mryall

I've heard good things about them too. Probably just some broken widget between my desk in Sydney and their servers somewhere in North America.

I'm kind of interested in the way many of those large-scale sites have to prioritise availability over response time due to their architecture. At least, that seems to be the way services like GAE work. They guarantee uptime, but latency for things like database queries tends to be fixed and not that fast.

You're quite a bit early. Or perhaps, 559 years too late.

The original written by Leonardo da Vinci is here:

http://www.cenedella.com/job-search/leonardo-da-vincis-resum...

The site also took an extremely long time to respond for me, which was kind of amusing given the content when it finally did load:

> I know how, when a website is besieged, to shard data onto the cloud, and make endless variety of mirrors, and fault tolerant disks and RAIDs, and other machines pertaining to such concerns.

You should consider using some of those "secrets" on your own site. :)

Edit: site seems to be responding quickly now. Must have been a momentary blockage in the tubes.

Yeah, they need an attachment to pick the ball up and start again. I'm sure they're just dying to get rid of the slow human component of their game so they can play faster.

Interesting. Do you use only creative-commons-licensed material or do the terms of Flickr's "copyright" license actually allow this use?

It seems to me that embedding an image on another site, even with a copyright notice, would be reproducing the image and not allowed under the normal terms of a copyright license.

Sorry to be a party pooper, but just ignoring legal issues around reproducing other people's content (some of whom make a living from selling it) isn't going to make it go away.

Edit: to answer my own question, the images are only Creative Commons attribution-licensed photos. From the 'about' page:

> The photos are pulled from flickr using its search api, searching only creative commons material, and watermarking them with the name of the author, to be in accordance with the creative commons licences, which all require attribution

I guess it depends on whether Dropbox think they could implement the same storage service cheaper themselves. S3 actually offers a lot. They have at least four nines availability (and I think you can pay for more), a ridiculously high durability figure, plus geographic distribution and replication.

Developing that for yourself would be very expensive, I imagine. I'd actually be quite surprised if Dropbox went through the hassle of setting this all up. It would have to be a significant difference in cost to justify the effort.

> [solar panels] are quite a bit more efficient than natural leaves ...

Got a citation for that? I'd be interested to learn more.

If you're working on a project with multiple people, having the CSS properties one-per-line helps a lot with determining who changed what in your version control system.

Most of the command-line diff tools don't highlight changes within a single line, and annotation tools usually work on a per-line basis as well.

You have made a really insightful comment, but I struggle to read it without wincing because of the misspellings.

lose, v. to part with something

loose, adj. not tight.

So yeah, Amazon might lose a large contract and might lose trust with developers. Sorry if it's a bit off-topic but I just wanted to mention how off-putting it is.

Yeah. Lots of them have twelve floors or fewer.

That is a great article, even aside from the anecdote about the bingo cards. Analysing what makes a good teacher is so important yet so difficult in reality because of the influence of teachers’ unions. There’s also is a huge reluctance to use any information that is discovered to improve our education systems.

Site doesn't seem to be responding. Google cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t0H7qG2...

It's interesting that they don't have their company name anywhere on the page except in small text in the footer. Also, even on colour.com the page title is still 'Color'. If it were my site, I'd be redirecting colour.com to color.com. (And swimming in pools of money.)

Tim has it exactly right. Searching some of the mainstream media sites in my area of the world -- Fairfax (smh.com.au) and Fox (news.com.au) -- shows up no results for 'tsunami' in their front page and world news section aside from badly informed reports about the nuclear reactors.

That's a really sad indictment of the state of our media organisations and where their focus lies.

> The second irony is that the Nash equilibrium for rational-actor based models of deterrence is not peace, but random violence.

Do you have a citation for that? I'd be interested to read further about it.

That's interesting. The initial feedback I read on iBooks vs Kindle back when both apps were first available was very heavily skewed the other way: people seemed to prefer the Kindle app.

Perhaps it was just a case of familiarity and the majority of the reports at that time being by existing Kindle users. Apple has also pushed out a few good updates since (including proper hyphenation!) so that has probably helped too.

It's pretty clear that he was talking about physical books. E-books that have no limits on distribution are affected by different economic forces. In this situation, what rights the purchaser has or should have are far less clear.

It's a shame but they kind of had this coming. Amazon's book-lending feature only really works with their business model as long it is just small groups of people lending to each other. They were never going to stand for people circumventing the whole model of individual payment by sharing books with random strangers over the internet.

I'm not saying Amazon (and the whole e-book industry) is morally right in restricting sharing like this, but you can't expect them not to stand up for their own interests.

In the long term, I'm sure we'll end up with freely distributable e-books. But that won't happen via Amazon's or Apple's online stores, which are quite clearly on the side of restricting distribution in order to charge for it.

Yes, all these new form features are a massive boost for consistency and usability of forms on the web. Opera is often ahead when it comes to web usability issues like this. Great work, guys.

I'm somewhat disappointed when charts like this use pre-release browser versions like Firefox 4 beta. If you're going to compare apples with apples, you have to use released, production versions of each browser for comparison charts.

Otherwise, why not include Webkit nightlies and the Chrome dev version? Maybe that would just make Firefox look even further behind.

The <output> element doesn't have many additional semantics on top of a non-semantic element like <div>. All it supports is a special "for" attribute that doesn't require any additional behaviour [1]. IE9 is the first version of IE that doesn't barf on unknown new elements in the DOM, so I suppose they got support for this "for free" without any additional development.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-output-elemen...

Most companies that are based on intellectual property, like software companies, need to maintain ownership of the copyright so that they can continue to sell the IP (software) for money. If someone else owns the copyright, the company has no way to prevent all the source code being released in the public domain, available to everyone for free.

If you don't own copyright on your own software, you'll also find it hard to sell the business in the future. Potential acquirers are usually interested in purchasing the IP owned by a company, not just the company itself.

IP that a company owns can be counted as an asset when drawing up a balance sheet. It is often quite a substantial part of the assets of any major software company, making the net value of the company much higher.

In my experience, companies usually default to owning the intellectual property for everything an employee produces then provide a way to waive their interest on outside projects by employees. The IP waivers require the employee to specify the scope of their outside work and get approval from the company directors so that the company's IP rights are waived on that code.

Playing multi-player games on multiple iPads (or iPhones or iPod Touches) isn't at all bad. I've had quite a few fun times with friends playing games this way.

Looking at the same screen works well for some games, but not so well for others.

Yeah, folks at my company follow discussions about our products on Twitter and it doesn't matter whether the person uses a hashtag or not. What you need is a distinct product name though, to only discover relevant tweets.

It would be more annoying if it actually displaying trending Twitter topics instead of "#everyone #loves #the #dickbar".

Yeah, in particular it would be great to see how the load time compares. John found that even loading literal JSON in a JavaScript interpreter is much slower than loading a comparable length string. Presumably the latter is just a buffer copy operation.

I'm pretty sure it's to work around a difference in SVG and VML. In SVG, a one-pixel line rendered at an integral coordinate (like x=1) will render half-half on either side of that value, resulting in a blurry two-pixel-wide line. VML renders a one-pixel line in this case, automatically colouring the pixel(s) between x=1 and x=2.

Raphaël adds 0.5 to the values in SVG in order to make one-pixel-wide lines render as a single pixel instead of two.

Maybe they just cut off access to Google.

What does "true decentralized internet" mean to you? Surely if you want to communicate with people around the world, you need to rely on someone to transport the data for you across the country and the oceans. If not government, then who? Why would you trust them more?