Link Anthology 1/9/09

[keilexandra]

* A NYT article on what carriers aren't eager to tell you about texting.

* JournalSpace loses everything in a malicious database wipe--this is why mirroring is not a backup solution, folks.

* Terry Pratchett is knighted for services to literature!

* Another NYT article, this one relevant to ableism, which I don't know enough about. Assistance animals now come in all shapes and sizes

* Via Dear Author: LJ has sent out a reassuring message, of course, but at this point I don't know how much to believe them. 12 of 28 employees have been axed. I've backed up everything with LJArchive, and I also hear that LJ-Sec is good.

* To end on a brighter note, via yhlee: 50 modern and creative bookshelf designs.

Comments

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

I don't really believe LJ either. The people they laid off were engineers, marketing & design. That's a very bad sign when it come to future, long-range business plans.

That they were laid off without severance packages definitely doesn't signal a company's financial health. You don't do that if your company is fine financially. Even when I was laid off by my first job (we were sold to another company and they didn't want to keep the employees, just the clients), I got a severance package.

[afuna]

LJ is definitely sticking around for the short term. I am not so certain of its medium to long-term prospects. I know that LJ is big in Russia (possibly India?), which probably means that it's not going to die, suddenly. But I've become interested in finding another home, because I've grown more and more disillusioned over the past year.

I'm very interested in Dreamwidth (this entry probably sums up my hopes for it). Full disclosure: I'm probably very biased, because I've been getting more and more involved in it over the past year ;-)

PS. The 12 of 28 is the number of staff in SF. They do still have people in Moscow. How many I am not exactly sure.