tybris

Right, and that's the sender, which is what I said. Note that the amount of traffic is effectively irrelevant since the connection is supposed to be dedicated. The only reason why the amount of traffic matters is that you need to decide which side pays what.

That's not how the Internet business model works. Receiving data is effectively free. Transit providers charge the sender for the bitrate (high for the web host, low for the web user) and a fixed fee for the connection, which you will have to pay regardless. Peering is paid for per connection and often by the web hosts who want to avoid transit and get better latency to the ISPs customers. In terms of traffic, there is effectively no difference in cost between sending traffic internally or receiving it from an external source. The reason for data caps is that ultimately networks are capacity constrained, but mostly at the last mile, not at the peering and transit links.

All of that is true if you don't consider inflation and the money supply. Then stuff gets complicated.

Gmail is an ongoing April fool's prank.

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googles_hoaxes

> And it would be catastrophically poor planning on the part of car designers

Why? I'm sure they don't like recalling their cars every couple of months to fix a bug, and customers don't either.

The approach of dynamically generating a callback script is more robust than pure JSONP. If your URL returns an error (e.g., 404), you immediately notice, instead of waiting for the time-out. These days, my usual approach looks something like this in flight:

    <script type="text/javascript">
        var response = undefined;
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="...">
       // response = { .... };
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
       _callbacks[1234](response); // response == undefined means error
       response = undefined;       // allow garbage collection
    </script>
    

It's a bit more administration, but I really like not having to worry about dynamic callback names, delayed errors, or non-existent callback functions any more.

That's trivial to set up yourself with Maxmind's GeoLite Database.

http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity

Not so long ago hard disk space was abundant, then programmers realized hard disk space was abundant.

I thought it was Lond.. no Helsi.. I mean Amst... Oh, never mind.

There's only one thing remotely comparable to Silicon Valley in Europe and that's Ireland. It's where the laws are right for tech. companies and Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and possibly even Twitter got together and are attracting a ton of engineers, which are creating a ton of start-ups, networking events, and even quite a bit of VC.

"Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time."

or "Name"

I think he learned a valuable lesson about how to use the Internet: lie about everything.

One of their mistakes was to publicly announce they were placing a major bid to protect themselves against patent litigation. Their opponents sensed weakness and trashed the party. This will be yet another business case for corporate secrecy.

Obviously the euro zone is bad, but I think you're overestimating how healthy the dollar zone is. Oil supplies are dwindling, the weapons industry is losing importance, the financial industry is not what it used to be, the car industry is no longer competitive, few major infrastructure projects are being undertaken, IT is one of the few industries that is going strong, but it contributes relatively little. Europe has a healthy, productive economy to back up the euro and it's a threat to the dollar.

I've heard a suggestion to change PIGS to BIGPIGS (Belgium, Ireland, Great-Britain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain). Until we get some extra vowels, we can let France off the hook.

Rich countries don't pay off debt, they inflate it away. One of the main reason for European countries to adopt the euro was to get a piece of the reserve currency pie, allowing more debt to be eliminated without severe economic repercussions. Unfortunately, they hit a road block in the Mediterranean, where, due to poor fiscal management, more inflation would lead to economic disasters threatening the stability of the euro. Meanwhile, the U.S. cannot afford much inflation at the moment, since it would threaten the position of the dollar as reserve currency in favour of the euro. Worse yet, they have their biggest creditor breathing in their neck with increasing economic and military power, who would not be pleased by inflationary measures.

Thus begins the biggest poker game of all, in which the U.S. suddenly cares about military spending and is trying to get Europe to spend itself into an inflationary cycle. Meanwhile, Europe is trying to prevent that through severe budget cuts. Ultimately though, neither can get rid of their debt without inflation so both taking inflationary measures is the only logical outcome. China and other countries heavily invested in euros (e.g., Russia) and dollars (e.g., Japan) will not be pleased, but ultimately their wealth is heavily dependent on the economic well-being of their biggest lenders and trading partners. There will be few winners in this game.

Reminds me of Orb, now called Orb Caster - http://www.orb.com. It was pretty awesome to play with and a good combination with a WinTV PVR card, but I never found myself in a situation where I would actually use it. I never really needed most of my media outside of the home. Admittedly, that was before 3G and smartphones became commonplace, but I doubt it would have changed much. At least not for me.

I know Amazon pays very little attention to competitors. However, their customers might have asked them to lower prices in response to Azure.

Read the article. No tax money was spent.

If half the world uses your product, at some point you'll stop growing...

I had it enabled for a while, but it never worked, which was pretty annoying when wanting to print a boarding pass.

I never bothered with notes. They never seemed to work for me. I think and memorize visually or systematically. Having connected words or flat sheets of paper is no good to me. I also saw tests as of more of a nuisance and a disruption in building an understanding. To spend as little time on them as possible, I would figure out how the lecturer creating the test thinks.

The day before the test I would spend a few hours having an imaginary conversation with the lecturer and made sure my model of him matched all my recollections of him/her (if unknown, I'd just imagine a generic lecturer). The imaginary form would ask me questions that might be in the test and I made sure I could answer them. I usually found the actual test to be predictable and much easier. My GPA in college was among the top 1%.

I've tried to teach this technique to others occasionally, but with limited success. It usually fails on not being able to imagine a honest representation of someone else and only asking yourself questions you want to be asked.

Version 12 and still no print preview?

?

I like that one much better. No need for the cockiness.

Hopefully they don't get too good at this. It's rare that a revolutionary army can lay down its weapons after the war. The French thought it would be fun to "liberate" the rest of Europe after their revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolutionary_Wars

Land was being mass produced in the first half the 17th century. My guess is that people couldn't imagine running out of land because you could keep reclaiming it from the sea, but they could imagine running out of tulip bulbs. Thus they undervalued land, and overvalued tulips.

Similarly, during the .com bubble, people couldn't imagine a slightly improved search engine would be worth anything, but an online grocery store seemed like a gold mine.

Bubbles happen when everyone realizes there is a gold mine somewhere, but no one knows how to find it. Some things are overvalued, some things are undervalued. Usually the gold is in a place where you least expect it.

The Netherlands had two flower bubbles, but not because people where crazy. People started to realize that this tiny patch of soggy land would one day be the biggest exporter of flowers and vegetables in the world. Flowers are clearly worth way more per kg than grain, but how much exactly? No one knows, but surely those tulips must be worth a lot.

I now understand that BitCoin is actually an experiment to teach people basic economics and why many of today's rules and institutions (e.g., banks) exist. Sorry for criticizing it. BitCoin is an awesome educational tool.