Sounds familiar: http://seoblackhat.com/2009/07/10/link-pyramids/
By the way, if blackhat SEO's describe this technique in the open, it's either already well known, or its effectiveness has been diminished to the point where hiding the details isn't worth it.

Steve, is that you?..

It's more like "Gattaca". But you are right, the ups and downs were already considered in the movies, with the emphasis on downs.

But now they are optimizing for another, even less standard database (Cassandra), tying themselves down to it with non-standard query syntax. What was your point again?

The thing is, the stuff they missed in their SQL queries doesn't even need a MySQL wizard in blue cape to grok. There were no JOINs, no subselects, nothing high SQL magic at all - an average self-taught DBA would spot the suboptimal index usage. They should have totally solved it themselves.

The funny thing is that they still can't skip "a very skilled optimizing DBA" step even with the NoSQL solution. They still need a database architect, and they still need to optimize their queries. But this time, finding a good DBA would be much harder since I imagine the number of NoSQL specialists (and in them the number of experts specializing in Cassandra) must be much lower than the number of good MySQL DBAs.

Of course, now that they have a system that supposedly scales with a simple addition of new hardware to the farm, they may get away from optimization for some time - if their DB architecture is good.

As several MySQL experts already noted, Digg isn't even using the indexes that provide maximum performance in the query that they present as problematic for MySQL:
http://mysqlha.blogspot.com/2010/03/index-only.html
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Getting_Real_about_NoSQL_and_the_SQL_Performance_Lie/

So you are right about the NoSQL fashion trend. Looks like for some companies it's easier to throw a pile of cheap commodity hardware driven by some NoSQL BigTable-wannabie at the problem instead of carefully optimizing queries and indexes for the best performance.

But Facebook's PHP is also a webserver, as evident even from this story headline. Hence the question is valid.
I'm too wondering how nginx + PHP/FastCGI compares to HipHop as a webserver.

since when a torrent is illegal? its just an ascii file with some Bencode encoding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bencode

download a .torrent file
open it with: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=31306 Bencode editor
and tell me when you find the k1ddy pr0n seal clubber W4rez.

disclaimer: you won't.

Shortage of stock?

It was MS who botched the 360 launch.
In fact, stock was so low that 2 months later they had a second "launch".

Everything else you said is just stupid.

Look at sales.
Nintendo dominated this generation, and it was clear that they "won" within 6 months of the Wii's launch.

What you're willing to propose and what is going to happen are sometimes two completely different things.

> Well, in Russia, police officers, medical workers, and every other profession actually have their own "days" as well.
^^^^^^
That, and also there seems to be a misunderstanding here, aka lost in translation. It's not a holiday in a sense that the whole country has a day off. It's just an official nifty name for this particular day. Also a good occasion to praise the work of your friendly programmer in the next cubicle.

Self-replying in the absence of edit feature:
Here's what I think has happened. Slashdot picked up the story on July 2, Ars guys read it among the stories from another news outlets, and produced their own breakdown of the same events.

Then ScuttleMonkey has read the Ars story, and thus the circle has been completed. The only question is: do the Slashdot editors read their own site?

I could swear I already saw this a few days ago here, on Slashdot. And indeed:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/184251/Browser-Vendors-Force-W3C-To-Scrap-HTML-5-Codecs?from=rss

five years ago, not a few months.