tophat02

One thing that really impressed me is that they didn't try to reinvent the wheel with their contracts. Good examples are the $PORT environment variable and sending all logs to stdout. It takes design maturity to do the wise thing instead of the fun thing, which would have been to force everyone to conform to a "Heroku Contract" API of some sort, which would really be no contract at all.

I've never understood this argument. I mean, yes, I get that all you're doing is moving the energy production somewhere else; but isn't that a GOOD thing?

My response to the "you're just moving" argument is that you're doing more than moving it, you're CENTRALIZING it. It's much easier to replace one coal plant with a nuclear plant or a wind farm (or 10) than it is to replace the thousands of cars that plant powers.

Am I totally wrong here?

I swear, one of these days I'm going to write an IDE that doesn't look like it was made in 1992. I may be a techie, but gosh darnit, I'm spoiled by iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. I want the stuff I'm using every day to LOOK nice.

(No offense intended, I just looked at the screenshots and my first reaction was "oh no, not again!")

The last paragraph is by far the most profound thing in the article.

I had this, err, idea! Congrats for doing what I wouldn't do and implementing it. Perhaps I should have just put the idea on CaptainObvio.us and let someone else implement it ;-)

This shouldn't be an issue, but I'm afraid it is: it still looks like a late-90s OS. That should be a top priority for the Haiku project.

The current Iridium looks like it has focused its marketing to the segments that actually make sense: maritime, explorers, and military.

But the infrastructure is up there and, sure, a bunch of people lost a lot of money, but it's THERE now. I could think of some products they could introduce that might be promising.

Here's an idea: a small piece of plugin hardware for iPhones, Droids, etc. This would be something you take with you (for example, on road trips or vacations to far-flung places). You would buy the unit for $149 and then prepay, say $30 for 10 minutes of service. The idea is that it's "there when you need it, wherever you are." It could even go in your first aid kit... it's there for emergencies.

Most of my emails are short. When I must write a long one, it's usually because it includes technical content. In that case, I do this:

Bob,

I discovered why the frobnostication terminal was slow and submitted a fix. It will be QA'd tomorrow. Please find the technical details below.

Regards, tophat02

<A bunch of newlines so Bob can see it's a short email with some appendix-type stuff below>

Now here's where I get into the technical details of the blah blah blah. This can span several paragraphs if I want. I don't worry about because I know Bob got the point up there -^

My personal opinion: if you can REALLY do what you claim then you should get every country's equivalent of the CDC working with you to MANDATE that this be part of every phone, and then of course you get the revenue from IP licensing.

In fact, I would broaden the scope a bit: make it like the "Emergency Broadcast System" for phones, only two-way.

Lots of privacy implications and the carriers and handset manufacturers would hate it, but I can certainly see it doing long term good.

Do this on one of my teams and I'll fire you that day. I KNOW it's a hack. That's why I asked you to hack it in! Do you think I like it?

Jesus!

I've never heard watched him speak before this. It's cool because you can tell he's a genuine geek at heart.

You've got folks who'll offer to tweet the content of your choice to 10,000 followers for 5 bucks, or put something in front of their 5,000 friends on facebook. That kind of thing.

You get what you pay for, but it might be worth five bucks to give it a shot. My biggest concern with a strategy like this is you might be seen as a spammer even though you're not the one directly doing the spamming.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but anyone who supposedly has 10,000 followers on twitter and is willing to say ANYTHING to them for $5 may not have the best followers.

Whenever I buy a stock I think of various "trigger points" that would make me sell it (or, at least, start to sell it).

If I owned RIM stock, this would be such a trigger point.

I wonder if there's any more "social" that could be put into GitHub's already "social" platform. For example: I always thought it would be nice to have a forum system (separate from the issue tracker) so that each repository could have a discussion forum.

I guess in general what I'm saying is it'd be nice to have some facebook- or forum-like ways for developers to chat amongst each other (either in the context of a repository or not).

No problem: take the same technology, rebrand it have a "business-oriented" name, make a different landing page, then sell both versions.

Did anyone else pretty much guess the problem areas as they were reading? As soon as I read "users will insert the pre-roll into their own videos before uploading" my mind went "ruh-roh!"

I think it was a great learning experience and he wasn't out too much money, but this is why I think having mentors who you can trust won't steal your idea is the way to go.

I don't know about the rest of you, but the moment I turned 18, this kind of assault on my privacy by my parents would have been completely unacceptable.

Isn't this the same guy who said "the network is the computer"?

The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

Do NOT bite your lower lip!

That and probably as a pun on the D language. I'm sure Walter Bright just LOVES the name. /s

Make something YOU want. Hope you're "most people."

Why not lend only to people who have already shown that they can handle money? In other words, why not mandate large annual fees for credit cards and VERY high down payment requirements for mortgages?

And yes, in fact, I AM suggesting that we only loan money to people who already have some.

EXACTLY. It's not that radical. Sad to see ieee drinking too much Kool-Aide.

I like this idea, simply because the world needs a place for radicals to be radical. Sure, there may be a lot of crazy floating cults, but there will probably also be some great advances from societies free of today's regulations and taboos.

But don't forget the part about "without due process." I think that in the future, we will definitely see the use of technology like this to read the minds of accused felons. I also predict the court will declare this perfectly consitutional, as your right to privacy is effectively waived given the right court order (and the motivating "probably cause").

TRULY innocent people will probably like this tech a lot.

Agile(n): a buzzword used preemptively on a project to remove accountability when things inevitably go wrong.

Perhaps the people who do the "best research" in compilers/languages simply suck at marketing.

Also, and I know this might be a heretical thing to say... maybe the ideas just aren't that good.

Software Engineering would progress a lot farther as a discipline if we weren't so preoccupied with throwing out the "old" to make room for the "new".

My definition of "legacy" code: code that is field-tested, has a low defect rate, and generally works.

Before the idea is out in the market, then I'd say that vision is slightly more important than execution. BUT, once it's out there and it's clear people want to buy it, then vision takes a back seat to good, solid, competent execution.

How many market leaders actually invented their markets? The business world is full of the remains of "visionary" companies who just plain got out-executed.