That's a good idea. Having that, plus an 'expected wait time' would be really useful. When I push the button, if it tells me I'll need to wait for 4 minutes and 23 seconds for the next elevator, I can use that time more effectively ... maybe go grab a coffee and come back, or perhaps even take the stairs instead.
I don't think owners of office buildings realize how painful it is to have slow elevators. We moved our office out of a 30 story building with 4 elevators, because the unbearable wait to get in and out of the building during peak times.
I just finished reading his biography, so it's interesting to see the young Steve. For historical context, their main products at the time were the Apple II and Apple III, so this was before the GUI / Lisa / Mac.
Right. If someone builds something interesting enough to get on Oracle's radar, then they become an obvious target for litigation. Doesn't make sense to build anything with Java, when there are so many other free alternatives available.
Definitely a cool idea. The best way to fly from Manila to China is on Cebu Pacific. No flight search in the world will tell you that, because Cebu Pacific is a local budget carrier and just advertises locally.
That's true - there definitely would be some room for disruption in the domain registration market.
The thing with GoDaddy, which is bigger than it's 8 nearest competitors combined, is that they've been successful on the back of mass marketing, and earning more dollars off of every single customer they have.
All those add ons, that we geeks so easily ignore, are just mindlessly added on by a large majority of other customers who really have no idea what they need. So instead of earning $2 or $3 for the domain registration service, like other registrars do, GoDaddy ends up earning $200 or $300 from those customers (which gives them more money to use towards marketing again).
I think a major hosting company with a good reputation might be able to make inroads into the domain registration industry (Amazon or Rackspace perhaps), but I don't think most people would trust their domains with a startup.
Just one more option - Twilio has a voicemail transcription feature as part of it's API, with automatic call back. So anything recorded could be available as text that way.
I was using this on a project for a while. But compared to running the application with PHP, it was always slower. Sure, I've developed applications with PHP since 2001, so I really know how to tweak it and optimize it. But, with App Engine it was really frustrating. Requests really took long to complete, and there was no real way to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. We created an 'always on' instance, but it was still quite sluggish compared to the exact app running on a standard linux, apache, PHP system.
I would still try it again down the road, but it's really not a good fit for what I'm currently doing.
Just out of curiosity, how would you describe what you are currently doing? Can you elaborate on why it might not be a good fit?
I'm honestly just trying to learn from your experience, not disputing anything.
Sure - no problem - the application is Generic Domain Finder - just search it on Google. The current app in the search results is still running GAE.
The things I loved:
- tight integration with Google accounts
- easy integration with other Google apis (we used a few)
The frustrating thing was dealing with the black box. We used an api to get domain availability. Every time it returns more slowly than the equivalent call on our linux based cloud server.
With GAE, you're basically stuck with what you get. With a generic Linux based cloud server - you have more room to optimize your environment, or even take your code and run it anywhere... AWS, Rackspace, Voxel...
I still believe in what GAE is trying to do - and I'll definitely try it out again for future projects.
Yup - honestly, it's the truth. Most freelancers DON'T pay for Photoshop. They don't have to - because they don't work in a corporate office, where software piracy can easily be enforced by BSA.
I know a lot of people 'want' to pay for the software, because they feel it's the right thing to do. A system like this will help them to do the right thing.
Sometimes heavy equipment is added on by contractors. For instance, I can dig this ditch with a shovel, or we can rent a backhoe, and have it done in a few hours.
