The Monty Hall problem goes like this.

Say you are a competitor on the game show "Let's Make a Deal" and legendary game show host Monty Hall has his classic choose which door contest.

Behind one is a new car, behind the other two are goats.

You choose one door.

Before that door is opened, Monty opens one of the remaining doors so you can see what is behind it.  And it's a goat.

Question:  Should you keep your first choice or switch to the last remaining door.

Answer: You should switch.  It is a definitive choice.  Switch.

The logic is that if you keep the door you have a fifty fifty chance but if you switch you have a 2/3 chance.  Because you are essentially choosing the 2 doors choice over the one door choice.

Don't believe me go here and try it out.

For a more detailed explanation go over here: wikipedia

here is a decision tree from that article.  Assuming the player chooses door 1 to begin with.

So we all know about Housevalues.com and Zillow.com which both tell you in different ways how much your house is worth.  But how do you find out what your site is worth?

Well there here are a couple of sites that try to tell you:

http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength - doesn't really tell you the price but does give you a rough index to compare it to other sites.

http://www.pingoat.com/goat/blog_worth - appears to weigh a similar set of variables as the SEOMOZ site but attaches a monetary value to the index.

http://www.business-opportunities.biz - Nice my blog is worth MILLIONS.  Well not millions, but this seems to overstate the value I would put on my site. 

http://www.dnscoop.com/ - and somewhere in between. 

The bottom line is that the price placed on your site is just abitrary and doesn't mean very much except as an index that you could track.

I still like seeing the thousands of dollars from the business-opportunities site though.

Back in the day, when life was hard, we had to mark up pages using notepad and we absolutely positively had to make them viewable within an 800 X 600 resolution. But you try and tell the kids that these days and they just won't believe a word you say.

Not a word...

So back in 2000 the broad screen resolution breakdown for web users looked something like this:

courtesy: www.thecounter.com

Therefore you as a web developer were incentivised to develop to the 800 X 600 resolution (I actually remember the discussion about moving up to 800 X 600 from 640 X 480).

Now-a-days it's much different:

courtesy: www.thecounter.com

It's just interesting now and again to revisit accelerating change.  Bottom line, if you are still basing your design on 800 X 600 you are not using the available screen real estate fully.

Update: and taking a look at my google analytics it is even more striking.