I think that it may be the case by law that the donor cannot select the individual recipient of a donation if the organization wants to retain tax exemption.
Can someone explain the perception that Facebook's IPO was a disaster? Doesn't the fact that the stock has not risen mean that the offering had the correct price?
Remember that 26 includes the value of $9B of additional cash on the balance sheet from the IPO. So the valuation of Facebook as a business is actually lower still, once you back out the cash.
I'd agree with you if the price has not risen. In reality, the price has fallen, more than 20%. It may be good for Facebook, but the price was not correct.
Thanks for your advice and everybody else's too... I still feel like I may at least give SimpleDB a try by making a new domain for each table and distributing the large tables over multiple domains (my data is amenable to splitting up). I may make two copies of some domains that are split up in different ways so I don't have to query all of the domains associated with a table.
Are JOINs used that often? My thought was that I could export the data to a mysql database for analysis if I needed to do any very demanding crunching.
JOINs are awesome. They're expensive operations, no doubt, but they make creating a web application a TON easier. If you're going to limit yourself to the way that Google or Amazon has to develop web applications, you're getting rid of your primary advantage.
Let's say you have a site with logins and comments. Comments are by one of the logins with a nice foreign key in a relational database or you have to add part of that person's info to each comment with something like SimpleDB (if you want to display the name next to the comment, you place the name there). So, then someone changes their name in the logins table - it happens. With the foreign key and a join, all the comments appropriately show the correct name. With SimpleDB, you have to go through and update every single comment that person has made to reflect the changes.
Take something like Facebook. Every single mail message, every single wall post, every single friend, every single Event, every single group, etc. would have to be updated to reflect your new name if it wasn't referential. Now, Facebook probably isn't referential. They're big. They probably spend a ton of time/money keeping that stuff in sync. In fact, they probably run those types of updates as low-priority background jobs (so while your new name shows up in your profile now, it is a while before it gets propagated). That's all guessing, btw, but you can see how much more difficult it is to keep non-relational data in sync.
Places like Facebook have to operate differently because JOINs do have cost. It's amazingly unlikely that a relational database won't suit your site due to scalability. If you're looking to make a cool site, do it the easy way first, then scale. Otherwise, someone else will build it faster than you.
Non-relational data seems easy and it is for simple things. It might be that your site fits very nicely in a non-relational model. Do be aware of the differences.
I've heard that there is too much latency to use EC2 as a host. Certainly xforwarding is not great. Check out the creators of "Friends for Sale": http://omnisio.com/sdforum/siqi-chen
Sergey Brin went to the University of Maryland. Larry Page went to Michigan. Marc Andreessen and Max Levchin went to the University of Illinois.
This not to say some schools aren't better than others, but when people do great things it's usually because of who they are rather than where they went to college.
Well, I'm not fully agree on the examples with Sergey and Max. Sergey's father is a very qualified ex-soviet mathematician, he gave very good basics to Sergey. Max moved to US when he was 16. He's got grounds from the soviet education system, which was very different comparing to US. So, their college choice (theoretically) could not change their fate. ;)
But in overall you're right. Don't treat college as your pass to success, however it could be your backup, just in case if you're not that smart as you think. ;)
How is the OLPC project "charity" when the governments buy the laptops from OLPC just as they would from Intel? The Economist is ridiculous, drawing false distinctions.
Perhaps they should just buy old laptops from eBay add crank generators and software - then pass them on to the third world. That would mean much lower up-front capital requirements. I mean - I could organize such a project in my bedroom.
Take a look at the specs of the OLPC. It copes with pretty extreme conditions. Heat, moisture, accidental damage, lack of clean power. The screen is readable in African sunlight. I'd place a pretty decent wager you'd be hard pushed to find a $100 laptop on Ebay that'd exceed the life expectancy and usefulness of an XO.
Not to mention the nightmare of trying to create any sort of consistent environment on 1000's of disparate machines and the person-hours that that would entail. Furthermore, I recall reading something about trying to give the XO sort of a "kiddy look/feel" in order to discourage adults from absconding with them.
What I wanted to question was whether those huge up-front expenses needed to design and manufacture a new kind of laptop were worth it. I mean even if you had to pay $200 on ebay - you'd have virtually zero fixed costs.
Perhaps that project just does not need to scale down.
Sure the XO is a nice piece of equipment. I would even buy one myself for 100$ if it was available on the market. (Besides I'd really like to try a crank to power my computing - but it's does not come with the normal XO, or?)
