Please dont take it in a negative way. I am very happy that I did start on it, but what I am sad about is that it did not pan out, and because in my opinion I did not try enough.
I agree to all your points (esp since otherwise, I will be branded an idiot:-) ), but all said and done, some days and nights, I do feel very sad that I did not go ahead with it.
There is a lot of knowledge gained from it, I have become much more competent programmer because of it, I appreciate my family more because of it, I got more time to play with my kid etc. But there are downsides too, which we should accept too along with the positives.
I am still happily married - so the regret is not about that.
The regret is due to the following reasons:
1. I started the company hoping that I will be able to be financially secure after a while. That did not pan out, and I am in the same state financially as I was before I started the company.
I have many other ideas too. I thought I will try out the most financially lucrative one, get enough money to be safe for the rest of the life, and then try out my other ideas. That is not going to happen anytime soon.
2. The realization that I quit on something. I did not try enough during the sales part. I could have persevered and then if I fail, I can accept. I myself know that I did not try anywhere near hard enough during the marketing/sales part.
It is very hard if you know you quit before you acted with your full energy on it. I did not do that, and so it is quite a big regret.
3. I now know that it requires perseverance. I did not know to what level - at that time. I lacked it then, and I am not sure whether I lack it even now. Unless you jump in there, you really do not know how deep you are.
So my confidence also has taken a hit.
Even though I tried a little bit, I am still in the same position as before. That does hurt, especially when you know it is only your fault.
I started my own company. The idea was good, and I had confidence in myself to create the program by myself. I left my job and started out on my own. My wife (and my 2 year old too) was also full supportive.
I completed the coding and testing part. It took me close to a year, but I finished it. It works great, everybody who saw the program (including one MNC), said it is very well done.
After that it came to marketing and sales. I went to an MNC where I previously worked. They said they are interested and pulled me around for 4 months before they stopped answering my calls. And by then - after 1 year - I got tired and lost my will.
I started fighting with my wife everyday for very small reasons. Pressure from parents/relatives/friends etc to look for a job etc. Not from my wife though.
I relented, and I joined a startup - actually I went there to sell my product, and they were very impressed and asked me to join them. It has been a year now. I have a fully done product with me. I have not gone to sell it to more than 3 clients.
It is something I regret, and regret a lot. But I now understand, with experience, that starting a business is not about coding or even having the idea. It is about perseverance and patience. Which I sorely lacked.
Even though I want to support Google in this case, we cannot be sure - unless we go through their whole set of comments. Note that android code was not written by Google - it was by Android Inc - and so we cannot just discount it by saying why would google need to do that. This will be a fun fight to watch though.
Indeed - especially considering the fact that one of the major class of solutions based on simulated annealing is actually a heuristics based solution. It really doesnt matter how you solve it at all - any way is welcome - as long as it reaches close to the optimal solution.
For a guy who lost both the arms, I think this motto is fine. This is a big deformity - and there will be a lot of bitterness in the soul against God and even to his fellow people. I do see some people overcoming that bitterness, but most people do not.
Think about it - being dependent on others for the whole life, everybody else showing pity on you - it is enough to make any one bitter - I know for sure that I would be. Especially a person who knows the joy of being independent till 18 - it will be especially hard for him.
Given the circumstances, I have no problem with that motto at all.
I was thinking that Windows Mobile 7 would be a big hit in the enterprise market. Windows Mobile 7 will be a big danger not to Apple, rather to Blackberry. They can go for the best Office/Documents/Outlook integration possible - and who would not love it? I have not seen many phones which can properly format a moderately complex.docx file as of now - this is where Windows Mobile 7 can enter the market and capture it.
It need not be even their decision (eventhough here it is) - you create a product which is useful for the military, and say you try to patent it - for selling it - as per the official secrets act, the govt can take this idea/product and use it - and ask the implementor not to mention to anyone. From then on the guy cannot even publish it. The govt does not give out proper compensation too. So it is not always voluntary.
I am not sure whether/. users appreciate the whole situation in India. Terrorists using blackberry is an actual problem here. Also, the threat of terrorists here is a real one - unlike in most other countries - with many countries actually pouring money in to push terrorism to India.
Before the current home minister came in with somewhat tight security and controls, we used to have a lot of terrorist attacks in India. The current homeminister radically decreased the number of incidents by overall increasing the security - while not too much impinging on the privacy till now.
Most of the security was through surveillance, which was being hamstrung by the enemy using blackberry for communication. So by creating this hullaballoo and then RIM publicly accepting it, terrorist will stop using blackberry for communication, thus increasing the effectiveness of surveillance.
I do accept the view point of - those who gives up privacy for security deserves neither. But terrorism is such a big actual problem here - with more than 800 sleeper cells currently, people are going to accept this - otherwise there is going to be daily bombings and deaths.
This is amongst the coolest things that I have seen in a long time. Unbelievably cool and useful. Microsoft, I bow to you - the table seems to be the future of computing - if not amongst the masses - atleast amongst planners and decision makers. Although it makes me sad about my existence as a person though - doing a 9x5 job which is neither cool, nor very useful for humanity as a whole.
It indeed might be the reason that this got picked. See - with this copy-pasted summary - there is much less chance of it being wrong - and thereby lesser chance of ridicule. Any issues in the summary/article - the buck can be passed to the article in question - again the editor escapes censure. This way, the editor does not need to think too much about the article, rather a non-thinking way of copy-paste can produce the maximum results with minimum effort and minimum pay for the editors. A more cynical view could be that with a perfect summary, people reading the article will be lesser - thereby decreasing the ad revenue for the articles - even though I do not fully subscribe to it - as per Hanlon's razor
I read your summary - it is a perfect summary - it summarizes the main points of the article properly and in an ideal world - all summaries should be written that way. But, the fact it was not picked seems shows the sad state of affairs in/. where quality is given scant recognition.
The point might be that - your behaviour at 40 is the same as your behaviour at 5. The in between stages are not considered - since people do change a lot through the years. But in the end, you mostly reach your behaviour back at 5.
I agree with all your points. I would also like to add the effect of confidence. For me, if I am confident that I am in it for the long term, my effort goes up quite a bit.
The effort is not fully visible to my boss all the time - since most of the effort goes in non-obvious, but nevertheless extremely important aspects of programming - thinking deeply about design and deciding the exact architecture which can handle most of the future enhancements, creating the best aspects for UI design and exact representations of qualitative and quantitative information, creating good test cases, creating bug proof code etc.
But, even if the effort is not visible to my boss straightaway, I dont have to care, since I am confident that my boss has confidence in me and that I am not going to be a fungible commodity to him.
If, as per mentioned in the article, that sort of competition and lack of confidence in workers is rife in the company, I am not going to create always the best output - rather I will be going to produce the safest output - the one with the most visibility - never mind how it performs later, after I get the advantages out of it. This is going to cause negative effects in the company in the long term.
I was in a big (1 lakh + employees) company earlier. There I was considered an easily replaceable resource - even though my performance was quite good, with this amount of people, they could always get a better person than me to replace me. Even though I did not know it at that time, my performance was then less than optimum - i.e. I was not trying to improve myself a great deal - due to lack of confidence and this was a negative cycle.
After quite a few years with this company, I was burned out, and I left to start my own company. Then I was absorbed (along with my product) by another startup. In the last 2 years, I think I have learned as much as the 10 years before in the big company - and my quality of work has now improved a great deal - this especially being because in the startup - and my own company - I gained a lot of confidence that I am in it for a long time.
Actually, the aspects of confidence is extremely visible in sports etc, wherein if the player knows he is in it for a long time, he tries to play his natural game - and he is not hamstrung by the fact that a risky move will not jeopardize his career.
Why the management in most companies do not understand this - I have no idea.
I also prefer desktops, but where I am from, (India), we do have power cuts quite often. Since there is no battery, it means that a UPS is a necessity. Also, here, most desktops do not sell with wireless adaptor - which means I have to buy the wireless adaptor separately. Now, considering all those, the price difference does not match up - and most UPS can carry 20 minutes worth of power, so compared to my laptop (4-5 hours battery on average), it does not even come close.
I would guess that in India, one of the major reasons people shy away from desktops is because of these factors - many friends who moved from desktop to laptop - is because of this. Most have a desktop setup though - with multiple monitors and keyboard, and they dock their laptop to it.
While this is funny - this is indeed what is going to happen in some time with the reader interface. The web site owners have reason to be peeved - if the user uses reader extensively, for web sites that are ad-based, they have no revenue stream. Why should they then spending their money, time and effort to create the web site contents?
So, either - as OP pointed out, they will intentionally sabotage reader mode or stop serving web pages to safari altogether. I would actually prefer the second option since I think this was a rather unethical thing to do from Apples part.
I am all for technology that enables users - google has shown the world how to provide the users with all support and then make money - for example they provided IMAP support in email, but then created such a beautiful mail interface that people I know use both thunderbird and web client. Thus, Google provide all support, and in turn they ask us to support them by at least viewing their unobstrusive ads.
I consider that a fair give and take. But what apple now has done is unfair - in my opinion. YMMV.
Also, the fact that top kill failed while their oil siphoning mechanism was perfected seems rather dubious. I understand that BP was taking a lot of flak, and they might be wary of pulling such a trick, but still my cynical side is not disallowing that possibility.
Generalizations are generally incorrect. In India - we do have anti-intellectual sentiment in colleges, people think that talent and ability is innate, getting good marks while being lazy is better than getting excellent grades after hardwork and so on and so forth. The difference I can see is that most asians who attempt spelling bee are kids whose parents who have immigrated to foreign countries. These people usually are much more hard working and also have a high pro-intellectual sentiment - which then shows up in their kids too.
Slashdot Mirror
Please dont take it in a negative way. I am very happy that I did start on it, but what I am sad about is that it did not pan out, and because in my opinion I did not try enough.
I agree to all your points (esp since otherwise, I will be branded an idiot :-) ), but all said and done, some days and nights, I do feel very sad that I did not go ahead with it.
There is a lot of knowledge gained from it, I have become much more competent programmer because of it, I appreciate my family more because of it, I got more time to play with my kid etc. But there are downsides too, which we should accept too along with the positives.
I am still happily married - so the regret is not about that.
The regret is due to the following reasons:
1. I started the company hoping that I will be able to be financially secure after a while. That did not pan out, and I am in the same state financially as I was before I started the company.
I have many other ideas too. I thought I will try out the most financially lucrative one, get enough money to be safe for the rest of the life, and then try out my other ideas. That is not going to happen anytime soon.
2. The realization that I quit on something. I did not try enough during the sales part. I could have persevered and then if I fail, I can accept. I myself know that I did not try anywhere near hard enough during the marketing/sales part.
It is very hard if you know you quit before you acted with your full energy on it. I did not do that, and so it is quite a big regret.
3. I now know that it requires perseverance. I did not know to what level - at that time. I lacked it then, and I am not sure whether I lack it even now. Unless you jump in there, you really do not know how deep you are.
So my confidence also has taken a hit.
Even though I tried a little bit, I am still in the same position as before. That does hurt, especially when you know it is only your fault.
Amen to that, brother.
I started my own company. The idea was good, and I had confidence in myself to create the program by myself.
I left my job and started out on my own. My wife (and my 2 year old too) was also full supportive.
I completed the coding and testing part. It took me close to a year, but I finished it.
It works great, everybody who saw the program (including one MNC), said it is very well done.
After that it came to marketing and sales.
I went to an MNC where I previously worked. They said they are interested and pulled me around for 4 months before they stopped answering my calls.
And by then - after 1 year - I got tired and lost my will.
I started fighting with my wife everyday for very small reasons. Pressure from parents/relatives/friends etc to look for a job etc. Not from my wife though.
I relented, and I joined a startup - actually I went there to sell my product, and they were very impressed and asked me to join them.
It has been a year now. I have a fully done product with me. I have not gone to sell it to more than 3 clients.
It is something I regret, and regret a lot. But I now understand, with experience, that starting a business is not about coding or even having the idea.
It is about perseverance and patience. Which I sorely lacked.
It is crispy and sweet, like snakes.
Thanks, that will help. :-)
Even though I want to support Google in this case, we cannot be sure - unless we go through their whole set of comments.
Note that android code was not written by Google - it was by Android Inc - and so we cannot just discount it by saying why would google need to do that.
This will be a fun fight to watch though.
Indeed - especially considering the fact that one of the major class of solutions based on simulated annealing is actually a heuristics based solution. It really doesnt matter how you solve it at all - any way is welcome - as long as it reaches close to the optimal solution.
For a guy who lost both the arms, I think this motto is fine. This is a big deformity - and there will be a lot of bitterness in the soul against God and even to his fellow people. I do see some people overcoming that bitterness, but most people do not.
Think about it - being dependent on others for the whole life, everybody else showing pity on you - it is enough to make any one bitter - I know for sure that I would be. Especially a person who knows the joy of being independent till 18 - it will be especially hard for him.
Given the circumstances, I have no problem with that motto at all.
I was thinking that Windows Mobile 7 would be a big hit in the enterprise market. .docx file as of now - this is where Windows Mobile 7 can enter the market and capture it.
Windows Mobile 7 will be a big danger not to Apple, rather to Blackberry.
They can go for the best Office/Documents/Outlook integration possible - and who would not love it?
I have not seen many phones which can properly format a moderately complex
It need not be even their decision (eventhough here it is) - you create a product which is useful for the military, and say you try to patent it - for selling it - as per the official secrets act, the govt can take this idea/product and use it - and ask the implementor not to mention to anyone. From then on the guy cannot even publish it.
The govt does not give out proper compensation too. So it is not always voluntary.
Here is the algorithm
unlock_code = random.random()
Pretty difficult to break - eh!
I am not sure whether /. users appreciate the whole situation in India.
Terrorists using blackberry is an actual problem here. Also, the threat of terrorists here is a real one - unlike in most other countries - with many countries actually pouring money in to push terrorism to India.
Before the current home minister came in with somewhat tight security and controls, we used to have a lot of terrorist attacks in India. The current homeminister radically decreased the number of incidents by overall increasing the security - while not too much impinging on the privacy till now.
Most of the security was through surveillance, which was being hamstrung by the enemy using blackberry for communication. So by creating this hullaballoo and then RIM publicly accepting it, terrorist will stop using blackberry for communication, thus increasing the effectiveness of surveillance.
I do accept the view point of - those who gives up privacy for security deserves neither.
But terrorism is such a big actual problem here - with more than 800 sleeper cells currently, people are going to accept this - otherwise there is going to be daily bombings and deaths.
This is amongst the coolest things that I have seen in a long time. Unbelievably cool and useful. Microsoft, I bow to you - the table seems to be the future of computing - if not amongst the masses - atleast amongst planners and decision makers.
Although it makes me sad about my existence as a person though - doing a 9x5 job which is neither cool, nor very useful for humanity as a whole.
It indeed might be the reason that this got picked.
See - with this copy-pasted summary - there is much less chance of it being wrong - and thereby lesser chance of ridicule.
Any issues in the summary/article - the buck can be passed to the article in question - again the editor escapes censure.
This way, the editor does not need to think too much about the article, rather a non-thinking way of copy-paste can produce the maximum results with minimum effort and minimum pay for the editors.
A more cynical view could be that with a perfect summary, people reading the article will be lesser - thereby decreasing the ad revenue for the articles - even though I do not fully subscribe to it - as per Hanlon's razor
I read your summary - it is a perfect summary - it summarizes the main points of the article properly and in an ideal world - all summaries should be written that way. /. where quality is given scant recognition.
But, the fact it was not picked seems shows the sad state of affairs in
3M is another one.
It'll be a fascinating sight to see, surely.
With your other eye, of course...
The point might be that - your behaviour at 40 is the same as your behaviour at 5. The in between stages are not considered - since people do change a lot through the years. But in the end, you mostly reach your behaviour back at 5.
4%
Also, I am amazed that this was not invented till now. Me and my friends were discussing the same thing - IIRC - about 3 years ago?
This will be a boon for laptops though. I felt that trackpad is not as useful as mouse - this can alleviate that issue
I agree with all your points. I would also like to add the effect of confidence.
For me, if I am confident that I am in it for the long term, my effort goes up quite a bit.
The effort is not fully visible to my boss all the time - since most of the effort goes in non-obvious, but nevertheless extremely important aspects of programming - thinking deeply about design and deciding the exact architecture which can handle most of the future enhancements, creating the best aspects for UI design and exact representations of qualitative and quantitative information, creating good test cases, creating bug proof code etc.
But, even if the effort is not visible to my boss straightaway, I dont have to care, since I am confident that my boss has confidence in me and that I am not going to be a fungible commodity to him.
If, as per mentioned in the article, that sort of competition and lack of confidence in workers is rife in the company, I am not going to create always the best output - rather I will be going to produce the safest output - the one with the most visibility - never mind how it performs later, after I get the advantages out of it. This is going to cause negative effects in the company in the long term.
I was in a big (1 lakh + employees) company earlier. There I was considered an easily replaceable resource - even though my performance was quite good, with this amount of people, they could always get a better person than me to replace me. Even though I did not know it at that time, my performance was then less than optimum - i.e. I was not trying to improve myself a great deal - due to lack of confidence and this was a negative cycle.
After quite a few years with this company, I was burned out, and I left to start my own company. Then I was absorbed (along with my product) by another startup. In the last 2 years, I think I have learned as much as the 10 years before in the big company - and my quality of work has now improved a great deal - this especially being because in the startup - and my own company - I gained a lot of confidence that I am in it for a long time.
Actually, the aspects of confidence is extremely visible in sports etc, wherein if the player knows he is in it for a long time, he tries to play his natural game - and he is not hamstrung by the fact that a risky move will not jeopardize his career.
Why the management in most companies do not understand this - I have no idea.
I also prefer desktops, but where I am from, (India), we do have power cuts quite often. Since there is no battery, it means that a UPS is a necessity. Also, here, most desktops do not sell with wireless adaptor - which means I have to buy the wireless adaptor separately.
Now, considering all those, the price difference does not match up - and most UPS can carry 20 minutes worth of power, so compared to my laptop (4-5 hours battery on average), it does not even come close.
I would guess that in India, one of the major reasons people shy away from desktops is because of these factors - many friends who moved from desktop to laptop - is because of this. Most have a desktop setup though - with multiple monitors and keyboard, and they dock their laptop to it.
While this is funny - this is indeed what is going to happen in some time with the reader interface.
The web site owners have reason to be peeved - if the user uses reader extensively, for web sites that are ad-based, they have no revenue stream. Why should they then spending their money, time and effort to create the web site contents?
So, either - as OP pointed out, they will intentionally sabotage reader mode or stop serving web pages to safari altogether. I would actually prefer the second option since I think this was a rather unethical thing to do from Apples part.
I am all for technology that enables users - google has shown the world how to provide the users with all support and then make money - for example they provided IMAP support in email, but then created such a beautiful mail interface that people I know use both thunderbird and web client. Thus, Google provide all support, and in turn they ask us to support them by at least viewing their unobstrusive ads.
I consider that a fair give and take. But what apple now has done is unfair - in my opinion. YMMV.
There has been quite a bit of scientific literature regarding BPA - see the links from Wikipedia.
Also, the fact that top kill failed while their oil siphoning mechanism was perfected seems rather dubious.
I understand that BP was taking a lot of flak, and they might be wary of pulling such a trick, but still my cynical side is not disallowing that possibility.
Generalizations are generally incorrect.
In India - we do have anti-intellectual sentiment in colleges, people think that talent and ability is innate, getting good marks while being lazy is better than getting excellent grades after hardwork and so on and so forth.
The difference I can see is that most asians who attempt spelling bee are kids whose parents who have immigrated to foreign countries.
These people usually are much more hard working and also have a high pro-intellectual sentiment - which then shows up in their kids too.