scw

No, it won't with the trailing '.' -- try it yourself, visit site.com/news and then search for 'news.'

This is still the case: typing in 'news.' will be recognized as a URL, and only subdomains of 'news' will be matched.

These visualizations are beautiful. What would make it considerably more interesting would be access to the code so we could run it against our own projects, or perhaps integration into something like http://www.ohloh.net/

You're completely right. To convince myself:

  trillion = 10**12
  wikipedia = 10**8

  surplus = trillion
  applied_surplus = surplus * 0.01
  print applied_surplus / wikipedia

which leaves us with only 100 wikipedias, as your numbers claimed.

>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

He switched context from discussing the US-only consumption to total global television consumption. It seems worth thinking about the implications of this change even if the numbers are inaccurate.

Great idea. I've been using browsershots.org, which while cheaper only provides static images of pages. Sandboxing the entire machine is a clear improvement. A logical next step is automated testing to take advantage of these system configurations, something like Selenium.

The $316m could accomplish much, but I doubt directly creating a startup hub. The drivers which turn cities into creative class meccas wouldn't be included, and it likely would face the same difficulties as the Middle East's education plans: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/education/11global.html

It would a powerful change if groups like Gates' (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120113473219511...) began investing in the efforts which have the best chance of the results they're seeking: startups. I'm guessing the startup model is antithetical to what BillsG sees as the answer, which is unfortunate.

It'd be much better if they de-aggregated this information over the surface to create a true 'heat map'. If they did this, you'd probably see true hotspots of patent innovation which I'll bet correspond nicely to startup hubs.

Nothing wrong with the article, but I was expecting... optimizations. It seems to instead be a list of additional software your average desktop user may find useful.

Curi, thanks for the helpful advice. I'll update the page to clarify the process and what the numbers mean. The numbers themselves are unitless; they represent the cumulative impact level from all threats combined.

What degradation means and how it effects our map should be illustrated, likely in a simple conceptual diagram showing how the color classification maps onto coral states.

I'm not sure if you're referring to the NYT image or our site, the site itself does a much better job of giving context: http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/GlobalMarine

The 'How did we create this map?' header lays out our process and what the colors quantify, in reasonably clear language. Our page also contains a link to the paper itself, for those who want to understand how to interpret the results.

The results are the first attempt to systematically quantify the effect humans have on the species living in the ocean, and doesn't cover what those effects might drive in the markets. Hopefully an economist will build on our data to answer the kinds of questions you raised.

No one in the article claims it is all downside (the shrimp farmer in Georgia now makes his income from Jellyfish) or a claim on the evolutionary advantage of the system. In a direct way, we can trace our own lineage as mammals to being benefited by the extinction of the dominant vertebrate for 160m years in the Cretaceous extinction.

However, in our current position, humans have a different role and relationship with nature: what we do has a direct impact on our environment. Even if you discount the loss of biodiversity as a minor thing to be waved away -- and even if you do take the fairly nihilistic view that all ecosystems are of equal worth -- there are direct impact to humans from our changing of the environment.

In the case of the oceans, they provide a massive economic benefit directly from extraction industries, which have been in decline due to overuse, and mechanisms like the great ocean conveyor belt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation) transmit tremendous quantities of energy into northern climates providing moderate climates at northern latitudes (particularly, Northern Europe). In the case of corrals, diving, recreational fishing and tourism are key components of many of the economies of nations containing them. Without these natural resources, local economies suffer, as has already happened in a number of Caribbean nations.

Has it ever been easier? Is there some hidden nostalgia for a world I'm not a part of that made application development dramatically simpler? Writing code is hard, no matter what the environment, one of Java's largest failures was 'write once, read anywhere'. Look at Joel's experience with .NET: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PleaseLinker.html. This article is just shrill yelling of 'square peg! round hole!' and apparently it works.

The NSF isn't the primary fund granting organization for medical research, the NIH is -- with a funding level (28.7B) that eclipses the NSF (5.9B). In 2003, NIH is estimated to have funded 28% of the overall medical investigation costs: http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/...

Pharmaceutical research in all likelyhood includes the cost of bringing drugs to market, currently around $800M per drug. Because of this high barrier, much of the Pharma energy goes into 'me too' drugs of a higher risk/reward ratio, again inflating the true spending on new research: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/what-dont-w...

I have a degree in physical geography, but now work full-time on some sweet research projects.

I'm a developer for NCEAS, an ecological research center, attached to UC Santa Barbara.

Don't want to start a 'my database is...' rant, but have you given Postgres a whirl with said data? It tends to be fairly robust for very large datasets, and its performance tends to be excellent under these conditions. Migration from MySQL is straightforward; I use both DBs in separate environments.

A minor meta comment; Good titles really do matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=103834

From Avi Bryant http://www.avibryant.com/2008/01/dont-panic.html: It's not perfect yet - there's no images, just text, and the parser is pretty basic and doesn't know about tables and stuff

More likely The Simpsons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons#Influences_on_lang...

Meet your reddit brethren: http://reddit.com/info/5yw4h/comments/

Read more on Slicehost -- its exactly that; you have full access to a virtualized machine, and can do pretty much anything.

A pet feature I wish they had was exposing a way to download the actual Xen image your site is hosted within. Then you could be developing your production server sans internet, and rsync the resulting image.

It would be helpful to know something about your requirements: as you move away from commodity hosting, the hosting world becomes more complex in what it provides.

I've been very satisfied with my Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com/) account, for excellent virtualized hardware, but depending on your scale, need for growth, geographic location, need for dedicated boxes, et cetera, someone else is likely appropriate.

For anyone interested in how the brain operates, including its ability to adapt to new sensory input, I highly recommend Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence

There is no evidence presented that backs up the claim that Linux is being displaced by Apple usage; even stated is that in the time monitored Linux web users doubled (albeit to a still minute fraction of the total users). The assumption that having no Apple on the marketplace would leave a niche easily filled by Linux is also unlikely.

Apple is making good inroads in adoption, after a few costly moves reducing its market share, is gaining and hopefully continues to gain, traction and position itself as the consumer alternative to the nightmare of Windows. Linux is many different things, but the gain of community supported, easy to install, open source software will likely continue making inroads into the proprietary world. It remains to be seen if Linux can bridge enough proprietary apps to address the needs of Joe user.

In many of these systems, an important factor is the software ecosystem surrounding the OS itself: Windows has had this major boost and resistance to competition based on its 1-2 orders of magnitude greater availability of software than any of its competitors, but OS X is attracting a number of niche apps with major strong appeal to some user factions, and Linux is finally getting easy to use methods to access the plethora of good apps that make an OS stick.

Interesting, it is reasonable to suspect that many brokerage houses (with billions invested in R&D and very intelligent individuals) are using the same approaches to the problems with the added benefit of a human driver behind the wheel. It seems to me that purely using automated approaches to investing (in this case, GP market timing) will always be inferior to the insights of intelligent investors coupled with intelligent computing, but that alone would be a major shift from most investors current practices.

Evaluate the space before settling on Drupal -- if your friend has experience, it should make the evaluation that much easier. There are a number of high quality CMS systems available, and just being familiar with one isn't a sufficient reason to use it.

You may even find that a CMS doesn't provide much for you beyond what you can get with a nice framework in your language of choice, evaluate these before settling on the defaults at hand.

I've written some code in Drupal, and while it has many strengths, its level of abstraction away from just writing simple PHP code in my mind doesn't really differentiate it from a framework... and in the framework space, there are some nicer options available to you.

Naming probably mattered more in the era of phone books and neon signs: if you didn't recognize the name as relating to the service you wanted, it counted against the name.

These limitations aren't present with a URL; a short meaningless name is probably better than a long meaningful one.

An interesting recent phenomena is companies replacing their trusted names built up over many decades with a short, catchy, meaningless one: the rebranding of Washington Mutual to WaMu comes to mind.

A better article on the same topic from the Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11...

I have an x61s, and highly recommend it. Lightweight (<3lbs), durable, great battery life, performs well (Ubuntu 7.10). If you are willing to wait a few months, a mac ultraportable is in the works and likely to be released: http://www.macrumors.com/2007/12/04/apple-orders-13-3-led-ba...

The two constraints you have that will conflict the most are lightweight and large screen. If you are using this as a primary desktop replacement, I'd go with a 20"+ LCD for desk usage.