irrelative

A lot of the math in this is a little... strange. For instance:

"20 * 60 * 5 = 60k satisfied clients a minute"

Hmm, that's a lot closer to 6k in my mind :-)

Also:

"The throughput of the server went from about 60k requests per second to about 380 requests per second"

The original (incorrect) calculation supposedly took place at 60k per minute, not per second.

Not trying to be a stickler for accuracy, but I feel like it matters when dealing with benchmarks.

Additionally, your arms are free which is a big win, and at least in the video, it didn't require wearing a helmet. I think they've made leaps and bounds over the smug issue.

It looks like this only targets indoor super smooth surfaces, but I think it could definitely find a niche.

Reducing the number of pre-forked processes shouldn't matter that much (at least with Apache). Your kernel implements copy-on-write when forking processes for all the memory that needs to be duplicated, so it doesn't actually use n times the memory, where n is the amount used by a single process -- in my experience web servers usually don't change much of the memory while serving content.

Spamassassin might do this differently though and I suspect child processes are more likely to use all the reported memory.

You're completely correct in comparing this to relationships (though maybe dating is better than marriage, but still...). Basically any pairing problem is prime territory for a technical solution. That's why we see so many attempts (and even successful ones) at dating sites. And job sites. And apartment sites.

Whenever you're involved with many options to choose something, and the other party has the chance to reject you, you have an interesting problem. Am I missing any big ones besides housing, courtship and employment? I guess higher education could be considered, but it's a little lopsided: more of a few-to-many relationship.

The point of the fee isn't to make money. Imagine how many people would have applied if it were free? They still need employees to read all of those applications and they need to keep the quality of student up as high as possible (so they can't just outsource it, or use a lottery).

Basically, your tuition could be even higher if they dropped the fee to apply.

...as long as he continues to reach his numbers. The real position he wanted to be in was to be able to ignore short term numbers for long term positioning. I think it's safe to say he can't really do that anymore.

I realize you're being sarcastic and this doesn't apply to you directly, but this has been bugging me for a while:

Everyone needs to stop saying these guys are "well funded." $200k is nothing especially for a team of 4 people. It's certainly not enough for them to hire anyone else full time to join them. Yes, they didn't have to do much to get this money and I realize it's infuriating if you're really struggling to get your business off the ground when 4 nobodies get a chunk of money out of nowhere, but please recognize that the amount is so small that it doesn't warrant outrage.

Furthermore, they didn't even ask for that much. It got a big network effect in light of the recent facebook privacy issues, but it's a one time thing and most likely the last money they'll ever see for this project. I don't think their situation is repeatable in any sort of predictable way, so it probably doesn't warrant studying (please correct me if someone's figured out a way to do this, cause I think most of us would like to figure out how to get free funding). We should wish them the best of luck and only care when they make something people want to use.

I can already see the headlines of outrage when they don't produce something that destroys facebook overnight, or maybe don't release on time, or their code is really bad. Anyone who contributed to them only expected to give facebook a little jab. There are reasons to question their abilities, but jealousy over their gimmicky funding really needs to stop.

Yeah, you could -- I wonder what would happen if the client gets it wrong or is deliberately dishonest? Not trusting the client is a big part of writing an open server and this seems like you would have to trust the client in a big way.

To me, the most striking part of this author's argument is that Microsoft isn't prevalent enough. They're still making plenty of money, but he wants them to be chasing the tech press a little more. It's pretty obvious to me: Microsoft isn't in the innovation business just like IBM and GE. They make money hand over fist, but they don't focus on the latest fad of social media or micro-blogging or mobile devices. If those any of those businesses show long term growth and profitability, one of the established leaders will acquire them and I would imagine Microsoft is constantly looking at such businesses for acquisition.

On a side note, I think he's reading into leadership departures in ways that suggest that he has more information regarding them, but he never shows it. An anecdote does not make a trend.

Not posting this to encourage people to use it -- I just recall a lot of people mentioning porn as a big barrier to the video tag taking off.

Maybe if someone creates a porn site that only uses HTML5, it can become the killer app needed to make people upgrade browsers.

What seems like a parody to you, seems like a pretty clever hack to me. The novelty of the making a beer pong company seems like the ultimate slap in the face to other public companies worrying about SOX compliance and such. I bet they make a lot of money from people willing to laugh at the idea and support their idea.

It's too bad that this is the case for facts as well as ideas. Ideally science can turn on a dime when the data is overwhelming, but in practice there's a huge lag.

The author of this hits on a really important topic in my opinion: that for all of the talk about adhering to the standards, in every other field of engineering adhering to the standards it the absolute bare minimum to have a product.

Imagine if you made cars and you didn't conform to the safety standard? Obviously that wouldn't work and you'd be shut down. However, a lot of web standards zealots seem to imply that meeting the standard is a great goal to achieve. There needs to be a bunch more innovation in all browsers, even just as tech demos or features for the vendor's home page so that other browsers can adopt the ideas.

Basically I think the author is spot on, but I wish it didn't have to be done through Flash.

I agree, but it would have been a less steep uphill battle if they had done this 7 months ago.

And, I'd add, not humble naturally but got that way by being humbled again and again by his knowledge.

As a home coffee roaster myself (including building my own roaster) I'm guessing that experimenting programatically with roast times would cause the smoke alarm to go off regularly.

I guess you could hope that later generations get better at this, but there's always the risk of a 5 alarm mutation ;-)

Not sure why you're being downvoted, because you're right.

Adobe feels like that for the same reason: you get an annoying swagger when you own a monopoly.

Adobe owns "rich content" on the web. And just like Microsoft, they also know what a pain technology transitions are. No company wants to support a flash version and an HTML5 version of their site/product/app. And just like Microsoft, they'll start to advertise how all the fun stuff runs on their platform instead of building new stuff.

Realistically, flash is here to stay at least until IE supports HTML5 and achieves a critical mass. Until then, Adobe can give the finger to everyone and maintain control no matter how hard developers or competitors whine. Feels very familiar indeed.

Additionally, the iPhone checkboxes were created because clicking checkboxes is hard to do with the iPhone interface, not because they're better than plain old checkboxes.

Just because Apple does it, doesn't mean it's the best way to do things all the time.

In addition to selective reporting, perhaps the terrorists who are trained creative writers get caught much earlier so we don't hear about them at all. Or when they try to create explosives, they blow themselves up, so we don't hear about them. Or can't think of any way to take destroy an airplane because they don't know how they work, so they never get anywhere.

When people ask why so many terrorists have engineering degrees, they really mean why do so many successful terrorists or high-profile terrorists have engineering degrees.

I agree. Nor do I call them beautiful.

Indeed. It was a Tom Clancy book with a hawkish pitch. Let me know when the movie adaptation comes out.

Once you've trolled a couple patents, you come up with catchy platitudes that make the issue seem less one-sided to the uninformed.

Shells are the web frameworks of 10 years ago. Good programmers will create them fairly easily, they're all pretty similar, most people learn one and get good with them. Also just like web frameworks, everyone's convinced that their shell is superior and that they couldn't get any work done if they used yours.

The actual headline says "suggests". I'd say that's considerably more speculative than "planning".

"A little early" seems like a giant understatement. Go has only been out for about a month. Python has been out for ~18 years, About 200 times longer than Go.

Why someone would choose to switch from a well established language to a brand new bleeding edge one is beyond me.

Anecdotes do not equate or imply a trend.

"Basically Windows has introduced point-and-click cloud computing for the masses and it’s doing it in a way that resembles the iPhone application directory but for web applications."

Wow, buzzword overload!

The existing players rarely try to innovate within their own field. As you say, someone will step up to the plate, which will allow existing players to buy the new guys or compete with them in the new field.

It is a big deal, but they aren't splitting their class A shares. Class B was introduced to make shares more affordable to people who wanted to invest, but wanted a lower entry point. I think splitting the B stock is keeping with that sentiment.

Indeed. Only twice as much "damage" as one process stuck in an infinite loop.