megaduck

24 ms·

181.
by megaduck 17y ago
I think for Wave to be ultimately successful, they'll have to ditch the "live typing" feature. Typing is a low-bandwidth form of communication, because you lose all of the other conversational cues (tone of voice, facial expression, etc.)
182.
by megaduck 17y ago
I think if he ran his own business, he'd be completely unable to see his own position objectively. People always think that they're doing the right thing, often with the caveat of "under the circumstances". That's why having a cofounder
183.
by megaduck 17y ago
Given that the business models are largely the same, I doubt it.
184.
by megaduck 17y ago
You're right that Chinese and English can be comparable in input time, provided that you're using something like t9 for the English. However, you lose a ton of speed the moment that you hit a word that isn't in your t9 dictionary. Chinese
185.
by megaduck 17y ago
This is one of the reasons that texting is so darn popular in China, and email is not. Texting is fast , and you can pack so much info into a single SMS that you almost never need to send anything longer. The same goes for books and essay
186.
by megaduck 17y ago
Co-founded. My understanding is that Kevin Rose had the idea, and Adelson helped bring it to fruition.
187.
by megaduck 17y ago
It's never too late. As most people have pointed out, most entrepreneurs are older than you expect. The kids who build successful businesses at 20 get all the press because they're the exception, not the rule. There's lots of examples out
188.
by megaduck 17y ago
Oh. My. God. I was one of the first Sidekick customers, long before the MS buyout. It was an amazing email/texting device, far easier and more comfortable to use than a Blackberry. Plus the web browsing was decent, and the UI was simple a
189.
by megaduck 17y ago
Refactoring doesn't have to be massive. Perhaps you can get by with a subtle tweak, so long as it's well thought out. Alternatively, if adding a feature demands a massive refactor, then it might be a warning signal that you've got some fund
190.
by megaduck 17y ago
Following the herd can be wildly profitable, but it's also easy to get trampled. Sometimes it's better (and easier) to carve out a small but profitable niche. Back when OS X was a fledgling platform, marketshare looked like a rounding erro
191.
by megaduck 17y ago
At this point, I'm far more willing to develop an app for WebOS than the iPhone. Despite the endless complaints about the iPhone app store, Apple's response has largely been monolithic silence. 3rd party developers can make or break a plat
192.
by megaduck 17y ago
We're using Solr as our index, actually. It's fantastic. However, Solr isn't really built to be a datastore. It's far more effective to have Solr return an OID, and then grab your data out of a database, KVS, or whatever. So, we're curren
193.
by megaduck 17y ago
This is an awesome idea. Our application (launching soon!) leverages search heavily, so the DB is almost always just acting as an inverted index. I would love to be able to just query lucene and get a data object in return. If we could dit
194.
by megaduck 17y ago
Scalability shouldn't be a problem. Stack Overflow uses ASP.NET MVC with a SQL server backend, and they're doing over a million hits a day.
195.
by megaduck 17y ago
Big? Perhaps. "Unlike anything else"? That's a grand claim. The net's seen some real craziness in the past. I remember when AOL was valued at $166 billion. MSFT was around half a trillion dollars at one point. It's unlikely that Face
196.
by megaduck 17y ago
Darn it, missed that one. You're right. Facebook is now a real business. I'll be curious to see what the eventual ROI is for their investors.
197.
by megaduck 17y ago
If it makes money, it's a business. If it doesn't, it's a hobby. Amazon, Google, and Yahoo are businesses. Facebook and Twitter are, to date, very large and elaborate hobbies.
198.
by megaduck 17y ago
Amen. All good advice. One of the truly insidious things about depression is that the sufferer often knows that it's just brain chemistry, that it's just "all in their head". That doesn't help. Depression is not a sign of personal weakn
199.
by megaduck 17y ago
A shotgun clause is probably the best method out of a bad lot, but it still has the potential for abuse. If a partner is going through financial difficulty (outside of the company), then the partner with a better financial position can forc
200.
by megaduck 17y ago
As my cofounder and I are currently finalizing our own incorporation, I look at Fundable's sad situation and think, "Wow. What if that were us? Is there any way we can avoid ever having that kind of situation with a clever bit of legalese
201.
by megaduck 17y ago
True, but it's hugely significant as a signal that "the JVM isn't just for Java". Languages like Ruby and Python have large mindshare right now, so InvokeDynamic floated to the top. Clojure will have it's turn. Things like tail recursion a
202.
by megaduck 17y ago
In the abstract, I like the idea of HTML namespacing. However, their proposed implementation gives me a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach. It seems that this proposal would contort HTML to better accomodate XML data, just as other int
203.
by megaduck 17y ago
It's hard, but necessary. My cofounder and I just hammered out our Operating Agreement, which contains special language for exactly this scenario. Amid such tragedy, it's best to have the legal framework 'on rails' so that you don't rea
204.
by megaduck 17y ago
This is exactly why our company is using a combination of JRuby and Java. There's some big "infrastructure" bits (like search) that really are better done in Java, and it's wonderful to be able to leverage that while still using nice ter
205.
by megaduck 17y ago
Indeed, you may. In fact, it's quite likely if you ever show real profitability. That's part of doing business in the PRC. There's a long list of foreign entrepreneurs who got robbed blind, often with government support. That's why the
206.
by megaduck 17y ago
One thing to remember about a lot of JVM language benchmarks is that they include the startup time for the JVM. Java code running on a pre-warmed JVM is significantly faster, and for short programs can be faster by an order of magnitude (o
207.
by megaduck 17y ago
One of the beautiful things about JRuby is that for performance-intensive code, you can drop to Java instead of dropping to C. Java's almost as fast, and a whole heck of a lot nicer to program in. If Surinx is able to produce Java-like spe
208.
by megaduck 17y ago
I feel a need to stand up for Java here. Most of Java's nasty reputation comes from J2EE, and not the language itself. Java is a wonderful tool for a LOT of systems programming. It's got a nice object model, automatic memory management, a
209.
by megaduck 17y ago
Actually, that's what makes them like NetWare. If IE fails to keep up, those dominos will eventually fall, albeit slowly. There's still huge NetWare shops (like the California Energy Commission), but they're ever-so-slowly dropping away.
210.
by megaduck 17y ago
It'll only hold you back so long as you're wanting to capture 100% of the potential market. Obviously Facebook and Google can't afford to give up any potential customers, but a lot of businesses can. How many websites have you seen that dem

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