Bad news, lads. (It's a Peel reference)

[hirez]

Ron Asheton's died and Florian Schneider's left Kraftwerk.

Bugger.

And now it appears that LJ have booted a swathe of their US-based techies. As is usual with these stories (about one a year since I joined) I'll believe it when I see it, but since it comes coincidentally close to the news about Journalspace, those of you with Unix boxes could do worse than ljsm.pl.

(May or may not work on other OSes, seems to depend on a third-party site in .ru to expand big comment-trees, so perhaps not terribly trustworthy for those of you who emit gossipmungous friends-only posts that attract pages of scurrilous commentary. There's nothing I can do for you on that score.)

Comments

[bluekieran.livejournal.com]

I can believe that they've shed some techies, but I doubt much more will happen. Maybe if they're paticularly tight for cash they'll shit on the free users a bit to make them move to paid accounts, but such is life.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Quite. If the server farm is now in, um, Montana, there's no real need to keep paying inflated SF salaries.

[drumiller.livejournal.com]

It may be that they shed the folks who wouldn't transition to the new location. Funny thing is that my ex-coworker up there has better telecommunications connectivity than I do in the Bay Area.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

True. I'm not sure I'd want to move from SF to Butte, Bozeman or Billings.

[drumiller.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't find cattle or moose that interesting. Plus, brrrr! I'm all about the temperate climate thing.

[spride.livejournal.com]

Nobody would. Part of living in SF is changing jobs with freq = shirt/0.33

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Is SF really that expensive (today)? Any well-run colo ought to be costing more for kit than for the wetware (or else your wetware isn't pulling its weight). Hosting prices in SF must be a buyer's market today.

PS - Anyone know about Telecity London b0rking itself badly today?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes.

No.

[meltie.livejournal.com]

All our grapevine says is "power outage". AAISP's had three bits of kit go pop in the same rack at the same time, so there could've been a surge.

[spride.livejournal.com]

Compared to what? NY, London, Tokyo, Aberdeen?

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

I've seen plenty of prophecies that the blogosphere/social networking phenomenon is going to get a shake-up sooner or later. A certain amount of weeding-out of the minor players has already taken place, of course. Trig (http://trig.com/), a kind of music-specific MySpace-alike went bust a while back, although the fact that it's still up indicates that someone must've rushed in with a first aid package. It'll be interesting to see whether these smaller, niche-market netwoking sites start going kaput for good as the recession bites - or whether their niches actually insulate them from the general doom 'n' gloom.

Plenty of people seem to be anticipating some sort of instant doom for LJ, but I'd be more cautious. The fact that it's the technical staff that have been shunted out of the door seems to indicate that for the immediate future LJ will be left to trundle along 'as is', without being developed any further, and without any fancy new apps being added.

That might not be a bad thing, of course. Some might say that LJ doesn't actually need any more technical development. It works; it does what its users want it to do. Employing a bunch of techies to continually add extra bells and whistles - especially if those bells and whistles don't bring in any actual profit - probably seemed like an unjustifiably expensive luxury in these stringent times. If that's basically the situation, it's not necessarily going to be a big deal for Johnny Average LJ user.

Of course, the obvious question then becomes, 'What if something major breaks, and LJ no longer has the in-house techies available to fix it?' That might be where the real crunch point comes.

So, I suppose a bit of backup wouldn't go amiss. Everything I put on LJ also appears in my MySpace blog (http://www.myspace.com/nemesis_to_go), which might seem like a case of backing up the frying pan with the fire. But given MySpace's ruthlessly commercial ethos - adverts with everything, whether its users like it or not - I'd bet that MySpace isn't going to go anywhere in a hurry. MySpace is making money for its owners in a way that LiveJournal never really has. In the end, that's probably going to be the factor that decides who lives and who dies...

[jendama.livejournal.com]

Are the 3mg working or do you prefer the 5mg?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The 3mg leaves me zombified the day after. Any more than that would be silly.

[jendama.livejournal.com]

A brief Google yielded this (http://www.talkaboutsleep.com/circadian-rhythm-disorders/circadian-rhythm-sleep-disorders/10-how-to-use-melatonin-correctly.htm).

Maybe invest in a pill cutter (and ensure that you're taking it the right time of day, etc.)? Good luck!