I disagree, politics has always been about haggling, you cannot do politics if you don't know how to build a coalition. A politician cannot represent 100% of the people that is why there are political parties and politicians of different ideologies. I think if you look a little deeper all the JFKs, Reagans and Clintons were hagglers and negotiators first. A good politician is an expert negotiator and the very best are exceptional leaders. Its been the same since the first democracy was born. The only change now is that it is very easy to identify who will part of your coalition.
Microsoft wants to leverage their desktop dominance to introduce people to their mobile offerings. The change from start menu to start screen fits right into that strategy. However you can get back the start menu by installing classic shell, pokki etc.
What kind of computations were you doing on MRI which resulted in such performance boost by switching to JRuby? I have tried Rails under JRuby many times, the performance is the same as 1.9.3 and memory consumption usually higher.
Why do you think Go is no suited for web apps? At the end of the day web apps are just servers, and Go is very well suited to create reliable and efficient servers. Go is also one of the languages supported by Google App Engine to create web apps.
Computer industry as we know it has got here because of sharing of ideas (someone once said "stealing ideas"), these patents wars just don't feel right and may hurt the industry a lot and stifle innovation.
I use hetzner, they are based in Germany. The customer service is stellar and servers are priced very competitively. You can check them out at www.hetzner.de
I am quite interested in this subject. What is the legal process of starting a country? Is there any land available in the world which can be bought for starting a new country?
You are correct in pointing out that absence of support and preinstalled Linux laptop and desktop is an impediment to Linux adoption.
However, after installing ubuntu on my Mom's computer last year, my support calls got cut in half. Now she doesn't have to fight with malware, viruses all the time. I think Linux as a desktop has matured enough that most people can use it for their everyday computing.
The advice is meant for the 10% not the 90%. People who took time to mail Michael Abrash, have some knowledge, ambition and passion. Out of these 10% some will have the drive to follow through, do the hard work and love the journey, they will become the top 1%. So the advice is not meant for everyone just for some.
But the question is, can't these horror stories happen on other payment networks. If a physical item paid by credit card is disputed "not as described", its my understanding that the credit card issuer will get the money back from just about any payment network. If you want to avoid such horror stories have a clear no hassle return policy.
I would suggest adding some human faces to the design (e.g pictures of a classroom, family playing bingo). Add a tutorial video on the front page displaying how "easy" it is to use bingo card creator. Also remove the "try now" button since you already have a 30 days return policy and see how it goes.
Ebay tried building a Paypal killer and was not successful even though they owned the network. They ended up buying Paypal and killing their own offering because no one was using it. It has been said many times now that buying Paypal was one of the best decision by Ebay management.
Padrino creates a rails like structure around sinatra. It provides convenience scripts, helper methods and some glue code to create rails style apps. If you like sinatra but want more structure around it you should definitely checkout Padrino.
About 2 years ago I helped a local cellphone repair shop to promote its services online. Here is what I did to make the shop's iphone repair business very successful.
1) Get it listed on Google maps with the right keywords, this was the top walk in traffic generator and best bang for bucks because local listing was free.
2) Created a webapp to generate ads for Kijiji and Craigslist, app saved adds for later use, this could have been done with any word processor but I found that the owner liked the specialized app more.
3) Get it featured in Kijiji's repair section, after Google this was the best driver of traffic. Craigslist came in last but still a very valuable source of customers.
This was enough to get the owner and his tech too busy. I didn't test facebook, twitter and adwords, but the owner showed me one of his competitor using facebook really well for promotions. If iCracked can somehow streamline management of these channels then it has the potential to become a very valuable service.
Thanks for the insightful explanation, though I am wondering about the practice of creating the artificial "pop" when IPO opens, why is this kind of premeditated pumping allowed?
Can you comment on why more companies do not IPO using dutch auctions? Is it more complex/riskier for the company, than the traditional IPO model? Since its my assumption, an auction will get the company a fairer value for their stock.
Its a very good article although the title should include Google, American Express and NebuAd. I am aware of Facebook, Google and Cerdit card companies using personal data to perform business functions. However I am quite alarmed by the incident mentioned in the article where six ISPs sold personal data. I have never heard about it before, and am wondering how common is this practice.
I ported my current app from Rails to Padrino and found the performance, in dev and production mode, generally faster than Rails. I made the switch when Rails performance in development mode became unbearable on my machine, although I believe Rails has gotten faster in development mode after subsequent releases. I am quite happy with Sinatra/Padrino and have no reason for switch back anymore.
I have been trying duckduckgo since last week for search, so far over 95% of my queries are resulting in good results, its my default now in pentadactyl. I will be installing Zimbra ZCS opensource edition on one of my servers for mail, calendaring. Haven't found any alternative for youtube yet.
Yes, but if you dig a little deeper, this guy is also running a blog. Stories like these raises his blogs profile and if the story gets picked up by a news outlet that can do wonders. With enough following he can write a book, publish articles in news papers or in very extraordinary case start his own reality TV series. History channel runs a popular TV series called American Pickers following two people who go around buying and selling antiques.