spokey

Ya know, I'm usually a fan of alternative history and "what if" kinds of futurism, but these people can't be serious. A breakup of the United States, let alone one that sees the US divvied up between Canada, China, the European Union and Mexico isn't even remotely possible in the next year or even in the next decade. Even with a 50+ year time horizon you have to be pretty imaginative to come up with a plausible course to a scenario remotely like this--and that's still ridiculously unlikely.

- Also, what does "European Union" even mean here? The EU is composed of individual member states. Is the former US Northeast ruled directly and collectively from Brussels in this scenario? Is that an independent nation that has joined the EU?

The author, and the "analysts" he links to are either trolls or fools. Possibly both.

Link?

Hi Jori and Karri.

Kippt does look promising. I have a little bit of a meta-question for you.

Do you have any tips or advice you could share about getting covered on RWW with an early stage app?

Based on a cursory look I think you'll agree that Kippt is an MVP right now. A well polished MVP, but still an MVP, and one that isn't markedly different than (and in some ways you've already called out, somewhat lacking in features compared to) a host of Delicious- and Instapaper-type apps. (I don't intend that to be negative, so I hope you don't take it that way.)

How did you manage to get RWW to cover Kippt at such an early stage?

It's less that no-one knows who _why is and more that good people everywhere don't bother to try to find out. The community is willing and able to support his preference to remain "anonymous".

I assume with enough Googling around you could figure out his given name, but I've never tried to do it. If you do find out his name or other personal information, please DON'T post it here. This thin veil of anonymity seems to be important to _why, and that's good enough reason for me.

It's kinda like the graffiti artist Banksy. It's not that it is impossible to track him down--he participated in a documentary about him and I think I've heard him interviewed on NPR before--but that those that could readily "out" him are willing to protect his privacy.

Are you a native English speaker?

I'm not the OP here, but I'm curious if you've never heard the idiom or the if the idiom just rubs you the wrong way.

> Replace god in this expression by gays, Allah, children, science, music, bits or whatever

That's just it, "for the love of X" doesn't really get a rise out of me for any value of X.

A less common variation of the idiom is "for the love of Mike", which I think points out how arbitrary the object one's affection is in this expression.

> And it doesn't provide any useful and constructive information to the main point.

Without commenting on whether the use was appropriate in this case (frankly I don't have much of an opinion either way), usually that expression is just a way of underscoring the importance of the part that comes after it. For example:

"for the love of x, please stop doing that"

implies more emotion and greater importance than:

"please stop doing that"

The importance of being able to actually reach potential customers, and how to do so profitably (ie. cost of acquisition).

No matter how well you can covert or how sticky your product is, you need to be able to get to them first. Most hackers I know (and the old me too) think SEO, SEM, display ads and maybe viral/WOM have this pretty well covered. Not every customer is easily reached via search keywords.

I have an ASUS (my second in the EEE line) with exactly the same keyboard. You get used to it, or at least I did. I actually think the chicklet-style keyboards on recent EEEs are among the best laptop keyboards I've used. A much bigger problem for me is accidently hitting the touchpad while typing. Depending on your OS there is usually a way to disable the touchpad while typing.

On the thickness thing, do they advertise this as being as thin as the Macbook Air? I took that picture more along the lines of "here is the X101 compared to a laptop you're probably familiar with". The optical illusion created by the black plastic is a little sneaky though.

Is there a site with reliable specs for this box? Googling around I've seen different numbers (e.g, a 16GB SSD vs. a 64GB SSD). What's the battery life? That's what appeals to me most about the EEEs.

I'm not sure I understand what it would mean for this to be "a hoax". Someone made and released it, right? I thought the point of Anonymous is that it is not a specific organization or group. Whoever made this video could claim to speak for Anonymous as much as the guys that hacked HB Gary, right?

Is it widely known/suspected that the various hacks and messages that have been attributed to Anonymous are from the same group of people?

EDIT: Ha. Great minds think alike. I see Xuzz was posting precisely the same idea as I was typing this.

I'm high on the introversion scale (and work from home, the cafe, etc. with some regularity) but I agree with the grandparent post. I like having a space dedicated to work and the ability to collaborate with my coworkers in person.

While it seems self-evident that a willingness to plow thru obstacles is a good trait for entrepreneurs to have, I think the specific example selected for the article is a poor choice. I have a word for the kind of person that would voluntarily attend and then disturb the religious observances of dozens of people because of a minor, fleeting, personal inconvenience, but it isn't "entrepreneur".

Bulldozing through a velvet rope to gain entrance to a club or restaurant is one thing. Bulldozing through a velvet rope because you were late to the opera or because you want to skip out of rabbi's sermon is another.

(Also, the title is misleading. The point of this article seems to be that there is only one type of entrepreneur.)

I hope this doesn't sound condescending because I'm very, very far from an expert in this field, but you might want to spend some time researching conventional methods of business valuation. I'm pretty sure your expectations are a little off here.

I think this could be a valuable service, but $99/test seems quite high (compared to similar services targeting desktop instead mobile users). At $500 to run Nielsen's recommended 5 person test, running my own tests starts to look like a viable substitute for your service (considering I'm likely to want to run more than one round of tests).

I think this is true at both ends of the scale: Startups will compare this cost against guerrilla testing techniques (e.g., sourcing testers on fiverr, asking people on the street, or inviting them into a lab for a hour for a small reward). Large firms will compare the value of this service to hiring a more high-touch UX firm (or building this competency internally) that does much more than record test sessions.

For what it's worth, here are some questions I have as a potential buyer:

* How long are the test sessions in general?

* How are the tests "facilitated", or more to the point, what happens if testers don't understand the task instructions or can't get the app to run?

* How are you sourcing testers? Can you quantify their demographics? Can you provide testers that meet specific demographic profiles?

I'm a little confused by your question. Are you looking to spend $100K or to generate $100K annually? If the latter, the company is probably "worth" 2 to 5 times $100K.

> There are not 10 herokous or similar

1. Salesforce's Force.com

2. Amazon's EC2

3. Google's AppEngine

4. Microsoft's Windows Azure

5. VMWare/Salesforce's VMForce

6. Makara

7. CloudBees

8. PiCloud

9. PHPFog

10. DuoStack

I'm not sure it's obvious that PaaS is "winner take all", but even if it is, right now there are several deep-pocketed companies fighting to be that winner. Sounds pretty good if you're looking for an exit.

I'm a couple of years younger than Julian Assange and commonly use two spaces after each sentence, purely out of muscle memory. (I took a "keyboarding" class in 1987 or so using an IBM Selectric typewriter and that's the way I was taught to do it.)

I'm not at all surprised that many people still do this. I'm a little surprised that people assert that's a "proper" way to do it or for that matter get worked up enough about it to write that you should "never, ever" do it. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I was expecting an actual negative consequence of using two spaces. Typography is important, but I'd guess that with modern kerning techniques the difference between two spaces and one is slight. (In fact, if I were designing a word processing app, I'd think this is is a case I'd account for: If there is a "proper" distance between the period at the end of one sentence and the start of the next letter, wouldn't you ensure that's the distance that is used whether the user typed one space or two?)