The Register: When children do journalism.

He may have some points in there, but any real content is drowned by the noise of the baseless insults, ad-hominem attacks, and poor writing. The angry rant style can be made to work, but it needs to be backed up by actual skill at writing, and it definitely doesn't substitute for content.

This article makes me sad.

> It's a joke.

Worse, I think it's art.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Paul Buchheit quotes:

"The internet is about harnessing the power of the bored for the benefit of the lazy."

This guy is so annoying. You might think that the non-success of his own startup (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/19/pressflip-is-a-belly-fl...) would make him slightly more humble, but apparently not.

The key word in the sentence "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" is "late." - i.e. it's about adding developers in order to meet a preordained deadline. Open source just removed the deadline from the process.

The first rule of Apple products is you don't talk about bugs or issues with Apple products.

And people complain about Zed Shaw's expletive-filled writing style? At least Zed has a sense of humor and blasts just about everything in sight. As for this article, let's see. Hero worship? Check. Ad hominem attacks? Check. Uninformed comments ("RubyForge? What... is that?")? Check.

Don't click through if you have epilepsy, or if you don't.

Well it IS in beta :)

From the last paragraph:

I just have to keep remembering this is the early days of the iPhone and I suppose it is similar to the early days of the Pocket PC when stability was also an issue. I did cut Microsoft and Nokia a break back then when they were starting out and I’ll keep using my original iPhone...

If I only had a nickel for every news article that would be dramatically improved if the last paragraph -- the one where the author apologizes for the linkbait headline -- were moved to the top.

Windows Mobile is somewhere between 5 and 8 years old. The release version of the iPhone OS is all of one year old and version 2.0 is only a month old. If you don't want to be burned like an early adopter, don't be an early adopter.

Incidentally, the rate at which MobileSafari crashes dropped a lot, for me, when I installed iPhone OS 2.0.1. This article doesn't say whether or not the author has done the same. And I agree that 3G and GPS may not be worth the additional monthly fees and the reduced battery life... which is why I bought a 2G iPhone on eBay.

There's a bit of a contradiction in this article. He says that programmers seem to be about 5 times as productive as they were in Fred Brook's day. If you reduce the size of a team by a factor of 5, you also reduce the communication overhead by a factor of 25. I do not see that this is accounted for in his reasoning.

Also, the truth of the majority of most FOSS projects is that the lion's share of the work is done by a minority of the contributors.

By what metric was it a huge success in 1999? They had a good product, but most people had never heard of the company. I remember having to explain that it was "kind of like Yahoo, but with good search and none of the other features", and they were always like, "well, good luck with that." (obviously thinking to themselves, "another stupid .com")