DISQUS

Sorry, but the number one thing that'll make me unfollow someone?

Caring so much about your number of followers that you change what you're tweeting about to avoid losing a single one of them. Some of these might be applicable to corporate accounts where you're the voice of a company, but otherwise? Tweet about what you want and screw the numbers game.

What assholes.

@Megan Taylor - @replies are not direct messages. The two are separate things.

@twply - Clearly, people are pissed off. Telling people to stop complaining will not stop them complaining.

Adding a clearer message like "this will post a link to our website on your Twitter stream" would do a lot to resolve the issue. The wording you use is ambiguous even to a native English speaker like me - it is not clear what "supporting you" does.

The @twply Twitter account is getting pretty testy.

Is that really fair? That's well under one per nation there, and this is a pretty unusual event. You can't expect the Russian media to trust the American media to take all the photos they want of their athletes, and vice versa.

@Public Relations - and *you* need a decent website before pitching your services. Hell-ooooo, 1990s!

Sure, until you have to change your password and have to do it in 30 different sites...

"Umm yes, they are, try coding in something outside python."

App Engine isn't even in beta. It's a preview release. They picked one language to start with, not as a final total.

Do us all a favour and give him a big earful about not having an RSS feed for the Craigslist blog - http://blog.craigslist.org/

"We didn’t go into World War II to beat Hilter. No, we went into it to protect our principles."

Not really, no.

We went into World War II to beat Japan, who'd just surprise attacked us. Principle had little to do with it, unless "fight back when attacked" is a principle.

If we'd fought WWII on principle, we'd have joined the war in 1939 when Hitler was rampaging through Europe.

"Flash isn’t that heavyweight..."

Apparently you've never used the Mac version, particularly on something like a Mac mini. I've no doubt it'd be slow as a stone statue of a dog on the iPhone.

I tend to doubt the target market for the $100 PC can afford to go and commit to a two year $40/month plan to get that $100 price.

Akismet is stunningly effective. One of my sites had 13,000+ comment spams caught with one or two missed. Absolutely amazing.

The WordPress theme Tarski I did with a friend isn't bad, either, if I may say so myself. ;-)

"Explain to me again how your standard of living is better? With waiting lines for medical care, fewer cars per family (harder to travel), smaller homes, higher taxes, and more expensive fuel."

This speaks to ignorance of the European lifestyle.

Waiting lines for medical care are a myth, and ignore the fact that the vast majority of Americans have to wait for their specialist care as well. My fiancée took three months to get into her first neurologists appointment. Fewer cars per family would mean harder to travel only if Europe didn't have a far superior public transportation system - you can take high speed rail just about everywhere. I personally prefer smaller homes, the higher taxes help with amenities like cheaper health care and public transport, and fuel isn't that much of a concern when you can take the train.

Your first and second points are contradictory.

"Or, hell, explain why, despite being so convinced of global warming, Al Gore had no problems dancing around the country on a freaking private jet (and in the electronic age, no less!), which single-handedly provided many, many times the amount of CO2 (and water vapor, heh) of a family’s normal use of an SUV."

For the same reason the President does it instead of walking - his time is valuable. Gore's flying around has the potential to do far greater good than it does harm, by opening peoples' eyes.

Nice to see so many people taken in by the the group advertising with "CO2 - they call it polution, we call it life" and funded by the oil companies. Screw the climate scientists - Big Energy must know what they're talking about, right? And no ulterior motives, of course!

"Too bad you and Al have no faith in the free market to allocate resources in the most efficient manner."

The free market allocates resources with short-term profits in mind.

We've long seen that big business needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into acting more responsibly in the long-term. You want a look at how an unrestricted free market runs things? Look at working conditions in the 1890s.

The words “Web” and “2.0″ would seem mighty generic to me.

So are "Windows" and "95", but it isn't surprising that Microsoft defends that trademark.

That said, there's no way they should be able to have "Web 2.0" service/trademarked. That's absurd.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Ah ha!

http://akismet.com/blog/2006/05/systems-error/

"We had a systems problem earlier today which caused spam to not get caught for some of our users."

I've been seeing the same rise, but Askimet's catching all of mine.

I don't really see how "Microsoft has these things, too!" are reasons to consider the platform. You need to show me what the Microsoft platform does better if you want me switching.

LAMP has free developer tools, free databases, Atlas was partially based off the open source Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries, it can scale, etc. Other than the names in #7 and #8, there's nothing unique to the MS platform on that list.

If Microsoft can't come up with genuine advantages over other platforms, they're not going to see much movement.

Are they iframes or some other included file? They look like they'd be where an external ad server would show up. Not so bizarre in that situation.

Ari: "We are a country of 5 million and how many of them are nerds? 1% or 5% or less?? Well why should Microsoft only listen to them?"

Because that 1-5% are the ones Microsoft is targeting with their web development platforms. Non-nerds don't make websites - why on earth would you listen to someone who doesn't make websites on subjects like this pertaining to making websites?

"We have a huge demand of .NET coders, more and more projects are done with .NET, which is fast reliable and cost effective."

The issue is not with .NET. You're setting up a strawman. The issue is with IE requiring hacks and workarounds to get some useful stuff working that should have found their way into an IE6.5 years back.

We're not talking about the server-side stuff. Microsoft's server-side offerings are nice, and compete just fine with PHP, Java, etc. That's not the issue.

The issue is Internet Explorer's massive lag time in implementing standards. Another issue is Microsoft's launching Live.com sites without any support for Firefox - with 15% market share (and far greater amongst early adopters - an important customer segment, that!), it shouldn't be ignored.

Live.com should have been designed from the start to work in IE AND Firefox - otherwise, you lose a lot of customers to Google and Yahoo!, who seem to have no problem doing so.