goodkarma

holy cow, I served with CDR Lahti on another ship 10 years ago!

I've been wanting a SSD for weeks now. I think hard drive speed is why Windows XP is running so slow for me (via VMWare on my Mac).

Downside is I've got a 320 Gb hard drive so need something somewhat comparable. Bigger SSDs are still not cheap! Saw the 250 Gb ones on Amazon for about $600. Almost bought it yesterday, but decided to wait until after my next trip..

I don't have a reference readily available, but I believe I heard/read recently that their revenues are in the $xx million/year (maybe $15M?).

Google was such a massive success that any search startup with a chance of being a "Google killer", or even just a worthy competitor, seems to be finding investors.

If 1% share is a billion dollars in annual revenue, there's some real opportunity there.

I think everyone is investing in search by looking in their rear-view mirror. I doubt the real "Google killer" will be a "text box entry leading to a list of links" search engine of the same nature as Google.

Glad to hear that the rumors in this article might be unfounded. I was hoping to get one of these in time for the holidays, guess I'll have to wait till next year..

I visited the site because I saw their commercial on TV. I imagine most folks will hear about it through their marketing campaigns.

They have plenty of smart folks over there - is it possible they did this intentionally? If their goal is to promote a phone launching later this week, perhaps SEO is not their top concern here?

Okay they fixed the problem. I'd delete my comment if I could but I can't. No need to take away any more of my karma!

Thanks.

All I'm seeing is:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: query() in /content/public_web_sites/www.inc.com/reflex/lib/dbi.class.php on line 152

Their website is functional and actually has quite a bit of content on it - including many years worth of letters from Buffett to Berkshire shareholders.

I'm sure the site would be fancier if Warren Buffett actually used a computer - but as far as I know he doesn't even have one in his office.

Your points are all true but printed snail mail is still more mainstream then PGP encrypted e-mail.

Despite its age and the fact that it is grossly inadequate, snail mail still has a place in our society - at least for now.

I love the idea of a printed letter API (like what postful.com has) as a solution to send automated letters to people. First one that comes to mind is to send a letter to someone if they do a chargeback or their credit card was declined.

I look forward to implementing something like this!

I remember seeing the Google piece and thinking it was a good idea then.

I can see the progression now:

1) local farmer rents out some goats as an experiment

2) seeing positive feedback, local farmer sets up a business breeding goats and renting the herds

3) seeing the success of farmer #1, other farmers set up their own local businesses renting goats

4) one enterprising farmer optimizes the business model and starts acquiring goat rental agencies and setting up regional "goat herding hubs"

5) enterprising farmer gets funding from a prominent silicon valley agency to scale this industrious idea and take it to the masses

6) enterprising farmer's enterprise is acquired by multinational farm equipment company (think "John Deere")

:-)

I LOVE HEROKU.

In the process of migrating a large app to the cloud via Heroku. (We have other apps already running there.)

The guys there are awesome and very helpful, and the service is mind-blowingly bad-ass! Amazing how Rails deployment has evolved!!

You can definitely host tiny apps for free.

If they are fairly low traffic sites with small databases (< 5 MB) that don't require SSL or more than a daily cron, they should fit within the parameters of a free plan - i.e. "blossom" database server, 1 dyno, etc.

WOW.

Google is fundamentally changing the business model of many companies. This is a great example. To Google this is all data, and their goal is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

So these companies should ask themselves: what are they offering? A service, or data?

That said, the stock market has overreacted. Nothing Google has done has affected the earnings of any of these companies. Yet. You all have a decent chance of pocketing a 20% gain if you buy now, because that fear got priced into the stock today.

Just to follow up - the stream has gotten a LOT better - watching Chris Anderson now. Awesome!

I think the special interests donate to folks they know they can influence. (Everything in government is about getting the votes they need, right?)

Which may be why Obama got a lot of donations from individual taxpayers and not multi billion dollar corporations.

So funny how Republicans use the word "freedom" (as in "Internet Freedom Act") when they're actually taking freedoms away (like Net Neutrality)

I've been trying to watch and the video has been pretty choppy too.

Not trying to hate or anything, but I'm pretty bummed about this. I was really looking forward to watching it.

>> But before I let you get too excited about this, a warning: Morgenstern doesn't tell us what Gödel's loophole was!

Wow, that headline was quite a tease!

Is it really that ridiculous? I'm not a lawyer, but I can see both sides to this.

The whole purpose of a trademark is to protect your brand from anything that could be construed as "confusingly similar". Spark and Sparc sound the same and are nearly identical in spelling, and they are both involved in the tech industry.

Whomever made the decision to send a C&D wasn't completely out of line in their reasoning. (Especially since it does not cost a whole lot to send a C&D. It will cost a lot more to take it to court, which I expect will be a factor in SparkFun's decision making process.)

That said, saying the two similar names are in the "tech industry" may not be sufficient justification for the trademark dispute any longer. The industry has so much breadth nowadays and there are so many businesses involved, as long as SparkFun can prove that there is enough differentiation between what they do and what Sparc does they can probably get around it (with some legal tapdancing).

This would probably not be an issue if SparkFun sold handmade chocolate candies :-)

>> oh, my bad. its rails, it fails to scales!

UGH

There are a bunch of sites that offer some kind of functionality like this. Some well known apps (like Tweetie 2) let you do it as well.

Documentaries such as "Recount" and "Hacking Democracy" have made me sick to my stomach - and for a while now I've been questioning the fundamentals of the 'Democracy' that we have been shoving down other countries' throats all these years.

I for one am thrilled to hear about something like this. I think it is long overdue and it has a number of benefits:

1) will save taxpayers money in the long term

2) will create a platform that many developers can review and audit, thus helping improve security and preventing fraud

3) will create a de-facto standard for how we vote, and hopefully over time become used by more and more counties

4) will provide a better level of technology so even poorer counties can (hopefully) upgrade to a high tech and more accurate voting system

Perhaps but I think it's a great start.

There's lots of different software involved here. They said "the election management components are built with Ruby on Rails".

I don't want to get into an argument about the security of the Rails framework specifically - as an active developer I know there have been several issues - but I doubt anyone can guarantee that anything will be indestructible forever.

If you felt strongly about it and wanted to rewrite that portion of their codebase in another language and framework, I'm sure they would accept your code contribution.

I read this article, and then I read Sergey's Op-Ed in the New York Times. I agree with Sergey more than this guy.

That makes sense in theory, but our company has dozens of WordPress sites. Once you have more than a few, managing software and plugin versions becomes exponentially more challenging.

I'm in the process of upgrading all of them to 2.8.4 and installing the necessary plugins and params in the config file so they can all be "auto updated" in the future. I plan on having my VA manage them from there.

However sometimes strange things happen - for example, I auto upgraded one of our sites the other day and the whole thing broke and only rendered a blank page, so it's entirely possible my VA will break one or more sites even using the auto upgrade functionality.

>> To do this, the sub releases a similar buoy through its garbage chute.

This is technically incorrect. The garbage shoot is for weighted trash that gets flushed vertically downward. If the sub were going to launch a buoy it would send it upward via one of its 3" signal launchers (used for flares, other buoys, etc.)

Wow, I didn't even know about Skype Extras until today! I could have been using Skype Extras to record calls, send faxes, and do all kinds of other great stuff with Skype.

I think Skype (and, by extension, eBay) really dropped the ball on this one.