eugenejen

For each service, they have different features.

From my experiences with different API, Google's geocoding api covers most countries. I suspect for all countries that Google provides street view services, the geocoding service will work pretty well.

SimpleGeo is pretty good, its coverage is less than Google.

Bing supports a lot of countries. But for a lot of countries, it support to major roads. You can see it here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd435699.aspx

Foursquare has around 23 millions venues and growing. I guess in next 2 years, we can see Foursquare's venues covers most mobile GPS coverage area on Earth and if their human administrators can maintain the quality.

Google is pretty good and fuzzy matching address. I tried SimpleGeo 6 months ago and it is kind of strict and pretty intolerant to address misspelling. Foursquare can match venue name to possible entries in the neighborhood in venue/search but I am not sure for address matching.

Yahoo! PlaceFinder seems lack of maintenance in data. Even they were the first one to provide geocoding api.

I think some libertarians support small governments and small corporations.

Large corporations always use their influence on governments. This happens for a lot of time around the world. Those corporations influence governments to stipulate laws that protect their own interests rather than interest of proletariat.

The most disturbing aspect is that those large corporations propaganda as they are in fact protecting proletariat's property right. In a country such as U.S. where 1% in populations control 33% of the wealth and 10% in population control 66% of the wealth, the law is not for protecting 90% population's property right, but the 10%.

You doubts this? Look at RIAA, MPAA's effort in U.S. Congress.

P.S. I am a closet libertarian.

I worked as a research assistant in physics 20 years ago and the opinions then was treating simulation, experiment, theory as 3 pillars for physical science. Each one has its own advantage and disadvantage in dealing with real world problem. But most of time, experiment is the only way to disapprove theoretical model/computer simulation.

Human beings tend to become overconfident in thoughts. And I think scientific methods tries to make sure that overconfidence won't mislead our judgement.

I see. And this is really frustrating unless you change the mindset to take everyday that is gained as a little victory for patients to enjoy life. But for patients of terminal cancers, the quality of life only deteriorates.

Having seen both my parents suffered terminal cancers and passed away, I think any economical way that can make people living to the end without losing quality of life is more important than prolonging life. And IMHO that is a very tough problem to work on.

No, crowd source this.

Well, Apple probably wants to push Thunderbolt to external hub manufacturers and storage companies as the new I/O channels. In that case, Macsales.com's custom mod external e-SATA port will be an inferior solution. (10 Gbps vs 3 Gbps).

Probably in mid 2012 we will see all new Thunderbolt based external drives and hubs for storage expansion of iMacs and MacBook Pros.

But I agree, it is still a pain in ass for DIYers to replace hard drives when the disk is broken. And Apple will sell more Apple Care for iMacs and Macbook Pros.

EDIT -

It seems Macsales.com's custom iMac e-SATA is not in product page anymore. I remember they had the service before that you can send your iMac and they will drill a hole on case and put a SATA port to the unused SATA port on the motherboard.

check q4m, it has been out in production use for 3 years.

There is a mysql storage engine that works as a persistent high throughput message queue. http://q4m.github.com/. It can deliver to 15k items/sec on a 4GB RAM, Intel X3220 @ 2.40GHz, with 7200 rpm disk. The performance of the queue is proportional to the disk, cpu and ram just as mysql.

wrong headline:

Free E-Book: "Principles of Digital Image Synthesis”

I am so curious to know who are those two companies. And I can imagine it is not easy to meet their requirements. I can imagine there are issues on authentication, security, access to data system, resolution conflict orders, consistent inventory accounting. Those topic are not rocking science but to do them well and make the system reliable (even just meet the requirements) is not a trivial task.

IMHO the cause for slow progress is due to most submarine research are restricted and classified as top secret.

At the other hand, I wonder why submarine exploration of oceans on earth is not regarded as highly as space exploration. Also while there are so many private start-ups focus on commercial space business, what about deep ocean? I know James Cameron's participation. But anybody else?

Are you referring to http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-applica...

http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-applica...

http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-applica...

By Richard Jones of the Last.fm?

Thank you for your replying. The original C10k from Dan Kegel was a guideline for me when I worked on project during 2003 - 2006. I am wondering what is the latest progress in this area. I am glad this problem is solved to you. I will check out niver tech in future when the problem comes up.

I have a stupid question here. When you have a large memory machine, why can't you serve 1M clients on 1 ip without IP aliases?

I asked this question because if one uses 17 instances to handle 1M connections, for each instance is around 50k. I am more interested in knowing the possibility and performance for one machine to handle 1M connections.

IMHO, the rising of Facebook and Twitter is due to email spams defeated email user experience in 2000s. FB and Twitter provide a much higher signal to noise level than email for common users without knowing spam filters and all other craps.

So maybe the thing that replaces FB or Twitter is something that makes my communication with my family and friends better. What will that be, we will know when it rises.

I agree what you said. But the total time spent on Internet of all human being will be bounded, not infinite. You can only have 7 x 18 billion person-hours a day to use different services. What you have to compete is the time that users uses your service.

Of course I maybe wrong in above statement. The statement doesn't include all automated computing processes. Then the limit may be much larger to be considered as unlimited.

IIRC Steve Jobs sold all his Apple shares when he was ousted by John Sculley. All Steve Jobs has right now are options granted during last 14 years plus what he received from acquisition of Next Inc.

MySQL has a storage engine Q4M, which is transactional and persistent. The performance depends on the server's performance, but I have not problem to achieve 10k/sec queue throughput on Core2 Duo 2GHz cpu. You can use the queue with standard mysql client.

Check out the http://q4m.31tools.com/, http://www.slideshare.net/kazuho/q4m-a-highperformance-messa...

IIRC the funding of Internet research in DARPA is in 60s.

Thanks to boomers in USA. They enable all my fellow people in East Asia lives a better live than my grandparents due to free trade.

Thanks to boomers in USA, now Rock, Punk, Alternatives, Hiphop music styles influence the music styles around the world. I hope you have patience to sit through traditional Japanese style music performance.

Thanks to boomers in USA, now we can have all cool movies from 70s and 80s to watch. All the exploitation movies in 70s are awesome.

Thanks to boomers in USA, now a homosexual/bisexual person can live life with less stigma, I think that's pretty fair to 10% of the population.

Thanks to boomers in USA, they dream about cheap personal computer that we can type rubbish into. Now we can generate so many bits that we never thought that we can capture them before.

I was not talking about entrepreneurship, but "Nope. Nobody ever made a billion dollars working for someone else,".

Just a fack check.

There is at least one person who have worked for others and becomes a billionaire because of that: Charles Simonyi. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi). But he is probably the only 1 in 6,697,254,041 human beings who achieve billionairehood by working for others.

And yes, he worked one time in Xerox PARC before Microsoft.

Thanks Arnór. This is very useful feedback because you are outside our test data point.

By the way, when you tried to change your location, did you try to type the location into the text box? Can I know what did you type so I can test on my end?

Hi Paul,

My current company (thehotlist.com) has been working on what you asked in these two paragraphs for two years.

"Facebook began by testing Instant Personalization with a handful of popular existing sites. But the interesting question for us is: what new things could be built using it that couldn't even have existed before? What new things could you do if you already knew users and their friends the moment they arrived?

One obvious advantage is that it will decrease the friction of trying something new. That will make it easier to launch dramatically novel things. The problem with dramatic innovations is that users often don't understand what you've made till they try it. Now you'll just be able to show them."

Would you like to give me some feedback if you visited thehotlist.com?

And if anyone visits thehotlist.com and has questions to ask me about the experience in using Facebook as main data source, feel free to ask me.

Eugene Jen

But the bacteria growth in Petri dishes is limited by resource, and bacteria has no way to change the situation.

Maybe we are really limited by available resources. We know for sure that we have limited supply of the solar energy. At the other hand, we are just using what is available on the surface of the Earth. Maybe we are going to figure out how to utilize more resources outside the surface of the Earth, or efficient way to use and recycle resources.

I think the problem is when cross border fraud happens, the complexity and cost for detective work is higher than domestic fraud. Also in case of regular refund for customers, it is much easier for Market institution to deduct fund from domestic sellers' accounts. While cross border market has to deal with tax, exchange rate and different countries law regarding for refund.

I guess for Richard Branson cases, the initial capital requirement for consumer oriented media/air line/mobile/finance ventures probably is larger than revenue from initial customers.

A list of them.

Classic:

App:

bing, box.net, dimdim, drop.io, flickr, Google Docs and Spreadsheet, meebo, mint.com, picnik, tinychat, Yahoo! Mail,

Fun:

Allrecipes.com, Boing Boing, CocktailDB, epicurious, Funny or Die, Hulu, Instructables, The Onion, Pandora, UStream, YouTube,

Info:

Craigslist, Howcast, iFixit, IMDB, indeed, Kayak, metacritic, Snopes, TED.com, Wikipedia

News:

BBC, Legitstalker, The New York Times, SI.com

Shopping:

Amazon, The Consumerist, Etsy, Restaurant.com

Social:

Facebook, Kiva, Tumblr, Twitter,

Tech:

Ars Technica, Filehippo.com, gdgt, Lifehacker, Makeuseof.com, techmeme

Undiscovered:

App:

CeeVee, Flockdraw, fur.ly, Roc,

Fun:

Band Camp, Clicker, Critical Past, Fiverr.com, "TheHotlist.com", Kideos, Locate TV, Pixton, RadioTuna, Roadside America, ShortFormTV, Shovio, WhoSampled,

Info:

Atlas Obscura, Calcmoolator, Everyscape, LyricRat, Quora, RiskyRoads.org, SeeClickFix, SepiaTown, SiteJabber, StarFall.com, This we know, Waterlife, We choose the moon, "We are no so smart"

News:

How is life today,

Shopping:

The DealMap, FoodPair, GigPark, Listia, LocalDirt, Milo, NeighborGoods, OoKong, Price Cheater, Seat Geek, SquareTrade, TinyPay.me, Zeer,

Tech:

Gizmo's Freeware, Lucy, Quirky

Edit:

I found my company, thehotlist.com is listed in undiscovered fun category when I typed the list. This made my day.

Good catch. Maybe I am naive and am fooled.

Maybe I should follow JWZ's step. Selling alcohols is more lucrative than programming!

I don't know. The guy who called said he was working as contract recruiter for Google. Maybe it's due to bad economy or downsizing?

I can imagine a software engineer who is suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome switches jobs from writing to keyboard to talking on the phone.

I can attest this.

I got called from Google during 2006. The HR guy screened me on the phone with all TCP/IP questions. I was amazed because he knew so much about TCP/IP and UNIX socket. It turned out that he was a former software engineer in Bell Lab/Lucent. It has been the best initial phone screen that I ever have.

I am curious about you theory because I've been in NYC since web 1.0 so I like to see how your theory is.

Would you like to share it?