michaelleland

Does anybody have any experience in creating a 3D interface for a business application? It seems that what video games do really well has never transferred over into the "real work" category of software.

Secondly, are impress & jmpress going to cause more 3D interface innovation?

There's an opportunity for some A/B testing, not just of price but of service. Another van, parked at another consulate, could vary one thing and the team could measure the gains/losses. I imagine this kind of thing is done in retail all the time.

We use PaaS because it allows us to focus our energy on the product that the customer sees, rather than on the backend stuff that, done right, never affects the customer. When our small team grows, we can afford to concentrate on our own hardware and make cost-saving decisions. But we are very light on system administration experience, and our scarcest commodity is time, not money.

It depends on how you use the list. If you use the list as a pointy-haired boss trying to micromanage somebody's work, that's one thing. But every one of those questions begins a conversation--like you mention with the reply "Why do you say it isn't?"

It's through those conversation that ensures that the best can ideas can come forth. This hinges on the relationship between the reviewer and the reviewee being solid, something that should be worked on long before the design review.

Terry Jones wrote about the "Web 2.0 Address Book" last October (http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/10/getting-closer-to-the-web-2...). It was an interesting concept that I've been following since. But it seems there needs to be a clear case for everybody to share their data in order for this idea to work. Wouldn't FluidDB be subject to the tragedy of the commons, with nobody curating the data and maintaining its quality? Or can it truly be the "wikipedia of data"?

First thing that came to mind. That's it, I'm starting a new railroad.

I agree. They could have forced it to land as well, simply by getting rid of an engine or two.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. If you read to the end of the article, you'll see why--he specifically called out this title if you'd like to take him out of context.

1)ruby_on_rails 2)Open_source 3)Philosophy

I can see this being really useful for some simple 3D transitions within web apps, along the lines of the cylindrical date picker in Safari on the iPhones.

6k-8k a month through small-time consulting. I've got one big customer, and two smaller ones. Good work, but it doesn't scale well.

I added ROR at the end of the list, with an "assignment" of making a web app to organize contacts. Do you feel that by that time the programmer will have become bored?

good call.

True. But my goal here is to get somebody to learn programming to the point where they could reasonably apply for a job. The question is, would you hire somebody who didn't know "stack, dynamic memory, pointers and so on" if they were willing to learn as needed?

I thought of this as well. My thought here on the different languages was to make the programmer's skill based on more than expertise in any one language.

What should the role be of (local) public money in private investments?

I have a related question: I have friends in two camps. One camp says all tools like this are inherently limiting, and websites should be built by coders who know how to code. They typically go on to talk about bloat-ware etc., and the fact that even the best tool will give you unnecessary code. The other camp says that with the tools out there, there is no reason to build everything from scratch every time, and that the photoshops and dreamweavers (and now Maqetta--sorry, but it is in the same classification in my mind) of the world are the only way to go.

What's an acceptable middle ground?

This is a cool concept--I think other professions need a bit of quirkiness in their training to make it this enjoyable!

...and wisdom is in the eye of the beholder.

The most valuable thing I learned in school, kindergarten through university, was how to learn. If my learning had stopped at the time I finished high school, I would have had only enough to survive; if it had stopped at the time I finished college, I would have had enough to hold down a steady job; but in neither case would I be doing what I do today.

In the same way, a developer that can only reuse code from a Google search can survive, a developer that can program decently in a number of languages can hold down a steady job, but a developer that can differentiate themselves by their ability to deeply understand a business need or language or technology can excel.

Learning for learning's sake is useful onto itself--the brain muscles that are exercised when a person learns the violin are the same that become exhausted learning deep domain knowledge.

Strongly reminiscent of John Galt's (and his friends') degrees in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand--they studied physics and philosophy together. Then then changed the world.

"Pricing for physical goods is simple. For example, if you are manufacturing staplers, all you need to do is to calculate cost of production and distribution, slam 20% margin on it and there you have the price you can sell your shiny stapler machines for."

Not true. In fact, a lot of Maker businesses get hung up here. The pricing of physical goods depends on the market every bit as much as the pricing of software or web services. In fact, large companies rely on that all the time--case in point is P&Gs Swiffer Sweeper, that they charge much more than the manufacturing cost for the sweeper and for the refills.

Many small business owners I've run across actually feel guilty if they charge "too much" (say 100% markup) for their physical goods they are selling, even though their competitors sell at that price. The price elasticity of demand applies just as much for physical goods as it does for non-physical.

And when they get Swedish, I'm in!

The awesome thing is that once the platform is there, they could easily open it up to other languages and get them rolling too--though they might have to really think before diving into languages with a different character set, such as Japanese.

Where do HTML/CSS fall? Are they unimportant or so important that they are considered obvious?