Agree. This service sounds interesting, but as an infrequent consumer of health care, this subscription model doesn't make sense. I would be interested in paying a flat fee to get my records. Then pay again in a year or two to have them updated. Wondering if the cost of obtaining the records is so high, that they need the subscription to run for x months to recoup? Maybe a hybrid approach would work: $5/mo to keep the account active, and then a user-initiated update feature at $40 a pop.
I've often wished for a similar marketplace, but more for consulting, than actual programming. When starting out with a new language or new technology (particularly unpopular ones, that don't have good online resources) it would be worth paying an "expert" for an hour or two of their time to ask questions.
I've found it helps if you try and go places when they are least busy. Coffee shops seem to have different down times depending on location, customer base, etc. My favorite spot is always crowded from sunrise until about 3pm and then totally dead for the rest of the day. Less noise, distraction, and guilt for taking a table when there is nobody in the place.
I also recently discovered the public library as a great place to work. Of course this will vary from city to city, but mine is clean, quiet, good lighting, comfortable work areas, cheap parking, and free wifi. Also, they have a great music collection to borrow from.
No. Aside from the fact it's unprofessional, it makes you look amateurish if the code ever ends up public. This happened with some YouTube code last year, if I remember correctly, and that is exactly what it made me think.
"Since Google acquired YouTube, the company has tried desperately to make something, anything, from its $1.65 billion investment, but so far, it has failed miserably."
I haven't read about or seen the 'desperate' tries and the 'miserable' failures he is talking about. What has Google really tried? Isn't this analysis a little premature?
I started my current project in ExtJS and a few weeks in, I switched to YUI. The ExtJS components look great, and are fairly easy to use if you use them in the standard way. However, I found that as soon as I wanted to do something custom I got totally lost in the 'ExtJS' way. While the YUI components are not quite as polished looking, I have a much easier time extending/reworking them. One thing I like about both frameworks is they provide layout management, so it is very easy to have a 100%width/height viewport layout that the framework manages (YUI's LayoutManager is in beta...so I guess I hope they don't scrap it before it reaches production level.)
I will add that the ExtJS forums are very active and pretty helpful...as are the YUI ones. I've asked several questions in both and gotten good responses each time.
To me the interesting part of this story is the advice to 'not cold contact the CEO'. If you have multiple email addresses coming into one box you'd better keep track which one a message is from and respond appropriately. There's nothing wrong about cold contact at a press@ address. As far as him not know what TechCrunch is...that part is pleasing. ;-)
I guess I am talking about travel. But in the point about a house I'm also talking about relocation. A house and all the stuff you accumulate because of it seriously inhibits portability. I wish I had maintained a smaller footprint, so the idea of moving wouldn't seem so daunting.
I don't think eBay has continued to innovate in the auction space. For instance, I often want to bid across multiple auctions until I can get something for the price I want. eBay has something to do this (called Bidding Assistant I think) but I found it to be inflexible and difficult to use. Now that the novelty of auctions has worn off, they need to improve the productivity/appeal of them.
I would agree with most of these...or at least don't disagree enough to parse them out. I would add two more to the list that I wish I knew at 22...
1) Don't buy a house. Yes it may be a good investment. Yes owning/living in your own house does provide a lot of personal satisfaction. But it can really tie you down. Aside from housing market woes, you become invested in a house and can become incredibly attached to it. It makes it difficult to just up and sell it in order to travel. Even if you can travel for $1000 a month, that doesn't work if you have mortgage/bills/upkeep on a house back home.
2) Don't get pets unless you are willing to be tied down or have a built in plan for having the animal taken care of while you are gone. Dogs/cats are a long-term commitment.
I'm drawn to a more nomadic life, but am having problem breaking free because of these. Anybody else run into these problems? How did you solve them?
I would love to come to a place like this. In fact, I go code at a coffee shop near my house, and usually get a tea and a shortbread bar. As others have pointed out, with such a narrow product scope, I think you might have a problem selling enough to make it work. Maybe you could also run a bakery-style operation and sell larger orders...pre-order by the dozen. Perhaps look into distribution possibilities with other places (coffee shops, convenience stores, ?) However, I think the cookies will need to be fairly special/unique to make this happen. This is somewhat similar to cupcakes shops...might be able to find out how they make it work (I bet it isn't one cupcake at a time.)
I like the current logo. After reading this, it makes me wonder how much time was spent worrying whether the reflected 'b' should be forwards or backwards.
I personally don't. I like to listen to the 'This Week in Tech' podcast, and those guys are obsessed with Twitter. I groan loudly every time the conversation comes back to Twitter which is like every ten minutes or so. It has almost become unbearable. Between that and TechChrunch, I've entered backlash-mode on the service, and I have never even used it.
That is an interesting idea. It sounds kind of like a user-driven pagerank concept. Since the mappings would be different for everyone (most of the population would not map 'news' to 'news.ycombinator.com') could even introduce a recommendation system where your unmapped pseudonyms came from users whose pseudonym mappings were most like yours.
I would like a way to blacklist domains that are being squatted. I’ve thought it might work to have a Firefox plugin to report and block these sites. If you could get a large enough community using it, the list would grow pretty quickly. You could maybe even have a script that would gray out any of those sites on Google. Would this be enough of a disincentive to squat?...if the domain was effectively "removed" from the Internet for those using the tool. If a domain was actually bought and contained real content, it could be removed from the blacklist...but the process to do so would have to be difficult enough to not negate the disincentive of the blacklist. Any other ideas on how to harm the value of a squatted domain enough to make squatting not worth while? (When I say squatting I also mean domains that are just parked and for sale. Technically I don’t think that is squatting, but it seems like that is being lumped in the conversation here...could be misunderstanding that though.)
It was interesting a few months ago when Yahoo maps moved from Flex to AJAX. I'm assuming the problem there was the mashup factor. I think using one of these RIA platforms creates (or at least give the impression of) a walled garden, which is not what people want on the web these days.
I think there is a chance they will gain momentum. As long as there are multiple browser vendors with significant market share interpreting/implementing specifications, web development is going to continue to be painful. As evil as a single-vendor proprietary platform sounds (is?)...it sure would make a lot of things easier.
I've started looking into moving an application to flex for two main reasons: #1 to support no javascript. As more and more ajax features creep in, it gets harder to always provide a noscript fall-back. #2 to do away with cross browser compatibility issues.
Some concerns that I have with Flex so far are #1 no html rendering built in...so there is no way to leverage existing static html/css resources without converting to flex ui (I've read that AIR comes with Webkit, but flash in the browser does not.) #2 there doesn't seem to be good support for printing, especially compared to simple print stylesheets. Oh, and the other huge concern is how prohibitively expensive flex developer is.
I love Bohnanza. Anybody played that? I know the premise of the game seems silly, but I've taught it to many (adult) friends, and it is pretty universally liked. I'm going to check out Puerto Rico based on some recommendations here...it has gone under my radar until now.
>A similar spec'ed Dell comes roughly at the same price.
I believe that Macs are awesome. I want one! But the same price argument doesn't fly. When I bought a new laptop about a year ago, I ended up with a Dell 'cause the same spec'd MBP was double the price, and I couldn't justify the expense. Having a quick look on the respective web sites, that is still roughly the case today. That makes for a pretty expensive OS.
It seems like this is working as designed. The problem is different definitions of "private," which I think SmugMug is wrong on. While the setting is functioning as they intended, I do not consider it to be private. If the label were "not displayed" this issue would probably not have come up.
I tried this library sometime around May of last year. I read through a wrox book called "CSS Instant Results" and many of the discussed CSS layouts required use of the IE7 script to work properly. I had some problems with the max/min width/height adjustments not holding when the browser was resized, and additionally there was some flicker when resizing. At the time, it appeared from the site and forum that there was not a lot of active development going on. Now it looks like there has been an update, and active development has resumed, so I would be interested to look into it again in the future.