Well, a little research into the competition is certainly part of the "non-technical" legwork that I'd do up front. Not only is it going to tell you if someone else came up with the idea first, but it would also give you great insight into potential pricing.
For example, let's say you make widget B to do 80% of what widget A does, with 20% newfangled features that people may or may not need. If widget A costs $10, but it costs you $12 to make widget B, you're gonna have a tough time on the market. These and many other questions need to be answered before investing much coding time on the project.
If the poster gets through that legwork and still feel like it's a good idea, I'd recommend attending some user group meetings in your community, developing relationships with folks who might be more technical. Find someone who's trustworthy whose interests parallel your own. Work with that person on a business plan & marketing ideas - they may be able to provide better insight into technical start up costs - and if it is still compelling once it is down on paper, it's a no-brainer to start coding.
If you get that far, I'd worry less about the competition rolling once you've gone public - there's no way around that... if it's a good idea, you'll get competition. At that point, I'd stay focused, follow my plan and run with it. And, once you've had some success, keep an eye on the rear-view-mirror.
Well, I think you may want to be a little more guarded in your approach. If it is a really good idea and you tell a forum filled w/capable programmers, there is some risk that someone will take the ball and run with it, excluding you from the benefits.
However, you do need to start talking about it with a few people that you trust. Pick some geeks, but also some non-geeks (provided your idea has a non-technical target user base). These conversations will help you flesh out more of the details - both technical and non-technical - that are important before a single line of code is written.
Thanks for the tip - I'll check it out. I am aware Veritca didn't invent it... actually worked with a similar implementation myself a few years ago. I think it's a solid concept, however, and I'm happy to see it getting some traction and press thanks to Veritca.
What's your opinion of the developments that companies like Vertica are making with columnar databases? They tout improved performance and better data compression as two benefits. Will we see similar developments in MySQL? New products?
They rolled it out by market - so it wasn't nationwide on 2/15. It just started impacting me yesterday - especially painful since I can no longer "see" domain names used by my employer that are internally-visible only, even when I'm connected to the VPN. As a full time telecommuter, I'm fairly unhappy.
Agreed. I've made decisions based on $ alone and haven't been all that happy with my decisions. However, when you're in debt from school, $ is important and it can be a good basis for your decision. So do yourself a favor and take into account the cost of living differences between the two locations. 120 miles may not seem like a lot, but in the area I live now, you'll find a difference of over $15,000 in the median household incomes across 120 miles. The lower Perl salary may be more competitive than you think at first glance.
You know, I'm not sure about that. I don't think there has been success in this area - that's why this technique - and other techniques that rely heavily on statistics (like probabilistic latent semantic analysis) have generated such interest among those interested in text mining. Since humans are interacting with the results, the fact that we humans can distinguish fruit flies vs time flies is enough - my understanding is that this approach summarizes the data based on relevance/proximity of significant/important phrases. I don't know if it does any stemming, etc. It presents the results in an intelligent manner and it's up to the human viewing the results to appreciate the subtlety of fruit flies vs time flies.
The reality is that I doubt fruit flies or time flies would even show up in the results unless those phrases were significantly present throughout the data.
I agree wholeheartedly. My son was born w/2 heart defects and developed a third just recently. The first two are issues with his valves (aortic valve being the more serious). The next one is Wolf-Parkinson-White syndrome - an electrical problem. We haven't had to move forward with any types of surgeries for any of the issues, but one of the things that they could do if they have to move forward is replace his valve with an artifical valve. He is only 22 months old right now, so valve replacements would need to be frequent as he grows.
The fact that they're working on this gives me faith that we could someday be looking at valve replacement surgery with a living tissue valve that would grow along with my son. Even if he has to have an aritifical valve implanted at some point before this is ready, it sounds like we're working towards being able to replace artificial valves with living tissue. That would be ideal. We (humans) are pretty good at engineering things, but I'd prefer to trust natural engineering;)
You know, it's interesting. We (humans) are quite good at indexing and sorting things. When most of us were toddlers, we learned how to put square pegs through square holes...how to organize things (toys) by color, shape, or function. When we learned how to read, we started small, but worked our way up to understanding the sections of a newspaper and what was fun (Comics) and what was not (Business). As our skills developed, some of us found journalists that we liked and some that we didn't - this helped us further refine our "searches" through newspapers.
Sections, headlines, story titles, author, location - all metadata that is used by us to index the info in a newspaper. I don't think we have the capacity to use many more pieces of metadata to index a newspaper - there's a reason the newspaper is in the form it is today...we have hundreds of years of refinement. Newspapers that sucked weren't bought and "natural selection" resulted in industry norms etc that present the user with a very consistent interface. If I read the NY Times, the interface is similar to the Wall St Journal, USA Today, etc. It's predictable, easy-to-use, and well-defined. My choices are limited, but the format is similar.
The web is a lot bigger than a newspaper - and the web presents the user with a number of different sources for info - all in a very inconsistent format. when I was growing up, there were 2 daily newspapers that we subscribed to - the Hartford Courant and the Journal Inquirer. Neither one was perfect, but they worked the same way for me. Today, if I don't like something I see on CNN.com, I've got a gazillion other choices out there. The challenge to the user is to find a mix of news sources that meet their appetites for knowledge. They also need to wade through the mountains of crap website designs that mean no 2 news sites are the same. I'm all for individual expression and I love clever unique designs - I like to think I've come up with a few in my time - but it does present the user with an interesting problem to solve. Some of us get it, some of us don't. Remember that article about Google users having a richer online experience? Some of that is because of Google - but some of that is because of the people as well. People who use Google are more likely to be able to cope with information overload and quickly parse out the important bits.
How do we make sense out of petabytes of data? This is why I think the work Google is doing w/Google Print and the work IBM is doing with UIMA http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uima is so critical. We've long since outgrown the day that a file cabinet was capable of organizing all the info that's important to us. We've outgrown the filesystem as well. And the web has outgrown us.
I understand there are other countries that are catching up as well in the area of skilled IT workers and solid educational facilities to prepare budding technologists for the market. Infrastructure is almost there, although cell phone capabilities aren't quite on par with the rest of the world. There are also some rolling power outage issues as well in the western corner of the country. But, it's only a matter of time before the salary dfiferential makes outsourcing to this country attractive.
They seem anxious to have a recovery in domestic employment market growth. They haven't seen significant growth in the domestic labor market for hundreds of years. The pieces seem to be almost in place for the Nacirema to start benefiting from IT outsourcing just like India and other parts of the Far East.
Isn't Norm the one who waged war against the UN and the Annan family for corruption in the oil-for-food BS? One has to wonder if he's got something against the UN or if he's really interested in maintaining freedoms.
It's probably a little of both. And yes, as a resident of MN, I'd have to say that the man probably isn't all that bright...although in this case he's probably doing the right thing.
Also, companies pay for specialized work in areas that they don't have a prayer of doing themselves. Sure, maybe they could pay a 1/3 hourly rate to program something in-house, but without the area-specific knowledge, they may spend more than 3 times the amount of time to create a product...and not even get it right when they're done.
I'm assuming that's a MEAN of.8 degrees. We can experience SERIOUS changes in weather/temperature while maintaining a fairly steady mean temperature. Saying the mean has been fairly steady doesn't prove that there aren't siginficant changes in temperature that are putting stress on the ecosystem in the winter months and the summer months.
If anything, global warming has been mislabeled. We should call it global weather transformation.
In any case...I wonder what the median change has been. Probably something more telling than the mean.
Agreed. Sure, we can measure environmental impact relative to GNP and celebrate the fact that we (in the US) are more efficient users of certain resources. I think that's something to be proud of.
However, when the overall quality of the environment is concerned, GNP is a useless metric. If the environment is degraded to the point that sections of the planet are less livable, less able to sustain its inhabitants (human and other), does it really matter what the GNP is? Only humans are concerned with GNP...and we're a small part of the system.
There needs to be a balance, and using GNP to justify resource (over)consumption is flawed thinking. Should we follow every tree-hugger's advice to the letter? Probably not. But there is some truth beneath the agenda...of both sides.
You know, I think you're right. It probably has more to do with what you can get from the internet...education/access to information...which, in my opinion, is a fundamental human right.
In the US, we see areas where poor people don't know how to use the internet or computers, and those people (and their children) are at a horrible disadvantage in the workplace, when you place them next to wealthier suburbanites who have had access. The internet is not a cure-all for equality in education, but it is certainly a step in the right direction...and a great vehicle for improving the state of education in the world.
I'd be more curious about why you're having so many issues getting the hardware and software to work...and why those problems are repeating themselves? Is it the same problem everytime? Or is it a new issue at every corner? The professional recording studio that my group used in the past used Macs quite reliably. We had no time lost with hardware issues.
I personally LOVE Logic Audio and think it is some of the finest software built for its purpose. I'm not as much up to speed on the Linux platform stuff, but if you're looking to do primarily notation, you could also investigate Finale for the PC. It is excellent. Good luck!
Dude. It sounds like working at RI was definitely not the right job for you. I disagree with you on the moral basis of inclusion/exclusion from the law, just because of the simple problem of "who's to judge" what's a noble survey and what's not. Besides, the purpose of the law is to limit teleMARKETING, which survey companies do not do.
There will still be people who get annoyed, but I don't believe that's reason to include surveys in a telemarketing law. They're not the same animal.
I do work for one, and we offer incentives all the time. The problem, from the respondent's point of view, is how the heck do you know you're talking to a reputable research firm? They're not going to know the company I work for from the JoePretendsToBeASurveyButReallyTelemarkets company...because most survey companies - unless you're Nielsen and Gallup - are not household names. I will say this though - if a reputable company got caught selling under the guise of research, they'd be screwed. That's one of the quickest ways to lose your clients/CASRO membership/etc...
I suppose that there are some companies out there who will attempt to circumvent the law that way, but this allows "reputable" survey companies to conduct business fairly normally. We don't do telemarketing - you couldn't pay us or our competitors enough to do that. See, if you're a member of CASRO you'll actually lose your membership if you attempt to "SUG" (Sell Under the Guise of research), and that's a pretty big deal. You'd lose lots of clients if they found out you lost your CASRO membership - they enforce standards in the industry.
I guess the red flag that should go up is, if you're on the list, and someone tries to sell you something, it's a bad thing. If the caller identifies themselves as a research company and only asks questions about your purchasing habits, experiences with a product, they're probably ok. We generally identify ourselves as a national/worldwide research firm in the first couple of sentences of the call.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounded to me like he wanted to maintain some level of ownership/control over the project. If not, then sure, tell the world :)
Well, a little research into the competition is certainly part of the "non-technical" legwork that I'd do up front. Not only is it going to tell you if someone else came up with the idea first, but it would also give you great insight into potential pricing.
For example, let's say you make widget B to do 80% of what widget A does, with 20% newfangled features that people may or may not need. If widget A costs $10, but it costs you $12 to make widget B, you're gonna have a tough time on the market. These and many other questions need to be answered before investing much coding time on the project.
If the poster gets through that legwork and still feel like it's a good idea, I'd recommend attending some user group meetings in your community, developing relationships with folks who might be more technical. Find someone who's trustworthy whose interests parallel your own. Work with that person on a business plan & marketing ideas - they may be able to provide better insight into technical start up costs - and if it is still compelling once it is down on paper, it's a no-brainer to start coding.
If you get that far, I'd worry less about the competition rolling once you've gone public - there's no way around that ... if it's a good idea, you'll get competition. At that point, I'd stay focused, follow my plan and run with it. And, once you've had some success, keep an eye on the rear-view-mirror.
Well, I think you may want to be a little more guarded in your approach. If it is a really good idea and you tell a forum filled w/capable programmers, there is some risk that someone will take the ball and run with it, excluding you from the benefits.
However, you do need to start talking about it with a few people that you trust. Pick some geeks, but also some non-geeks (provided your idea has a non-technical target user base). These conversations will help you flesh out more of the details - both technical and non-technical - that are important before a single line of code is written.
Thanks for the tip - I'll check it out. I am aware Veritca didn't invent it ... actually worked with a similar implementation myself a few years ago. I think it's a solid concept, however, and I'm happy to see it getting some traction and press thanks to Veritca.
What's your opinion of the developments that companies like Vertica are making with columnar databases? They tout improved performance and better data compression as two benefits. Will we see similar developments in MySQL? New products?
They rolled it out by market - so it wasn't nationwide on 2/15. It just started impacting me yesterday - especially painful since I can no longer "see" domain names used by my employer that are internally-visible only, even when I'm connected to the VPN. As a full time telecommuter, I'm fairly unhappy.
Agreed. I've made decisions based on $ alone and haven't been all that happy with my decisions. However, when you're in debt from school, $ is important and it can be a good basis for your decision. So do yourself a favor and take into account the cost of living differences between the two locations. 120 miles may not seem like a lot, but in the area I live now, you'll find a difference of over $15,000 in the median household incomes across 120 miles. The lower Perl salary may be more competitive than you think at first glance.
You know, I'm not sure about that. I don't think there has been success in this area - that's why this technique - and other techniques that rely heavily on statistics (like probabilistic latent semantic analysis) have generated such interest among those interested in text mining. Since humans are interacting with the results, the fact that we humans can distinguish fruit flies vs time flies is enough - my understanding is that this approach summarizes the data based on relevance/proximity of significant/important phrases. I don't know if it does any stemming, etc. It presents the results in an intelligent manner and it's up to the human viewing the results to appreciate the subtlety of fruit flies vs time flies.
The reality is that I doubt fruit flies or time flies would even show up in the results unless those phrases were significantly present throughout the data.
How can I encrypt my emails so the person recieving can read them, but everyone else can't?
Do what I do: use the dialect spoken by the martians in Mars Attacks. It's pretty damned hard to decrypt "ack ack ack ack ACK ACK ACK ACK!!!!".
I agree wholeheartedly. My son was born w/2 heart defects and developed a third just recently. The first two are issues with his valves (aortic valve being the more serious). The next one is Wolf-Parkinson-White syndrome - an electrical problem. We haven't had to move forward with any types of surgeries for any of the issues, but one of the things that they could do if they have to move forward is replace his valve with an artifical valve. He is only 22 months old right now, so valve replacements would need to be frequent as he grows.
;)
The fact that they're working on this gives me faith that we could someday be looking at valve replacement surgery with a living tissue valve that would grow along with my son. Even if he has to have an aritifical valve implanted at some point before this is ready, it sounds like we're working towards being able to replace artificial valves with living tissue. That would be ideal. We (humans) are pretty good at engineering things, but I'd prefer to trust natural engineering
Best of luck with your child.
I agree - I'm a coder and actually think I would much prefer the natural definition of multiple panels to help me organize my workspace.
You know, it's interesting. We (humans) are quite good at indexing and sorting things. When most of us were toddlers, we learned how to put square pegs through square holes...how to organize things (toys) by color, shape, or function. When we learned how to read, we started small, but worked our way up to understanding the sections of a newspaper and what was fun (Comics) and what was not (Business). As our skills developed, some of us found journalists that we liked and some that we didn't - this helped us further refine our "searches" through newspapers.
e rywhere.ap/index.html. They're not talking about online newspapers, but I believe the issue they describe is the same one we face with online newspapers.
Sections, headlines, story titles, author, location - all metadata that is used by us to index the info in a newspaper. I don't think we have the capacity to use many more pieces of metadata to index a newspaper - there's a reason the newspaper is in the form it is today...we have hundreds of years of refinement. Newspapers that sucked weren't bought and "natural selection" resulted in industry norms etc that present the user with a very consistent interface. If I read the NY Times, the interface is similar to the Wall St Journal, USA Today, etc. It's predictable, easy-to-use, and well-defined. My choices are limited, but the format is similar.
The web is a lot bigger than a newspaper - and the web presents the user with a number of different sources for info - all in a very inconsistent format. when I was growing up, there were 2 daily newspapers that we subscribed to - the Hartford Courant and the Journal Inquirer. Neither one was perfect, but they worked the same way for me. Today, if I don't like something I see on CNN.com, I've got a gazillion other choices out there. The challenge to the user is to find a mix of news sources that meet their appetites for knowledge. They also need to wade through the mountains of crap website designs that mean no 2 news sites are the same. I'm all for individual expression and I love clever unique designs - I like to think I've come up with a few in my time - but it does present the user with an interesting problem to solve. Some of us get it, some of us don't. Remember that article about Google users having a richer online experience? Some of that is because of Google - but some of that is because of the people as well. People who use Google are more likely to be able to cope with information overload and quickly parse out the important bits.
CNN has another take on it here http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/26/information.ev
How do we make sense out of petabytes of data? This is why I think the work Google is doing w/Google Print and the work IBM is doing with UIMA http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uima is so critical. We've long since outgrown the day that a file cabinet was capable of organizing all the info that's important to us. We've outgrown the filesystem as well. And the web has outgrown us.
From MS's FAQ:
4. Can I use Express Editions for commercial use?
Yes, there are no licensing restrictions for applications built using the Express Editions.
I agree you'd be silly to use it for commerical use, but it seems to me that you can.
I understand there are other countries that are catching up as well in the area of skilled IT workers and solid educational facilities to prepare budding technologists for the market. Infrastructure is almost there, although cell phone capabilities aren't quite on par with the rest of the world. There are also some rolling power outage issues as well in the western corner of the country. But, it's only a matter of time before the salary dfiferential makes outsourcing to this country attractive.
They seem anxious to have a recovery in domestic employment market growth. They haven't seen significant growth in the domestic labor market for hundreds of years. The pieces seem to be almost in place for the Nacirema to start benefiting from IT outsourcing just like India and other parts of the Far East.
Isn't Norm the one who waged war against the UN and the Annan family for corruption in the oil-for-food BS? One has to wonder if he's got something against the UN or if he's really interested in maintaining freedoms.
It's probably a little of both. And yes, as a resident of MN, I'd have to say that the man probably isn't all that bright...although in this case he's probably doing the right thing.
Also, companies pay for specialized work in areas that they don't have a prayer of doing themselves. Sure, maybe they could pay a 1/3 hourly rate to program something in-house, but without the area-specific knowledge, they may spend more than 3 times the amount of time to create a product...and not even get it right when they're done.
I'm assuming that's a MEAN of .8 degrees. We can experience SERIOUS changes in weather/temperature while maintaining a fairly steady mean temperature. Saying the mean has been fairly steady doesn't prove that there aren't siginficant changes in temperature that are putting stress on the ecosystem in the winter months and the summer months.
If anything, global warming has been mislabeled. We should call it global weather transformation.
In any case...I wonder what the median change has been. Probably something more telling than the mean.
Agreed. Sure, we can measure environmental impact relative to GNP and celebrate the fact that we (in the US) are more efficient users of certain resources. I think that's something to be proud of.
However, when the overall quality of the environment is concerned, GNP is a useless metric. If the environment is degraded to the point that sections of the planet are less livable, less able to sustain its inhabitants (human and other), does it really matter what the GNP is? Only humans are concerned with GNP...and we're a small part of the system.
There needs to be a balance, and using GNP to justify resource (over)consumption is flawed thinking. Should we follow every tree-hugger's advice to the letter? Probably not. But there is some truth beneath the agenda...of both sides.
Excellent Silence of the Lambs reference! Laughed my ass off...good way to start the morning...
That was the funniest post I've read in a long time.
OOGG right.
You know, I think you're right. It probably has more to do with what you can get from the internet...education/access to information...which, in my opinion, is a fundamental human right.
In the US, we see areas where poor people don't know how to use the internet or computers, and those people (and their children) are at a horrible disadvantage in the workplace, when you place them next to wealthier suburbanites who have had access. The internet is not a cure-all for equality in education, but it is certainly a step in the right direction...and a great vehicle for improving the state of education in the world.
I'd be more curious about why you're having so many issues getting the hardware and software to work...and why those problems are repeating themselves? Is it the same problem everytime? Or is it a new issue at every corner? The professional recording studio that my group used in the past used Macs quite reliably. We had no time lost with hardware issues.
I personally LOVE Logic Audio and think it is some of the finest software built for its purpose. I'm not as much up to speed on the Linux platform stuff, but if you're looking to do primarily notation, you could also investigate Finale for the PC. It is excellent. Good luck!
Dude. It sounds like working at RI was definitely not the right job for you. I disagree with you on the moral basis of inclusion/exclusion from the law, just because of the simple problem of "who's to judge" what's a noble survey and what's not. Besides, the purpose of the law is to limit teleMARKETING, which survey companies do not do.
There will still be people who get annoyed, but I don't believe that's reason to include surveys in a telemarketing law. They're not the same animal.
I do work for one, and we offer incentives all the time. The problem, from the respondent's point of view, is how the heck do you know you're talking to a reputable research firm? They're not going to know the company I work for from the JoePretendsToBeASurveyButReallyTelemarkets company...because most survey companies - unless you're Nielsen and Gallup - are not household names. I will say this though - if a reputable company got caught selling under the guise of research, they'd be screwed. That's one of the quickest ways to lose your clients/CASRO membership/etc...
I suppose that there are some companies out there who will attempt to circumvent the law that way, but this allows "reputable" survey companies to conduct business fairly normally. We don't do telemarketing - you couldn't pay us or our competitors enough to do that. See, if you're a member of CASRO you'll actually lose your membership if you attempt to "SUG" (Sell Under the Guise of research), and that's a pretty big deal. You'd lose lots of clients if they found out you lost your CASRO membership - they enforce standards in the industry.
I guess the red flag that should go up is, if you're on the list, and someone tries to sell you something, it's a bad thing. If the caller identifies themselves as a research company and only asks questions about your purchasing habits, experiences with a product, they're probably ok. We generally identify ourselves as a national/worldwide research firm in the first couple of sentences of the call.