brucehart

I've seen some speculation that Gmail slows down because your account is assigned to a server with other older accounts which are also growing and straining server capacity. Is it possible that the speed increase comes from being assigned to a new server more than the decrease in mailbox size? It would interesting to see someone test this by fully restoring their old account in a new account and comparing performance.

I like the idea, but it isn't clear to me what motivates the users to participate. Can the developer offer some sort of financial incentive to the users?

This is an area where a disruptive technology is due. Imagine if even 10% of bikes had technology that wirelessly sends out GPS coordinates or can identify the owner via an embedded RFID tag. Suddenly stealing bikes is not nearly as risk free and the incentive to participate is greatly reduced.

You're right. I was looking at the diagram. Clearly the author accidentally swapped the two names in that sentence.

He is saying the opposite. The downtown train arrives on the hour and the uptown train arrives at 5 minutes after the hour.

I read somewhere that JCPenney is shifting to a strategy like this for clothing brands. The stores will start to shift to a cluster of mini-showrooms that each showcase a different brand. My first thought when I heard this is that the brands that are strong enough to be successful in this format would have already have their own store in malls.

I think such a strategy would only work for marquee brands. Apple can get away with a store with nothing but Apple products, but I wouldn't want to buy a TV from a store that only sold LGs. I would want to compare across brands since there is little to differentiate an LG from a Sharp or Samsung.

I was under the impression that TicketsNow had very little market share. Aren't (EBay owned) StubHub, EBay and Craigslist the major players in the secondary market (excluding scalpers at the event)?

I have college basketball season tickets and my online account is integrated with TicketsNow (one click to electronically list my tickets to any game). I've tried using it as a seller and have had no interest in my tickets. The same tickets usually sell within a few days on StubHub.

As a buyer, I have checked TicketsNow on occasion and rarely find any tickets available for the event. One time I did find a great deal: 5th row center court tickets to a sold out game at face value. I think I got them because no other buyers had looked on the site.

I bought an original Tivo with lifetime service in 1999 and I still use the subscription today. 6 or 7 years ago they offered a promotion that allowed you to transfer your lifetime service to a new HD unit and that device is still running. The service has cost me an average of $1.28/mo.

People do get very jealous even if it doesn't affect them. I automated something similar in one of my grad school courses (image processing). Each assignment required a report to be generated in a particular format that showed all of the results from each step in the assignment. It could be very time consuming because if you made any adjustments to your code based on incorrect results in later steps, you would often have to go back and edit the entire report to reflect your changes. I wrote a script to automatically generate these reports as I worked on the assignment. If I made any changes to my code, I could generate a new report in seconds.

A student in my class looked over my shoulder and saw me run my script in the lab. I thought she was just going to ask if she could have a copy of it, but instead she angrily accused me of plagiarism. When I asked where I was supposedly plagiarizing from, she instead just accused me of cheating. She went up to our professor in class and demanded that I received no credit for the assignment. The grades in this class were not curved in any way, so my grade would have no impact on her's. Luckily, the professor just laughed at her and said "What? I'm supposed to give him an F for being smarter than you? Write your own damn script if it's that useful.".

I was able to find a cached version here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

It's a neat story, but I am suspicious too. The photo in the Springfield Gazette is a mirror image of this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abelincoln1846.jpeg . Wikipedia claims this photo is from 1846, but the newspaper is from 1845. Also, I would be surprised if a photo could be printed with that level of detail in 1845.

I wonder if this more of a tribute to P.T. Barnum (the first subject mentioned in the article) than Abraham Lincoln.

Google has $44.6 billion in cash and short term investments at their disposal. Dropbox was recently valued at $4 billion. If Google could spend hundred of millions (or even a few billion) offering tons of storage space, you would have to think might consider doing so over doing something like trying to buy Dropbox. They would become the leader in the space almost overnight. At the very least, I would expect them to offer unlimited storage for movies and music purchased in the Google Play store (similar to Amazon).

That has to be a mistake. You already can upload more than 7 GB using Google Docs. It would be more in line with Google to offer 100 GB or 1 TB free and really blow away the competition. I wonder if they have considered what it would cost to offer 1 TB of storage vs. buying Dropbox. Most people would not use anything close to the maximum and of course the storage costs will get cheaper over time.

Google needs to give people a compelling reason to try out the service. Remember when GMail launched in 2004 and 1 GB of storage space for e-mail seemed crazy? I think Hotmail offered 4 MB of space at the time. You had to constantly delete old e-mails to keep below the quota. Storing files in the cloud is reaching a tipping point where it becomes mainstream. Google needs to get a foothold now if they want to be the leader in this product category.

The download is a QuickTime file (.mov extension).

For Windows, Duplicati is a good option: http://code.google.com/p/duplicati/

For Linux, try Duplicity (which I mentioned in another comment): http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Both are open source and have similar features to Arq (including Amazon S3 support).

I looked into backup options for my company and ended up rolling our own solution using an open-source program called Duplicity: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ . I've been really impressed with Duplicity. Incremental backups are fast, the data is encrypted and you can target many different source/destination types (local file system, ssh, Amazon S3, ftp).

Yes, you can reach me at bruce.hart AT gmail DOT com .

I have a little experience working with Google Calendar. You should be able to add events to other calendars if you authenticate with an account that has appropriate permissions (just like you would in the Google Apps interface). You'll need to use the CalendarId of the coworker's calendar in your requests, which you can retrieve using the calendar.calendarList.list function.

This is a neat project (with good documentation!). I really like PhantomJS, and it's great for pulling data off of a single page but sometimes it can be a pain to use it to run a series of steps in sequence. I was thinking about trying to hook into the PhantomJS, but this looks like a very clean way to do this. A similar project that is also very useful is pjscrape: http://nrabinowitz.github.com/pjscrape/ .

There was a lot of hand waving in that article to arrive at that conclusion. The "80/20 rule" is a good estimate for some situations, but it may not apply in this case. For example, Netflix probably doesn't follow the 80/20 rule since most subscribers pay the same price for one of a couple different plans.

Best Buy was my favorite store when I was a kid. Now it's too much of a chore to shop there. Even if you buy something small, you get hit up with offers for credit cards and magazine subscriptions. They play games where they tack on Geek Squad fees to remove software or install antivirus programs when you try to buy a new computer whether you want it or not.

The last time I went there was about a year ago when my Dad wanted to buy a 60" LCD TV. The selection was poor and confusingly scattered across different sections. When we asked a sales guy for help, the first question he asked is if we needed an HDMI cable to go with the TV (that hadn't been picked out yet). When I said we didn't need to buy a cable the sales person stopped helping us and left. We walked out of the store empty handed.

I noticed that the Nest asks you for your zip code. Maybe it uses the Wi-Fi connection to pull weather information so it can make adjustments like this?

Google's pricing is pretty close to Amazon's for low-end users, but high-end users will still find S3 to be much cheaper. I was hoping Google would be the competitor that would pressure Amazon to reduce the cost of S3. S3's prices have been pretty constant over the last few years even though I would assume that Amazon's expenses have decreased due to lower storage and hardware costs.

I've used name.com for many years and have always been satisfied with their service. The advertising the author is complaining about only shows up if you do not configure the DNS records or name servers after buying the domain. Usually I spend 30 seconds setting this up as soon as I buy the domain, so the advertising doesn't even cross my mind.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought this practice was pretty standard across the industry. The "unscrupulous" registrar tactics that I'm more concerned about are registrars that take domains when they sense demand (such as from searching or whois lookups) and hold it from you until you pay a premium. I've never had this issue with name.com and have found it very easy to transfer domains with them as well.

This $49 development kit from Arrow is a good place to start if you are new to FPGA development but have a programming background: http://www.altera.com/b/nios-bemicro-evaluation-kit.html . There is a step-by-step tutorial included that shows you how to program the FPGA and how to set up an embedded processor on the FPGA that you can program in C.

There are several free programs that will download all of the photos in your Flickr account. I've used this one in the past: http://sunkencity.org/flickrbackup/ and it works pretty well.

Netflix isn't competing with cable in terms of getting eyeballs for the same content, but it is competing with cable in terms of time spent on entertainment. I know several people who have canceled their cable subscription because they found they had plenty of things to watch with a $10/month Netflix subscription and no longer found a $50-100/month cable subscription to be a good value.

They must have changed the prize distribution procedure for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I was on the show in 2000. They gave us a big speech about how if you win a big prize, they will literally cut you a check for that amount and you should talk to a tax advisor before spending anything. One of their early winners got into some tax trouble. I didn't win anything on the show, but they sent me a check for $400 in January to cover my taxes on the plane tickets and hotel.

I have to wonder how many people are clicking (tapping?) on these ads by mistake. When you play Paper Toss, the ad is in a band across the top of the screen and you are moving your finger towards it every time you make a throw. The ads I saw were not very relevant. For example one was for storage rental in California when I live in Ohio.

The mobile ad space at the moment reminds me of when AdSense came out a few years ago and all these web site were making huge amounts of money. Eventually Google tightened the rules and advertisers got a better handle on the real value of the ads. Now it is much more difficult to make good money unless you have a very high traffic site.