desu

Well, I was interested enough to download and run the OSX version. Fails with some library issue, even tried off the disk image which the help says can be done.

I'm sure it's great but not exactly a good first impression for this mac user!

Well, it's more like the pro is that there is no profit motive to keep her there. The staff would be delighted to get rid of her to a bigger facility elsewhere. I live a kilometre north of a large hospital in Sydney, Australia and we get helicopters coming in all hours of the day and night, presumably doing just that.

The "con" would probably be that there would be no facility for spinal surgery in a rural area in the first place. She would not be able to choose to be treated there and she's getting on one of those helicopters.

I saw a presentation a while back which indicated there was a bit of erlang creeping into the mix behind the scenes, too.

Like, say, Facebook?

Thanks. I want to know the answer, but not so much that I'm willing to spend the several hours necessary to familiarise myself with a large foreign code base. I was hoping someone here could give a quick top-level explanation.

From looking around, though, I think they're caching the user's votes and then just assembling the page on the fly from cache fragments. You could do that pretty quickly. Might be wrong.

It would get too large quickly.

Check this out for a good explanation of why you want to keep cookie sizes as small as possible: http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/03/01/performance-research-part...

Yeah, that's what you'd do as the user makes a vote. But how would you load the page in the first place? The front page is different for each user, as they've likely voted up and down numerous links on it.

You could load a generic page and then apply their votes by AJAX or something but that doesn't strike me as being any more efficient for the DB than just generating the page.

Seems to mainly be about Reddit.

Didn't seem to answer the #1 question I had in my mind - how do they cache votes for logged-in users? Do they, say, cache a generic front page and then apply the user's prior voting choice via JS? Or do they cache the page only for the general public, and for logged-in users just cache their voting history and generate it on-the-fly?

However they do it, they do a damn good job. I'm always impressed by how responsive Reddit is, along with the other highly dynamic / high load sites like Digg, etc. They manage to stay up and running fine even with all that going on; but just a link on their front page to someone's blog, which should be almost static, crushes that server into goo. Shows the power of good design!

... but if you want to do that, why not just have a website so everyone can look at it? You don't need to tie it to people who bought the album on iTunes.

I understand your point about music moving into the background when you're at a computer, and agree to some extent, but I think that's more to do with the fact you are sitting in front of an entertaining multi-function device rather than on a couch in front of a dedicated stereo system. It is possible to set up the latter even with a computer, and you'll still be distracted by all the possible activities with your computer even if you have a bundled web site to look at.

I agree that it's good to have something album-related to look at, to allow you to concentrate on the music more. Personally I think computers are the worst possible device to fulfil this role but don't have any other solutions.

I see no point to this at all, but seems some people like it. When I listen to music I'm appreciating the creative output of the artist; there's no need for it to be dolled up by animated web pages and visualisers and what not. In fact I find that kind of thing distracting and usually annoying, like those DVDs which have some half-ass custom menu effect meant to "put you in the mood" or something; I wish I could just skip it.

Still, glad (and somewhat surprised) to see it's not an encrypted, proprietary black box. Kudos to Apple for that and a great advertisement for the excellent Webkit.

ClickAgents! I remember them! I still have an uncashed cheque from them from 1999 or something. Somehow my personal website managed to make USD$40 or something. It would have cost me $30 to cash in Australia so I just kept it as a momento of times gone by.

They try their best to make you feel like a real asshole for walking away, though, especially if they took you for a test drive and everything. I think a lot of people just don't have the "jerk DNA" to do that. They prey on people's basic politeness.

While, like the author, I can feel some sympathy for the individual salespeople, the industry as a whole is just awful and I can't wait to see it die. It's coasting on pure momentum now but the minute people can reliably buy a car elsewhere, like they would buy any other major item, sayonara dealers.

I just wish I could go to the Car Shop and buy a car the same way I go to a department store and buy a TV. I can look at all the models from all the different brands. They all have a sticker on them with the best price. I choose one, pay for it, and leave. That's all I want! The dealer system adds no value for me at all - in fact it makes the whole experience worse, and then rips you off in the bargain. I just can't stand them.

But people don't just buy houses, they buy lifestyles and locations in which they live. The actual physical house might be better but who cares?

Your average NYC dweller probably wouldn't even live in Jackson if the rent was totally free. The physical quality of the house's construction, etc, is almost totally irrelevant.

Oh, I didn't mean that. I just meant that "how much stuff you can buy" is perhaps not the only possible measurement of quality of life. And I've long thought PPP to be almost irrelevant in developed countries. Every single thing I buy I buy on quality, not price or quantity. PPP utterly fails to account for that. It's useless.

Anyway. Cool, I like Zurich. Hm, this thread is making me remember all these cities and influencing my holiday plans!

update: you edited your post. I have never been to Jackson, nor any American city aside from NYC and the California sprawl (LA/SF/SD). Yes, your 44-yr-old schoolteacher might enjoy a happy, quiet life there. I am sure it is a fine city, but I have zero interest in ever visiting it. Again, you are right - we are not the right control group here.

Lausanne!? That's practically in France!

edit: well it is!

I guess that depends on what you mean by "standard of living".

I can give you a triple gold plated guarantee, though, that the Germans would not consider living in Jackson in your $129k house next to Wal-Mart a "high standard of living".

So, in summary, no, it's not possible. You should travel a bit. The whole idea is a complete joke. I mean seriously, would you rather live in Berlin or Jackson? Seriously? Berlin has a 24hr tram every 15 minutes, go whereever you like for like a euro. Some of the best nightclubs in Europe (America has 0 good nightclubs). What was that about cheap jars of pickles at Wal-Mart?

Hm, the problem with PPP is that it's very unclear what it's measuring. Someone with a wal-mart nearby has a higher "PPP" than someone without it. Definitely Americans have access to a lot of cheap crap; it would not surprise me if an average income earner in the Mississippi could indeed buy more random junk each year than your average German.

Purchasing power and quality of life, though, are two very different things. The idea that your average "Mississipean" has a higher quality of life than your average German is laughable. Intuitively, I would have thought Germany was higher overall than the USA, quite a lot higher.

Raw powerpoint: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwmills/EAC.ppt

This article made me want to go and re-read this one: "Confessions of a Car Salesman"

http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/42962/article....

I'm not condoning this company's actions but since it is almost certainly a completely automated process, how does this differ from, say, gmail reading kids' conversations to display ads? Should gmail be restricted from doing such for minors?

How about online communities like Habbo Hotel, et al? Because if they don't collect general marketing information from the activities within their pages, I'll eat my hat.

And how about if the software was free and marked as marketing-supported?

Just food for thought.

Exactly what I was thinking - I bet 95% of their customers never even hear about this and furthermore, the activity is probably in their 30-page EULA so the parents agreed to it.

This kind of thing reminds me of that study which asserted that the COPA act would kill far more children via the targeted advertising for childrens' junk food it enabled than it would ever save from "online predators". Untended consequences ...

I guess I just don't like integrated mega-software like "team studio". Give me some nice, loose tools that work together well. Git is all the collaboration tool I need.

And, for what it's worth, the open source community will give you unlimited seats worth of all the best web development software in the world for $0.00 :D

Seeing a few startups' websites fall over says precisely nothing. They could have been on $20 VPSs for all we know - a twenty dollar VPS being something that is possible with OSS. Or maybe not well tuned - since the vast majority of startups use open source software, it's only natural that you will see a disproportionate number of sites using that software fail.

Anyway, I'm glad your technology choices are working out for you. However, you must understand that a $2k per box markup would be a stroke of death for many lower-margin startups.

And how does your reckoning change when the big day comes that you have to buy another server? And another? And then another 20? And you've locked yourself into the MS stack?

That $2k/box starts adding up real quick.

Windows can also execute all the Java and Ruby stuff that you see in nix platforms.*

Really? Hit any Ruby mailing list and every second post is a Windows user complaining that something doesn't work. Not just obscure things either - DataMapper doesn't work on Windows, or didn't a few months ago. Capistrano, the "official" Rails deployment tool, is not supported on Windows. And good luck with any gem that requires compilation.

Not to mention you lose out on all the command line tools. You'll need to install cygwin, of course. At that point you may as well just stop trying to run unix on a Windows box and just, you know, run Unix.

Not to mention the subtle insinuation that the open source "freeware" is just a toy and everyone knows you have to pay for the real stuff.

I cannot imagine how Microsoft developers begin a project. "Today, I'm going to write this new web app to change the world! Right after I spend the day setting up Microsoft Team Studio and purchasing software licenses for every computer I plan to use!" How inspiring.

Oh yeah, in his particular case sure. But I was speaking about the general case of journalists whose words might affect the market or who could otherwise stand to gain by influencing public opinion. That is much more common than Pogue, who is kind of a one-off.

It's wonderful for redundancy as well. I recently migrated our DNS from two dedicated servers in the same data centre, to three $20/month VPSs all on different continents. I don't need power or bandwidth, what I need is super-redundancy. These new VPS deals just hand it to me on an ultra-cheap platter. Couldn't be happier.

The security is just an added bonus.

You should publicise it more on the WP home page! I'm pretty technically able and yet it took me quite a while to even realise I could do that.

This goes way beyond Pogue. There are plenty of journalists of all stripes whose writings I would suspect a lot less if I knew, say, their entire stock portfolio.

Having David place all (all!) his personal investments into a blind trust seems like an excellent idea which many other media personalities' credibility might benefit from. The same goes double for anyone talking about the stock market directly, especially "analysts" - in fact it arguably should be a condition of the job.