grown up with basements all my life. I was always trying to figure out where to store things.

He replied that he had been in his house since it was built in the early 50s, and he pitied whoever had to clean the basement out when he died. That was the first time I ever thought of a basement as a double-edged sword.

I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady’s attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn’t even remember what else I had stored in that attic.

And yet when I got back I didn’t discard so much as a box of it. Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.

This reminds me of the storage unit I rented when I was selling my last house. I filled a 100 square foot room with extraneous stuff I didn’t have any day-to-day use for. It sat in there for more than six months.

Paul Graham on: Stuff

That’s very true.

Unfortunately, Instapaper’s support for the Kindle is missing one pretty big feature: the ability to assign a specific Instapaper folder to send to a Kindle.

The only choice today is to feed “Read Later” to a Kindle. That’s great, if you only use Instapaper for articles you want to read later. But how many people actually use it that way?

I feed all sorts of things into Instapaper.

• Longer-form articles
• Short blog posts
• YouTube or Vimeo video pages
• A political petition to be filled out
• A cool gadget I saw on Amazon or wherever

The long-form articles are what I want to send to my Kindle.

The blog posts would work for it, but why bother sending them there? I can usually read those in under two minutes. And sending video pages or petitions to my Kindle is just a waste. I can’t do anything with them there.

My solution for a while now has been to split “Read Later” into two folders. The main “Read Later,” and a second that I named “Read Later - not for Kindle.” I have two bookmarklets in Safari, one to send to my Kindle, the other to send to a generic Instapaper folder. Not so bad, right?

Not if I’m using a browser.

Here’s the problem. I send things to Instapaper from a lot of places. The browser, sure, but also from certain web apps I use, and from a number of iPhone apps. Sometimes I email content to my Instapaper account. And none of those methods support folders. The default for feeding into Instapaper via its API or email is to stuff everything into “Read Later”.

That leaves me back where I started—now I have Kindle-inappropriate items that might get fed to my Kindle. I have to pay Amazon for that delivery (okay, it’s really cheap, but I’m still paying for it).

I have workarounds. Most iPhone apps, for instance, support opening links in Mobile Safari. So I do that, leaving the app I was using, wait for the page to load a second time in Safari, then use a bookmarklet to save to my non-Kindle Instapaper folder. Then I have to go back to the app I started from, sometimes having to wait for the page to load a third time, only to tap back to whatever I am viewing (a Twitter stream, Facebook, Pulse News, whatever).

I could just put everything in “Read Later”, then go into the Instapaper iPhone app or the web site and tidy up the folders before Friday morning when the weekly Kindle deliveries go out. If I remember to. Which I never do.

All of this would be solved if Instapaper supported assigning a folder for Kindle posts. Then I could haphazardly fill up “Read Later”, and as I look through that stream, move things into the Kindle folder. Easy. Or at least much easier than the dance I’ve been going through.

I mean was going through. Because at this point, I’m finding this dance so annoying that I have turned Kindle deliveries off entirely. I’ll just read things on my iPhone or laptop, and go back to using the Kindle for reading books.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Kindle and I love Instapaper. I’m just sick of workarounds.

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

If so, do you tell this person he is “too serious,” or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?

If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren’t caring for him properly.

Caring for Your Introvert | The Atlantic

I just found this gem in Vim’s help files.

:help map-overview

1

:nunmap can also be used outside of a monastery.

A few months after the FCC dropped the fairness doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s program, with its in-your-face attitude and one-sided perspective, was syndicated. Limbaugh marketed his show in unprecedented fashion, offering it free of charge to stations across the nation. Within weeks, fifty-six stations had picked up the show; within four years, over six hundred stations were carrying it—the fastest spread of any talk show in history. Others imitated Limbaugh’s format. The number of radio talk stations more than doubled from 1987 to 1993.

In 1993, the nation discovered the political power of this new entity. The Democratic Congress and newly elected Democratic White House revived the effort to make the fairness doctrine law. Rush mobilized his listeners. The bill never came up for a vote. According to National Public Radio, “privately, top aides in both the House and Senate admit that efforts to reimpose the doctrine have been put on hold in large part due to the talk show hosts.”

In 1994, talk radio made itself felt in national elections. When the Republicans stunningly captured the House of Representatives that year, for the first time in almost forty years, Newt Gingrich called it “the first talk radio election.” In early 1995, the Republican Party held a special ceremony for Limbaugh, naming him an honorary member of Congress. They dubbed him the majority maker.

Guernica / Public Disinterest

As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?

What’s different about religion is that people don’t feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those.

Keep Your Identity Small | Paul Graham