I tend to agree with you. When I write scripts, I target sh, not bash. If it doesn't fit in sh, then I look at a dedicated scripting language (perl/ruby/python) that will almost certainly be a better fit.
This makes a lot of sense, and meshes with my own experience. I've created a lot of programs that collect data using Python/Ruby/similar and then use R for the analysis.
While using two languages is an overhead, it feels like it plays to the strengths of both sides.
Congrats to the Zite team. You made one of my favorite apps, and whether you continue development at CNN or move on to other ventures, I wish you the best and look forward to seeing what you do next.
Zite is one of the most used apps on my iPad, and has been for ages. I would've happily given you a few dollars for it, but I guess this worked out well for everyone.
If you're on FreeBSD you can use dummynet to simulate packet delay and loss.
It's quite handy. My partner has slow, unreliable, high-latency Internet in his house and there are an entire class of performance problems that are extremely obvious when I work from his place that are barely measurable when I work from a 100mb line that's only a few milliseconds away from a major datacenter.
I second Sloppy. I've found it very useful for debugging Flash errors that only happen occasionally. By slowing the loading sometimes them become reproducible.
It's also useful to see how a webpage loads on a slow connection - for example: is your copy legible before your background image has loaded?
You know nothing about the people you judged except that they threw a coffee into a virtual 'give a coffee / take a coffee' tray. And from that, you've extrapolated that they care more about art than world hunger.
Being a fast-follower is often an excellent strategy.
I've long thought that somebody will make a fortune by setting up a company that clones successful America-centric startups into Europe, Asia and/or Brazil; using a fast-follower strategy to test core ideas, but then implementing them in untapped markets.
The have cloned AirBNB (Wimdu), for example.
I seem to recall that they had several large exits by cloning sites like eBay and then selling to the company they cloned, but I can't find the article right now. In a sense, if an American company doesn't know how to penetrate a particular international market, then these clones actually do add value.
I don't agree that ACSOI makes sense. Marketing isn't just the initial customer acquisition cost. It's also a substantial expense that keeps existing customers active, engaged and profitable. If it was just about customer acquisition then we'd never see an ad for Tylonel, Coke or Budweiser.
Fortunately Groupon is issuing a new S-1 tomorrow, so it's likely that those who are looking for more information will get it.
It'd be trivial to sort the calls by listening to a few seconds of each to identify potential high value phone numbers (banks, florists, catalogue ordering lines, etc), then listen to every call to the high-value numbers.
