I'm in love with Khan Academy. I truly think it will be able to make a difference. My only concern is about the visa.

Where's the story?

It seems that they can crush Dropbox anytime, they just need a cross platform "rsyncing" client and a UI

That's a pretty big "just"

As a dropbog alternative, I use Live Mesh from MSFT - 5GB storage and possibility to sync more folders.

Regarding the Google offer: It seems to me that the storage can be (currently) used only for photos (picasaweb) and gmail. It doesn't look bad, but I would still prefer to pay price for bandwidth per year. If I have to use this as a backup for all my photos in original res., 20GB is not enough, so the Flickr's unlimited storage for $25 still looks better.

For me, the OK price would be $5-$10 per 20GB upload bandwidth/year.

I'm using SpiderOak which gives you 2GB free, but you can get an additional 1GB for each free referral, for a total of up to 5GB free. You get a 'zero-knowledge knowledge environment' (everything's encrypted on the client-side before upload, and they can't even see the file names or other meta-data). You can use an unlimited number of devices, sync folders between machines, no special 'dropbox' folder is required, share folders with others, and use their web interface (though I'm not sure what the implications of using that are on the 'zero-knowledge environment'...I don't know how they've designed that).

Does Live Mesh support Mac and Linux because if not it isn't so much a competitor to Dropbox.

I just said that I use it as an alternative, since I use Windows. So it is a competitor for PC+Windows users, if you want me to be more exact.

It does support Macs. It's got an API so hopefully someone will build other clients, like for Linux.

Of course they could.

But they'd have to want to be in that market and then to provide a better UI and functionality set than the existing system.

And would they make enough money off of it to be worth investing their time in? Probably not.

they won't; both serve different needs.

dropbox is mainly used by people who don't use webapps to manage their documents and photos.

I don't really know into deep the Rails community but what you say regarding Django's it is true. I really like the average mindset of the folks in that community.

The only problem with BeautifulSoup is that its kind of slow, but if it's fast enough for you go for it, otherwise you can try lxml with its lxml.html module. See also: http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/03/30/python-html-parser-per...

Upvote I used to dig BeautifulSoup. It's latest release is slower than it's predecessors. That's why I use PyQuery nowadays, it's based on lxml and uses a jQuery like API to access the DOM.

I'm always terrified that these conversations will unearth a library or technique that will immediately obsolete most of the code in my current pet project.

Thanks!

I highly reccomend PyQuery. It's basically the jQuery API on top of lxml.

any chance of this running in IronPython?

Don't quote me on this, but I believe you can get this running by way of IronClad. (AFAIK lxml doesn't run on IronPython without using IronClad right now.)

http://www.resolversystems.com/products/ironclad/

I forgot what BeautifulSoup couldn't do that made me look for something else, but I've been using html5lib for those purposes these days with good results, especially if you need to output modified HTML.

which is the name of your company :) ?

Virtualmin. We'll be hiring for a couple of positions a little later this year (primarily related to our new cloud computing products, rather than what you see on our website today). Feel free to send over your resume.