matrix

Anyone know what the business case for this change was? What was wrong with the old logo? I'm having a hard time understanding what the thinking was here.

Detroit's story of a working-class town that failed to evolve is depressingly familiar throughout the US in many small towns whose main industries have moved on - for example, the old railway towns. I feel these towns die because they lack the critical mass of people with a culture that embraces technology and change.

Unfortunately, the pain that comes with this evolutionary process is probably unavoidable. To change it would require a wholesale change in culture - something that takes a generation, if not more.

Good article, but I'm concerned the premises of the article have been skewed by misleading graphs. The initial graph of GDP to medical expenditure is reasonably convincing, the graphs later in the article much less so. I could be wrong about this, but it feels a little like the data selection and curve fitting have been selected to supported the hypothesis rather than the other way around (something that could easily happen accidentally).

On a tangential note - that pie chart he uses in each section is an unintentionally good example of what not to do when displaying data. I have to confess, I don't really understand it.

I strongly agree. There's a real opportunity here to create a truly open VM, one that is designed from the beginning to support functional languages. It would need a major corporate sponsor though, because building a new platform requires a very substantial investment. Microsoft... you listening?

My experience is similar to yours, and your observations are absolutely spot on.

I'm always a little suspicious of anyone who has the job title "Project Manager".

Excellent observations. I agree that a major strategic shift is required and that means thinking long and hard about their reliance on owning the Windows platform as their primary competitive advantage.

If I were Microsoft, I would port .Net to other OSs, and aim to own the VM space. With the JVM in Oracle's hands now, there's an opportunity for a new player to take the lead. It's corporate infrastructure, it's a platform play, and it's developer focused, something they're historically good at. As a bonus, it helps them get products like SQL Server on more platforms, and into more customer's hands.

Good questions, but I would go a step further: a lot of clients do not have a good feel for what a web site might really do for them. An important part of the engagement is to act as a facilitator to help the client identify what their needs really are.

I feel the blame is very much misplaced; Google had nothing to do with the viability of "Cadio" name. It was inevitable that people would confuse it with "Cardio", whether Google auto-suggested it or not.

That said, I do sympathy for the difficulty in finding short, easily spelled domain names. It's been downright ridiculous trying to find good names in recent years.

If I understand this blog post correctly, it seems to be suggesting that sovereign wealth funds would be potential investors for startups and that they would be ideal investors because they would not be seeking a short-term exit/liquidity event.

That seems unlikely to me, given the risks inherent in startups, and the fact that the VCs drive for rapid ROI is arguably an important source of focus for proving/disproving a business model before you burn through too much capital.

I strongly agree. This is the correct answer to the problem. That and adding sales tax to the tagged price (i.e. don't add sales tax at the time of the transaction).

Pure link bait; the actual article does not say anything of the sort. The article is, in fact making the point Americans as a whole no longer "make things", and are avoiding getting their hands dirty.I'm not sure if the premise is true - it would be nice to see some hard data to back it up.

I was/am in the preliminary stages of researching and testing a product for dealing clothing fit issues. In the course of this, I learned far more about clothing sizing than any sane person should know. I can tell you that vanity sizing is something of a myth - it's really size inflation.

What's happening is this:

Consumers have an expectation of being able to buy the same size forever, and buy clothes accordingly. Size 34 waist 10 years ago? Just grab size 34 from the rack. Of course, people gain weight and should go for a larger size. But they don't - they still see themselves as a size 34 and keep buying it. And complaining or moving on to the competitor when it doesn't fit. The problem is even worse for women's clothing for reasons too lengthy to go into here.

The only reliable solution is a system similar to the European standard, EN 13402. With this system, the fit tolerance (range of body dimensions it is designed for) for the item is listed on its hang tag. This gets away from issues like styles that are designed to have very large amounts of ease, or elastic fabrics.

For those that are thinking of building a product in this space, another thing to keep in mind is that most customers just don't care that much about good fit. Sad, but true.

Large brands like Levi's generally use several contractors, and the quality (and therefore fit tolerance) inevitably varies from contractor to contractor. Chances are that was a bad batch and/or you were shopping in an outlet mall (where they send a lot of the odds and sods).

This product does exist. See: myshape.com

If anyone wants to discuss this product in depth, drop me a line. This is a product space I have been eying for some time and have done considerable research and experimentation on the topic.

Based on the presentation - and the evidence is pretty compelling - it seems the manpower is there; it's just that the core developers don't want it.

I'm so glad this presentation is getting attention. The presentation really nails it, and I can only imagine the well-deserved awkward moments it caused a few people.

All the issues are big, but those that touch on the nature of the closed nature of the Django community are, I feel the most important criticisms. A project like Django cannot scale effectively (in terms of pace of innovation, willingness of people to contribute, mindshare, etc) unless they address the community issues they have.

I'm thinking Rackspace might well have been in the right on this one. If the customer was in fact phishing, Rackspace was well within their rights to shut down the account. It's really up to the application creator to prevent that abuse.

That said, it's good to have a reminder of the risks of outsourcing your hosting. I still think the tradeoff is worth it for experimental products where you don't want to invest too much upfront.

Hey, not before they come to Utah first!

Kidding aside, I used to live one block away from a Trader Joe's and am sort of over them now. It can be a frustrating place to shop when you just want 'regular stuff', rather than paying the markup for fancy varieties of things. It's very nice to have as a supplement to a normal grocery store though.

I can't believe this story got so few votes. It's great story of the ups and downs an entrepreneur went through to bring his product to the market. Worth the read.

I feel the main problem with extensions is that the "application" level of abstraction doesn't work very well in practice. It was an ambitious idea, but there are too many dependencies for that to be feasible.

That said, I still like Django for quickly banging out moderately complex apps.

To me, the single biggest fault -- one that very nearly made me just get up and go the the nearest Apple store, right then and there -- is the fact that Windows STILL will force a reboot of your machine while unattended (I did figure out how to turn that off, but your average user would not be able to do it). Whoever decided to make it default to forcing a reboot is unforgivably stupid.

Not to mention: why is it, that in 2010, we have an OS that still requires reboots at least 3 times a week?

For me, the big question is: where does all this leave IBM? IBM has a huge investment in Java, but now Oracle has made it clear that they're not going to play nice. The senior guys at IBM have to be thinking long and hard about that...

The story isn't really about them freezing the account. I think everyone accepts that PayPal needs to be vigilant against fraud, given the amount they deal with. The story is that that legitimate customers are pretty much powerless to unfreeze their accounts; there's no due process, no oversight, and no accountability. If PayPal decides to screw you, that's it. Game over. Thanks for the free money.

While I'm proud to see the cafe my sister manages get held up as an example to be exported elsewhere, I'm skeptical. The fact is, when scaling up a food or beverage franchise, food quality takes a distant back seat to consistency, supply chain management, leveraging economy of scale, and all kinds of unglamorous factors like that. The truth is, on average, people don't care as much about quality as you might think they do. Starbucks, McDonald's, Chill's, Olive Garden... the examples of mediocre, but consistent winners go on.

Agreed. Unfortunately there's a group of lobbyists that have successfully prevented efforts to eliminate the penny (these groups primarily being "Save the Greenback" and the cotton industry).

Sometimes I think we'd be better off eliminating congress...

Sigh. People keep missing he most important aspects of the so-called 10,000 hour rule.

It's not 10,000 hours of practice. It's 10,000 hours of a certain type of practice. The practice must be directed, with feedback from coaches. The original paper this came from also mentioned that the experts practiced differently: They often spend a lot of time doing drills and focusing on individual skills. It's a very focused, methodological approach.

I can't recommend the Steelcase Leap enough. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I found the Aeron chairs to be somewhat uncomfortable. The Steelcase Leap, on the otherhand... I've had it for a year and couldn't imagine working without one.

I found mine for $100 on Craiglist, so maybe try there.

I don't see an email link your profile. I'm in Utah myself, might be tempted for the right kind of gig.

I like it, but making fun of Java (and Java's "thought leaders") is just too easy. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. With a grenade launcher.

Eclipse is another matter: far more ridicule is called for. Far, far more.

This presentation can basically be summed up as a verbal kick up the ass - "JFDI". For that, it's useful - beyond that, I feel it's much too shallow for the HN audience (we know this stuff... we've read Steve Blank, we're looking for more nitty gritty details).