I agree with this part of the article:
While amidst recent market turmoil its stock is down 16% from its recent high of $747 to about $629 as of Thursday, I suspect that just means now is a good time to buy.
I disagree with the rest of it though…  For example, this here is some complete non-sense:
Google has a Microsoft-like lock-in
While trying to investigate a bit into the rumor of Google buying Skype, I ran across this rather lengthy post. In there, I stumbled upon a thought which is simple and rather obvious, but which I haven’t had yet:
Google isn’t a search engine company; it brokers connections between people and corporations for profit.[…] Search is just one, albeit dominant.
If anyone of you guys knows of any good hosting company that offers managed dedicated servers, now is an excellent time to let me know via comments or the contact form. So far the best I’ve found is XLHost.com . I am also talking with Rackspace.com, but something tells me that they will be a bit too expensive – not that I am jumping to conclusions here though.
I’ll need two servers to start with. I might grow up to anywhere from 6 to 20 in the next 6-8 month. Servers should have fast processors (3.0 GHz is ideal). Better even if they will be duel CPUed. 2 GBytes of RAM should fit me fine. I am not yet sure about the storage. I know that it has to be SCSI and that there should be at least 40-60 GBytes of it. Maybe more. I’ll have better numbers later. I will also need a lot of bandwidth. Both incoming and outgoing. 20 GBytes per month is the red line minimum. 200 GBytes per month is something I feel more comfortable with. 2 TBytes will make me smile one extra time.
Software-wise, I’ll need a Linux-only setup. Fedora Core 4 is preferrable, but anything Red Hat labeled should do just fine. I’ll need MySQL 4 or above, perl 5.8 with A LOT of CPAN modules that I’ll need to install myself, python 2.4, and a Subversion client.
What do I want from the hosting company? Well, I want my servers to be available 24×7. That’s the main requirement. Then, I’ll need their help with backup configuration. I’ll have a large MySQL database to backup and a lot of small files (think mail spool and proxy cache scale). Also, I would expect them to manage security updates and fixes for all the servers – I’m really out of time to keep up with that right now.
An additional strong wishlist item would be a LAN interconnecting all my servers. I’ll have a lot of traffic between the servers and I don’t see any reason why I should pass it via a outside network, where it is slow and expensive.
That’s about it.
Oh, the budget line? Let’s say anything within $300 USD.
Are you still with me?
I’m sure by now everybody knows about One Million Pixels project. Interesting idea that earned the guy even more than a million dollars and that will make you go “Oh, Jez, why didn’t I think of it first?”.
The idea was so simple and effective that several projects spinned off of it. Some are simple copies. Others try to apply the same idea to something other than pixels.
One of these new projects got my attention – One Million Blogs. Instead of pixels it tries to sell one million spaces for blog links. If you have a blog, you can pay $1 and get linked to from that site. You will even get a 30×30 pixel square for your logo, or whatever else you want to place in there. Saying that they want to see one million blog links together, and not only one million dollars, adds a nice touch to the project.
In fact, I liked it so much, that I immediately sent them my $1 USD (via PayPal). Within a few hours I’ve got a reply confirming my transaction. I emailed my ugly face downsized to 30×30 pixels and this blog’s URL and got linked. I even received two personalized buttons – my number is 52 – that I can use anywhere to link back to One Million Blogs. Since I am not using buttons on my site, I’ll save them in this entry.
Check it out. While you still can find me in there…
Now this one is simply great.
I was reading through the funny IRC quotes at Bash.Org.Ru, which is a Russian analogue of Bash.org, when I came across the quote #4741.
Here is a rough translation for you:
Billing
Dear customers! For the last three days we had a technical problem and your used Internet traffic wasn’t calculated properly. We kindly ask you to calculate the approximate amount of traffic that you used during this period and pay cash accordingly in our office. With best regards, company management. http://isp.kz/
I smiled and almost went away. But before I did so, I noticed a small post-scriptum – it was a moderatorial note from bash.org.ru that confirmed that this message was actually posted to the official website of the provider.
So, I rushed to check it out and, indeed, it was still there.
I was laughing so hard that I almost woke up Olga and Maxim. I mean how stupid and naive that is – asking your customers to pay based on their own calculations? What are they counting at? Good will? Honesty? Or maybe they just have an excellent sense of humor. If so, they should have an update of some sort published shortly.
After all, those who thought tha Borat (.kz stands for Kazakhstan, as does Borat) was an exhageration are wrong. He is by far not. No.