jhollingworth

He has classical chronic fatigue syndrome, on the same continuum as fibromyalgia and 'ME'. The best term is 'syndrome of central sensitisation'. "Gulf war syndrome, yuppie flu etc are all part of the same spectrum. It is akin to phantom limb pain.

The problem lies in the brain, in the area of the brain that processes incoming sensory information before it presents it to consciousness, which is where we all live. Our brains have the capacity to turn up sensation in the short term to help us respond appropriately to a threat: for example people report that in a road traffic accident everything becomes vivid, and time slows down. This normally turns down after the threat passes. If the threat is severe enough, the memory may keep coming back in flashbacks and nightmares, and the person suffers anxiety and panic attacks. This is post-traumatic stress disorder.

Some people develop the syndrome of central sensitisation after a major stress (I had a superfit tree surgeon, a felled tree landed on him but not a branch hurt him, but afterwards he developed severe generalised pain , couldn't sleep and was exhausted. He never worked again).

The more common group are people who have major childhood threats, such as early bereavement, parental violence, bullying , sexual abuse etc. It seems their brains become hard-wired in adolescence to be in a permanent state of this hyper-vigilence. All they need is a 'second hit' later in life, some emotional or physical problem, and the whole process is triggered: central sensitisation ensues as a permanent problem. It's like a radio with the volume turned up too loud: there's nothing wrong with the signal or the radio, but the noise it makes is intolerable.

In fact, sophisticated research tools have demonstrated chemical, electrical, blood flow changes and on functional MRI in sufferer's brains. In fact, there are physical changes to the brain in PTSD, with atrophy of the hippocampus.

Listening to these unfortunate people is fascinating, because it is clear their suffering is so great and real, and it gives us insight into the variety of experiences that human beings endure. A character in The Tempest remarked how beautiful the island was - it is so sweetly perfumed and the waves breaking on the shore make such sweet music - whereas his companion said ' It stinks like a fen.'

Treatment is far from satisfactory, especially for protracted severe cases.

If you want a basic data driven application which isn't going to have a significant load, then I would go with RoR. I have personally found that when ever you go beyond that use case, you will very quickly find the limitations of the framework (e.g. you can't start a sepeartate thread in an action). Yes there are workarounds to these problems, but they are all rather experiemental and a bit hacky.

For all the thats bad about microsoft, the fact that they are making ASP.NET for profit means they are designing it for large companies which have very complex problems to solve. This means that ASP.NET is designed to be highly scalable and efficent.

What I would say is avoid WebForms at all costs, it is a horrible framework designed for desktop app dev's (using WinForms) to quickly get to grips with web development. Unfortunatly to get WebForms to act like a WinForms app requires a lot of horrible things (i'm pretty sure that satan invented ViewState). Also, as xenoterracide mentioned it will run best on Windows Server meaning you will probably have to go down the microsoft route and spend crap loads of money.

A better option would be to look at Castle Project (http://www.castleproject.org/) they have basically developed a port of Rails for C#. It has all the core concepts of Rails, works brilliantly on MonoRail and uses NHibernate at the core of it's ORM and so can you use whatever DB you like.

I think in the end, you shouldn't be looking at the language and saying this ones got more hype I should use that one. I would say look at the actual problem you are trying to solve, what are the requirements? Do you need something out in a couple of days which just does adds a few records to the DB? go with RoR. Are you making a massive data mining app which is gonna be run by 50k people? Go with ASP.NET (or MonoRail)!

They have an amazing product and keep adding new features (e.g. recently added git support!). Awsome customer service, a person responded to my feature suggestion within 12h.

Most importantly they have a good business model. Most startup's see a problem that needs solving and solve it with no regards to how to make money from it (ad revenue will not make you a millionarie unless your google!). They will ultimately fail. I like companies which actually have a little bit of business acumen and can actually find ways of making money from their product. 37signals is another company that does this well

disclaimer i am not looking for ideas for a news site, personally i feel the market is saturated, and anyway i have far better ideas to work on ;)