82 karma · joined May 3, 2010
Personally I don't like being treated like this - as a user or a developer. So I take my time and money elsewhere.
(North) American telco misregulation is a disaster.
He's also ridiculously generous. Also, he builds cool robots for fun (or at least used to).
Also, was someone really trying to run performance benchmarks on a shared machine running on a VM and expecting to get anything meaningful out? Really? Like really? I'm embarrassed for you.
A more thoughtful assessment would have examined what packages were installed & used rather than which ones existed. That data is really easy to find: http://popcon.ubuntu.com/
* search
* deleting songs from a playlist (safely)
* multidimentional stats queries (eg: http://developer.rdio.com/docs/read/rest/Methods#getHeavyRot...)
Perhaps we could have modelled these in a REST-like manner, but it seemed simpler to make the functionality available through an RPC protocol - simpler for us to implement and simpler for developers to integrate into their software.
Ultimately, within reason, good programmers are worth whatever you have to pay them and bad programmers aren't worth what you pay them. There are way more bad programmers than good programmers and money isn't the way to attract the good ones. You have to attract them with interesting problems and a great work environment. If they're there for the money then they're probably no good anyway.