My own clickbank/adwords story: I had heard good things about clickbank, despite being filled with spammy stuff. I found a product I had personal interest in and was actually pretty cool, signed up for adwords, and submitted an ad to be ran. A day later and I'm banned from adwords never to have an account with them again because I was advertising this product.
Unlike your experience, it happened to me so fast it made my head spin. I called support, and they said they couldn't even talk to me because my account was banned. I emailed an explanation to start their appeals process, and was shot down incredibly fast.
I really need an account now, but I'm not allowed to... So yep--it does suck to be us.
I'm a big fan of their free e-mail forwarding and customer support (they got a domain back for me that I had let expire out of its grace period).
But, I'm surprised so many people tolerated godaddy for this long just because of their control panel. Every time I have to go in there and help a client/friend, I begin to feel like an idiot almost immediately. It's impossible to find anything intuitively and I feel like their design changes every few months.
Namecheaps panel isn't pretty by a long shot, but it's so clutter free I just don't care.
I've long been fascinated by the making of physical products. It seems to much harder than software. I feel like I can make bits dance from my keyboard, but assembling atoms is much harder. Any chance you could write a blog about how you made this, the challenges, and the like? Also, possible to bootstrep your way through it?
I've had a gmail account since the service started, and I have an email address thats just my first name--a very common first name. Because of this, 15 email addresses are associated with mine (as in, I can reset their passwords and what not). Not really the same kind of deal, and it doesn't really affect me--just the people who signed up with my email. Just had to rant about it.
Over the years I've bought a few laptops off ebay that have worked out very well. Dual core Dells with two gigs of RAM are in the $300 range. Sometimes the batteries can be iffy, but otherwise they work out great.
It makes sense that the sports genre was chosen. With scores, winners, teams, tournaments and the like all being mentioned in pretty much every article out there, it stands to reason that it would be fairly easy to parse them all and get good data. I'd imagine tech and celebrity writing would also work well.
Political stories have such a wide range of views, this approach would produce gibberish until you sort out all the articles on a left-right scale.
I enjoy reading about education here in the US, and in other countries. It's all well and good to compare our system to others. But, I can't help but wonder what the chances will be that the system here will ever actually be reformed.
I have terrible vision, and utilize the browsers zoom function a lot. On their new site, I can zoom without having to do a lot of horizontal scrolling (just in Firefox though, doesn't seem to work as well in Chrome). So, aside from the aesthetic for the masses, there's an element of accessibility here that shouldn't be overlooked.
Might also be nice to have a 'Start Game' button--I clicked the link and then got a dialog about losing. Blocks on the edges are also a little hard to get at. Nice job! Fun too. :)
For as popular as chrome is, I feel like the browser market is going to become bifurcated between "normal users" and developers. Chrome is speedy, stable, and I recommend it to everyone since I'm the computer guy in my circle. But Firefox is still my development browser, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
You couldn't find any reliable people with decent customer service skills? Soemthing seems off about that. Maybe you should get someone to help with hiring. If the actual business made that much, then why not run it instead of selling the idea?
I think you should run your idea by a few other people (maybe some advisers?) and see what they have to say. I've never been to grad school, but I don't think it would be out of the question to get that prototype going while pursuing your degree. Assuming you're not devoting crazy amounts of time to research/dissertation, that is.
You should consider adding some more body weight achievements maybe some more exercises. I prefer them to weights--cheaper, always available. http://www.frixo.com/sites/fitness/ is a site I use for reference, but there are many out there. Maybe some yoga as well? Adding some amazon affiliate links to some equipment might do well. Pullup bars are cheap and awesome.
Questions like this, "what should I build", and "which language should I use", and etc make me cringe when I read them. Asking questions is awesome, but these just don't seem to be productive. His question isn't related to building a web app at all, he just wants to know if he built that app, could it make $1k+ per month. Plus, any answer(s) given will likely just fuel his planning, and not execution.
Like airplanes, they would be safer than driving. But, each incident will receive so much more coverage that the statistical safety will be largely ignored by the terrified public.
I know exactly what you mean, and I'm only beginning to overcome my 'bad design sense'. Since I started coding before designing, I've found it helpful to draw parallels between the two. Like studying good code helps improve your own programming skills, finding and examining what makes a design 'good' is extremely helpful. I've got a huge folder of code I use over and over again, improving it as time goes on. Likewise, I've started to keep a folder of design components -- layout ideas, button designs, gradients, as well as links to the previously mentioned 'good designs'.
Edit: This sounds like common sense now that I read it over again. Sorry if it's not helpful.
I'm older than these guys--late 20's, married, no kids (yet). I just don't see this lifestyle bring very practical for married/family folks. But then again, I've never heard any stories of people other than young singles doing stuff like this. Anyone know of any outliers like this in the valley?
I vaguely recall a study done many years ago that looked at the ability of people to recall information they had seen in documentary style movies. Try as I may, I can't seem to find it. Check out "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition" if you want a boatload of interesting info on learning (I may have seen the aforementioned study in there, but I doubt it).
It wouldn't be out of the question, given the modern understanding of learning and memory formation, to say that not much can be learned from simply watching content. For real benefit, the information has to be looked at a few times, and applied through practice.
Haskell. I've seen a lot of haskell code, and have always been impressed with how few lines of code it takes to express complex ideas. Been reading "Learn You A Haskell" to get started, but it's coming along a lot slower than scheme.
I like to think that if things were explained in simple enough terms, judges would understand and it would have to go forward. This feels like a 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' quantity of optimism. Still, a guy can dream.
Surely the FSF has tried to argue this in court.. right?
For me, the only thing that matters is not having my details out in the open. I had a namecheap whois privacy expire on me before a domain, and within a couple of weeks I had already gotten snail mail spam asking me to switch to some bogus domain registrar (80 bucks a year).
> And how can we improve on the status quo?
The current, arcane system, needs to be done away with. Whois returns the registrar, and if the feds get in touch with them they can get to owner. Isn't that good enough for law enforcement?
I popped a comment in the original post about wanting to see some RMS code. After doing a lot of searching, I still can't find a thing. I don't want to get terribly off topic, but as I said, I'd always heard he was a great programmer and would love to see some code that was of his creation.