AlunAlun

WebGL, which is now supported by all modern browsers, with WebGL2 (more flexible, fewer restrictions) around the corner. Most of the professional level tools as exhibited by the OP will be using a custom engine built on top of it.

For smaller projects, the excellent Three.js [0] is an easy way into creating 3D in the browser.

[0] https://threejs.org/

See also: Clara.io [0], Onshape [1], Lagoa (bought a few years ago by Autodesk) [2]

I must confess I struggle to see the long-term market for these services - I was working on a startup in the field for a while, and eventually decided it wasn't worth continuing.

The only thing these services really offer above desktop equivalents (which Autodesk totally dominate) is the collaboration (like Google Docs for 3D). But do you really need to collaborate to create 3D? Maybe to review/annotate etc. but to actually collaborate during the process of creating an object/scene?

To put it another way, are you going to convince your entire art team to leave behind the toolchain they have used their entire career, just so they can 'collaborate'? And if so, do you think Autodesk are going to let that happen? (Obviously not, as they bought in to the field a while ago).

[0] https://clara.io/

[1] https://www.onshape.com/

[2] https://architosh.com/2014/11/autodesk-reportedly-acquires-c...

Hi,

Thanks for commenting, and for your work on Footpath. I hadn't seen it before, I'll be downloading it now.

You have stumbled across one of 'problems that many startups rarely address'. I've been involved with several startups and heard hundreds of pitches; and as somebody naturally focused more on the product side, I always get stung when a more pragmatic (i.e. money-orientated - usually an investor) person says "you'll be crushed as soon as you succeed!".

The simple fact is that as soon as a small service invents a product or feature, and shows that it works (such as your app), the big fish are going to ask themselves "which is cheaper: copying the feature, or buying you out?"

As you have no patents, it is naive to think that Strava (or any company) would feel any "ethical" (as you said in your article) qualms about copying you. They had an engineering team look at it (as your server logs show), and report that they could probably copy the feature in a few months i.e less money than they thought it would take to buy you out.

> The issue as I see it is that Strava is being misleading in saying they came up with an idea themselves and can innovate quickly, when in fact the data shows otherwise.

What possible reason would they have for doing otherwise? In the quotes you chose in your post, there are no explicit lies - they don't claim to have invented it, they just say they "came up with the idea for the mobile version". Why would they promote another service needlessly?

I admire you for having created a great product, which I will undoubtedly use. But if you want to create a great business in the future, think from day 1 about how to protect yourself for when it gets successful.

You can repeat it all the times you want, but it it is still a shortsighted view.

“A database and a contract”... but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data?

Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems.

I agree 100% with the article in that blockchain is being ‘applied’ to a whole bunch of places that don’t need it. That doesn’t mean that it can’t work well in many other (legal!) scenarios.

Or as Louis Pasteur put it: “chance favours the prepared mind”.

Lots of harsh comments here, some seem a little short-sighted. I wonder how many are actually from Tenure Track Lecturers? Every field is very different. Some fields value industry experience highly, some care only for publications. Some value teaching experience more than others.

My experience of getting a tenure-track position is that you’ve got to be the right person in the right place at the right time. My academic record is patchier than the OP’s, but it is offset my several years at fairly senior level in industry, which my university values happens to value. And I entered the picture just at the right moment.

To take a simple example, HTML was originally a pure markup language, so if you wanted to make text bold you <b>would do it like this</b>; simple, declaritive

But then it was decided that there was no semantic purpose to the <b> tag, <span style="font-weight:bold">so it became this</span>.

Now, with the ubiquity of js, it's more like <span id="bold-text">this</span> (along with something like getElementById("bold-text").setAttribute("style", "font-weight:bold") in the background).

It should be pointed out that things come full-circle: frameworks like Bootstrap define the <strong> tag which, via similar JS to above, all-but-duplicate the functionality of the original <b> tag. I think the OP's point though is that you have to add a JS framework to do this.

That’s because it’s possible to argue that Occitan, Catalan, Aranese etc are all ‘dialects’ of the same language.

I speak Catalan, and I can understand most written Occitan, for example.

“A language is a dialect with an army and navy” (said somebody, once!]

> When only 20-30% of the population can speak correctly a language, how long can it survive?

When it has the same legal rights as the dominant language, government funds to help run media and entertainment, and a strong culture determined to nurture it, I would argue that it can survive indefinitely. All of which are the case for Basque, which is in fairly rude health at the moment.

Nice post, I would add a couple of points re. Welsh. The first is that it was not really dead 50 years ago. It got as low as 15% of the population in the 50s/60s, and was undoubtedly headed for obscurity and ‘death’, until the revival, as you mentioned. But it was still alive (q.v. Dafydd Iwan’s [0] most famous song, “Yma o Hyd”). Now welsh is spoken by around 18% of adults and 25% of children, and is increasingly seen as an important part of modern Wales.

The other important thing to realize is that Welsh was ‘formalized’ in 1620 when the Bible was translated into it[1]. This had the double effect of unifying the distinct regional dialects into ‘high Welsh’ (a distinction which exists to this day!) but also, crucially, providing a standard text which people could use to learn to read and write. It meant that Welsh was able to flourish into a full legal language, and not just used as a ‘home’ language.

This gave it a backbone which was not present in other ‘regional’ languages (such as its nearest relation, Cornish), which in turn have all but died out.

With respect to the original post, I note that the Bible was only translated into Occitan in the modern era [2], which would support the evidence of it still being a language only used at home, and not in formal situations.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dafydd_Iwan

[1] https://cy.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beibl

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_into_the_...

I am university lecturer, and the rules have been tightened dramatically in the last few years, precisely to prevent 7 or 8 year-long PhDs, which were indeed getting increasingly common, and benefited nobody.

Now, students must submit their thesis within five years (one of my students very nearly failed his PhD because of this), and there are funding restrictions for continuing beyond three.

This used to be the situation in Europe but it got out of hand, as a result all new PhDs in Europe must be advertised as three year programs, and completed in four at a maximum.

Your second paragraph sums everything up perfectly. I am a tenure-track lecturer, and love my job for all the reasons you mention, despite the relatively poor pay. I essentially have the freedom to work on whatever the hell I want; and that to me is priceless.

I would also mention teaching: some academic staff hate it because it takes time away from research. This is true but my experience is that if you put time into being a good teacher then you get to take your pick of the brightest students to help you with your research, which can lead to interesting Masters projects which lead on to PhDs.