Does this metric pass the smell test?

Via Silicon Alley Insider, an analysis by a company called Drake Direct claims that 1 in 4 pageviews in the US goes to Facebook. ..

IE6 users and status-conscious creative directors

A friend directed me to this site , belonging to a creative director at Squarespace, and containing the following message for IE6 users: Hi, if you are coming to this site via Internet Explorer 6, you might not be getting the best experience possible. Honestly, I can’t even begin to think about what your entire experience on the internet must be like? (…probably like riding a bike on the highway while cars blow by you on their way to Costco to get gallons of mayonnaise and 60-inch plasma TV’s). How will you ever be able to use this website?????? You wont. You’re an asshole and your browser is an asshole. So look, I’m going to be honest: I kind of hate you. BUT we c-a-n make this work. Here is what I am going to need you to do: fire up your Toshiba ShitBook© that weighs about 45 pounds, wipe the Cheeto dust off the screen, download Safari ( http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ ), delete Internet Explorer from your computer, punch yourself in the face, and get me a pulled pork sandwich. ..

California says the iPhone costs $599

I recently purchased a new iPhone 3GS since my previous phone bit the dust (or pavement, more accurately). I went to order online via AT&T, and was surprised to find out the tax on a $199 phone was $56, or over 25%. Wha? I went to make the same purchase at Apple’s online store, and found the same thing. ..

Will Apple fix Boot Camp for Windows?

I wrote earlier about how Windows running on Mac hardware via Boot Camp appears to have serious battery-life issues — getting only around 2 hours of life on a machine that should offer at least twice that. ..

Is Verizon’s network better, or is it simply untested?

This article over a TechCrunch is putatively about the iPhone, but the take-away for me is that AT&T’s data traffic has grown 50-fold over the last 3 years: ..

Mozilla VP: “mistakes were made”

I love the language of Mozilla VP Mike Shaver’s non-retraction retraction regarding a Microsoft plugin for Firefox: We received confirmation from Microsoft this evening that the Framework Assistant add-on is not a mechanism for exploiting the vulnerabilities detailed in the earlier post, so we’ve removed it from the blocklist. ..

Word nerdism #1: Make mine a medium

I am a word nerd, I love crosswords and love to wonder how words and expressions come to be. I also love thinking about computer languages as languages, with style and grammar. (For example, see the interplay between terseness and readability.) ..

Think of SSDs as multi-core storage

I’ve written a few times why solid-state hard drives (SSDs) are a sea change, similar to our transition from CRT to LCD a few years ago. ..

StackOverflow == Facebook * .0001

Apparently, Facebook is running around 30,000 physical servers. That hurts my head. With 300,000,000 users, that translates to around 10,000 users per server. They are doing (back-of-the-envelope) ~4.2 billion pageviews/day. Each server, then, is doing around 140,000 page views per day. ..

Solving the n+1 problem in Linq to SQL, using projection

Rick Strahl has a nice solution for mitigating the n+1 problem in Linq to SQL. The n+1 problem is a situation where, as you iterate over a set of query results in a list view, one or more additional database queries are fired for each row in the list. Since database calls are relatively expensive, you want to keep these to a minimum. ..