jmackinn

I think this hits on a big stumbling block for the product. There are a huge number of companies that don't allow the data to be removed from their workstations or servers.

If the product could be implemented as an extension for Excel, similar to Xobni in Outlook, then there is much more potential. There is really no reason for this to be an online app.

by trying to create products to compete with the iPhone, blackberry has essentially conceded that their brand is inferior to the iPhone.. Wait, What?

How is competing at all the same as conceding? The opposite is true in fact, not competing is conceding. RIM is going after a market of people that enjoyed their Blackberry's but loved the 'trendy appeal' of the touch screen iPhone. This doesn't mean that the people who want an actual keyboard can no longer use a Blackberry. They can stick with the Bold, which I'm sure will not be the last real keyboard phone that RIM ever makes. The Storm will serve to keep plenty of already existing customers from switching to the iPhone or G1 because they like the Blackberry system, or it's standard for their companies. It will also likely drive new customers who want the professional appeal of a Blackberry with but still dream about the iPhone. In plenty of industries iPhone's are regarded as a tech toy, not a business tool.

RIM has also already deviated from the full keyboard with the introduction of the Pearl, which was targeted as a more consumer phone to compete with Motorola and Nokia and this has been a great success.

Just because justin.tv may not have been at fault doesn't mean that they won't share in the blame.

I don't think this blogger actually read the post by Google. The neosmart article emphasizes This is a departure from the process outlined in OpenID 1.0. This is because Google is following the OpenID 2.0 protocol which does contain the discovery request and the XRDS document process.

http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-2_0.html#disco...

This is not a fork from OpenID. They are simply using the newer protocol.

You might want to check out dotProject. I've played around with it a bit and there is a lot of functionality. It doesn't have the simplest or most intuitive UI, but it's free.

http://www.dotproject.net/

I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers that the iPhone will take over Windows mobile within another quarter. From what I've found, Apple currently has a 2.8% market share in terms of OS use on smartphones and Windows Mobile is up at 12%. Not to mention how far back they all are from Symbian with it's 57.1%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Operating_systems

What makes you think that Google would have any interest in buying twitter?

You don't just get to choose who will buy you.

This article reminded me of a Wired article I read years ago. After a quick look I found this: The New Diamond Age - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html

Some lines in the Smithsonian article are almost word for word right out of the Wired one which seems slightly odd.

Either way, a very interesting topic.

The Cluny did attract smart people and was fast growing and profitable. This, however, was in large part due to donations and endowments making it a charity and not a business and much of the wealth obtained by the Cluny was a direct result of state conquest as their greatest patrons were kings and royals. Another reason for its rapid growth was the fact that subordinate houses (priories) were given the same privileges of having no secular obligations (by Pope Benedict VIII). This caused many already established abbeys, of the Benedictine order, to associate themselves as Cluniac houses. This differs entirely from the growth of Google who received no special privileges from any governing bodies and relied upon a superior technology for success.

There is a tenable connection in the fact that a great deal of resources in Benedictine monasteries (not just Cluny) were used to collect, catalog and preserve information (mostly in libraries). The Cluny Abbey itself had what some consider to be one of the best libraries in Europe at the time.

A statement of the form "x is like y" is an invitation to consider similarities between them, it's also an invitation to consider their differences, which in this case out way the similarities.

As stated before, why is it necessary to compare the Cluny with Google? The Cluny is an interesting and important topic on its own. Perhaps the reason to compare it was to add sensation to the headline or so that the 'this is off topic kiddies' on YC News don't cry foul, but either way, not necessary.

That's a pretty weak connection. You're comparing a 11th century religious organization with a capitalist corporation founded 1000 years later. This is not to say the Cluny wasn't dynamic, but why is it necessary to try and compare it with Google?

You could try the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org), but I don't think they take snapshots of websites as frequently as you're looking for.

I'm really not sure, I have no idea where you are getting a 60x energy boost from.

You're using a link that claims the resource limit to be 1000 years (the first one).

And did you really state that taking uranium out of granite is economical? The granite you want to mine is worth more than the uranium in it, not to mention that it would take more energy to mine it than you would get from it. There are only 3-10 part per million of uranium in granite.

It's good to know that there are other people who are great promoters of nuclear power (I am a huge fan), but you're not reading your sources very well (the last article you linked to put the cost of uranium as nuclear fuel at 0.5c/kWh at a spot price of $53/kg), your math is full or errors and you clearly haven't researched exactly what goes into taking uranium from the ground and using it to produce power, or the related fields, such as energy production and consumption in general, mineral exploration and mining, or waste management. You fail to take into account production levels (which are currently only about 65% of consumption), an increase in uranium demand (based on new and proposed build will double by 2020), increased costs of actual mining and transportation of the resource just to name a few, or the effect of mining and extracting ever bit of uranium from the planet. There are limits to fuel efficiencies increases and as well to the economic viability of nuclear power. This is why it's a good idea to invest in new technologies now, such as fusion (the whole reason this discussion began). Sure we can take every last particle of uranium out of the Earth's crust and ocean's but I think we can spend our time, energy and effort doing something more productive. Uranium and thorium are finite resources and no amount of water extraction will make them not so. We once believed oil would last us forever and we have come to realize that this is not so. Let's not make the same mistake by promoting unsubstantiated and irrational ideas that nuclear (fission) will last us for half a trillion years when very educated and informed people who are actual experts put the number at 1000 years. As a nuclear enthusiast, I'm fine with the 1000 years because I hope that by then we have something better that nuclear (fission) to get our power from.

Current extraction from sea water runs over 4 times the current spot price for Uranium. It is currently an UNECONOMICAL way to get Uranium.

Please reread the original article I linked to regarding the 1000 year supply. It actually deals with undiscovered reserves.

In addition to these identified resources, the category of uranium that could be expected to be found based on the geologic characteristics of known resources has grown by 500,000 tonnes to 10.5 million tonnes.

The data comes from Uranium 2007: Resources, Production and Demand - often known as the Red Book - published every two years by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

from: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF_Exploration_drives_ura...

Julian Simon was a professor business administration, not a mining engineer. Those articles refer to scare tactics presented in terms of resource scarcity by environmental fanatics. He says nothing about the definition of a mineral reserve. But I can help us with that.

Reserve definition

Reserve definition is undertaken to convert a mineral resource into an ore reserve, which is an economic asset. The process is similar to resource evaluation, except more intensive and technical, aimed at statistically quantifying the grade continuity and mass of ore.

Reserve definition also takes into account the milling and extractability characteristics of the ore, and generates bulk samples for metallurgical testwork, involving crushability, floatability and other ore recovery parameters.

Reserve definition includes geotechnical assessment and engineering studies of the rocks within and surrounding the deposit to determine the potential instabilities of proposed open pit or underground mining methods. This process may involve drilling diamond core samples to derive structural information on weaknesses within the rock mass such as faults, foliations, joints and shearing.

At the end of this process, a feasibility study is published, and the ore deposit may be either deemed uneconomic or economic.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_exploration

On the contrary the article you provided did not once mention the words 'economically recoverable'. What you are looking for is the reserves of Uranium in the world. Reserves, in mining means the amount of ore that can be economically removed from the earth. For those numbers please refer to the link that I listed previously. If the percent of uranium oxide in an ore is less than 0.1% (by weight) then it is not economical to mine.

Here are the energy densities in MJ/kg: Deuterium-Tritium fusion - 337,000,000 MJ/kg Nuclear fission (of U-235) - 88,250,000 MJ/kg Natural uranium (99.3% U238, 0.7% U235) in fast breeder reactor - 24,000,000 MJ/kg Enriched uranium (3.5% U235) in light water reactor - 3,456,000 MJ/kg Natural uranium (0.7% U235) in light water reactor - 443,000 MJ/kg

The higher output is a function of the higher energy density.

Your numbers may be correct about how much uranium there is in the earth's crust but you are missing two very important points. Only a tiny fraction of the uranium is in concentrated enough deposits to allow for economic recovery of the mineral. This and the fact that U-235, the fissile isotope of natural uranium, occurs in only 0.711% of uranium containing minerals leaves only enough uranium with reprocessing for the next 1000 years.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF_Exploration_drives_ura...

Thorium required a breeder reactor in order to produce the U-233 necessary for fission, and as stated in another comment, these reactors are still in experimental stages and have a much lower level of operational safety record.

I believe the same argument was used for why we should just stick with oil.

The energy density and potential output is far higher (theoretically) with fusion than with fission. You may also want to check your figures on the half a billion year fuel supply. At current rates of use, uranium fuels will last about 1000 years. Thorium is an alternative option for fission power; however, this is yet unproven in large scale deployment. There is also the fact that fusion reactors will produce far less high-level (long half-life) radioactive waste.

50 years ago, and even today, critics believed that there was no place for fission power but now it appears to be our greatest alternative to providing base load power over hydrocarbon based plants. The uses of fusion technology are not only limited to power production either. Fission power has resulted in advances in materials, medicine, the understanding of basic atomic science. There is no doubt that properly understanding fusion will lead to many advances in other fields.

You are in fact correct already. One of the research goals of ITER is to experiment with different materials being subjected to the neutron flux in order to determine the radioactive byproducts and their theoretic half-lives. They are also proposing that the neutrons be used to facilitate the production of tritium from lithium and hydrogen as well as using the neutrons as the main source of energy output for the system.

While the article is extremely interesting I find that costs and time periods for this kind of science are misrepresented. Not that $5 billion isn't a lot of money, but it is on par, if not lower than many other energy projects. The Alberta Tar Sands alone have had more than $30 billion invested in the past decade. It also does not come close to the investment originally made into fission power production and continually made to produce next generation reactors. Without 'risky science' we don't move forward. Our efficiency may increase; a better stone for making axes means a tree can be cut faster, but by making great leaps forward in science, we may no longer need the axe, or even the tree. The ITER, the LHC, the Manhattan Project, are (were) investments in our future and the future of science and understanding. While some of these projects may fail, the cost of not trying is far greater.

Picking the right one is the hard part.

This is both a good piece of advice and a bad piece of advice. The fact that someone can copy your idea is really not of great concern if you execute well. This is very true. But a business is not all [in] the execution. Execution is important, but if you spend all of your time working on a useless or stupid idea then you have just wasted lots of your time, effort, and possibly money. Execution is only good when you have a decent idea to start with.

I really don't see how these bags are different than any normal laptop bag except there is some airport/security reference in the name, the price is inflated and they are made with cheap plastic zippers. I've traveled all over the world with my laptop and electronic gadgets and never once had an issue an airport because I used a simple laptop backpack bag.

I'm sorry, but what exactly do you mean by not entrepreneurs in the sense of the word as used on hn?

I'm not really sure what you're getting at with your retort.

1. The claim was that in crappier weather people tend to stay in and work instead of lounging about in the sun. That's not to say that this is true, but simply stating that SV has good weather is missing the point.

2. Just because there are lots of people in the Valley to recruit doesn't mean they are automatically better than workers from elsewhere. The ease at which you can fill your company with seemingly qualified people is not tied with how good of a product of how successful a company will be. The article makes a good point about ship jumping and spiking salaries.

3. Your again confusing quantity with quality. You'll still be groveling to get a chance to present at any of the top level VC's in SV and since there are a lot more presentations being made, the chances that they've seen same idea you're trying to present three times already that week means you'll still likely have to settle with the bottom of the VC pile. That is unless you have a good idea and a good presentation in which case top VC's in Boston, Tel Aviv or any other place would be just as happy to have you. This is all besides the fact that plenty of successful startups bootstrapped themselves to success.

4. A startup does not need to 'Exit' in order to be successful. Not all startups have the goal of hoping that Google/MS/Yahoo/Ebay will one day look down pick them as the prettiest girl at the dance, some startups want to be the ones doing the picking and plenty are fine just making decent money doing something they love. A narrow focus of an Exit only strategy puts many startups in an early grave despite good chances of becoming successful in other ways.

5. Good board members can be found just about anywhere on the planet and with teleconferencing technology as it is now, being located in the same city as every board member is not necessary and actually might be a hindrance. Besides that, I'm not quite sure what three other bubbles happened in SV other than the Dot Com one?

There are plenty of good reasons to startup in SV, but that don't make it the only place where a startup can be successful.

It's so nice to see this kind of thinking on YC News. There seems to be a growing trend that startups have some specific criterion for success (120 hours/week, absolute knowledge of programming, moving to SV). I find that a good amount of the passion I have for startups comes from the fact that there is no set plan for how it needs to be done. Interesting and creative ways of 'hacking' the business world don't have criterion. Just because PG or Google or 37signals did something a certain way does not mean that it is the only way, or even the best.

There is the old saying that there is more than one way to skin a cat. One way it to work ever waking hour of your day, but another and just as viable way is to work for 10 hours/week.

This mentality of absolutes in entrepreneurship can be detrimental to ones success and promoting it only devalues the usefulness of communities like YC News.

The impact that Jim Gray had on computer science is huge. I would highly suggest reading the wired article on the extensive search that followed his disappearance. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-08/ff_jimgra...

I've used the Scotiabank business plan writer before and fount it to be pretty good. It is an online app now but the last time I used it, the writer was a standalone program. I imagine that it's the same though.

http://cgi.scotiabank.com/planwriter/scotia_sb.html

I have to say the arrow key navigation is awesome. I hate to have to click all over and the fact that there is only one story at a time yet I can navigate to others easily is very appealing.