soyelmango

I was just thinking today, "I wish there was diskprices.com but for RAM". THANK YOU! Please could you add other locations? (In particular amazon.co.uk)

"Advertising is a tax for having an unremarkable product", said someone (http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/is-advertisi...)

Or in other words, spend your time and money not on advertising, but on making a product so compelling that your users/customers advertise for you. Think Dropbox, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Skype – no advertising, but a product that people will encourage others to use.

So… it does work like that. The value of the collection and of your house is a combination of its raw value, as well as less tangible/quantifiable factors (location, condition) – not to mention supply/demand.

The accumulated effort of building your house – and thus the worth – is encapsulated right there in the number of rooms, location, and condition. In fact, I'd bet the human effort in building a house (planning, building, decorating) is more than the cost of bricks and mortar.

I love the app, but there is one thing I'd change to perfect it, because I'm a heavy label user:

When choosing a label, there's no immediate visual feedback to show which label you've selected. This might not sound critical, but using a finger on a moving train can lead to inaccurate pressing! Compare that to the web interface: select a label, and there's immediate feedback saying "this conversation has been moved to/labelled "whatever_the_label_is".

I'd like to either see my selection invert, or a confirmation similar to the web interface.

(And agree with the OP: taking up valuable screen space with a thick border is inefficient).

"Sending your friends/family/colleagues a link on MegaUpload (or similar) was essentially putting a paywall between them and the file you actually wanted to give them."

However, if you want to transfer a large file to someone, and are not technically savvy enough to have Dropbox, FTP, or some other hosting, you'd probably Google how to send a file, and services such as MegaUpload and Yousendit would be the top results.

The services are biassed to make things as easy as possible for the uploader (free, no sign up required, just enter recipient's email address, redirect to subscribe page after), who is unlikely to take into account the things done to make things a little harder for the downloader (delayed download, premium paywall, throttled free service). For clients who have neither the budget nor the wits to pay for the premium service or their own hosting, the free service worked fine for occasional use.

The Economist on Ikea: http://www.economist.com/node/6919139

re: 3

Surely one reason for Netflix, Hulu, etc is to aim to provide a single point of access. Without this, you'd have to sign up to an account at HBO, Fox, Universal, Everylabeloutthere, then download each of their apps to get at the content.

That is, until Mr Entrepreneur creates a service that scrapes, aggregates, links to, or otherwise makes it easier to access all these content producers from a single site. The content producers might even decide that hosting, billing, and all that coding takes too much, and outsources it to Mr Entrepreneur. That hosting, billing, and coding costs Mr Entrepreneur, so he'll want a cut to cover costs, and some more to provide a profit incentive. Still, as a single point of access, tempting the producers with the promise of its big user base, the service can negotiate bulk licences…

And so, we're back to where we are now, where you access content through an intermediary, and pay for the convenience.

Capitalism comes in for a lot of criticism, but arbitrage and innovation is one of the things it does well (as long as there is balanced competition and regulation.)

That said, just because that's the way things are done now, that doesn't mean it's right. There is always scope for things to be done better, and for some of us, that ease is provided by torrents and such.

Domain speculators selling at a fixed 'low' price.

Yes, I had the same thought. By appearing on BBC with this powerful message, he's created a viral campaign for his services.

Oh, and here's Gina Trapani's blog post on standing desks… http://smarterware.org/7102/how-and-why-i-switched-to-a-stan...

Firstly, I'm not aware of how RSI is related to sitting, or how standing would alleviate RSI. RSI is due to many things: posture, positioning of mouse/keyboard, length of work/breaks, and of course, how repetitive your movements are. Given all that, standing or sitting is just a small part of RSI, and possibly the least significant factor.

If your posture is right, if your desk, mouse and keyboard are at the right height and distance, if you take regular breaks, and if you exercise your hands/fingers, then it makes little difference whether you're sitting or standing.

That said, I've recently set myself up with a standing desk – just an Ikea Fredrik. I just want to try it out for myself too, to see whether I like it. I do kung fu, and my main motivation was to practise my stance for longer periods. It's a stance similar to if you were sitting on a bar stool – that is, a few inches lower than standing straight-legged, with hip tilted straight.

That stance has taken some years for me to be able to do for more than 20-30 minutes without turning into a jelly-legged mess. If you're standing straight-legged, this won't be a consideration for you. So, I'm in reasonable shape, but by no means super fit.

This bit you add – "I'm not very used to standing and walking, and I'm afraid of being tired all the time and having back and feet pain..." – is a really important point. Don't expect to be able to just start working at your standing desk for extended periods. Go and do more walking at the very least to build up a bare minimum level of leg/back strength and stamina.

A standing desk is a great motivation to sort out your level of fitness. How long should you try the standing desk before giving up? That depends. Give yourself time to get used to it. Don't stand before you can walk (to paraphrase "don't run before you can walk").

Good luck with it, and please do report back after you've tried your standing desk for about a month. If you keep a blog, a blog post about your experience would be great.

Derek's post was a surprise - though I shouldn't have expected anything less than the unexpected from him. I think a 'desk' like his is something to aspire to - the freedom of not being tied to a physical location to perform what would generally be desk-bound work.

I also sometimes find that a desk as a place to work carries too much expectation and pressure - sometimes it's useful to step away from it and have fresh surroundings.

[Hi, I'm the founder of Tagbento - if you have any questions just ask. Your feedback is welcome too!]

It's certainly not a vital issue, but I'd say it's at least an interesting issue. I say that because it's one of those things that people take for granted. It's useful and interesting (at least it is for me!) to analyze the things that we do out of thoughtless habit.

Hey, no need to apologize for your rant - you have the right to free speech.

I must ask though what gives you the impression that I'm looking down on others. When I wrote "...I don't have pets/children, nor a mobile home", that was merely a statement of fact. Read the article ( this bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation#Argume... ) and you'll see why I said what I said, with no malice nor condescension intended.

Personally I'm an 'over' for functional and aesthetic reasons. I could never understand why some would be 'under's - but then again, I don't have pets/children, nor a mobile home.

As if the double referral incentive (referrer and referred) wasn't viral enough... Go Dropbox!

About switching jobs - 2 great articles from Mark Suster's 'Both sides of the table:

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/22/never-hire-job...

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/25/job-hoppers-re...

These kettles that keep water hot all day long seem very wasteful to me.

That said, does anyone know if it takes more electricity to reheat water than to maintain it at a given temperature?

The aim appears to be more about stopping children being born with defects caused by the parents' drug use, and stopping children being born to unsuitable parents.

Tackling world overpopulation will be achieved by far more controversial methods than birth control of a minority group...

Perhaps you should be recommending yousendit.com or similar

Yes, definitely written by someone who uses a laptop on the go and doesn't like carrying its weight about - even though he acknowledges the significant proportion of users whose laptops don't ever travel.

In this case, the market is working for the majority of consumers - and he's rightfully disgruntled because he wants a laptop to be a laptop, and not a desktop replacement.

After reading this, I've just noticed that my FF has the option. I've never felt the urge to use it - probably because I have a (127,127,127) background so that I can actually see my icons and text.

I think Glen justifies it well - it's not a tiny little feature, it's a load of unnecessary overhead. Good on him and the team for standing their ground.

Reading some of the comments on the tracker, I'm amazed at how much of a must have they consider it.

Ooof... that's what I meant!

Good point. However, the balance of the text is more alarmist than rational.

I suspect that the target market is unlikely to read the text closely enough to distinguish, for example, between correlation and causation ( http://www.bellyarmor.com/radiation/health-risks/autism - note the graph correlating cellphone subscribers and autism case).

And while I might want to credit them with presenting technical information and research, this is more likely intended to obsfuscate and alarm with scientific/statistical terms than to clarify...

Let's see; http://www.bellyarmor.com/faqs

"How do Belly Armor products work?

Without getting too deep into the details, RadiaShield® fabric shields against everyday radiation by neutralizing incoming electromagnetic waves - similar to how noise canceling headphones work with sound waves or how a grounding wire neutralizes an electric current."

No, noise cancelling is active - Belly Armor doesn't emit opposite phase radiation to cancel the radiation. No, a grounding wire grounds an electric current to the ground - Belly Armor isn't grounded.

However, if at some point in the future, significant correlations are proved, I'll eat my cynicism and hat.

The eyedrops you refer to are belladonna, Italian for 'beautiful woman'.

The intro from the Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna ) says:

"It has a long history of use as a medicine, cosmetic, and poison. Before the Middle Ages, it was used as an anesthetic for surgery, the ancient Romans used it as a poison (the wife of Emperor Augustus and the wife of Claudius both used it to murder contemporaries) and predating this it was used to make poison tipped arrows."

and

"Drops prepared from the belladonna plant were used to dilate women's pupils, an effect considered attractive."

Your common sense reply shows how easy it is for us to get distracted by issues of race, culture, westernization.

I think this is certainly an example of real people aiming for a western ideal of beauty.

However, a quick google search http://bit.ly/bHOnEC doesn't show a particular bias for double or single eyelids in anime.

This would explain the glut of sites such as cuteoverload.com

[Edited from one of my comments ( http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/08/30/guest-post-w... ) at the article]

Many people want to show that they have the financial means to enjoy leisure - whether that be because you’re well paid enough to take holidays, or because you employ others. Most of the westernised world aims to get a tan - it shows that we have the means to go to far away sunny places and laze in the sun. Conversely, in Asia, a tanned skin is what you get from labouring outdoors (farming, for example), and so light skin is a sign of a leisurely life.

And if you can’t afford a leisure lifestyle, you can buy the appearance of one in a bottle: fake tan, or skin bleacher.

Depending on what's at stake, it may be possible to prove that changes were made after the article was written, IF the free hosting keeps - and makes available - reliable access logs.