jmitcheson

3D printing is exciting, but it's easy to get carried away. Paper printers exist, yet people still purchase books and magazines. By the same token, even if everyone had a 3D printer, they wouldn't necessarily print every object they own instead of purchasing it.

In addition, our culture has slowly eroded the usefulness of printing parts. Parts are great if you fix things, but consumers don't fix things. They break them and buy a new one!

IMO 3D printing will provide a huge boon to 1-2 person commando hardware startups more than consumers, in the same way that access to free development tools and cloud services have been a huge boon to 1-2 person commando software startups. In that way, consumers lives will certainly be changed by 3D printing because of being provided more products, but not necessarily by actually owning them and printing things with the printers.

Have you watched many of Rich Hickey's talks? There are videos of them around.. I think you would like them.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you mention the gaming industry; I thought I'd point out the biggest new development there is giving away the games for free and charging for items, aka. F2P (Valve/TF2 is one example. They increased their revenue 12x[1]).

Is this just not another form of freemium?

[1]https://www.google.com.au/search?q=tf2+f2p+revenue

Yeah I am logged into 3 google accounts. I tried again, and there is nothing in either the console or the network tab after I finish the google login window. It's like it just isn't communicating with the other window.

Ninja bug report.

I installed it but couldn't log in with my Google account. I clicked "Sign up with your Google account", completed the Google accounts popup, and then the Google accounts popup was happy and it went away, but then nothing happened in the Mention window..

I think you are right that these things were less common 50 or a 100 years ago, but consider this (first comment on the blog)

"It’s not a job that I want, or that I even feel really suited for, and it’s not paying what I need, but after 11 months of unemployment, you take what you can get. I’m not going to spill all my guts here, but life is really starting to suck for me, mostly because I’m shoulder-deep in debt and can’t see a way to scrabble myself back up. This is an important fact because with how little I make, and how much I owe, I no longer can afford health insurance."

How common was this situation 50 or 100 years ago? And 100 years ago people would have had better support systems from living in smaller communities. Modern life causes depression; I don't think it's necessarily an over diagnosis.

Saying HTML5 won't be 'production ready' for a while, and saying that HTML5 will never be production ready are two very different things, but I feel people conflate the arguments all the time.

If you do believe that HTML5 will eventually be production ready, even if not for another 2 years, ask yourself this: when that time comes, do you want to be the guy with 2 years experience or the guy with none? When the industry is ready, 'HTML5 developers' are going to be all anybody wants and they'll want them all right now. If you want to jump on a moving train carriage then you have to start running towards it very early...

It's not bad, but I think it's unfortunate that nobody is working on it. The sooner that HTML5 features are implemented, the better. I thought that posting it here would get some eyeballs on it!

The front page slider timeout neglects to take into account the loading time of the first slide. So the first slide seems to only appear for a second and then the second slide comes in. I never really thought about that before, but if we make autoscroll timeouts then the first slide should probably have a longer delay.

Title could be better, but I found it an OK-read. The leap from film work to software work isn't a huge one (today's startup guy is yesterday's starving artist)

This passage in particular is where it begins to get more general

" The whole “start-your-own-company, be-your-own-boss” racket is heavily pushed by government agencies and all kinds of employers. It was first put forth as a solution to high unemployment unemployment and then, less openly, as a route to cut costs and erode worker solidarity and class consciousness. It relies on people’s underlying hatred of work, personified by the boss, and sells the dream of autonomy by telling people that they can become their own, fake, boss. The reality is different."

Why do people hate on PhoneGap so much? Specifically, I mean when people complain that the UI of the apps produced with PhoneGap don't "feel" right. PhoneGap sacrifices the quality of the UI for benefits in other areas (a boost to development speed, and making it easier for a novice developer to get started).

The argument against PhoneGap seems to be either that there isn't a place at all for such a technique, or that people think the benefits don't outweigh the drawbacks. Another option is that people dislike the developer accessibility aspect out of pure snobbery.

However, I rarely hear people making these arguments. I just hear (not necessarily in this thread, but in previous ones) "blah blah it sucks blah blah why not write native code blah blah".

In some cases the customer is the investor; the product is the startup. Or so it seems.

You read YouTube comments? I don't know man, you might want to watch out. It could turn out in 20 years from now, researchers discover that it kills your brain cells or something.

Bespin merged with "Ace" - the new project is at http://ace.ajax.org/ or https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace.

As an aside, I was sad to see Bespin go. It used canvas for rendering, while Ace uses the DOM. While the Ace team had good reasons for this, Bespin just looked so.. pretty..

Not true. 'Regular' people probably didn't think anything about this before the lawsuit. Now they think something.

Cars and computers all look pretty similar, but people manage to distinguish them. The only difference between cars, computers and mobile devices is that mobile devices were only just invented in our lifetime. We have had the experience of seeing none of them, then only one brand, then finally more brands. Cars and computers? We were born (most of us) into the reality of them already existing. With all of the different brands and models.

Trust me, once mobile devices have been around for a person's entire lifetime, that person would laugh at this lawsuit just as much as we today would laugh at a lawsuit based on 'damages' incurred from mistaking a Ford for a Honda, or for mistaking a 50" LG Plasma for a 48" Sony LCD. Mobile devices seem different because they are new. That's not Samgsung's fault..

1. The desktop isn't the same. Bouncing is helpful to combat overscrolling, which isn't a problem on the desktop. That's why you haven't seen it. (On a desktop you have to actually click the scrollbar, or use your finger on the mousewheel - both of which make it pretty obvious that you've reached the limit of the container).

2. Real world things bounce. Copying the way something works in the real world and emulating that in software and sticking an Apple logo on it is not inventing something. That's just... building things.

3. I don't mean to misrepresent the first part of your argument, but "it's a good idea" doesn't cut it for patenting consumer software / hardware. There are real criteria (mentioned by others) that this doesn't meet.

Changing topic slightly, how is a jury supposed to decide "non obvious to a person skilled in the art", anyway? Does the jury consist only of hardware engineers? Because that would be the only way it would be fair. I can no more wonder what would be obvious or not to a doctor, teacher, lawyer, fireman etc. as they could wonder what would be obvious to an engineer.

Don't use this website. It's a scam.

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/50dollarlogocom-c1... http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080324152924AA...

Plus my own experience.

If you want to pay $50 for a logo, google "Stock logos". If you want an actual good logo, 99 designs has a logo section (they start at like $300).

'Launchrock' style landing page - check

Completely clueless stock image - check

I left in a hurry.

The Statwing homepage looks really nice. I think they did a good job of something quite hard: making a data analysis tool look interesting!

FWIW it's around $130 AUD to lodge in New Zealand. Most Australian companies you do business with will treat you the same, plus: no software patents :)

Of course if you have complicated tax / revenue issues it's probably not worth the hassle.

It's a shame Google Chrome still doesn't render CSS3 fonts correctly on Windows. The strangest thing about it is that they barely even seem to acknowledge that it's an issue.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8950164/horrible-renderin...

If you've noticed that web fonts look terrible on Windows / Chrome, please star these issues!

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=91899 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102371

A good article.

Dropbox's onboarding is very good, but one thing I wonder is: has it always been that good? For example, what was the onboarding process like when Dropbox very first launched - was it terrible, average, or pretty much like this the whole time?

I guess the reason I'm interested is that we all have these really early stage discussions in our startups about how perfect to get the onboarding process before launch, and it would be cool to know the story about Dropbox for a reference.

I do that too. As for the OP, I think when he says "unproductive" that he is talking about tasks which appear to be important work tasks, but which actually aren't.

Some examples (mine, not his): spending a few hours watching Google IO videos on scaling to a billion users, or a few hours tracking down reporters trying to pitch them your pre-alpha demo.

This link has been passed around here heaps, but it's Rich Hickey talking about how that "downtime" like you spoke of is not only part of the problem solving process, but it some cases that it's the most important part! http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586

That's a good idea. This article explains more about the Cloudflare breach, if anyone's interested.

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/attackers-hit-twofa...

Is there really a decline in big ideas, or only an increase in small ones? The argument doesn't really seem to be based on any actual data.

To be honest, I really don't get this issue that journalists and other non-business people have with consumer web startups. It's as if they think that the business gods issued us all with a magic 'business voucher', and we chose to redeem it with a consumer web startup as opposed to say, nuclear fission or curing world hunger. The economy gave us this 'business voucher', and consumer web startups are the only thing the voucher is good for.

A robot.

Thank you

amirnathoo: the trigger.io website mentions a cloud build service to compete with the PhoneGap Build API, but I can't seem to find any more details. Could you point me in the right direction please?

Generally speaking, are the performance claims legitimate?

Client side form factor detection: nightmare mode