You probably didn't see what kind of crap SF.net was before this redesign. I think they did a good job of redesigning homepage but project pages stlll look like they are work in progress..

There's no "somehow", it is almost like telecom companies can force govt to form regulations in their interest.

Not "almost like", it's exactly that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

This is called Oligopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly in half-assed capitalism. Note that this can be worse than monopoly because few competitors can essentially create informal cartels.

Yup. What frequently happens is that companies in an Oligopoly are able to collude to raise the barriers of entry, keeping out new competitors: sometimes with "help" of government regulations, sometimes because of lack of government regulation. As long as there are only a couple of them (< 4 controlling > 80 percent of the industry), they can keep prices artificially higher than they need to be.

When there's no actual competition and little threat of new competitors entering the market, their incentive to innovate or become more efficient is diminished. Consumers end up paying too much for mediocre goods/services.

If there is an Oligopoly, then how has this occurred? What entity is there providing the conditions for the Oligopoly to exist and persist? If there were not government interference via the CRTC we would have open competition. But we don't because the CRTC is there. And they have the power to make sure that no real competition can take hold. Where does this lead us? Straight back to corporatism (the government and corporations are in bed together) - Let's not use the term capitalism anywhere in this context.

This is really a worrying level of monopoly by Bell.

Nice tool! One thing I would like though is Image from a URL.

Writing MS-PST parser to centralize all my emails over the years in a single database: http://github.com/niravthaker/slibpst

It appears that his primary assumption, NPE prevention, on Options is based on blogs rather than actual good quality code.

If you look at how Options are used in Scala core lib, you wouldn't make such claims and you will definitely not use it only for null checks.

Three reasons I can think of, in order of time to get things done:

1. Availability, ease of use of Java based hosting provider

2. Time from writing code to live deployments

3. Lack of agile frameworks like rails, django or any other php framework (hot code reload etc.).

  prefer to rate sites by their "percentage of total Internet traffic"

I can't help but wonder how ridiculous business model like Alexa's works in reality, their source of data is not even scientifically relevant to measure total internet traffic, and yet they manage to get attention from everyone?

I almost feel that I would be laughed at if I had this start up idea and went to raise funding.

It's weird, but as a stats guy, this makes total sense to me. They are sampling a small (hopefully random) group of internet users in order to draw conclusions about how the population at large behaves. It's no different than a political poll. Just like political pollsters, they express their results in relative terms to sidestep the much trickier issue of guessing N, the population size. Hence pollsters do not try to estimate voter turnout, and Alexa does not try to estimate how many people are online.

FWIW, the firms who are giving absolute viewer totals are (I'm pretty sure) just taking this a step further by estimating the total number of people online and multiplying. This is a way harder estimation problem, which explains why the resulting numbers are all over the map. The Alexa data is not any more worthless, just less ambitious.

Its different from political poll because it is not random. Its like looking at internet usage pattern of Indian internet users and predicting the traffic of Reddit, when most of the traffic of reddit comes from USA/EU/Canada.

And that's exactly whats happening, Alexa relies on people who install Alexa toolbar and from what I remember reading most of Alexa users are from South-east asia, or more precisely, from India.

This is so dubious, its not even funny.

They have rankings by nation in addition to the overalls. Their base is far from a scientific sample, but I think they give better ballpark figures than some give them credit for.

Their "what's hot" section often has stuff about wordpress and the like, so there are obviously many webmasters. There is plenty of American Idol and all that, also. I have no idea, but I'd guess they advertise the toolbar in different places and maybe allow it to be bundled with screensavers or whatever.

I think that the only tech-savvy people that use Alexa toolbar are webmasters who are trying to get their Alexa numbers up, basically.

IOW Selection Bias is the problem here.

Not so much into stats but isn't a good statistical sampling has to have a uniform distribution over population space like strata/demographics?

I wonder what their sample size is for 1.56 billion internet users (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+internet+users).

As a side note: Alexa is an Amazon.com company!, when did that happen?

1999. If I recall correctly, it was one of their first acquisitions. It didn't make sense to me then, either.

Remember that code isn't the only form of contribution,You can provide non-code help as well. Add/Update documentation of open source projects.

The only reason why RTFM fails is because documentation is outdated or non-existent.

With intermediate level this is lowest bar to achieve, and you will learn a lot just documenting the stuff as you will be forced to understand internals.