chris100

That's the key restriction from Linus right there. He was talking about system-level code.

For everything else (application-level, frameworks, etc.), you need the abstractions that C++ provides.

It's hard, and "fluffy" at the same time :-)

So I wouldn't say it's hopeless for Bing at all. There are so many ways that search could be different from Google's current results...

So, assuming the market is bad and jobs are hard to find, is it then ok to work nights and weekends like the article describes? Or should there be some kind of limit to "slavery"?

On one hand, as a hacker myself, I like the idea. It's as free-form as possible. Which is exactly the right spirit of hacking: no forms to fill out, no rules and procedures.

On the other hand, they are bound to end up with thousands of weird requests. Sorting through those will be a lot of work, in order to find a handful of gems, I'm afraid.

But I hope it works out for them and trickles down to the entire hacker community.

(I'll let you figure out on your own why that particular link works so well)

Actually, it had two huge benefits: a lock-in for early adopters, and it is memorable. Don't discount the second benefit. Once enough early adopters talk about it, the general public will come to remember the name. This is extremely important for a consumer product.

(remember the FatBrain naming story).

Why? Because the date serves a purpose: so that people can know when your copyright expires and your content falls into the public domain. If you move up the date incorrectly, you are cheating the rest of the world.

As you can imagine, we are not that eager to copy your home page for free 75 years from now, but the law doesn't care.

Right now, the privacy policy looks great on the surface. They are launching a new product.

But you can't deny that Google's entire DNA is to extract monetizable information from huge amount of seemlingly unrelated raw data.

That's why you have to take their privacy policy with a grain of salt.

I use NPR as a counter-argument to saying that good content will find a way to make lots of money. Show me how because I don't see it.

Personally, I still believe that investigative journalism has a lot of value, but no way to charge top dollars for that value.

I don't know about you, but when I browse the web, I actually don't type that much.

Mike Arrington was specifically referring to the need to browse the web from his couch. In browsing mode, you like to explore and click. Type? Not so much.

And intensive use of my iPhone has shown me that the screen is just a bit too small to seriously browse the web for more than 10 minutes at a time.

So yes, there might be a market there.

So much for virality :-)

Of course, the business plan is just a stack of paper. You may have brilliant execution on paper, but who knows if you will be able to pull it off.

Insert mandatory quote about military planning being necessary but not surviving the first contact with the enemy

Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen.

Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of breaking a platform into small pieces and argue that individually, each piece already existed. The scrollwheel? A program to synchronize your player? Etc...

That's missing the forest for the tree. Someone (Jobs) saw all these disparate pieces and had the vision to build a full, coherent, intuitive platform that solved a real problem and made the device a winner.

Until you understand the difference between a laundry list of features and a solution, you'll keep writing useless code :-)

I'm sure I can come up with a decent definition for squatters.

Even when you edit a 500-slide powerpoint, all you need at any given time is to see the current slide. Same for word processing.

Rather, I agree with the original poster that it's the APIs that are the weakest link. HTML and CSS are ugly APIs when you think of GUI development.

If that's the only problem, you could just open your retail store outside a mall, where no one can bother you.

Think El Camino in Silicon Valley. If you have the best value (unbeatable price and good service), you should have a winner, right?

You'll quickly learn that you have two weapons: money in your pocket that the other guy wants, and the ability to walk away if you don't like the deal.

Everything else is fluff.

PS: another way to practice is go through timeshare presentations. Keep saying no. You'll be amazed how low the prices can get. You'll be handled by 2,3 or 4 different sales people, each with supposedly more authority and better deals to offer you. Keep saying no. You'll see :-)

What if a retail store offered great advice and let you order online so you get the best Internet price?

One reason why I almost never visit a retail store anymore is because the best deal is always online.

So rather than take it as a challenge for retail, embrace it. Can one build a retail business that relies on ordering stuff from the cheapest online retailers?

I can think of the obvious reasons why not. But if you think creatively, wouldn't that make sense? Even the cheapest online retailers offer some kind of referral compensation. There may be other ways to make money than making a profit on the big ticket item that your visitor came in to order...

Somehow, someone saw a niche that this gigantic tools failed to address.

The beauty of the startup is that if you focus on the right micro-segment (aka a niche), you can grow very quickly and eventually topple the incumbent Goliaths.

music my family pictures my email, contacts and calendar work files

If you imagine a tablet/netbook with GoogleOS, I'm still scared to death of losing the network. There is some talk of offline storage, but the details are super-fuzzy.

On a plane: where is my music or my videos? At my grandparents' place, where Interent is still not quite reliable In the middle of visiting Death Valley

This is when I'd like to have a yelp for service providers, or a "karma keeper". Today, a lawyer at Wilson Sonsini did some bad karma. Another day, another partner there will do a great thing. Can we keep the score somewhere?

Eventually the scumbags would rise to the top and we'd all know better.

Just like playing tennis or golf on your wii isn't quite the real thing. Why is it that for arcade games (think Doom for instance), the disconnect with reality is not as noticeable?

But if you put exact URLs in your robots.txt, then a normal person could pick them up from there and access your content.

Make sure you use a directory structure and forbid all files from the content directory :-)