ptbello

oh and by the way, one of the mice is called Algernon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon#Short_stor...

And yet, this sounds amateurish compared to the exact same scandal in Italy, but on a national scale: the "official" tourism portal: http://www.italia.it/en/home.html.

It had been calculated that direct and indirect costs of the project summed up to about 140M€ over the years.

At the time, someone put up a dedicated blog on the subject: http://scandaloitaliano.wordpress.com/

The WSJ was on it: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121969807244970447.html

It even won a wikipedia entry: http://translate.google.it/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=h...

Grab something to eat

Maccy D's or KFC

Only one choice in the city

Done voicing my pity now lets get to the nitty gritty

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z1kRhiPE0E#t=30s

What's with "partly" anyway? More like "entirely", regardless of the muppet conspirancy theory

> there's no one go-to framework for MVC work

I would say there's a lot of consensus around Symfony

http://symfony.com/

I think this is a brilliant idea, and someone will eventually do it.

Richard Branson already organises meetings where you donate a few thousands to a charity of his liking in order to have access to a dinner and a chat with him. Why wouldn't he add a few dollars to charity per email AND mitigate his inbox problem a at he same time.

Also I love the idea of an automated system to adjust the asking price as f(total unread messages)

> (x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

Seems to me a very good reason to go ahead! It' less about the what and more about the how.

> (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money

I don't see any problem there - all it takes is an automated response with a PayPal link

> (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers

They are out of target anyway; this idea applies super-busy/famous people who can afford to lose a few messages.

--the longer you work with something the more you realize how little you understand it

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

Your "pushing someone in front of a bus just because you can" metaphore is flawed: there's no gain in committing murder in public; conversely the whole point of corruption is financial gain.

"Embrace sunk costs" had got to be my favourite (albeit painfully common)

Does it really matter if RIM are deliberately trying to block the app vs. they are experiencing organizational mayhem that results in the app being blocked?

Point is, these guys have invested man months in an app that would add value to the playbook, and all they are getting are dazed canned responses.

In a similar position it seems more than enough to decide to drop RIM development and move on with the other platforms.

I'm doing well with the IKEA Markus, which is also reasonably priced. http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/70178863

"No egos" is a nice take although it appears to address internal dynamics more directly than customer relationship. It would be nice to add something more consistent with how customers think of the company; google's "don't be evil" would be a good example of a culture motto that reflects equally on employees and customers.

Brilliant site. Please, allow users to post comments and "translations" for each post!

Well, if it hadn't been anonymous, it would have been easier to fire the guy.

As you say, the real problems are the grip on the media and his deep rooted dishonesty; but the harem thing does help to paint the picture. I mean, we're not just talking multiple sexual partners here, we're talking about renting a whole housing complex to lodge dozens of sexual partners, alongside financing a fully blown recruiting organisation, on a national scale, in order to sustain a healthy flow of fresh partners coming in; again it might not be the main problem, but it gives you an idea of the scale... plus, one wonders what share of mind might be left in the man towards actually administering the country.

It's the scale, man. The sheer scale of it. Average corrupt politicians have a mistress, or two, or three; he has a harem of a couple dozen, several of which minors. The average corrupt politician casts his shadow on the media; he owns the media. He has brought the concept of "conflict of interest" to a whole new level.

At least as a dev you can get WP to do what you want pretty easily, regardless of how bad the code is. In comparison Magento is far more convoluted.

You could join dribbble http://dribbble.com/site/about

Nice! Here's my 10 seconds experience: in the search results page I got the sentence "Showing 125 cards worth between $10 and $200 discounted from 0% to 50% for ITunes." But the actual results have discounts between 8 and 10. In fact I clicked on "from 0% to 50%" and tried the range 45-50 but got no results; incidentally this distracted me from realising I could have clicked the column header and sorted in the first place. Perhaps the the sortable headers functionality should be more prominent by design. Great idea anyway!

Nice idea. Only (minor) remark: I don't particularly like the handwriting font, would have gone for a slicker design. Other than that, thumbs up for the smooth and simple implementation!

Should be complemented by a brief hystory of Steve Ballmer tantrums: http://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/09/ballmer_throws_a_c... http://www.gearfuse.com/ballmer-lashes-out-at-microsoft-empl...

If the sector is tourism, there's plenty of space for verticals. I have a client who has a ring of sites offerinf holydays for board sposrtsers: surf, kite, snowboard and the such. Sambeau suggested cyclists. Another idea could be: travel for families with children. Travelling with children can be hard, especially if the destinations are exotic and the children are small; so a website featuring advice on this topic might have an audience.