pwaring

"There is nothing preventing Facebook from being the next Myspace"

You could make a similar argument about Google becoming the next Yahoo! when someone devises a better search algorithm/interface.

Most technology stocks are high risk propositions, with the exceptions of huge multinationals like IBM (their size and government contracts make them harder to challenge).

Except you can block read receipts in most sane mail clients (Thunderbird has options for always/prompt/never for example). It doesn't appear that there is a way to block your messages being marked as 'seen' on Facebook, unless it's buried deep in the frequently-changing privacy settings.

You can turn that LinkedIn feature off, or at least they claim that you can.

Already (indirectly) posted and discussed yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3965688

As always, it depends on your audience. If 1% of your users have IE, then it may well be too much work to support it - although 8/9 are a massive improvement on 6/7.

On the other hand, if you're in my position and run a site where 100% of the users have IE installed in a corporate environment (i.e. often an old version), support is never 'too much work'.

I don't think anyone would seriously buy based on the current figures. If you buy Facebook today, you're hoping for exponential growth over the next few years, at which point you can either sell at a profit or take dividends (if Facebook ever pay them - US technology companies don't tend to pay out much).

If you want a return now, you could just buy shares in a utility company for a fraction of the price, since they already make multi-billion pound/dollar profits and distribute large chunks to shareholders.

This reflects my experience (UK) - I get recruiters asking me on a regular basis why they can't find any PHP developers, when I look at the job ad it's because the offers are things like 'experienced mid-level developer, 20-24k'.

You can set up your own resolver - I've done this in the past when I've been with an ISP with dreadfully slow nameservers (they weren't doing any interception, just the service was bad).

Part of the problem with software is that there's so much of it. You don't just have the stuff running on routers, you've got your customer management system, logging + auditing, DNS etc.

There's no point in an ISP offering IPv6 if its routers support it but their back office management software doesn't.

I think you've got the point I was trying to make the wrong way round. If I set up half a dozen REST services with SSL on a single IP, clients which don't support SNI will experience problems. Last time I checked, libwww in Perl, urllib in Python (until 3.2) and the WebClient library in C# all didn't support SNI.

It's not just IE/XP which is the problem, library support for SNI is still pretty poor, which is an issue if you're running REST services.

A fast moving standard is not necessarily a bad thing, provided that changes don't break backwards compatibility.

In some ways, I'd like the C standard to move a bit faster, to keep up with things like multi-threading (although there's an argument to be had over whether that should be defined as part of the language or left to vendor-specific libraries).

Absolutely. I work for a 'start-up' in the insurance sector, where everyone uses IE (the only non-IE entries in the access logs are myself on the development sites). If we ignored IE (and I'd love to, given the number of headaches over the years) we wouldn't have any customers.

We could get away with not supporting Chrome and Firefox though as I doubt anyone would notice.

The problem with encryption is that, as far as I'm aware, it doesn't hide the sender/recipient information. You might not be able to read the content, but intelligence agencies are just as interested in who is communicating with whom as they are in the content of the messages.

Oh, and we have a law in the UK which makes it a criminal offence, punishable by 2-5 years in prison, to refuse to hand over the private key so that your data can be decrypted. :(

It's not really sad, some administrators don't like immediately upgrading to the latest and greatest version. Anyone running Debian stable will probably not get 5.4 until 2013.

"other" in that context related to Google, not Microsoft.

I suspect by the time LibreOffice threatens Microsoft, everyone will have moved to Google Docs, or a similar service provided by other companies. I still don't know anyone who uses LibreOffice who isn't a geek.

It's fair that they're upset, 8 years in prison seems overly harsh though. In fact, any time in prison seems a bit over the top for what is essentially a breach of contract and therefore a civil matter between Goldman and the ex-employee.

You can do the same with Symbiosis, which is just a bunch of Debian packages on top of lenny (and soon squeeze):

http://symbiosis.bytemark.co.uk/docs/symbiosis.html

I've always run my own email for several reasons:

1. I can choose my domain (although nowadays that's not a problem - it was when I first started).

2. I can tweak spam and anti-virus filtering.

3. I can view the logs if I think something is wrong.

4. I can be as (in)tolerant of other mail servers as I want (I've noticed that Google is a bit lax in the rules it enforces with regards to rejecting mail).

5. I don't trust Google or other providers not to mine my email, or to back it up.

6. It's a useful learning experience.

It is a daft valuation - for $100bn you could buy the big three quoted supermarkets in the UK (Sainsbury's, Tesco and Morrisons) and control 50% of a market whose main product (food) is a necessity. Or you could do the same in retail banking, again a necessity in the modern world.

Or you could buy Facebook, with $2-3bn in revenue and a big database of users which they haven't really worked out how to monetise yet.

Technically the organisation in breach would receive a penalty, not a fine. I realise that's a bit pedantic but there is a difference (fines can usually only be made and enforced by the courts).

The ICO can also prosecute the company and officers in the criminal courts under some situations, including: "unlawfully obtaining, disclosing, or procuring the disclosure of personal data;" (I don't know whether this would count as unlawful disclosure or not).

The ICO does have a limited budget and powers though, so responding promptly to all complaints might not be possible.

IR35 is not quite the same as whether someone is employed or a contractor - you could claim to be a self-employed contractor when working from home and IR35 would not apply. If you did that then it would be a question of whether you were employed or self-employed, and that would determine which forms of national insurance contributions were paid (your income tax would remain the same).

IR35 was introduced to stop contractors from setting up a limited company and then having the company contracted instead of the individual. The individual would then take dividends out from the company, which are taxed at a lower rate and not subject to national insurance.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ir35/

Often you'll buy what's called a 'commercial combined' policy, which will usually cover professional indemnity, employer's liability and product liability (if you sell things), plus extensions such as theft cover.

EL is the only compulsory insurance which applies to all private sector employers, although in certain industries you will have additional requirements (e.g. conveyancers have to purchase professional indemnity insurance).

I don't have exact figures, but each site probably gets a few hundred hits/day, and the mail server probably gets hit every few seconds. The OP made a sweeping "not an option" statement though, not "on a popular site hosted on a VPS".

The latter part is simply not true - I run Apache with mod_php for a number of sites and web services on VPS's with little RAM without any problems, and that's alongside MySQL, Exim and SpamAssassin.

They also have a certain amount of prestige and perceived quality compared with self-publishing. This probably matters less for technical books, but in, for example, academia, there is a huge difference between being self-published and published by Oxford University Press.

That lesson also applies to every industry, not just publishing. I can't understand why people start a major piece of work (books can take years to write) without having an agreed and signed contract in place - you're just asking to be screwed over.

I've never had a problem using Namecheap, their support tickets tend to be answered quickly and their prices are reasonable. They also used to charge $17.76 for a two year .uk domain registration, which was amusing.