goodkarma

I find it amusing that the Republicans are critiquing our new President when their former party leader raised our national debt substantially (and brought back massive deficits).

I also find it interesting that they discuss ending bailouts when Bush gave the first bailout before leaving office (but no one actually monitored where the money was going).

If Google explained their termination process for Google Checkout, would that mean they also have to explain their termination process for Adsense?

We use Payflow Pro Recurring Billing (PayPal).

If you don't need access to the funds for a few days I would recommend using Braintree for recurring billing. But if you want the funds in your Paypal account immediately Paypal's Payflow Pro is a decent option.

I love Rails!

I have been programming my whole life - more than 20 years. Rails is the most amazing framework to work with. You can do nearly anything with it - and pretty quickly. And you can get a LOT done in just a few hours of work!

Besides all of this, though, Rails is what got me to learn and truly appreciate Ruby. And Rails would be nothing without Ruby. Rails is fantastic, but Sinatra, Merb, etc., are other options that I am exploring more and more depending on the needs of my project.

America's Big 3 automakers have been lazy and complacent for years. They haven't made substantial increases in fuel efficiency in decades, and preferred to sue California to fight the zero-emission vehicle law rather than sell more electric cars. They take tons of handouts from the government (hydrogen research, hybrid research, bailout money, etc.) yet lose millions per day.

Bottom line: they don't deserve to be in business.

Even if Tata's Nano is $5k, I would buy one.

Sounds great in theory, but I can buy a lot of paper for $1000...

Looking forward to checking this out. Have been looking at Rightscale but their fees are steep. Glad to hear Cloudkick could be another option.

LOL there are some people listed as "celebrities" that are definitely NOT celebrities!

I love it! It's a great idea, and a scalable business.

Right now we are generating PNG graphics using a Ruby library, but I'm looking to move to either Flash or Javascript-based charts.

What are the advantages/disadvantages of Javascript charts vs. Flash? Are the JS charts compatible with Safari and IE? (have had other javascript compatibility issues with them so far)

Sorry I was a bit harsh there. I had really hoped to see the full interview and got a little frustrated.

Curious.. do you have the original (full-length) interview video? Would you mind posting it somewhere?

I made the app for myself. I wrote the first code a few days before flying to Startup School last year. I wanted to be able to tweet things when I was traveling. Initially, all it did was schedule tweets. That was the feature I wanted most. Over time, as I wanted it to do more, I wrote more code.

There are tons more features we will add - and a lot more that I'm sure we will add that we don't even know about yet. I am trying to constantly keep my ear to the ground and listen to my users and influential folks in the search marketing industry and trying to prioritize what needs to be done based on feedback and my own daily use of the app.

It's kind of the whole premise of what PG says to do - launch early, and listen to your users. Many startups change their whole model after they launch. We now offer many features I would have never guessed when we launched the app last year.

Really?

I think the whole point is to launch as early as possible. "Release early, release often"

Plus you want to get up and running, get some users, and start building momentum (which comes from people using it, talking about it, giving you feedback, etc.)

I recommend building the app for yourself. You will know what features need to be done first.

Oh my gosh, how annoying is the video at the bottom? I was hoping to just see the interview with Paul, not a sliced and diced version that screetches like he's pulling a needle over a record..

This was great reading. I've put off A/B testing with Google Website Optimizer long enough. Looking forward to boosting my revenue! ;-)

I've read real estate investment books that advocated getting interest only loans and refinancing every few years (to take out the equity), but that assumes the value keeps going up.

In this situation it didn't.

But should the bank take responsibility for the market price of her home going down - by taking a loss on a loan and re-valuing the price of the house? No.

She wouldn't be complaining if her house was now worth a million.

What if you say you offer toll-free tech support to paid plan users?

I'm in this exact situation and I am not sure if I can get the right person to answer the phone as effectively as I could.

I'm not dying to answer the phone - but until I have a good feel for what the "frequently asked questions" are, I can't pass that responsibility onto anyone else.

>> But do book sites really help sell books? As in so much of publishing, no one quite knows.

How could it not?

I can't believe so many folks are talking about how expensive it is. It's $129 per month people!!

If you're gonna launch anything that people will use you ought to be able to monetize. If you can't, what the hell are you doing in the first place?!

Is there a way I can use this instead of a multi-slice conventional EngineYard setup? Or do you have a RightScale-type thing in the works?

As a customer I'm glad they are laying off people. They charge far more than they should for the resources you get, and it seemed like they had way too many employees than they needed. Our sales rep was totally clueless and gave us bad information several times - I wonder if he is still there..

We're paying around $1100/month and looking to migrate off EngineYard as well - can you point me in the right direction and/or provide any tips for a migration to AWS?

>> So, if all goes normally, 19-January-2038 will suddenly become 13-December-1901 in every time_t across the globe, and every date calculation based on this figure will go haywire.

Good thing we have 28+ years to sort this out..

I've never been able to get Rails set up on AWS - had problems with the AMIs etc.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for a LAMP/Rails setup?

In the past 3 1/2 years (since I started buying Apple products), I've had a 60% defect rate by computer (5 computers - though each defective computer had multiple issues), and a 66% defect rate for other products (iPod 3G, iPhone 1G, Time Capsule)

We have http://www.plumcard.com/ and love it.

2% cash back if you pay within 7 days of your statement. (But there is a minimum monthly spend of $1000 or something like that.)

I don't think DHH is being a jerk. He's just got an opinion, and I guess some of these folks are a little too sensitive.

He built Rails for him - and it has taken on a life of its own. And that's awesome.

I think the Merb guys are brilliant - I was really impressed by them at the MerbCamp in SD this past September. I'm excited about Rails 3.

If you join http://nase.org (National Association of Self-Employed) you can get a pretty good rate on health insurance through them.

I've been an affiliate, and am getting ready to launch our own in-house affiliate program (using iDevAffiliate) to promote our own products and services.

Feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat in more detail.