My web server has been in production for 5 years now, no hardware failures at all. A Dell Poweredge machine. So yeah, having an OS on it that has at least a 5 year support period is pretty important.

Google's Android operating system is certainly getting it's fair share of rosy coloured predications lately. Overtaking Windows Mobile isn't hard to imagine, especially if Microsoft can't make Windows Mobile 7 radically better than what they have at the moment, but overtaking Apple in just 3 years is going to be a pretty big challenge. The iPhone is the bomb as far as consumer space smartphones go. It's sexy, slick, delivers a fantastic user experience and has a huge and thriving developer base. A testament to this is the fact that even my wife, the most vehement of Apple haters likes “the jesus phone” and wants one. The iPhone's market share arrived at where it is today in no small part by Apple exploiting the huge momentum of the iPod - millions of happy iPod users make for a pretty easy upsell target. Not to mention that Apple know a trick or two when it comes to marketing products to consumers. More here: http://www.rypenow.com/community/the-rype-blog/android-overtaking-the-iphone-within-3-years-call-me-sceptical.html

Just in case this hasn't been posted yet, check out the video on the product website: http://www.yikebike.com/ The expressions on the faces of the observers are extremely funny :-)

The Queen's English was good enough for Jesus Christ and it's good enough for me.

I've been told that Bad Behavior is the shiznit. http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/

Hot damn I'm good. This just in: "Earlier yesterday, Telstra told the stock exchange that it would boost the speed of its Next G mobile broadband network to the point where it is faster than than the Government's proposed fibre-to-node network. It will also boost the speed on its Foxtel cables."

So why did Telstra not want to win this? It seems the perfect out. Submit a half baked proposal and omit an obvious required detail. It looks like they tried but actually they wanted to fail. Interesting. This might be a long term play at not having to service the whole of the country, which is unprofitable and expensive (Australia is a big desert, with dense population centers on the coast). Maybe Telstra predict better profit margins in delivering high speed data through the air, and are betting that in 10 years, data will be fast enough through the air to compete with any wired solutions. I think they want to be free from government regulations.

This may seem like a silly question, but why did Microsoft use an AJAX setup for this instead of using Silverlight? I thought the whole point of Silverlight was for RIAs? Have they lost faith in Silverlight already?

Agreed. I had the same reaction. Python and ruby fanatics are like religious zealots and can't see the forest for the trees. I love PHP and I'm not ashamed of it. It's fast, flexible, rich and diverse. Sure, a bad coder will make a mess, but then a bad tradesman will make a mess with a hacksaw too. It's not the hacksaw's fault. You can use PHP for pretty much anything. That being said, I wouldn't use it to code a website for a bank, but for 99% of websites, PHP does that job well and that's why it's so damn popular.

If the entire view is designed in a proper language like Python, doesn't that mean that interface architects and graphic designers (who like creating interfaces) will also need to know Python? I thought one of the most important aspects of the MVC approach was that programmers could focus on the data and logic, and interface people could focus on the view. I say no to this approach.

"Don't use it to hide the contents so you can throw up a "but you have cookies disabled and we can't track you." Fair enough. "Don't try and block off your page because your advertisers want to use javascript to enable a billion popups." Agreed. "Don't use scripting to sanitize your POST submissions; You should handle that on the backend, it's more secure anyway." No, disagree. Validation should be both client side and server side. It wastes the users time making them wait for a post operation when a simple alert would have done the trick. "Don't use it to load content; That's what CSS and XML are for and it renders faster anyway." Neither CSS or XML can be used to load content. They're both descriptive, not active. Javascript on the other hand, via AJAX, does load things. And AJAX IMHO is good, if used in the right places. It can make interfaces more efficient. "Don't make your entire site dependent on having javascript enabled. If you're worth your salt as a developer you can find a way to make that page render without enabling javascript. Sure, it may not have all the chrome and pretty-shiny on it, but remember that there's a lot of devices and a lot of browsers that use the web, as well as people who are color blind, blind altogether, or who use low-end systems, or cell phones, or PDAs, etc." There is no golden rule for this. It's all about context. If I'm building a web application (as opposed to a brochure web site), then I think requiring javascript is absolutely fair game. If you don't like javascript, don't use web apps and stick with traditional desktop apps. I'm guessing from your attitude that you probably do anyway. "Don't try and use javascript to obfusciate or disable standard web features (like view source). It's not going to stop anyone who wants to make a copy and it'll piss off everyone else." Yup, agreed.