107 karma · joined March 13, 2010
I spent six months reviewing all the smaller distributions of Linux until I found one that would boot fast enough to be usable with QEMU. It works like a charm and i rock solid. I highly recommend it.
I know of plenty of successful "older" entrepreneurs here, even in IT. We don't have this cult of the under 25s here as much I think.
Perhaps VCs like under 25s because they are just easier to manipulate? Or is it just another sign of a culture that is worryingly obsession with youth and staying young at any cost?
I could feel my toes curling at certain points. Funny, but not perhaps what was intended...
LiveCode is an offshoot of the HyperCard codebase and will run on everything from a toaster to your car. The apps seem pretty slick in the demos. Android support in in testing.
Look at the Irish people (generally a decent lot) and the Irish State (mostly a basket case morally and financially).
People are great. I love people, including nearly all the American I have met. I have yet to meet a state I can respect.
It is interesting for me as an Irish person to see this brought up as our government (a sorry lot) are under huge pressure to keep jobs and money in the country. Putting this under the spotlight is the last thing they need. Our economy is in a pretty poor state.
I have trained several hundred people in software development when working as a contract trainer and it was always attitude that allowed me to guess who would be the more competent programmer.
I would prefer to hire a well rounded competent young person who could become a solid competent developer that some rockstar programmer with no personality. Fair play to this guy, he is doing something original instead of feeling sorry for himself.
I don't think you understand how difficult it was to be an Emperor! An Emperor who was unpopular could be assassinated. An average Joe Soap who is unpopular may have rows with his family or work colleagues but is not usually murdered. Being an Emperor raised the stakes and the paranoia.
Apple does not seem to care that they are losing the great grandchild of what made their earlier computers so useful - HyperCard. Oh well.
Sentience is more than just a matter of modelling, surely?
Note, I did not say that a sentient, non-human thinking being is an impossibility, but I am not sure that it would happen by building big fast models.
Makes it easier to spot performance issues if you are not using a desktop water cooled super computer that boots so fast it causes nosebleeds and nausea.
Chomsky has never supported any Marxist dictator.
Hurling is a popular native ball sport in Ireland which involves two teams playing against each other with sticks called hurleys and a ball called a sliothar. Think of it as ice hockey without ice / skates and the sliothar instead of a puck. A wee bit of violence and tribalism are also as big part of the game, as in ice hockey...
The market will get taken over by a cheaper, more open product that runs flash.
That is my Nostrodamus bit done then.
I agree that Apple are doing well now, but that is not the issue. I think they may have damaged their long term prospects, which in IT is the next 5 years.
Don't get me wrong, I have worked with Rails - I admire what 37s have done and a good rate of churn in new ideas in any profession can be healthy and welcome thing.
I just wonder if 37s have gone from being the underdogs? What do you rebel against when you are the status quo - at least among the opinion formers and alpha geeks?
It is like when a renegade leftfield music act become mainstream. Look at Rage Against the Machine (with their leftist anti-capitalist music) becoming millionaires after signing up to one of the biggest capitalist music corporations on the planet.
Now we have a set of cliches for a small funky online company should act.
It is all about subverting the dominant X paradigm where X is anything that you don't like or don't use or don't understand.
- Only use Apple computers to subvert the dominant Windows OS paradigm
- Only use Rails to subvert the dominant PHP/Java paradigm
- Only use Textmate for editing to subvert the dominant Vim/Emacs/Notepad/Eclipse paradigm
- Use swear words in your presentations to subvert the dominant politeness-to-people-who-pay-into-conferences paradigm
I could go on. I am generalising here too! But sooner or later 37s may wake up and realise that they are the new mainstream amongst the web dev crowd.
They have slayed the monster of PHP/Java.
Perhaps its is time to stop playing the hip outsider?
With a system like that, marking out a piece of 3D space would be simple enough, like avoiding landing your plane on an island where the natives were less technologically advanced and hostile.
No proof, but a delicious tantilizing thought :)
Ah, that you see is the challenge of Stoicism. A Stoic does not believe that there is anything evil in nature, impersonal perhaps, but not bad. There is nothing evil about death, earthquakes, viruses or asteroids. They just do their thing and sometimes happen to go against human interests. This does not make them evil.
This is a difficult way to think at first, but it makes sense to me. Stand out under the stars and look up. Take a look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field). The universe is just so much bigger than me, so much bigger than my species. Why would I be surprised that it does not always operate directly in my interests?
Think about an ant in a busy railway station. If she gets trod on, does that make the commuter evil, or just indifferent to the ant's interests?
That is one of the lessons I have learned from observing nature. The complete absence of self pity, ruthlessly so.
The short poem 'Self Pity' by DH Lawrence illustrates this well:
"I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself."
Even if you live to be 2000, you cannot bypass suffering and you cannot stop change. Our attention span is between 5 and 15 seconds and you will have to share that present, that moment with all other human beings, just the same as if you only had six months to live.
The point is not how long you live, but how well.
As Marus Aurelius says in his Meditations:
"For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing."
But being a Stoic has little to do with the standard cliche of suppressing your emotions.
It is a philosophy that emphasises a rational response to nature, your own and that of the universe. "Follow nature" is a common Stoic saying - unconditionally accept that which is the case and do not disturb yourself with emotional upheavals about that which one can do nothing.
The French philosopher Pierre Hadot summarised the four features that constitute the universal Stoic attitude in his book "Philosophy as a way of life".
These are:
- We are part of of a Cosmic Whole, made up of the totality of the universe and the totality of all human beings
- There is nothing evil in nature. The only evil is moral evil in humans. Realising this makes a person serene and free, the only thing that counts is the purity of your own conscience.
- The belief in the absolute value of the human person
- The concentration on the present moment through training and spiritual exercises. Through the present moment we have access to the entire cosmos.
Much of modern cognitive psychology owes it roots to the work of the Stoic philosopher Epictitus. Much of our beliefs about human rights, the basic ethical doctrines of Christianity and our notions of healthy psychological self sufficiency all come from the Stoics.
And yes, I am a fan :)