I think you're underestimating the effects of Murphy's Law. Ah well, necessity is the mother of invention.
508 karma · joined October 18, 2007
Lesser features -- Slicehost has several kernel versions available. Rackspace Cloud does not. Slicehost control panel's UX is just much better.
In spite of all this, I've been moving as many of my customer's servers over to Rackspace for a while now. Most of them don't need the extra bandwidth you get for the slice, making Rackspace Cloud much cheaper when you add in backup images.
IPv6 is a big deal though. Everyone's going to have to touch their long-running servers sometime before the end of this year. With IPv6 Day closing in this June and the eventual migration of residential broadband to IPv6, this is one of those inevitable things that isn't going to magically go away.
What do you think about this? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100311190247AA...
I have two friends who have experience with Montessori, and like you, I'll put together funds to get my future kids in there some day.
One of my friends is an Aikidoka. He had started hanging out with some folks who turned out to operate a Montessori school. They liked him enough that they invited him to teach there -- more to expose the kids to different ideas. My friend tells me that there is a selection process involved for the kids, and not all kids can get in. They'd put them in the environment and see how they acted. My friend and those operators are pitching Aikido to the national board as a form of conflict resolution. Which, if you know anything about Aikido, is remarkable.
The other friend is the only old man I know who says things like, "I can't wait to see what will happen", and "Using predictive modeling is like driving by looking at the rear view mirror." Most old people I know are quietly staring at death looming in the future. This guy put his son through Montessori. His grandson is now in Montessori, though the daughter-in-law objected at first.
From the comments from these two, from the smattering of articles I've read about them, the key behavioral patterning related to startup is the development of gumption. That is, instead of using external reward-punishment and coloring-inside-the-approved-lines, these kids go out and do what they want, using their own internal sense of right and wrong. It's something I've been hacking my own mind with much of my adult life -- through things like playing Go. Does this guarantee these a Montessori grad to be wildly successful at building out a startup? No. But it will save a lot of misery from twisting yourself, cringing from Authority or staying trapped in a losing situation (a la Gervais Principle).
That is way better than recruiting Tiger Moms and Dragon Ladies.
Considering that "web apps" in the future will really mean "mobile apps", I think in the future Rails will mostly drive endpoints and barely serve dynamically-generated HTML, most of the views being constructed out of Javascript/HTML on the browser end. Testing to see that data gets applied to the right DOM element will be easier on the browser side (or even with a fake Node.js browser) if the mocking is done there. I suspect that isolating the views properly from the rest of the app will make the whole stack easier to test and maintain. (It is also easier to find a decent Javascript developer than it is to find a decent Rails developer).
Platonic dialectic is related yet different, but I can see how modern ignorance of rhetorics have led people to equate platonic dialectic with debate, arguing with fighting.
Now, if there were an OSX-native app that does 3-panel merges, I'd gladly switch off of Meld.
When I go into my Gmail account, I have filters set to label my email. I don't use folders there. Half of the documents I care about are on Google Docs, where I use search instead of a file browser. I don't use a filesystem metaphor on my non-jail-broken iPod Touch either, except maybe to access the apps.
With mobile web apps set to explode in 2011 -- Android is predicted to go to sub-$100 retail price, it means a lot of people's first experience of a personal computing device will not be a filesystem.
Steve Blank wrote an article http://steveblank.com/2010/11/24/when-its-darkest-men-see-th... on why the traditional barriers of entry for businesses, particularly Internet-based businesses, are -simultaneously- falling down ... at the same time that a large number of recent-collage grads are entering the workforce in the middle of recession, with the real estate market still crashing around us. It means that not only is it easier to start your own business, many people are forced to.
Indeed, http://www.fastcompany.com/1707431/the-rise-of-the-homeprene... talks about the "homepreneurs", having home-based business.
One interesting thing reading this and reading the interviews in Founders At Work was that many of the tech founds then and the founds now say that it is much more acceptable now to operate a business from the home than it was say, in 1980. The idea of a garage-based business in Palo Alto is the stuff of legends, but the reality was that in mind 1970s, 1980s, even the early 1990s, you don't get as much credibility with a home-based business. With the number of big IPOs and "rags-to-riches" stories, garage-based businesses are more acceptable. So is the fact that people can rent Class-A digs to woo customers and investors.
But think about this in the context of that Atlantic article. The article talks about how the traditional mixed-use neighborhoods wove residential with commercial concerns. Someone living in a traditional neighborhood could get all of their basic living needs by walking, all within a 5 minute walk.
In other words, it -seems- that a "home-based" business is more acceptable in the present than in the past, but dig deeper into a past when towns were planned around neighborhoods instead of zones, and you see this is actually an American tradition.
What's different now is that the barriers of entry are falling particularly for web-based businesses. People outside of IT -- and even inside IT -- don't know this, but virtualization has changed the game since 2005. In late 1990s, the cost for setting up your server and a landline was in the tens of thousands. In 2005, it has dropped into the thousands, and probably less. With virtualization now, we're talking about ~$10/mth for base cost; expert labor costs much more than the servers themselves.
Even product-based businesses operate virtually now, as described in Tim Ferris's Four Hour Workweek. Product fulfillment can be outsourced to competent firms. So are product design and marketing. Just-in-time inventory has made its way to small businesses, so there isn't a need to warehouse inventory yourself.
My point is that the numbers of people with a non-traditional job -- that is, unless you look all the past 1920s when it was traditional to own your own business -- can fly under the radar of zoning laws. And further, there will be an increasing demand and pressure for traditionally-planned, neighborhood-based communities. I don't think homepreneurs want to live in surburbia. I have friends who drive out to the local coffee shop, to get their socialization while "working from home". And if that coffee shop was instead a pleasant, 5-minute walk away?
In terms of practice, it means someone stops being mindful of the task on hand and starts performing his tasks mindlessly. The present moment is always surprising, this principle of adaptation is not.
I'm also applying one of the principles from Sun Tzu's Art of War (related to misdirection) and looking for it in Chess, Go and some RTSs. I may end up picking up Poker and learning some things from it.