Some telcos seem quite intent on charging more for bandwidth than the cost of a film in a bargain bin. If telcos continue to strangle bandwidth then physical media will remain viable for a longer period.
It may be that each search term in a full-text index is held in a separate but hidden table and therefore large chunks of text create a large number of rows. This would explain why inserts would be slower and why quotas are more likely to be encountered.
Sending passwords via plain text forms and plain text emails are both bad practices. However, plain text email is distinctly worse because the data can linger for months or years in less secure systems.
A credit card number sent over unencrypted HTTP may only be vulnerable for a brief period. However, a credit card number sent over SSL and forwarded as a plain text email may be vulnerable until the credit card expires.
Is Facebook unaware of Nagle's algorithm? It is trivial to reduce bandwidth by batching notices. You could even set the maximum frequency yourself. Or is this not implemented because it would make the service less addictive and less viral?
JavaScript gives you the most possibilities because you can place semi-transparent items anywhere in a webpage, they can resize with user interaction and move down a webpage as a user scrolls. JavaScript can also be used to re-write a webpage, including changing images, fetching more text, revealing optional form elements and the changing the destination of hyperlinks.
Some, if not all, of this can be achieved with IFrames and Flash but web browser security is such that you'd have to include JavaScript anyhow.
> 3. There is nothing wrong with your technology choice.
Exactly. LAMP is a good, safe choice. Many of the largest websites are LAMP (Slashdot, Wikipedia) and its the others that have the most scalability problems (EBay, Twitter).
From the article: I come from a Microsoft background, and you can say what you want about Microsoft, but their development tools and libraries are rock solid. If they have a library called System.Web.Mail, you can rest assured that it will actually send emails when you ask it to. Unfortunately, this is not the case with PHP.
I'm astounded by this comment. Some Hotmail's most spectacular outages were from failed attempts to migrate away from a Unix MTA.
The former may be fun with ampersands in shell commands. Try double quotes around the URL. The latter is a world of pain. What version of what browser are you using?
Specifically, anything that matches the case-insensitive regex \[[0-9A-Z_\.\-]+\] and there's already a surprising number which provide useful searches.
There's a section in the script to only give the top 100 tags. I commented it out so that you could initially see the full range of curiosities. Long term, there will be a more concise list.
Your deal doesn't have to be exclusive. Indeed, it may be in your interest to supply content or functionality in a non-exclusive deal. (A good example of this would be Microsoft licensing MSDOS to IBM on a non-exclusive basis.)
If you've got good content and functionality which is wanted by one website then there exists the possibility of others wanting it too. Getting the first sale is the hardest and one customer has already "beaten a path to your door".
A licensing deal would allow you to remain independent and it would reduce the legal complexity of an acquisition to that of a simple business deal.
You'd probably enjoy using SquirrelMail. It is a web interface to an IMAP server which implements an interface similar to Yahoo's old interface. You can configure your own instance to access a third-party IMAP server.