abl

Highly recommend Martin Gardner's books. One of my favorite childhood authors.

Personally, I use lifelines. First I eliminate 50% of the wrong answers... If that doesn't work, I ask the audience. When all else fails, I call Bill Gates. :)

there is also a berkeley CS class youtube video that goes into the differences between a linked list and an array:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp8oiO_CZZE

it is a good intro to the subject, however, Shewchuk does not thoroughly explain the difference beetween lookup/ access time and search time for arrays and linked lists. I like the explanation given by the commenter on stackoverflow

my guess is this is their attempt at standing apart from the crowded space in this sector and forming their niche.

I second Google Sites, because it is very easy to use and has a good WYSIWYG. However, it has its limitations and google tech support is not very good through their forums. The premium version is costly and does not appear to provide any significant benefits on top of the free version.

Anyone know of any google sites worth looking at for their design?

Advertising forgotten after the economy makes a comeback? Try telling that to Google right after the economy picked up post-911!

"Nifty, though having used both languages I don't know why you would want to use Java instead of Objective-C."

One big benefit of using Java is for people like me, who don't own a Mac, and can't develop using the Cocoa platform. Once I get my hands on a Mac, it probably will make more sense to use the native platform, but until then...

I couldn't tell from the presentation whether some sort of JVM is required to be installed on the iPhone. It doesn't sound like it if the code is finally converted into Objective-C, but I remember seeing some installation instructions when I visited iphone4java.com... Or is this an entirely different project?

Orian,

Are you going to continue with this same concept, or going to start on something new? What are you going to do differently now to make sure that the startup succeeds? Or this this Part IV of your blog? :)

Based what I've read about this startup, and on the facts presented, it is difficult to tell whether Orian or his co-founders were in the right. It would require to place all of their efforts under a microscope - we don't know how much time Orian sacrificed to go out of his way to find venture funding, etc.. versus the other partners who may have been slaving away over the code. My guess on the whole venture falling through is this - the other partners felt like they were doing more work and putting in more into it than Orian was, probably because they felt that networking is a lightweight activity. Or because networking sounded to them like a more glamorous activity, rather than coding. Or, maybe because they felt they wanted an equal share in the leadership. Whatever the case may be, we don't know how much coding and networking took place.

Orian's case brings up a good question that I've dealt with in the past, and I am sure is on the minds of many startup founders here - how important is it that the co-founders are all technical, and are all coders? Is it, "product first, marketing second?" Or is it equally just as important to have a strong "networking" guy on the team? If so, what are his roles, just networking, or coding as well? What about a guy who is doing the coding but feels he could do networking just as well, is it unfair to him?

Going back to Orian... judging based on other factors, there seems to have been some trust impediments in my opinion - having two votes when all other things being equal is not a fair distribution, even for the sake of maintaining decision-making. Trust between partners is more important than decision making, otherwise the whole thing falls apart.

Rather than take apart Orian's flaws, I am trying to understand if this startup could have been saved. What if Orian went to his parners, and said, "Guys, how about we all participate in the networking?" (Assuming he did his equal share of the coding by working on the demo.) Maybe this would have generated some further excitement and instilled trust in them? AND, it would become self-evident whether or NOT the networking efforts equaled the coding efforts. I know that some may argue this is not a good solution, because concentrating on networking would have further removed them from realizing a product, but at least it could have played a role in bringing the team back, which it sounds was their first priority. Another thing, higher visibility and transparency. If all the partners were stuck in the same office all day long, maybe this lack of trust would diminish? Maybe a regular status meeting to keep tabs on everyone's progress? What does everyone (including Orian) think, what would be possible solution in their case?

I wouldn't go as far as labeling it evil - as long as you have the resources and the "follow-through" to make vaporware into a real product. It took a significant amount of resourcefulness to land a deal with IBM, whether it was easy because of prior contacts, or hard-earned from the ground up, is notwithstanding. However, the final product was delivered, and the quality was good is most respects. But Gates' goal was not to build a product from the start, and Orian's goal was, which makes the situation quite different.

True, Microsoft is an example, Gates went out and bought what would become MS-DOS, AFTER he made the deal with IBM. However, this has to be looked at in context - he had the money to buy it from someone else.

it may be a walled garden of sorts, but unlike apple, facebook does not prevent the developers from introducing apps that compete with the garden's in-house functionality. They let the users decide instead what's best for the users.

meanwhile: http://web.archive.org/web/20010415022831/cwn.uchicago.edu/2...

google! - "yahoo!" wanna-be? :)

what happened to your hosting for Cacheout?

awesome work! would you mind telling us how it works? :)

I got decent results, but for a small number of search terms:

When I searched for: "com surrogate encountered a problem" I got decent results, but when I searched for "com surrogate encountered a problem norton ghost" the results were off completely.

I then tried the second search query with google and got precise results.

It seems like it was such from the very start. Apple had many restrictions on third party apps for the early Mac, meanwhile Microsoft embraced developers, and with the likes of AmiPro, Windows 3.1 flourished. I believe this is one of the major reasons why the Mac lost market share. Although probably better positioned than before, Apple may be making the same mistake.

Reminds me of Apple's early days, when they didn't have an easy way for third parties to license their apps, their OS ended up without quality applications, and then Windows 3.1 ate their lunch... Anyone remember AmiPro?

I am looking to leverage both Ruby and ASP.NET libraries, that's why I'm hoping IronRuby is mature enough... In May, they made the announcement that it supports Rails. Of course performance and memory are still issues, I think that's what they are focusing on improving now.

We were thinking of hiring off-shore developers. Our concern is that even if we make them sign NDA's and an employment contract, it will be difficult and costly to enforce and to gain back any payments for damages, if they break the contract.

They aren't very straight-forward.. vs LAMP: free = free :) but... I like the tools.

I believe MSFT improved upon this since - you can call stored procs through an ObjectDataSource. So, as long as you have your tiers set up right, you could just rely on CRUD in the db back-end.

You know, maybe they are using mono for .NET on Amazon..which is not the road I want to take - too much setup, maintenance, and uncertainty.

The shared hosting comes with a drawback - most of these shared hosts are black or white - either all linux or all windows. If I want to run php scripts, or a C++ process, I am stuck - unless I go with a VPS or dedicated, which brings up the cost to $50+, at which point one might as well go with Mosso or EC2..

Btw, if anyone wants to split Mosso with me, please PM me.

I agree - it seems like their products have so much potential but they are not improving upon them, not taking advantage of the whole "release often" paradigm, which in my opinion is easier to do with SaaS. Maybe easier said than done though....

With Google Sites for example, users are clamoring for features, in fact there seems to be a consensus on which lacking features are most important, yet no word or ETA's from Google.. I got a response back regarding the premium edition of Google Sites, seems like the only premium feature available now is that each user gets extra 500MB disk space.. For $50 / user, thats hardly "premium" in my opinion, unless I hear otherwise.

Would it be easy to upgrade and scale the Express database later to a full-blown version of SQL Server using replication if I see that my app makes money and is worth the investment paying for a commercial SQL Server version? I think I could probably even find a hosted SQL Server, so I wouldn't have to pay full license fee. But I guess that prevents me from running on a dedicated server...Thats why I am hoping I can move it over later to some scalable solution like Mosso, and not worry about paying for the full license, only for as much as I need depending on the traffic.

What about running the .NET app on Amazon EC2 with a mysql backend?

I am thinking of using SQL Server Express as my database for now - to take advantage of its visual tools, and later I could port the db over to MySQL.. If I keep all the business logic in the app and limit my database code to CRUD, trying not to use anything Transact-SQL specific, it shouldn't be too difficult to port the db to MySQL, what do you think?

I hope Google Sites takes off and kills this ugly beast.