devmonk

There have been studies for ages showing that consumers are unhappy and stressed with too many choices. This is not news. However, what people that swear by the "limit choices" mantra fail to recognize is that this stress is endured for the benefit of providing better to one's self, family, and others. For example, as a U.S. consumer, I hate the cereal aisle. Way too many choices. But, if I can bring home something that is desired by my family or something new that might make my family more healthy or happy, I'm happy to bear the burden of a more stressful choice.

But, having more choices is not always better. Additional complexity is stressful as stated. So, you need a balance between choice and the freedom to choice what is "best".

Federal law permits people to take their phone numbers with them if they switch cell phone service. It's nice to have more flexibility- but is this really what we need?

Yes. Yes, it is. Although, I don't agree with the government always having to get involved.

The missing ingredient on Apple's side that is allowing Google to excel is the lack of openness in attempt to control and micromanage the experience. While truly good design requires a great degree of control, people like freedom.

If you travel around the world, one thing you will notice more often than not is that cities and towns are often poorly planned. This is annoying to many of us, and we respect the cities and towns with the well planned grid layout of roads, where the roads are numbered in order, etc. So, if a more well-controlled and better designed city or town is better, why are there more cities and towns that are more loosely planned? Freedom. Things that grow organically, grow more.

This is why Apple failed against the IBM clones and Windows in the late 80s through the 90s. Apple had the chance to allow Mac clones, but didn't since they would compete with Macs, and they'd lose control.

People that think analytically can really piss people off that aren't as obsessed with detail. I've learned this over time and have to turn myself off every once in a while.

It takes the right environment to excel, and I believe that Richard was blessed with one. But he was also just a remarkable person. Love his books.

I'm curious what that has to do with data analysis.

I know of many successful writers that freelance for various publications. There is a huge difference between doing that and running a publishing business.

Having to compete in this day and age with a myriad of news sources, when many formerly strong publications are getting beaten and watered down having to compete with the free online world of publications, is not going to be easy.

I think you'd need a print mag, personally. I like many others still value real physical publications enough to pay for them. Even if I mostly read news and info online, I don't pay for anything I read online. And having a publication that enough people will buy requires a good bit of money to do the design, marketing, printing, distribution, etc.

In short, what he is doing is nuts.

Again though- more power to him. I wish him well.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7318/full/nature0...

- I think the font choice is unique but a little too distracting.

- I have no idea why I'd want to give you my IM address, because there's no demo or screenshot of what it provides.

- TimeTracking.im is way too large.

- You have unnecessary visual element of the blue background box, which is distracting.

- .im being red is distracting.

- Time tracking and timesheets shouldn't be in red unless they are links. I actually tried clicking on them.

- Since there is no apparent business model, as a technical user (whom you'd be trying to attract), I think you are going to take my IM and start spamming me.

Some suggestions:

1. If you don't have talent on board to assist with this, and you have the money to, then why aren't you talking with them?

2. As detailed in many other places on the web, just making your site/webapp provide textual content without a lot of crap or images/flash containing the important stuff is a step in the right direction. Try this out: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html What do you see? Is it content that you think a search engine would view as crap (would you view it as crap) or does it look like something that someone searching through it would view as representative of what they'd be searching for if they were looking for something that your site provides?

3. This does not mean that you have to axe images, flash, etc. (although it might help), but use alt tags, etc. and put in metadata, descriptions, etc. that would help someone looking at the source of your webpage(s) as if it were a human reading through it. (right-click -> view source, etc.).

SEM is getting listed in the ads in google, etc. Google Adwords are great and can help get yourself noticed if you are selling something and competing against a lot of others for the same search terms that are in the top of the results, but doing the SEO stuff (even by itself) might be better if you rank highly enough in the search results for the terms you want people to find you with.

There is a lot more to it than that and the tricks change over time, but odds are someone told you that you need SEO, and now you are freaking out. Don't. Your site may suck. Fix it. Consider getting your URL out there in other ways (printed ads, business cards, etc.).

http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/coincidence-in-lott...

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h5297/text

And related tax code:

http://uscode.house.gov/download/title_26.shtml

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^VIX+Interactive#chart1:s...

VIX is going down, but fear is not as low as it was in 2005. It's not exactly the time to be jumping in head first.

For those interested in VIX:

"VIX is the ticker symbol for the Chicago Board Options Exchange Market Volatility Index, a popular measure of the implied volatility of S&P 500 index options. Often referred to as the fear index or the fear gauge, it represents one measure of the market's expectation of stock market volatility over the next 30 day period. The VIX Index was introduced by Prof. Robert Whaley of Vanderbilt University in 1993."

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIX )

There are a wealth of reasons to be bearish with the market right now, not the least of which are:

* Market instability over the past few years.

* U.S. government warning public of poor economic outlook.

* Banks having second half of mortgage crisis ("foreclosure crisis").

* USD, Euro, Yen fluctuations and "currency circus" going on internationally.

* Economic crises internationally.

* Continued political issues and terrorism threats on global scale.

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

The primary reason that Britain doesn't accel at more, I think, is both opportunity and size of the population. If Britain were at least the size of the U.S. with otherwise the same ratio of opportunity to excel vs. the U.S. counterparts, they should have produced at least one startup-gone-global-household-name by now.

How well does it withstand impact compared to concrete or steel?

But what about:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/inside-a-state-of-the...

She's not wearing her mask properly!

I think the only way you'd make headway is to focus on customer service and presentation:

- Provide a way to directly download the file via link vs. having to visit a page first.

- Be very specific about the amount of time the file will be hosted, and tell the customer that you will contact them at the email address provided to remind them prior to expiry that it will expire. There will also be a defined period of time following expiry when the file would stay there until payment was made to extend the contract before the file was removed.

- Be clear about how you store the files (using some well-known enterprise provider, or describe the fault tolerance enough where people feel safe).

- Site must look very legit so that customers will really believe that you will take care of them.

- Limited downloads or time limit is not something people are looking for. I think the companies that did rate limiting slow downloads that require customers to buy faster download had a better model, even though I never bought one. However, you can't do this and handle the first requirement of direct URL to download, so maybe you could offer both; if the customer wanting you to host the download wants a direct URL, they can pay you for that on subscription basis, in which case their customers would not have to wait on the download; otherwise, the customer downloading the file has to pay subscription for a faster download.

Realistically though you can't compete with larger companies doing massive storage. They will win on pricepoint. The best chance you have would be better service and usability, but imo it is a waste of your time.

http://www.scribd.com/search?cat=redesign&q=programming+...

Or use google.

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Apdf+inurl%3Aprogrammi...

And there are torrents, etc.

Or, just buy it from Amazon, BookPool (well that used to be a better deal years ago), etc.

(Don't do anything illegal. Pay for what you read, otherwise good authors won't write anymore.)

I've heard this suggestion from a burn-rate-limiting standpoint, but not from a productivity standpoint. If single-person teams were more effective (which I don't believe they are), why aren't they used by companies like Google that take pride in smaller teams?

http://www.google.com/trends?q=posterous%2C+%22doogie+howser...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=mint.com%2C+%22doogie+howser%...

Estimate the tasks that are involved in the development yourself (a wild guess on the large side). Do the development. Measure the differences in the tasks as a multiplier.

Now, throw out all of that.

Repeat, but this time whenever you repeat the same process, determine the multiplier average across your tasks. It will almost always take N times more than you think it will after you have some level of confidence with it, and if you keep estimating the same way, you can always multiple your first estimate with the 2-3 times (or whatever your N is).

Note: I've seen that for iOS apps, it will require a lot of overhead including memory debugging and getting through Apple's approval process, so it's not just about development tasks. The cycle of having to go through the approval process can be weeks or a few months (or more/or never!) the first time, depending on your app.

By your example, somewhere beyond "billions and billions".

The U.S. seems to do the same thing with our deficit. It's over $13 Trillion USD, and yet they don't put that under every government office sign.

At some point, numbers seem to get just too big to matter to people. Kind of like Richie Rich and all of the jewels and jewelry all over his estate. It was just there. It didn't matter.

BTW- Richie Rich is back. "The first new Richie Rich comic should hit retail in early 2011.": http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/18545.html

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1056026/

Simplicity is the reason that higher-level languages and lightweight process for project/task management, design/development should win.

So what's the problem in general? Well, let's take it a step further and find out.

It could easily be argued that the same technique of simplification can and should be applied to other areas of our lives. Federal and state laws, rules, and regulations in the U.S. are extremely complex when looked at as a whole, so let's start there. But that is a huge chunk, so let's focus even more: Since tax laws are especially burdensome, and it would seem simple enough to try to simplify them. There have been efforts by many to push for the "Fair Tax", "Flat Tax", etc. Why hasn't everyone jumped aboard this train?

These efforts fail because:

1. The people pushing to re-engineer the system would end up causing so much change that many people would lose their jobs (accountants, lawyers, the IRS, etc.) and there would be mass turmoil on top of that prolonged unemployment.

2. The same large accounting industry, lawyers, etc. have a good bit of lobbying power. Threatening these people's livelihoods will produce even more serious action if they ever thought it would really happen. Right now they are just on-guard. Imagine what it would look like if they were cornered.

How all of this applies to tech:

Along with complexity comes process and resources to deal with that complexity. If you let things get complex and they stay that way long enough, you are going to have trouble simplifying. Simplification will almost certainly have detractors come out of the woodwork pushing for the old way of doing things, and if you still follow through, it may end up with a number of people getting let go.

Whole industries have sprung up around ISO, CMM, etc. certifications, UML tools, etc. Banks are afraid of giving up the waterfall design/development teams, even if they have other teams doing "agile". Even "agile" has their folks pushing scrum certification, etc.

The way out of this I think is to start over.

Start your own company and make your own way. This is the only way to break the cycle.

By the same token, government needs to be reinvented if it is to ever be simplified. But, neither revolt nor destruction is the answer. People make fun of people that try to start their own governments within the geographical bounds of other governments, but they are on the right track at least, even if they are a little (or a lot) crazy. But really, there is almost no place on Earth to start anew.

So, we need to colonize space. Earth is just going to continue to get more and more screwed up, and the human race needs some chances to start over and simplify.

No. Just open-source the non-business-specific part.

Most of the world's largest companies depend on open-source projects. Many of these companies contribute back to the projects or start new projects of their own. It bothers me to no end when I see representatives of these same companies claiming that open-source is some kind of disease. I understand the ramifications of using some licenses (GPL, AGPL) in the wrong way, but thinking open-source is bad or dangerous is going to leave you out of the big leagues in this day and age, for many markets, at least.

Sure, you need a business model, and you need to make money, and you're almost surely not going to make money by just developing an open-source product.

But, companies these days win on the service they provide and the continued development they put into their product, as long as the continued enhancements to the product are of significant value to the customer (subscription model or timed-support/upgrade-license model).

I talked recently to someone in a new startup recently that had a really bad attitude. She didn't understand why all of the companies were developing solutions for a large enterprise product were embracing open-source, and she thought that her startup was going to put the rest of the solution providers to shame because she would reap the benefits of keeping all of the code developed by her company to themselves. I understand not wanting to give away the bank, but that type of attitude especially in the market that she was trying to enter will not work. I'd hope that her way of thinking was the exception rather than the norm, but I'm sure it is prevalent within many larger companies, where they are far enough away from the developers and IT workers that they just have no freakin' clue what goes on there.