A Core 2 Quad server with 2 Gigs or RAM at ServerBeach is gonna run you $99 per month, bump it up to 8 gigs of Ram, and you pay $160 per month. You get 2 Terabytes of bandwidth over at least a 10MBit connection and a 250 GB hard drive. ServerBeach will fix that bad boy if anything goes wrong -- for free.
Yeah, I have a server in my garage, AND Comca$t business class (30up/5down with 5 ips for $79 here in Miami), but we only run dev and staging sites on it. Production is always outside.
However, IF you already have the comcast business class, then buy a cheap quad core dell at BestBuy for $699, they generally come with 8 Gigs or ram and 1 Terabyte hard drive. Thats our development machine. Its super-quiet and runs cool in the hot garage.
The only problem is Comcast goes down here a bit too often for my liking. They're maybe down or slow around 10% of the time.
Jobs, for the vast majority of people who only move horizontally and very little vertically in any org; will never scale.
This is why America is overrun with tons of get-rich-quick schemes. That's why MLM seminars are crowded after work at your local airport hotel. That's why the lottery lines are crowded on Friday afternoons.
And people in those jobs know it. That's why they keep trying for the MLM or trying to start a side-business. And thats why so many people get thrown into despair when they lose those jobs after calibrating their lives around it.
I'm pretty sure in 10 years from now, there will be more and more people working freelance, as businesses realize and it dawns on people that the days of the kinds of permanent jobs our Dads and Moms had are over.
One tip... Leave the review form visible. After someone reviews the movie, save the review in a session, and redirect them to the signup (or login) page. After signup or login, save the review and redirect them back to the movie page... or even better...
Redirect them back to a "thanks for reviewing page", where you can show them a list of movies that they could review.
This will exponentially increase the number of reviews that you will get, instead of forcing people to signup/login first.
I already see it when trying to hire programmers and designers.
Because a programmer knows a mish-mash of PHP, Java and a little Javascript, they think that they are immediately qualified to write a scaleable web app.
Designers are even worse. Just because they know photoshop or dreamweaver, they think they are a designer.
I find that my programming candidates from the open-source world, though, tend to be better then those using the latest and greatest editor with some kind of intellisense on Windows.
Yeah, Heroku should put up or shut up until they start offering alternate NoSQL databases (and no, MongoHQ is not an alternative because of network latency).
Google wave is a godsend for teams of people who work together. We no longer have to exchange a million emails about a project topic. We all keep it into the wave.
Been using it for years and years and years. It has not sucked for me.. except once. But then again, my bank sucks. Amazon sucks as a payment system. Google sucks as a payment system.
Thing is, so many people use Paypal, and its indecently convenient, that you end up living with the suckage.
Just like that crappy car you have that sucks. You get out of bed one morning, the very time that you need it to go to that new job, and it wont start. Ugh! You get it fixed, then it works like a charm for the next 8 months. Then it sucks again.
These PayPal suxx horror stories are true. But they are few and far between. I don't see less people using Paypal because of those stories. I see more. Putting them out there is good because PayPal will hopefully pay attention.
But stop griping and get a decent alternative to paypal, and NO, what you are about to suggest is not a decent alternative, unless it works exactly like paypal and all my friends and employees use it.
Well worth the read to learn the design decisions and the capabilities that are opened up with Redis by keeping just the keys and least used data in memory.
I'm no musician, but I love music and the people who spend 100% of their time creating it.
Saying music should be free is like saying the work of a graphic designer, visual artist, or other artist should be free too.
It's easy to sit in front of your pc and spout off about music being free when you don't value the work of artists.