You just have to wear it proud. That's the problem with AIDS, too many people walking around ashamed of the lesions on their face. I walk around with lesions and I make it look good. More girls talk to me *because* of it.

click on "travel" then enter your query. not so hard, was it?

Ok, but, if you search the "Linux Windows" suggestion, the very first result is a very long, well cited, and fair comparison of linux v windows...
http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/Linux.vs.Windows.html

Google's natural language query features are so spotty that you can't ask a question and expect an answer with any reliability. For example, similar to your example, "How tall is Barack Obama" answers me correctly. "How old is Barack Obama" does not.

"Florida Unemployment Rate" answers me. "Florida Minimum Wage" does not.

And on and on.

And in different areas, it really does shine. For example:

Farecast integration, eg TPA to ORD:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=tpa+to+ord&filt=all

Search-the-site box, eg New Egg:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=New+Egg&go=&form=QBRE

Guided Search Sidebar, eg atrial fibrillation:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=atrial+fibrillation&filt=all

And the hover states for search results are impressive. It doesn't just pull the first X bytes, it parses the entire page and returns a synopsis as best it can. These features were from Powerset and they've done a good job with them here. Similarly, the hovers on image search.

I don't know if Bing will gain any traction or not. But at the very least it's the 2nd best search engine available and it's been live for about 12 hours now...

Bing has a calculator.

1 + 1: http://www.bing.com/search?q=1+%2B+1%0A&filt=all
2 * pi: http://www.bing.com/search?q=2+*+pi&go=&form=QBRE
2 miles in feet: http://www.bing.com/search?q=2+miles+in+feet&go=&form=QBRE
etc

You mean like the FF Extension? You realize that Adobe does the exact same thing with the java VM. It's SOP that you're complaining about only because it's Microsoft. ...Just sayin'

Isn't that a distinction without a difference to most users?

I'd wager that in nearly every case where a user installs the java VM themselves, it's because they tried to install/run an app that required it and were told that they needed the Runtime, with a link to download or include as part of the current install process.

And I'd wager that in nearly all of those instances, the user has at best a cursory idea of what the Java VM is.

The fact is.. all this is doing is adding 50 bytes to your 500 byte UserAgent string, and supporting ClickOnce which is a distribution method identical to that used by Java and very similar to what's now used in Adobe Air.

Your analysis seems a little soft.

Murdoch is nothing like this guy. Murdoch got "high up" in News Corp by BUILDING the company himself. He embraced changing technology. He is STILL embracing changing technology. And the story you linked is nothing like that this guy is advocating.

Murdoch is saying, "Newspapers produce a large amount of new content each day. People value investigative journalism. Investigative journalism requires great investment. The old way we funded that investment is being rejected by the marketplace. We want to provide the same Investigative Journalism we have come to rely on, but we need to fund it differently. So we are going to charge you for the premium content we supply. We have to."

The Sony exec is saying "Waaah. Waaah. Waaah."

I dont much like Murdoch or his politics. But there's nothing wrong with what he's saying. People have long paid for newspapers, newspapers provide a real service and they are a NEED, not a want like music and movies from Sony, and they're going to move to a "freemium" or paid subscription model online.

There has been so much high-profile news about Newspapers going under lately that he probably thought he could capitalize on the emotional sentiment that most people have about it.

There's no doubt that the rise of the net has hurt the newspaper business as it's existed in the past. It's 3 major revenue streams (Advertising, Classifieds and Subscriptions, in that order) have all been eroded to various degrees.

And it's really a terrible situation because they did what they were supposed to do: They have diversified their revenue. It just so happens that the internet is such a sea change in content distribution that it invalidated all 3 major revenue streams in one felt swoop.

The BS from this Sony guy, though, is that he compares it to how the internet has hurt Sony's music biz. I "pirate" content with the best of them but I do agree that it's not cool to take from artists for free. Tho I don't mind so much because Artists have lost their way for so long and have gotten so abused by "The Biz" for so long that I'm not taking $15 out of the pocket of The Boss when I download his new CD, I take maybe $1. Or less.

No doubt it's Sony (et al)'s fault for failing to bend to the new realities of the market. But that's the cause-in-fact. The proximate cause of their troubles is people downloading unlicensed content.

That's far from the story of the Newspaper Business. They chose to give away their content (more or less) for free and try to monetize with online advertising. The proximate cause of their revenue drop is giving away their content. The cause-in-fact is a changing distribution system (the internet).

He's muddling the issue because any intellectually honest person knows he hasn't a leg to stand on. That he's whining because his money tree is dying a slow death.

To quote a smart man, "Gee - big surprise."

The GOP has shrunk a great deal in the last 4 years. Moderates and Independents left the party. Millions of them.

The result is a GOP that is far more conservative than it was as recently as the 2004 election.

BushCo drove so many sane people out of the GOP that the only people left are of the dyed-in-the-wool variety.

Such a party is not going to nominate a moderate. Specter knew that. Everybody knew that.

The people of PA have re-elected Specter many times. By switching parties he's preventing a small group of very conservative voters from restricting the people of PA from electing somebody they've supported over and over in the past.

This would all be moot if PA, like most states, had open primaries where registered dems and indies could vote in the GOP primary if they chose to do so.

Uhh.. Have you ever heard of Conrail?

Not to mention the fact that Trucking companies pay a lot to drive on the interstate.

Your comment about weigh stations being closed betrays some naievte about their function. Truckers don't pay at a weigh station. The stations are for spot checking to verify that the trucks weight is acceptable for (1) the road but mostly (2) the truck class.

Have you ever seen those stickers on the door of the cab? Each truck is licensed and the cost of that license varies on a number of things, including the type of good to be hauled and the weight of the hauls.

Many Toll Roads charge far more for tractor trailers than cars. And there's a higher tax Diesel than Gasoline.

The government has done it's fair share for the freight railroads.

I think you can sum it up in a single word: Conrail.

FWIW, clustering doesn't have to be hard. Vertical webserver sharding can get complex. (eg, these servers load accounts, these servers handle signups, etc)

But you can simply scale out many PHP/Python/Ruby apps by storing Session data in the DB or on a NAS share. Then do a simple round-robin in the balancer.

Storing session data that way does give u a bit of a hit so you won't see try (O)N scaling. Probably something more like (0)0.9N. EG 2 servers would give you 1.8x the capacity of 1 that stores session data on a local physical disk.

This is basically rubbish. HTML Rendering is not the bottleneck. It's the DB. Tweaking the MySQL Query Cache and using memcache is the solution here.

In both cases, you'd update your cache as part of the DB update.

Any cron-driven pre-caching is just the PB to your caching jelly.

The query cache requires no add'l code to implement and can produce huge efficiencies. Simple sharding will ensure any given mysql server has enough cache resources to remain performent.

And memcache has swell libs that sit in front of an entire cluster of mc servers and make your life easy. Cache server sharding and striping are done for you.

It becomes as simple as:

function load_profile(id)
{
    memcache = memcached.instance();
    if (profile = memcache.read('profile_' + id))
            return profile;

    p = profile.instance();
    if (profile = p(id))
            return profile;

    throw new Exception('not found');

}