MikeW

Your performance will vary a LOT because there are so many changeable pieces. Mono 2.8 brought some perf wins with ASP.NET. mod_mono is the only recommended way of hosting ASP.NET right now.

Because I can deviate from the defaults so much if I wish, I was able to switch the Mono Garbage Collector from Bohem to sgen (mono --gc=sgen) and get roughly a 30% increase in reqs/sec.

There is a team dedicated to ASP.NET on Mono and I've really found them great to deal with. When I was seeing perf and memory usage issues, over a period of a couple of weeks they helped narrow it down and made some very major gains there. Those are in git master right now and will be shipping with the next mono release.

Devs often migrate from one project to another and it really is not two guys in a basement. They do call on resources from right across the project. I saw firsthand when talking to them about an issue, they discussed it with their asp.net guys, guys working on the VM, a guy working on the GC and a guy working on the new profiler and made adjustments to it to help track down the issue.

It was all done in the open, they committed their patches, it fixed my issue, and this is why I love open source.

I haven't been able to find any English language reporting of the proposed update to their copyright law yet but Google translate has done a terrific job at it!

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&u=...

Netflix on Linux via Mono MoonLight would only be possible if Microsoft were willing to license PlayReady DRM for it. There are over 8500 signatures on a petition to NetFlix to put pressure on Microsoft allow this. I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Source: http://jacksonh.tumblr.com/post/965806498/how-to-watch-netfl...

I don't believe there will ever be a clear "winner" because the landscape is constantly changing. Sourceforge was THE place to store your OSS code and provide downloads and there was a really great broad selection of code and a way to discover it. But they didn't build good ways of managing it and the whole experience became cluttered and confusing. I saw many projects move to Google Code who provided a clean interface.

And now I see many of those projects move to github and everyone I know is a big fan of the forking and pull requests.

But the landscape will change again and github keeps needing to iterate and innovate on their product. Just about every time I use github, I curse their disastrous search. There is just so much innovation they could develop around code management which they don't have, a competitor could jump in and they too could become the darling of the development world. They too will have "won".

What about all the services offering provider.com/~username.

Scrolling status bars used to be all the range in the 90s, I wonder how long until url hacks allow for scrolling address bars with this.

I can't speak for their Cloud offering, but I have been using their Kimsufi Large (2.6GHZ) dedicated servers for around a year.

It's renewal time next week and my plan is to stick with them and drop my Slicehost.

Pros: - Pricing is great. Hardware performs well. The value for money is far better than anything I can get in my own country. - Most countries now have local sales/support teams so you can deal with a friendly local representative and they will deal with France and Octave. - They're very fast with getting new Linux distros prepped for their manager system.

Downsides: - Routes from your ISP to OVH may not be optimal. I've seen reports from people here complaining of routes going right around Europe the long way, from various ISPs. - Pulling a large file from Novell to my Slice in the US I was getting around 2MB/sec but to OVH it was just a few hundred K/sec. Decide the value of bandwidth and where your customers are. - I've had an unexplained reboot that I haven't been able to track down. It didn't bother me enough to track it down with support. - The Manager user interface seemed to be a machine translation from French into English. Quite often the statements made no sense at all. This has improved quite a lot within the last 12 months though.

I've had more positives with them than negatives. Their Kimsufi dedicated offering suits me well and I'm incredibly impressed at how Octave has grown the company

I've got a small webapp targeting ASP.NET MVC 2.0 (built with Visual Studio 2010) running on Linux with Mono 2.6 and served with nginx (using the fastcgi interface to mono) so if you put the time in, it's possible to deploy on an open source stack.

I saw a commenter talk about Linq-to-SQL and yes this is possible too. I use a PostgreSQL server and use Linq-to-SQL with it. It works but as expected, the documentation is poor.

This is free to use, but from my experience some of the costs can be very frustrating time spent trying to figure out why things are not working as they should, or barrier to entry with poor documentation.

As one commenter pointed out, mono behaves strangely when changing part of your codebase while it's running. Modifying a file can cause 500s or timeouts to be thrown. Killing and restarting the fastcgi process is needed.

A major positive is the developers who work on these parts of mono are very responsive to issues and code is improving all the time.

Interesting. I do something with SVN (and haven't had a problem so far). I have my Visual Studio project directory located in my Dropbox so the current file saves end up backed up.

I also have a local SVN server binaries and configuration stored in my dropbox, aswell as the svnroot. It means whatever computer I go to, I instantly have a local SVN server running too.

Naturally I don't have 2 computers running svnserv at the same time. It was the lower barrier to entry than SVK and the VS Git Extensions aren't quite there yet.

Yes, I've upgraded from 2008 to 2010. The ASP.NET MVC tooling is a bit better, intellisense is smarter and multi monitor support is better.

However I still design everything to be cross platform compatible and I deploy my asp.net mvc webapps on Linux with nginx and mono.

The main photo is the Windows Mobile powered HTC HD2. I'm not sure why the author of the post included not only a picture of the wrong hardware, but the wrong operating system too.

http://hypem.com is probably my favourite simply because I've learned of so much music I've bought because of that site. I especially love the remixes and mashups.

https://old.thesixtyone.com is also a pretty good site for finding interesting music.

I hate the Microsoft Natural 4000 so much - I have one here. Apart from the split layout there's not much for me to recommend.

Problems I've faced on it are: 1) Long spacebar with pressing mechanism in the centre. Pushing from the side (where my thumb is) creates a slight resistance in the centre plastic which then causes a louder clack when it gives way. This is noticeable when working in a silent room, and noticeable on my fingers.

2) Too much key travel on all keys - when I went back to typing on my mac after using my 4000 for 6 months, I couldn't believe how much more relaxed my fingers were after not having to press so far down with the keys.

I think the MS Natural 4000 keyboard is designed for people who aren't aware of their fingers but think they're getting ergonomic benefits just from a split keyboard with a faux-leather palm rest. I tried many of these MS 4000 keyboards and they all had the same design that I consider to be a flaw.

Yes. One account for AWS stuff Another account for books/dvds/etc.

I'll take a stab at it as I've used both. Or rather I've used both for actual work.

DropBox wins for me because it can access their servers through our firewall (which only allows HTTP/S access to less than 5 ports). Live Mesh could not do this.

I found dropbox a tiny barrier to entry. It was so unobtrusive. Live Mesh pops up stuff on startup, complains that it can't access the internet. Etc. Dropbox just stays silent and waits file locks are released and internet connectivity returns.

Getting at my files online is SO much easier with DropBox, ESPECIALLY now since they have the new UI. It's fast, Mesh isn't.

I've never used the remote desktop feature so I can't comment.

Oh and the feature I use nearly daily is the Public folder where I just save a file in there, right click in Explorer, copy the public URL and give them the URL rather than worry if the email client can support a 10MB file. Brilliant, much faster than slow Messenger file transfers! I don't believe Mesh has this ability.

Anyway, DropBox is a simple enough concept and I feel they refined it so well that anyone can use it. Mesh is just complex and has way too much UI stuff going on.

I'm still well under the 2GB limit but have a 50GB Pro account (for now anyway) - just waiting for the selective sync feature now

Good to see Con back. But three letter acronyms have too many collisions and this is one of those cases.

As soon as I saw the title of this post, I was instantly reminded of BFS - the Be File System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System

Although in this case it's a Kernel scheduler rather than a Kernel mode Filesystem driver (even though Linux already has kernel module named bfs - Boot File System!) - indeed a TLA may have been a poor choice for a really useful project!

Google, Bing and Yahoo do not have themselves as the top hit for that query either. Zoning in on Bing here and taking that as a recommendation is not entirely fair. http://www.bing.com/search?q=search+the+web gives google http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=search+the+web gives google http://www.google.com/search?q=search+the+web gives yahoo

Everyone here knows it's perfectly possible to manipulate queries to all engines to return top results for their rivals.

HN loads extremely quickly. I can generally scan through a page of comments quicker than the linked article while their rendering is blocked on 3rd party scripts/ads

I've been clicking around the web since 1996 and each year I find more and more data inaccessible because of DRM and region blocking.

The content was there before, but in pirated form on youtube, etc... now it's being replaced by the copyright owners and locked down. I encounter SO much content online from so many sources that now prevent me from seeing it because of my IP, or saving it to disk.

This is not changing for the better, it is getting worse. I see the future of the internet as locked down and limiting.

The news item is not where the interesting discussion is happening, the comments on http://peterkleissner.com/?p=11 are worth reading.

TrueCrypt encryption is not bypassed in the sense that you can taken a offline drive and get access to the data without the key, but just like all good MBR worms, the TC loader can be patched (from both within Windows with Stoned, and from an offline system) to do whatever malware you want to do as soon as the TC key is entered.

I guess one takeaway from this is the same as we all should know from the past - even with full disk encryption, don't behave pooly by running potential MBR-patching malware as an administrator.

My main laptop runs Windows 7 - nearly all development is done on this, compiles using Visual Studio 2008 and Cygwin. My netbook runs Windows 7 - I do nearly all my social/recreational stuff on that machine. Also it has VGA out and I've come to rely on Win7s projector detection magic for presentations to just work. It's the only machine I travel with. My top-of-the-range Alum Macbook runs just OSX, got it for xcode, which is gathering dust because most of my dev work is in VS.net and even after months I still can't get into the swing of using OSX. Machines synced with the amazing DropBox of course.

In serverland, 1 dedicated server (France) and 1 slice (USA) running Ubuntu 9.04 server, the other vps running RHEL; Mono 2.4.2.

I always have a stack of Putty windows open.

Thanks for the advice - I subsequently did that. But I have to point out you know nothing more about my situation than what I said in response to your comment.

Just like GitHub are investigating possible outcomes of their situation - in my situation I was perfectly able to survive on my means and dedicate 100% of my time being top of my year, building a strong reputation within the school of IT and working on my own tech projects that just happened not to be money making exercises. Git was not used, SVN was. If Github existed at the time and for free, I can think of a couple projects I built at the time that I would could have used it for. I still strongly feel for certain classes of product, a free version for students would get them hooked early - but it's a choice GitHub have to make themselves. I hope I've provided counter points to the "all students can afford this" argument and points for why a free student license should exist.

I agree. I spent a considerable amount of time learning about/setting up/configuring my own SVN server and tools around it simply because I couldn't find a free hosted alternative that didn't expose my source code.

If I had a free github/alternative account I'd probably give it a shot and give that my time. Although more for curiousity sake... git doesn't integrate with the VS.net IDE which I spend a lot of my time in.

They wouldn't lose me as a paying customer because I never intended on paying in the first place (as evidenced by spending more than $7 of my time in setting up an alternative). They may gain an interested follower in the long run.

I had eactly €100 per 5day week for most of my first year at college. €65 was my accomodation (quite a distance from the college) which included breakfast €4.50 lunch at college x 4 days (I'd frequently get it for less + drink because the lady on the till liked me) €3 for a sandwich/roll x 5 days which I'd eat in the evening. I had to budget because I had NO OTHER INCOME so your remark about beers doesn't cut it. My blood just boiled when I saw you generalising students like that.

And there is a considerable leap between using something for free and paying any money for it.

Oh how I wish I could do that. The majority of people (college students) who access my webapp do so on IE6 because: - They're accessing it during class time or hogging the computer labs/library throughout the day and IE6 is the only browser on the majority of the machines on campus. - IE7 is on a smaller percentage (a quarter perhaps) of machines within the campus - still a hefty percentage - no alternative browsers anywhere. - Their home laptops have never been windows-updated and still run IE6, or those that have WU'd run IE7.

The only times Chrome, Safari or FF hit the app is when the computing students use it - and they tend to not be my demographic because they don't store every detail of their life on social networks whereas the IE6 loving social-studies students do.

I was going to buy this book until I came across this very poor review of it on http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1BLJZBGOHH7F9/ref=cm_cr_pr_v...

I figured http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php might be a better alternative source to learn iPhone development from - or at least provide a learning environment thats more engaging than a book. It's free also.

I find http://hardforum.com/ to be excellent if you want to discuss hardware. It's the forum site from hardocp.com

PuTTY Connection Manager - http://puttycm.free.fr/

Dupe :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349078

Oh, then that confused me. Does luckycal not already have access to my facebook friends list? I thought when luckycal presented me with my friends list it wanted me to send an app invite to them all?

I still think it's a fundamentally awesome tool and all niggles can be worked out through incremental updates.

I've been using Luckycal for about a month - it frequently reminds me it can't find any events for me.

I remember seeing very complicated sentences to describe simple things within the app.

It seems like for it to become useful, all my friends need to install the app. Is that correct? I'm still waiting for luckycal to recommend something to me.