WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

al_james's comments

al_james | 13 years ago | on: Amazon's homepage was down

Does that mean its a big bate and switch model? Get market share with cheap prices, destroy the competition then ramp up your prices.

al_james | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: TaskUp.com - the only task list you'll ever need

For me, trials only work if the price point at the end of the trial is attractive. Personally I would probably be more likely to sign up at $1.50/month than $9.99 / year.... I know its crazy, but it just seems less risk. I really think you should keep the low monthly cost option.

al_james | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: TaskUp.com - the only task list you'll ever need

I love the pricing scheme. Most web based services start at several dollars a month (probably because of card processing fees) or an expensive yearly signup. For a simple task app like this, I would not pay several dollars a month and a yearly lump sum would be 'risky'.

I know the service provider is probably paying a huge % of card processing fees though. I wonder if there is a service that would handle 'subscription micro-payments' for cheap services like this (eg. combine all your micro-payments onto one bill to save fees)?

al_james | 13 years ago | on: Single Element MacBook Pro with CSS

Wow. There have been many of these "Look what I can do in CSS" articles lately, and frankly, they are normally quite boring. However this is the first time I have ever gone "wow". Very impressive. Quite useless really, but good work.

al_james | 13 years ago | on: MySQL now includes memcached, and a plugin that allows fast NoSQL-style access

Seems like a very misleading title. Surly it should be "MySQL now supports the memcache protocol for simple NoSQL-style access on InnoDB tables".

As far as I can make out, the memcached server software itself is not included in MySQL right?

SELF CORRECTION:

No, it does seem to include memcached as well for write through caching. Interesting. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-memcached-bene...

al_james | 13 years ago | on: ZeroRPC

Cool. When the spec is published, I may have time to contribute a PHP client.

al_james | 13 years ago | on: ZeroRPC

Looks very convenient. Are their any plans for other language support (in particular on the client side). Ruby and PHP client libraries would be useful.

al_james | 13 years ago | on: Ex-Facebookers launch MemSQL (YC W11) to make your database fly

Yes, its not clear on their site, but the gigaom article states: "As its name implies, MemSQL achieves its fast performance in part by keeping data in memory".

Yes, it does write to disk (append only logging I think) but my point was, that if you are keeping ALL your data in memory, you can optimise the storage for fast queries, as opposed to a hybrid / paged memory and disk system.

al_james | 13 years ago | on: Ex-Facebookers launch MemSQL (YC W11) to make your database fly

I think its that its an in memory database, optimised for memory as opposed to disk. The SQL to C++ seems a bit of a confusion to me, I guess it means it has a JIT SQL compiler to optimise the query to native opcodes. Meh. But the in memory and mysql wire compatibility are big wins.

al_james | 13 years ago | on: Ex-Facebookers launch MemSQL (YC W11) to make your database fly

Looks useful. Drop in mysql compatibility is a huge plus for many projects that are tied to mysql (for whatever reasons).

Does anyone know if there are any plans for having MongoDB style replica sets (e.g. sharded and replicated databases in a cluster)?

Also, it would be great if it supported the native mysql replication, so you could have MemSQL replicas of a master mysql DB.

al_james | 13 years ago

Arh yes. Thats almost exactly what I was talking about. I think its a good idea, although getsatisfaction's implementation (language, high fee to remove competing ads) is not great.

al_james | 13 years ago

How do you mean?

Maybe I misunderstand what getsatisfaction is.... could I go there are report a bug on hacker news for example even if hacker news have not joined getsatisfaction?

al_james | 13 years ago

Yes thats interesting. In fact stackoverflow is an example of what I mean. Even if the service provider does not choose to use stackoverflow for issue tracking, people will still ask questions (and indirectly report bugs) because of the community. Any technical service provider who cares about users would be stupid not to monitor stackoverflow for discussions about their product and jump in.

However, you are right, stackoverflow is not for the type of issues we are talking about, like "I cant login", "This form gives me an internal server error with this input" etc...

al_james | 13 years ago

Arh... but with that, the service provider has to opt-in.. they have to choose to add get satisfaction. I am talking about a place you can go and register issues you are having with a service, even if they have not added any formal issue tracking (either because they are too lazy, too busy or simply dont want to know).

Of course, the trick is to get the service providers to take a look, but with enough user engagement, maybe it would work.

page 3
newer more