gapless != cross-fade. An MP3 stream is divided into frames that are larger than CD frames. If a song ends in the middle of a frame, that frame is padded with silence which cause an audio dropout when playing albums with continuous sound, like live recordings for example. Most modern MP3 encoders (at least LAME) use a non-standard (but nowadays defacto-standard) tag to store the exact byte on which the song ends so players can skip the silent padding and play the album just like the original CD would had. Worth noting is that this problem is MP3-specific. All modern codecs/containers already handle this natively.

Basically it IS just (a subset of) plain HTML+CSS with a standardized naming structure for table of contents, chapters, cover and similar, all bundled together into a zip file. It defines a default style for unstyled tags and which subset of HTML and CSS the renderer must handle to be compliant.

The blood thirstiness of Americans never cease to amuse me...

What do cellphones and speech have to do with each other? :)

Instead of Lift, checkout Play (make sure you watch the screencast)! Scala support is currently a plugin but will be the first choice language in Play 2.0 (currently in beta), and it has commercial support available.

Basically, it's Ruby on Rails for Scala and Java.

But neither of us turn of all we're scripting and caching so the problem persists.

Here you are.

How can anyone possibly not realize what shoes-cucumber does? It's a cucumber plugin for shoes! Duh!
Personally I prefer plain rspec with capybara and steak over cucumber, though. And I don't use shoes.

Only if you're doing it wrong.

This. It's not specific to Ruby frameworks though. You're pretty much in the same situation if you want to use anything other than PHP+MySQL. Generic hosts nowadays are pretty much meant for non-programmers to run their own PhpBB, Wordpress, Drupal and various legacy websites, not recently developed web applications unless the developers are still stuck in 2004 and choose PHP+MySQL as their language and database even when they have the chance to start from scratch.

Personally I just get a XEN/KVM server somewhere and install what I need myself, be it Ruby+Rails, Node.js+Railway or Scala+Play and Redis, RIAK, MongoDB and/or PostgreSQL.

How much is the result skewed because of celebrities with tens or hundreds of thousands of "friends"?

I'm looking forward to version 10.8: "Lolcat" and version 10.9: "Pussy".

They've done worse...

Yes, for Apple.

I miss those days. :-(