Weird... every sample link flashes the resume then shows 'ut oh :(' in IE9 and IE10... Odd, since I'm not seeing anything on this that would explain this technical limitation.
Given the purpose of the site and it's broad potential reach (and the fact that it's not a domain that requires pushing the envelope in terms of rich user experience), I was pretty suprised to see that the entire 'Rated Services' section was a giant white block in Internet Explorer 9.
I could understand lack of support for IE7 (or perhaps crappy formatting), would raise an eyebrow at lack of support for IE8 (given the nature of the domain and that there's no compelling reason for a lack of graceful fallback in this case), but lack of IE9 support is a bit... suprising.
I certainly hope the team plans on addressing this, otherwise you're cutting a large chunk of browser users out of the picture for (from what I can see) no compelling reason related to the technical requirements of the kind of content you are delivering.
When I first loaded the page, I was unsure about whether they have no sites, i.e., whether they're just showing a proof of concept. The text said they were planning to review ToS of major sites by middle of july, so that prompted me to fire up Opera.
If somebody wonders why I want to use IE9: easily configurable and non-obtrusive, BUILT-IN plugin blockers and ad blockers [+ do-not-track lists].
I have a client who just switched to GMail, and most of the enterprise development team is in a state of revolt... apparently they are cracking down and removing outlook since people were just using the outlook client to get to their GMail.
One complaint I heard was the lack of sorting features (sorting your inbox by subject, sender, etc.) which also drives me nuts when I use Gmail on my personal account.
> It's immensely pleasurable having a piano next to where I program. I don't know what I am doing, but I suspect this is a lot of the allure - I sit there and poke, and figure out my programming challenge of the day while my fingers are occupied. We all know full well how the frontal lobe needs to be engaged for the "coprocessor" to have a chance at resolving our issues for us.
While not directly related, this is exactly the same reason I have a beater guitar hanging directly next to my workstation - if I get into a bit of tough code, I just take a break, strum a few chords, and then get back down to business.
I for one would have no problem with this. I'm well aware that the sites I go to will in many cases show custom experiences, just as I'm aware that Google tailors it's ads based on my browsing history.
If I am heading into an online retailer, or searching on the web, I'd much rather see relevant content.
I find this kind of customized experience a lot less intrusive/creepy than, say, having stuff randomly posted to my Facebook timeline, or ads showing up with my implied endorsement to my friends.
> It would be great if there was regulation over certain types of data that would require companies to post back to a central database if they take certain kinds of information. It would be great if there was a device that could help level the playing field.
My god, I hope not. The last thing we need is legislation that determines, because I went through the work of building up and creating a successful product and now have a massive amount of valuable data, I have to share it in the interest of 'leveling the playing field'.
I've been on the side of being a content creator with a very successful site, that was promptly scraped by a competitor because I had ammassed a large amount of very useful data. This data that was, through my site, freely available to the public, and the ad revenue helped pay the bills.
So I really don't have a lot of sympathy for someone who had, as part of their business model, the practice of scraping content from someone else's site, nor do I agree that we, as developers, should have free and unrestricted access to someone else's API... they are the ones gathering/storing the data, building the network, etc.. and any use they decide to allow us is at their discretion and a gift. Nothing wrong with that.
A company does not need to provide a constructive part of the community to achieve their goal of profitability... they just have to provide something that some segment of the population is willing to pay for, or build in a degree of lock-in that guarantees continued profits.
For example, It's probably fair to say that Monsanto is not a constructive part of the marketplace and community, but they sure do have a sustainable profit generating engine.
Edit - if you're going to downvote, how about some discussion as to how this comment does not add to the conversation... since I'm sure there was some other reason for the downvote other than not agreeing with me :)
And if they're not a constructive part of the community, the community has every right (I think it's practically an obligation) to berate them for it.
Just having a business plan and making money should not protect you from criticism or absolve behavior detrimental to the general community! Yes, legally Craigslist has no obligations; that's why nobody's litigating. I argue that morally (at least from a utilitarian standpoint), Craigslist does have an obligation to play nice. And so I welcome critical blog posts and bad publicity.
Oh, I agree 100% that if the community disagrees with the behavior of an entity they they have every right to berate them. And if a company behaves poorly enough, it will open the floodgates for competitors and revenue loss (i.e. GoDaddy during SOPA probably lost an appreciable number of customers).
That being said, in this specific case I think that whether or not there is a moral obligation to let a third party scrape and mix-in your data is very debatable (given that Craigslist does not provide an API).
Sure, people should play nice. And some may interpret playing nice as 'don't scrape other people's stuff for your own startup'. Or at least don't be suprised when they get pissed ;)
You could take tabaco companies, much of alcohol, gambling, TV and other addictive "entertainments", and to the extend that they are enterprises (if not legal), much of the arms trade, mafia / organized crime, illegal drugs trade, and modern banking, as not providing net social benefits. While generating profits.
I see pretty comparable numbers of listings for Python, Ruby/RoR, Java, and .Net (although if you add up all of the nix web dev jobs and bundle Python, PHP, and Ruby together vs. .Net, you're going to see a lot more of the former).
For web dev in general the split is pretty even, but if I am looking more at startups or small shops, the balance shifts towards Python/RoR (with Javascript being pretty ubiquitous whether you are on .Net, Java, RoR, or Python).
Still see this more of a tooling cost issue though, which makes sense. MS licensing is not cheap, although I've worked with a suprising number of startups that are on the MS stack, or using a combination of languages.
