The fact that they are using rails demonstrates more newbie-style cluelessness, to me. Not even remotely a good choice. But, the sort of things 4 guys fresh out of college with no experience would think was the obvious choice.
It has a lot to do with Reddit in that Reddit was available, better, and already fairly well known. It's not like the article could possibly go "How Digg's Whatever Benefited Mixx.com". Reddit was basically standing there ready to soak up Digg users once masses of them stuck their heads up for long enough to notice that Digg isn't really that entertaining or informative, and other sites may suit them better.
I, too was annoyed when Google changed to automatically 'fixing' your terms a few years back. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes they TELL you at the top, sometimes they don't. It took me a while to figure out that single quotes are ignored while double quotes are taken very seriously. In the meantime, the usefulness of Google went way down for me. I don't mind having to use double quotes, but it should be the other way around - I'd rather click a 'do a fuzzy improved search' box than have to say 'yes this is what I really want to search for I MEAN IT' with double quotes.
I have seen a blank page on Google, too within the past couple of days. Never saw anything of the sort before. It was when I clicked to try a search on News, and I couldn't get that search to come up with anything different - until I turned of 'Instant'.
Oh well, whatever. I'm sure they logged an exception and will fix that soon.
As for people gaming the results, it is a huge problem, but it's a problem that is bound to plague any market leader in search.
I'm sure they do that on a bit by bit basis, when they're isolating one transaction at a time, but are you sure that when they 'freeze' an entire account, they reverse all of the transactions?
I totally agree. But still, these people are serious in a way. It's generally the hobby or very-very entry level range. The thing is, they'll spend plenty of money on supplies and marketplace fees, but have this aversion to purchasing something relatively virtual, especially as they think they can do themselves or get it for free. The same goes for their websites.
It's bad decision making, no doubt. They're sacrificing their professional image, and being penny-wise and pound foolish.
Their site really is slow as can be. I dread not being able to dig something up in my email, that means I have to go use Paypal's search - each page can seriously take 10-15 seconds to come up.
Look how they recently froze $10m that was donated to Burning Man.
Seriously, how does they review process work, exactly? They could try Googling the customer and find out it's an internationally famous festival that has been going on for years and years. Instead, they just seem to notice the money involved and try to seize it. I bet that somewhere in paypal, it works like DEA style asset forfeiture, and the people who freeze accounts stand to benefit financially, personally and directly.
Sure, rebooting is often the most straightforward way to fix runtime issues because it resets everything. In this case, sounds like resetting the clock would have been just as effective. I'm sure these days, you'd have something like the equivalent of a ntpd update every hour to take care of that.
If the US, EU, and Japan are doomed, who isn't? I don't think the answer is China and India. China's plan seems to be to lurch full steam ahead (no pun intended) into our style of entirely non-sustainable petroleum and coal fueled over-consumption.
I think you're seeing a knee-jerk reaction to what is seen as a knee-jerk reaction to Microsoft. The truth is, MS clearly sucks beyond any hope. People are sick of hearing it, though, so especially if they use Windows and don't know any better, they deny it and become angry.
NO, I did the opposite. I had a successful, promising career dong something totally unrelated, and decided I'd had enough and it was time to do something new. Now I'm a software dev.
Good move. I had a girlfriend whose father worked designing guidance systems for rockets. He couldn't speak a word about his job to his family, and it was apparent that his conscience struggled with the fact that his engineering handiwork was only good for killing people.
I think MacOS is close enough to a commercialization of Linux for the desktop to count as that. (I realize it's not based on Linux of course, but the result is very similar).
Me too, I was thinking about how I was looking for an upgrade to the Linux UT 2003 a while back and couldn't find it on the official site. I decided downloading it from some random place was risky, and here was almost my reinforcing, validating catharsis - but alas, it's just about some IRC client that nobody uses.
It makes sense in terms of physics. Start at 0, red, the beginning of the visible spectrum, and the number increases along with the wavelength, all the way through violet, the other end of the visible spectrum.
And maybe hire some experienced programmers/project managers to architect the system first? My experience with the code put out by fresh CS graduates is that it's a bit naive and by-the-textbook, not surprisingly.