points

I can't quite tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

Google only updates PR every few months afaik, how long have you existed? Also is it a fresh domain or was it in use before you had it.

Is there an 'official' list that's better? Seems a useful thing to have.

"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." is such a wooly useless statement though.

You could argue that based on the above, the US shouldn't have a minimum age limit for alcohol since it clearly infringes on teenagers (heck even college kids) pursuit of happiness.

I'm not arguing that it's correct that they have strict laws about pornography, nor would I argue that it's incorrect that the US has strict laws on alcohol. It's up to each country where to set its own laws.

Did you just try to assert that the United States Declaration of independence should apply to all of humanity?

Mind. Blown.

Well he was already in Canada... He was arrested while "visiting Iran".

I'm not sure that has worked out so well in the past. Invading places to bring them a particular definition of freedom is a bad idea.

Definitely if the citizens themselves want to take action, then it's up to them to do so.

When you live somewhere, you play by the rules of that country... and if it's a country that doesn't have good rules, you can emigrate.

> " "delivered the awesome Android experience to the iPhone" - yeah probably never."

That's because the iPhone still doesn't have half the features that are standard on Android :/

We know what the service does. We have that much data - we can see what users are allowed to do on the website, and what they cannot do.

And for the level of content, interactivity, media, etc etc, I can say that 500 is silly.

Well TBH 500 is ridiculous overkill. Even 100 would be pushing it.

Is this the shape of things to come?

Comparisons of apples to oranges... It's not about traffic, it's about what sort of website you have, how dynamic/static it is, etc

A wiki likely has relatively few writes compared to reads, so caching should work very well.

That said, always nice to see people optimizing properly and using a sane number of servers.

It's not just Apple that does this (with great effect).

Look at things like the Nintendo DSi, which is being released in a range of new colors. Simply adding a few different colors to a device means a big surge in orders I'm sure.

But yeah, I don't really care if the iPhone is black or white too much.

FWIW, It's easy to come to this conclusion about any 'new' 'fresh' 'empty' medium.

The reason people bark one word commands on IRC, and often treat n00bs with contempt is just that IRC is so damn big and busy. Millions of people use it daily. Millions of questions/answers/conversations flow through it daily. But, it's still the best (IMHO) way to get instant contact with geniuses, and instant answers to your questions. Tech giants hang out on IRC and you can immediately (And without having to signup or get reputation points) chat with them.

So 'SO chat' could be a great medium to get answers.... until it gets big.

Any stats on usage? How many concurrent users / messages per second?

> "You can get 20 rep by asking or answering a single — literally, one — half-decent question"

So what you're saying, is that any spambot could thwart the system easily, and the arbitrary restriction is silly, and mainly just means this will not take off beyond fanatical SO users (Which is fine, if that's their aim).

IRC has developed fantastic ways to keep out spammers and idiots. And the methods don't usually involve things like this.

You're high.

I think what you're finding is that facebook is far better for 'personal 2 way communication', whilst twitter is better for mass announcement.

It's a different scale of working. FWIW, I much prefer facebook, especially for things like family announcements.

GEM was still so superior.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager

If ever there was a good lesson it's this - DRDos was lighyears ahead, and far superior to MSDos. GEM was ridiculously more advanced than Windows, yet they lost. Having the better product doesn't always translate to winning.

Of course things like this helped MS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

(MS put some code in place to detect DR-DOS and make things not work properly).

"Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg later sent another memo, stating: "What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS."

It'd be great to see a movie made of this period of time when MS were engaging in so many dirty tricks.

If you have friends that use Opera, I expect so.

Nothing better than being at a concert, and some idiot chatting on his smartphone with strangers about how great the concert is.

Why don't people just turn off their phones and enjoy the concert/event/whatever?

Meh what is society coming to!

Same with many of the protocols that have taken off. Look at HTTP - it's an abysmal wasteful stupid protocol, but it kinda works well enough.

The volume of communication is FAR higher than twitter though, and the number of engaged people is likewise higher.

I agree @ stand alone mail clients, but I'm betting on webapps. GMail really is a great webapp.

Tools->Mail and Chat accounts? rly? I thought the idea of an all in one internet behemoth died with Netscape Communicator.

Opera Unite? what? why? I just want a web browser. I don't want a web server or file sharing solution.

This is the main reason I don't run Opera apart from testing - I just want a fast small browser. Also I find the UI and rendering to look cluttered and a bit second rate.

Great to see Opera is getting websocket though: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/10/11/websockets

I completely agree. The same goes to some extent with asking for donations.

OK, my experience is much different. I would far far rather provide a free ad supported service than charge.

If you give it away free as ad supported, users tend to be extremely grateful. Once they start paying, even a tiny amount, they start to be more resentful and demand far more.

It's not about "cheap option" at all.

You get fanatical customers everywhere, and they can be good and bad. They've mainly been good in my experience though.

I don't think that's the factor at all in that case. If buzz and twitter were launched at the same time, twitter would win. Buzz did too many things wrong - privacy, being integrated into gmail, not as open API etc, no arbitrary restriction on length to get hype, etc

Plus, being launched by Google, may actually be a curse. I doubt the xbox would be as successful if more people actually knew microsoft was behind it.

Startups have a great advantage in that they're assumed by users to be new/fresh/good guys/underdogs/etc etc

> "Google could blow most startups out of the water if they chose to focus on building exactly the same thing."

I'm not sure that's even true - look at buzz and wave. For all the time money and effort they've spent on that area they seem to have little return.

That sort of app isn't something you can win by technology alone, you need to capture users in a way that the users feel comfortable with.

But there is some history here, if I remember right, kiko (YC funded calendar) decided to close and sell on ebay when Google released their own calendar.

> "Ads don't pay any more"

That's a bit of a generalization. They pay well for me :)