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Does anyone have any other sources for this information? Like anything that makes it look less like a rumor?

What is the advantage of polling over comet? I guess the real question is how often is a user re-polling the same value, without it changing.

-Ben

Try a place like slicehost.com or linode.com where you can seamlessly upgrade your account over time. Both start around $20 a month, and both will let you instantly upgrade your account. That said -- if you have a good growth trajectory, you will know when you've reached the limit of your current hosting company. But honestly, the most you'd save is about $120 a year, so if your serious about your project, I'd start with a virtual server you can upgrade on the fly, it will cost you less than you spend on 2-3 months of your cellphone service (depending on plan).

With the recent launch of Google Voice, google might end up having the best social network data of any social network, since they will essentially act as the phone company, your email provider(Gmail), and your instant messaging service(Gtalk). (i.e. they could know who all your friends were and how often you spoke to each of them) [this is assuming you aren't doing all your messaging through facebook]

Any word on whether these will be 32 bit or 64 instances. Slicehost's ram is far less "efficient" than linode, and you only really need 64bit for addressing ram anyway.

I don't suppose anyone knows of a Ruby interface that let's you call erlang directly from ruby as a true erlang node (like py_interface for python).

For #1 how would you handle situations where someone signs up up on the 20th of the month. Would you charge them for 10 days, or for ~40?

What about if instead they signup on the 28th of the month? 3 days or ~33?

I'll be honest, I can get the marketing side of the green argument. But, it seems to be crazy how much emphasis there is on "greening".

I can see an argument where there is a real value proposition, for example, solar panels in Arizona, Southern California, or Colorado, places with above average sunlight. Water optimization in LA (not in Oregon).

But, when you have people in Virginia i.e. (http://tjspi.110mb.com/press20082404.php) trying to put solar panels on top of a school, in a region that is incredibly hazy during the summer (the time where electrical energy could do the most good by balancing peak load). It just seems to me that eventually the money for these sort of unsustainable --- well intentioned investments in green technology will go away.

I.e. it appears there is a lot of hype, and a lot less real substantial progress. Obama's new green jobs, are only really beneficial to the economy if they actual reduce our dependence on foreign oil (we are the larges consumer of oil in the world) at the same rate that china increases it's need for oil, so that the price of oil stays high even if the US isn't buying it. And in terms of beneficial to the environment --- we all live on the same planet --- and that's a worldwide problem to solve.

How does campfire handle this? -- it seems like something the 37signals people would have put time into.

Man, what's really cool about this, is how it's implemented. They use a flash application that sits where the link to "upload files" is, so when you click on the "link" your actually clicking on a flash application which launches a flash file browser. The flash then talks to javascript which creates the div for the file and draws the progress bar.

Really slick :-)

Depending on how much work you plan on doing you might take a look at QuickBooks, which can do cool stuff like keep track of all the checks you are writing. If your on linux might want to try: http://www.gnucash.org/

If you want something simple, try: http://bambooinvoice.org/

I recommend against writing your own software. (Although we did write our own timekeeping application -- which we license to another local company)

Wow, this is a really slick move. Who else is competing with Amazon in ebooks and paid online content delivery to mobile devices?