Let me pull on a conspiracy theorists hat here, and give one possible reason:
When you purchase a laptop, at least in my experience, it records the serial number of the laptop purchased. Now, generally you don't purchase a laptop in cash (At least in the states, but that really has to do with overzealous cops who think anything over a hundred dollars is drug money), you use a credit/check card. What this means is at checkout they have an address, and name (From the card) and a serial number.
You go home, and type away, log in to Facebook, do whatever you normally do, all the while keylogger is running away in the background. NSA walks over to Samsung and says "Hey, can we get those keylogger results? Great, here's your million dollars", takes those, then sees that John Doe is searching for poison on Google. They run off, and arrest him.
Basically, that information would be NSA's wetdream.
Is this true? Probably not, but it's one possible motive.
Yes, this is very true and was a mistake on my part that I am learning from.
I was on multiple ruby lists, lists from various conferences I have been at, etc and when I started looking for work again I realized I was stupid to delete it.
The major problem with 'in the cloud' assuming you mean something like EC2 or Rackspace Cloud is performance.
Many of those types of hosts use a similar setup for file-systems (Amazon might not, but not sure): GFS. Now, GFS has suffered from problems, and even huge, expensive hosts like EY got hit with it. In fact, the last time I worked with cloud hosting (I much prefer my own box) load times for static images could take up to 200 ms due to the design of GFS.
My suggestion is either go shared (If you don't want to learn sysadmin tasks) or if you do, go with a good VPS host, or get a dedicated box.
It's funny, but I have thought about going the dating site route.
Looking at the state of gay oriented dating sites, they all pretty much cater to one-night hookups and there are folks in the LGBT community that aren't into that and instead want to make a relationship of it.
I have been playing with the idea of building that type of site. Not only will it fill a need I see, but I could play with web telephony and stuff like that.
There'd be a few things to think about: should the project already exist? If it exists, does the preexisting admin need to be involved with this crowd-source site? If it doesn't exist, should the submitter be the admin of the new project? Should submitters get their reputation from activity already performed on other sites?
Maybe a pledge system, where the submitter and pledgers agree to begin once a certain number of people pledge, and those pledges should be recorded to see if they're followed through. The site should aim to take a project from idea to completion. The submitter could set a number of roles that developers can choose to fulfill.
Even some crowd-sourced funding could work. Funding could be introduced or opened at some point, say from the beginning, but with activity picking up as a project progresses. Imagine Diaspora using the site.
I am picturing an almost Reddit like interface on the front end with lists of open source projects looking for help, os projects that are needed, and os projects that are being abandoned and need people to take over.
Yep. GitHub has an API so that could be useful. I'm sure people will want to discuss projects and ask questions, especially with the admin or creator.
Also, I was thinking that a widget would be good, so existing sites could let its users know it's looking for development help. These sites would build up a record of people that have contributed code.
It is certainly something I could use as well. It's so hard to figure out what to write OS-wise (That's the number one question during interviews: Have you ever contributed to open source, and I always say I don't know what to do or haven't found one to work with).
I have to figure out a name, but for now I will start doing some development, and mockups and see what I can come up with.
bbommarito - I had the idea that you might want to work on one of my sites for a convertible note or straight equity. Ping me if interested (or anyone else) - at least you'd be standing on something already there. It hasn't launched but once it does, it really needs another piece to give it something that could gain decent traction. It uses Django.
I can also help with this idea too if you like (inc. mockups) - an idea which really comes about from this situation I find myself. For a domain, you could use hackerbrain .com which I can give.
Now, when you say "discuss projects and ask questions" are you thinking wiki interface for discussions, maybe a sort of GetSatisfaction type idea for discussions, maybe with voting?
Even Github lacks some neat discussion systems that might be nice to see somewhere.
Provide a realtime chat if you can, ie like:
https://github.com/isaacsu/twich
Give it a timetable so each project has a set time for participants to chat, (the project in question is displayed at the top of a page.) You can also record chats, and offer multiple rooms.
I figured most here are actually building something, but hey worth a shot asking.
The main reason this thought came up is being out of work (You don't hire a Ruby guy and then say "Hey, make this PHP script, Magento, go fast on two servers so it can handle 1000 concurrent requests") I have nothing really exciting to do. Figured I could kill days while looking for a gig with screen fulls of pretty colored code.
When you purchase a laptop, at least in my experience, it records the serial number of the laptop purchased. Now, generally you don't purchase a laptop in cash (At least in the states, but that really has to do with overzealous cops who think anything over a hundred dollars is drug money), you use a credit/check card. What this means is at checkout they have an address, and name (From the card) and a serial number.
You go home, and type away, log in to Facebook, do whatever you normally do, all the while keylogger is running away in the background. NSA walks over to Samsung and says "Hey, can we get those keylogger results? Great, here's your million dollars", takes those, then sees that John Doe is searching for poison on Google. They run off, and arrest him.
Basically, that information would be NSA's wetdream.
Is this true? Probably not, but it's one possible motive.