Valleywag
America, Fuck Yeah
Posts Tagged “
Ted Dziuba
”
America, Fuck Yeah
social networks
To track the frequency of words in Facebook Wall posts, the social network has created a Lexicon feature. Programmer-gadfly Ted Dziuba suggests this search: "pregnant, tequila."
Facebook's new Lexicon feature lays site demographic bare
To track the frequency of words in Facebook Wall posts, the social network has created a Lexicon feature. Programmer-gadfly Ted Dziuba suggests this search: "pregnant, tequila."
Uncov editor switches to photo art
Terrible Ted's Photoshop remix of an Owen-and-Julia party shot is so good I had to pull it up out of the comments.
software
Why Microsoft wants Yahoo -- it's losing at paintball
Can Microsoft's army of programmers write software for the Web? Judging by a spate of recent outages, no. Hotmail, Messenger, and other services targeted at developers and partners have broken down recently. Which is bizarre: Writing an operating system is a vastly more complex affair than coding a website. "Like war versus paintball," says Ted Dziuba, the programmer and former editor of startup-debunker blog Uncov. Therein lies Microsoft's problem. Once you've trained to fight a real war, you can forget about winning at paintball. More »
caption contest
Leah Culver gives Kyle Shank the cupcake treatment
Former Uncov guy and Persai CEO Kyle Shank, at center, recovers from an unsolicited cupcake smearing by Pownce's Leah Culver. The attack, likely motivated by Uncov accomplice Ted Dziuba's frequent gibes directed at Culver, took place at Flickr's fourth birthday party. Flickr's Cal Henderson, right, is said to have served as Culver's accomplice. Speaking of, can anyone confirm whether Henderson and Culver are dating? The two were inseparable at SXSW. If so, snaps to Culver: We hear Henderson's website is highly scalable. (Photo by magerleagues)
ec2
Amazon.com gives startups a 50-percent-off sale
Jeff Bezos likes to say he's in the business of delighting customers. And then he delivers that howling, hooting laugh. The latest guffaw-provoker: Amazon EC2, a service which lets startups run their programs on servers housed in Amazon.com's datacenters. When it launched, Amazon promised "the equivalent of a 1.7GHz x86 processor" — in other words, a fairly low-powered server, but at the cost of a dime an hour. Ted Dziuba, the acid-tongued former editor of Uncov, found that Amazon actually delivered half that performance. Why haven't you heard more about this? Likely because most of the me-too, slapdash websites making use of Amazon's EC2 aren't running anything more processor-intensive than an index-hit SQL select. More »
valleywag calendar
Don't FAIL to meet Ted Dziuba at Moose's
What better way to celebrate a week of turning down TechCrunch job offers and reducing its writers to obscene Twitters than drinking at Moose's? Persai's Ted Dziuba is our guest of honor for tonight's Valleywag Friday. Read on for the rest of the calendar: More »
duncan riley
TechCrunch races us to bottom, wins again
TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley offers a more colorful description of Persai programmer and Uncov blogger Ted Dziuba than I could ever, ever come up with. If you missed it, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington recently tried unsuccessfully to hire Dziuba to port his Uncov-style nastiness to Arrington's platform. Style points to Riley for his use of c*nt. I had no idea he was a Unix guy.
blogging for dollars
TechCrunch fails to hire Uncov editor
Give Michael Arrington credit: He tried to hire his worst best critic, Uncov editor Ted Dziuba, who spent several months shadowing TechCrunch posts with scathing, technically astute slams of Web 2.0 startups and their products. Arrington's offer sounds pretty sweet: "write a weekly or monthly column for us. we'll call it a counter balance to our hype. No rules or restrictions on what you write," was Arrington's email, according to Dziuba. But from what I know of Ted, he has two reasons not to take the offer. More »
developers, developers, developers
MySpace has launched a so-called "developer platform," allowing glorified Web designers to write widgets slightly more sophisticated than a photo slideshow for the News Corp.-owned website. I asked Ted Dziuba of the late, lamented Uncov what he thought. Here's what he said:
MySpace non-platform launches
MySpace has launched a so-called "developer platform," allowing glorified Web designers to write widgets slightly more sophisticated than a photo slideshow for the News Corp.-owned website. I asked Ted Dziuba of the late, lamented Uncov what he thought. Here's what he said:c++ standard library: developer platformExactly. But calling it a "platform" lets MySpace pitch itself as the next Microsoft, and its "developers" fancy themselves the next Linus Torvalds. It benefits everyone, except for real programmers who have to explain to their CEO why they don't have a platform, too.
java with hibernate & struts: developer platform
ruby on rails: developer platform
myspace: not a developer platform
breakdowns
Pownce's botched launch reminds us why we miss Uncov
Last night Pownce attempted to launch live to the public, but instead launched FAIL, a tipster tells us in an email with this error message attached. No, this tipster is not Uncov's Ted Dziuba, the Leah Culver-despising hero of all real programmers. We ended all that. Nevertheless, Dziuba's definition of the site remains useful. More »
"I am a little sad to see it go. But it had to be done. It's like breaking up with a girlfriend who's a fiend in the sack but she's batshit crazy and you know she'll just drive you nuts in the end." — Uncov writer Ted Dziuba explains why he decided to quit posting his nasty but technically astute takedowns of Web 2.0 startups. [Epicenter]
the crunchies
Valleywag kills Uncov once and for all
Folks, it's my fault. I broke Uncov, the hysterically funny anti-TechCrunch which so ably dissects why startups fail. It all started with an innocent idea for a stunt: Send Ted Dziuba, Uncov's lead writer, to the Crunchies, to see what he made of the TechCrunch-sponsored startup awards show. "It will be a nonstop festival of fail," I promised him. Dziuba, after a bit of fussing, agreed. The result is classic Uncov: Dziuba chronicles the presenters' ineptitude and fittingly doesn't write about a single "winner" — predictably, he found them unworthy of mention. But I didn't expect this: "One more thing. This is the last Uncov. Ever. I have been getting tired of it, and this has been manifesting itself in my writing. After seeing the spectacle at the Crunchies, I think it's finally time to quit." Ted, you're just going to quit like that? Fail.
party report
We wear our sunglasses at night
No, I don't understand Paul Boutin's fixation with Bono, either. But he brought a fistful of sunglasses to Moose's on Friday, and before we knew it, everyone was putting them on. The bar's lighting is already moody, and let me tell you, when you put on a pair of Bulgari, it gets murkier than an open-standards discussion list. Things got even geekier when the boys from Uncov rolled in. And then, out of nowhere — well, out of Las Vegas, really — Julia Allison and Meghan Asha showed up to glam up the evening. Did we say "happy hour"? Our apologies. We practically closed the place. Next Friday: Natali Del Conte's going-away party.
"The whole scene is like a little league game where everyone's a winner and everyone gets a trophy at the end. You've got people like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble who are the coaches of the team and handing out the trophies, and then Uncov is like the creepy guy in the trench coat sitting in the stands." — Startupper Ted Dziuba tells Wired why his nasty little blog kicks the collective asses of the TechCrunch crowd. [Wired]
party report
The geeks behind caustic Web 2.0 review site Uncov threw down Friday night at SoMa's Mars Bar. There were no demos, no sponsors, and not a blue shirt in sight. Instead, there was a lot of drinking. My kind of scene. A few months after launching the site, writers Ted Dziuba, Kyle Shank, and Matt Kent decided to venture into the physical world and actually meet some of the people they profiled — the ones who were brave enough to attend, anyway. It was billed as a "Drink the Pain Away" night, and, yes, that description was very, very apt. Uncov, of course, prides itself on being the anti-TechCrunch, and its meet-and-greet reflected that spirit. Unlike the uptight, identically dressed sycophants atTechCrunch9, the crowd at Mars Bar was vibrant, loud, and fun. And drunk. Very very drunk. More »
Geeks gone mild raid Uncov shindig
The geeks behind caustic Web 2.0 review site Uncov threw down Friday night at SoMa's Mars Bar. There were no demos, no sponsors, and not a blue shirt in sight. Instead, there was a lot of drinking. My kind of scene. A few months after launching the site, writers Ted Dziuba, Kyle Shank, and Matt Kent decided to venture into the physical world and actually meet some of the people they profiled — the ones who were brave enough to attend, anyway. It was billed as a "Drink the Pain Away" night, and, yes, that description was very, very apt. Uncov, of course, prides itself on being the anti-TechCrunch, and its meet-and-greet reflected that spirit. Unlike the uptight, identically dressed sycophants atTechCrunch9, the crowd at Mars Bar was vibrant, loud, and fun. And drunk. Very very drunk. More »
