I believe that at one point they had leadership staff members literally going over to the office of FB's guy on the hill. Unfortunately I have no idea about the contracts, but given the cast of characters involved, I'd have thought it wouldn't have made a difference.
It was among the most appalling acts of customer service I've seen from a vendor in my career. They literally did not return our calls or emails and the project ended up cancelled.
I once had cause to attempt to seek help from Facebook on an issue we were having building something for senior Congressional leadership. They blew us off when we had leader's aides calling and asking for help. It boggles my mind how hostile FB is to people working with their platform.
I think it's only a matter of time (maybe 10-20 years, who knows) until one of the larger urban areas with huge traffic problems, such as Manhattan, London or Beijing mandates these sorts of systems in congested areas. It really seems like it could be the only viable solution to traffic problems in cities whose roads just can't handle the loads, and it seems like a logical next step after congestion pricing like London already does.
The most likely way is regulation similar to HIPAA which mandates data controls for sensitive personal information and lays out penalties and procedures for disclosure.
No problem. Do you have any info about your startup? I have been working on a similar idea as a back-burner thing for years but I'm in the process of doing a different startup, so I think it'll stay there.
To be fair, 1,000 (or however many you need) stored procedures probably wouldn't be all that much better. I've seen systems taking both approaches and I've seen both go right and wrong. It has more to do with the team than the technology, I think.
I don't mean to start an argument over which ORM you want to go with, but you might want to give this a look, if you're interested in being able to quickly iterate on a data model and still have test coverage: http://wiki.fluentnhibernate.org/Persistence_specification_t....
I think having good HTML/JS/CSS support is a general trait of all of the JetBrains IDEs, in case you are curious if the one for your language has it too.
Ender looks really interesting but I feel like it's missing the example that really shows the power behind it. I'm not sure I'm seeing it right now. Anyone have/know of such an example?
This seems like as good a place as any to ask: I work at a company that's distributed all across the US and East Asia. We don't really have a coherent phone system. This isn't my area per se, but I'm curious to see what options are out there. What should I look at? Is Skype the way to go or are there better "corporate" options?
You mean like iOS style? That is a pretty good idea. I've certainly seen it done with custom boxes but it would make a nice addition to the browser chrome in the same way that the link element can be.
I would definitely use HTTPS, but that's not really what I had in mind. When I said I wouldn't use encryption I was thinking specifically about PKI stuff like PGP, precisely because like you say, it sucks to use it. Badly enough that I think it would make you stick out and receive additional scrutiny if you did.
The closest thing I've heard of recently would probably be VisualStudio LightSwitch. I've never used it and am pretty skeptical about this sort of thing in general from experience with MDA tools in the past, but it's probably worth a look.
I think the basic argument is "use a one-time pad" but it assumes that an unencrypted but unique email account meets the same requirements as a cryptographic one-time pad, which I don't think I agree with.
That being said, I probably wouldn't use encryption anyway. I wouldn't do anything that might cause my correspondence to receive any further scrutiny whatsoever.
I can't speak for Google, but Amazon doesn't do it. It took 41 hours to upload my collection (not counting podcasts, which for whatever absurd reason are not supported) to Cloud Player and I have a 15mbps fios connection. If I had a regular cable modem or whatever I probably wouldn't have bothered.
My first job was in that era at my hometown ISP. I got a discount on shotgun modems. We could pirate Doom and Photoshop 3 on the T1. Nothing ever seemed that fast, even now when I have a 35 mbps fios line.
You don't have to run to the debugger to get dev storage, just start it separately. It should put something in your start menu like Storage Emulator. It varies with version.
It can do some really impressive stuff. During my "office hours" mine turns on BT and pairs to my BT speakerphone and sets a particular ringtone. Off-hours, it unpairs the device and sets a different one.
I'd be curious to see how this approach compares to the opposite, which strikes me as being more effective at reducing karma gaming. I.e., your own karma is invisible but you can see everyone else's.
If I were them, I'd look at an approach that was based on either SimpleDB or S3. I've been working on a couple of prototypes of systems similar to theirs for my own stuff at work, and I've been toying with a system that uses S3 to store what I'm calling "absolute fallback" sources of data for conversations (basically, JSON documents) and SimpleDB as a front-line store.
My general take on this issue is that if you're running your app on EC2 and your persistence medium is something that's also on EC2, you really have no ideal high availability scenario. Of course, even in my case, if SimpleDB and S3 go down, I'm still in trouble, but at least I have the option of throwing Akamai in front of it.