jamesk2

Steve Jobs hates flash for a lot of reasons but it is mostly because flash runs faster/better on Windows than on Mac OS. This article quantifies what people who use Mac, Windows and Linux know already: Flash is a hog outside of Windows.

Flash and Acrobat: more reasons to just go to open source.

Barbie used to think that "Math is hard," now she's a master of recursion and lambdas.

Lots of designers and programmers have invested a lot of time mastering Flash so it would really suck for them if it died.

Another consideration is what kind of startup are you? What companies are similar? Where are they located?

For example, google, linkedin and facebook are "Palo Alto (and South).

Your startup would benefit from relationships with other companies, so where are those relationships in the bay area?

One designer not mentioned on this list is Jason Fried of 37 Signals. Basecamp is very useful. Web App designers don't get the attention of flashy visual designers but after repeated usage of an application, you really get a sense of how well thought out it is.

I'm getting very different results when I run these tests. At prime time 7 pm to 9 pm pacific time on weekdays is different than sundays at noon.

For housing: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/ - for shared rooms and sublets.

For tech companies: http://www.wayfaring.com/maps/show/4358 - this is a map of many of the tech companies in the area.

For activities, check out http://meetup.com - there are lots of tech activities all over the area.

Yeah, making the product is hard but there are many newsletters that cost way more than $25 month.

Here's a list of investing newsletters that cost more than $25/month.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/newsletters/newsletters.asp?...

There's even one that is $100 month and I've seen others that are even more.

The difference between these and "high-quality magazines" is that these are extremely targeted to a specific audience with a minimum of advertising.

For those who don't know who he is:

He designed the IBM and the Next Computer logos as well as many other well known logos.

Woz left Apple a long time ago, so did Allen and Filo (Yahoo Co-Founder). It's a bit of survivor bias and interest in the limelight that the more famous names persist.

> So it seems the best mix of founders is to have one lunatic visionary dominate and regular people cofound.

Woz and Paul Allen were pretty visionary themselves. I think working at the same company after they've made it doesn't appeal to everyone and Allen actually got sick and left. Microsoft was well on it's way to being massive so I wouldn't chaulk it up to Bill Gates alone.

"Some simple algorithms can be developed that allow remote cores (other nodes) or even heterogeneous cores (different types of nodes) to be used by the program."

Does this mean blocks and GCD would allow easier cluster and cloud computing too? Or maybe use all the CPUs in a household to complete tasks?

Their first games were called "Frequency" & "Amplitude" - a bit hard to market! And yes, they did not sell well.

I'm not getting one until there's an apple branded version of it.

Yeah but a free adwords model would be wickedly popular.

Maybe Google Augment or gAugment

Hey, if Dr. Tattoff can remove tattos with a laser somebody will make rewritable lasers like DVD-RW! Maybe not infinite rewrites but it's possible.

Anyone see Blade Runner? There was a chinese guy who is the eyeball making specialist.

Recently I saw a story that scientists are growing livers for transplant. I'd like an eyeball upgrade. Maybe one that doesn't fatigue as easily as my default parts.

How about skipping the contact lens altogether and using Lasik to etch a conductive surface like circuits onto the cornea itself. It's bio circuitry via laser lithography.

Always on augmented reality.

With 65k apps in the apple app store, it's going to be pretty hard to get any attention for your iphone app.

Launching a cool app on Android first will get you a lot of press. There's just less competition there. There are tons of well read bloggers and journalists who would be very interested in your Android App and the people marketing the phones would probably feature it in their ads like apple did with the "There's an app for that" ads. That's how marketers think. "It worked for Apple, so we'll do it too."

Going to the iphone first will probably take two weeks to a month to get approved while the Android version can update faster with less hassle. You get to iterate faster and get feedback on the latest results. A faster feedback loop is essential to iteration and improvement.

After you get some attention, then you can make an iphone version and if you're a top 5 Android app, that's a good reason for people to take a look.

In the history of software, I'd say look at Microsoft Excel. It launched on Mac which had some crazy new features like a GUI. It quickly became the top spreadsheet on the mac (there was little competition). Launched on Windows a couple years later and went on to dominate the category.

It is abysmal but isn't it a bit early in the game to call Android out?

Multiple companies are involved in getting these things out and it takes longer to set up than having one company control everything.

There's a lot of marketing dollars at work with android and the network effects of the users will ramp up. The first generation of androids were ugly and inelegant compared to the iphone but the next gen looks better thought out and prettier inside and out.

Like Wayne Gretsky said, "Skate to where the puck will be"

As someone who as explored both "creative" pursuits such as art and the technical pursuit of coding, i explain to my techie but creatively challenged friends that pursuing art is like hacking your brain's kernel while it is running. A bad line of code can bring down the entire OS. It might be why traditional creatives have the reputation of being unstable. You can't really take your brain offline and debug if something goes wrong with refactoring your aesthetic assumptions. If a creative is hacking their visual identity, they can get to look pretty weird through the major releases and might require several dot releases to look "right."

But then we encounter the creative coder. Those people are freakiest of all and for that we are all better off.

Wouldn't the cost per square metre fall with efficiencies of scale alone? While it might cost $200 per square metre in the beginning, the costs would fall over time.

Non-standard parts installed by huge amounts of human labor vs. standardized solar panel installations dropped on site a la prefab housing?

I've been using Yammer for my startup. The members of our team are in LA and NY. When two of the three talk, the third member can catch up when he can.

We put notes, links and documents on there. It's also a group Getting Things Done system. We try to finish every meeting with next action steps.

That may work but there's going to be so much noise in the population how do you filter it to get "colors?"

There's a google vid on this subject: I never did get through it but it might make more sense to you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgqWMGT9haY

This is cool but is there a function for finding hidden topics? i.e. given red, yellow, blue -> colors

Go for the library support. I chose python because of existing functionality I needed now. Writing it from scratch would have been very time consuming.

As for non-web services, Python has some good GUI tools and some workable ways to make windows apps.

It also didn't hurt that google is behind python. The speedups targeted seem attainable. http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/

As for finding engineers who are good at ruby or python, it's pretty slim pickings for either.

Knowing a market is pretty intrinsic to marketing. It seems obvious now but iFart was genius in that lots of people found the concept funny enough to pay a dollar for. I know plenty of people who have bought it on a whim at parties.

Your odds of hitting on Red or Black is not 50/50. It is 47.37%. The ball can land on green. If you don't get your money back, it's a loss.

http://wizardofodds.com/roulette

Most games at Casinos are stacked against you. They have very smart math and stats geeks who've figured all this out. Try counting by yourself with a 6 deck shoe. Or even a single deck is hard because they reshuffle after 2-3 hands.

One interesting thing from the article. Picking unpopular combinations of numbers can offer less competition in large jackpots. i.e. adjacent numbers 23-24-25, etc... because people mistakenly believe that's less likey to happen than totally random numbers.

An innovation is a new way of doing something. A cell phone maker actually owning the store where applications are sold online was new and successful or we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Really, how many applications would the iphone have if AT&T or Verizon controlled what was allowed to be downloaded there?

Apple is trying to do innovative things like the App Store. In trying something new, they made mistakes. And if they want to keep innovating, they have to keep making new mistakes. I hear all the time that we as entrepreneurs need to fail fast and fail often to innovate.

I think this is just the price of innovation. You're not going to hit ever ball out of the park and some foul balls will wind up hitting someone in the stands.

Keep making good reasoned arguments about the flaws but boycotting seems unreasonable.