rdrimmie

Portland (OR) comes to mind as a place where there's some fantastic tech people and no university, but I'm not sure if it's considered a startup hub or not.

For somewhere around a year now, we've had an average of one new startup registering with our Venture Services Group each day. I am struggling with the correct way to be pedantic about it, it's just the connotation of "comes out" that I want to highlight - the startups registering with us don't necessarily meet any minimum requirements, versus those who graduate from one of the incubation or accelerator programs we run or are associated with.

(I work for Communitech, but not in VSG so my understanding is likely to be only slightly more refined than noirman's, and could have a hole or two)

(edit to add: we're working on fixing the site!)

I've noticed a lot of games in the Mac App Store are starting to have a single "unlock full game" IAP. These I really like. The good ones have enough content to show the nature of the game, get me hooked on the mechanics or story and lead directly into the single unlock.

It's a classic shareware model and results in my willingness to pay more for games because there's much less risk. The good ones also are very explicit in the description on the App Store that it is a first level/trial with IAP.

I find it to be very consumer friendly.

I'm a big fan of Jumpcut (http://jumpcut.sourceforge.net/), a dedicated clipboard manager. Several other tools that include clipboard management have been mentioned but if you don't want the rest of the functionality, this is great for it.

iCal and Mail do a fantastic job syncing with Google and Exchange, so I use those.

My wardrobe follows many of these mechanics - jeans, t-shirt, hoodie. In the winter (I live in Waterloo, Ontario) I just add layers. Sometimes more shirts, sometimes long underwear, and always a jacket, hat, gloves etc. It's usually pretty warm inside, so the core pieces don't change.

I switched about 8 months ago because my employer bought me a BlackBerry (edit to add: Torch 9810). I was quite surprised with how good it is, though my needs for it are pretty lightweight: Email, occasionally Twitter, and casual browsing. It does all of those extremely well.

The BB10 devices should run Android apps, but I doubt there will be better Google Apps integration. My guess is that they will feature better MS apps (in part because of the Bing app on PlayBooks) before they do Google ones.

This is a great article. My knee jerk reaction was to be a bit defensive "but native development is a lot of work too!" And it is, great applications require a lot of work regardless of platform.

But the article isn't (explicitly at least) saying that web-based mobile applications necessarily require any more work than porting an application between multiple platforms, but it is saying that web-based mobile application development isn't just "crank out an app and it runs great everywhere" which is something a lot of proponents (among whom I count myself) certainly do argue.

As the article concludes, there are a great many number of considerations when selecting a platform, and the detail here highlights the many that exist for mobile development.

I really very deeply enjoyed this article.

Sure there's room, but the thesis is that rms' personality does disservice to his cause. He is willing to email documents around to collaborate using Free Software, but he's not willing to market effectively.

My reading of the Velocity article suggests that Ted donated his million to the University "to expand support for student entrepreneurs".

The University, in turn, has established a million dollar seed fund to support student ventures. So while it is probably basically the same million dollars, the University is acting as an intermediary and has control over the fund in some fashion or another.

I personally would not be able to convince myself that my side project's execution is /better/ than something MetaLab (or any of the many companies I admire) built, but certainly it would be better suited to my personal itches.

That is not intended to be a comment on your execution though, I don't know what you've built.

What I would try to do is refine the niche that I am satisfying. There are a ton of task management applications out there, which means that there is a large number of ways people like to track and do their tasks, which means that something that solves your particular problems very well is going to satisfy more.

I wonder if the trade-off of devoting those 10 hours to deliberate practice results in much better use of the other 25-30.

Most standard two-column layouts follow the golden ratio roughly. If you look at, for example, subtraction.com (a good place to steal layout inspiration from) it's 2 columns within 2 columns within 2 columns.

It certainly was the reason for the outrage over the caps Bell tried to impose.

It's not that caps, or usage-based billing is inherently evil, it's just that the caps were very low, the per-usage rate beyond the caps were very high, and Bell was forcing the independent ISPs that use the network to share the same model, effectively disabling any competitive advantage they might have.

edit: I fear the phrasing of my first sentence may sound like I am arguing against your point, but in fact I am empathically agreeing and just kind of fail at text sometimes.

I've read a lot by him, but looking at it again I think it's fairly reasonable to say that this post is written with the assumption that you are up to date with at least some of the way Rands presents situations and conveys his message.

Over time the site has largely evolved into the first public pass of content that eventually becomes part of a book.

Personally, I'm a big fan of articles that don't assume every reader is a newcomer. It's a barrier for newcomers, but explaining all of his shorthand and previous content... well, it's arguably two books worth of stuff.

If you accept that Waterloo is part of the Golden Horseshoe (a possible point of contention, but born and raised here I've always thought it was) then Toronto and Waterloo are similar and connected in the way that San Francisco and San Jose are, though on a small population and density scale.

I don't know much about the Valley, but the impression I have is that it is a large area with regions that focus on different aspects of technology and I think that is true for the Golden Horseshoe.

I am missing some, but there's a large number of great schools (York, Ryerson, McMaster, Sheridan, Conestoga, Waterloo, Laurier, Guelph) that tend to act as focal points for regional specialties, highlighted by the differences in focus by tech organizations like MaRS and Communitech.

And if you extend a bit towards London and Stratford you get excellent culture and schools like Western and Fanshawe, and in the other directions towards Markham and Kingston you get highly educated knowledge workers.

Organizations like the Ontario Centres of Excellence (http://www.oce-ontario.org/) - who I am not directly connected to but professionally benefit from and generally admire - are viewing this part of the world as much bigger than any one city, and I think that is necessary.

If there's anything we have that is similar to Silicon Valley (which benefits as well by relative proximity to LA and San Diego) is that this is a high density population area, at least as far as such things exist in Canada.

About 18 months ago, my dad left the job he'd been working at for 40 years (not entirely by choice), set up a new shop and has been going strong ever since. That's awesome for me to see. Every time I think I missed my chance I realize it's always there.

Basically you're supposed to look at their eyes for 5-7 seconds at a go. Then look away but not at their chest (regardless of sex). Flick to something behind and above them, glance at a window or clock or other feature in the area.

If you don't like their eyes, focus on the bridge of their nose, they won't be able to tell the difference.

For neurotypicals, it creates sensations of companionship and trust, until it goes on too long and then it becomes creepy and uncomfortable for them.

I absolutely think it's a problem that the vast majority of elementary school teachers are women.

I don't think it's inherently terrible to have fields that are dominated by one gender or another but I do think that in the case of school teachers men are being pushed away by social forces and it's detrimental to all children to be taught only by women.

Two things for me today! Thank you.

I am pretty strongly affected by the environment that I'm in, so this post really hits home for me, but there's a conflict I can't resolve about always being the worst x in your collective noun:

Why would a collective that is better than you, which probably subscribes to this moderately common notion, hire you?

I guess Harpo had the same problem.

I strongly suspect jmillikin is taking the piss and the tone may not be being transmitted with the text. It is the same argument as the article itself, reductio ad absurdum.

I had always just assumed that deformation of blood cells as portrayed by computer graphics in shows like CSI or House were arbitrary and 'artistic representations'. But the last 15 seconds of this video are outstanding.

The knowledgable folk will probably benefit from knowing your region and if there is anything regarding IP in your employment contract.

Anecdotally, my employment contract has a clause that grants my employer shared copyright to all my work unless they officially disclaim interest, but because that clause exists there's also a pretty simple process: I present a 1-paragraph overview of the project and someone with signatory authority writes on the paper "[My employer] is not interested in this project." Then signs it.

I don't know how well this would stand up if it ever came down to a court case, and there's definite benefit in that there's only 8 of us here so pinning down such an authority is a matter of me putting the paper on the desk next to mine.

Every now and then someone explains something that should have been completely obvious and I get floored. Of COURSE that's how hsl works, how else could it work? Love it.

With that I certainly do agree.

That's untrue. I haven't used Windows as my primary workstation in over two years (and it was an XP system then) and I can hop onto a Win7 box and interact using most of the same commands I internalized administrating Windows 3.11 boxes on LanMan networks in the mid-90s.

The real problem is that Windows skills generally are only transferrable to other versions of Windows whereas Unix command line tools - be they GNU or BSD - are. And even that's not entirely true. If there's a Windows command-line tool that you learn about and like I guarantee you it's based on a Unix command-line tool that has a man entry.

Absolutely. I develop mostly in PHP and JavaScript and thrive in Ubuntu, and plan on giving Mint a try next time I need to start from a base install.

Meeting people. It's not easy and it's not fast, but if you can find an interesting and relevant meetup, or user group or some-such you can start talking to people doing interesting things.

Local technology associations are also good sources. I'm in Waterloo, where there are organizations like Communitech (http://communitech.ca) and Canada's Tech Triangle (http://techtriangle.com) that offer social events and whatnot. Also, if you're really bored or motivated, you can go through their membership lists checking out all the companies in the area and see if they're doing interesting things.

Look for Camp events in your area too. DemoCamps, StartupCamps, BarCamps, FooCamps, yadda yadda.

I think imposter syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome) contributes, and a grim view of prospects combined with lack of knowledge on how to find jobs. If all you're doing is reading monster.com postings or whatever then the majority of jobs postings that are out there are terribly written and deeply discouraging.