If you're absolutely new to web programming then the first thing you must learn is HTML. Some may think thats a given, but I think it's important to point out. If you can't get your head around HTML, you're not going to be building websites.
You'd need only look as far as FEMA to see an example of what a government agency can provide. Do you really want a similar agency running your healthcare? I'd sooner sign up for Google-Health, if there were such a thing.
Enron's ability to manipulate the system was only possible because the system was not a free market, but a disastrously regulated market. Also, Enron behaved in criminally fraudulent ways, which for a business, is the beginning of the end. So Enron does not provide a free market comparison.
When will other countries understand that: the best role of government is to ensure the rights of businesses and people. If you get that right, the rest will follow. They shouldn't be using tax dollars as venture seed money. They'd be better off refunding it to the taxpayers!
100% agree - I never saw the rationale for the government making risky investments, just because purportedly nobody else does. Imagine your bank adviser telling you they are going to put your money into high risk investments because nobody else does. Yet if the government spends our money like that, few people seem to realize that it is basically the same thing happening.
But I agree with you that it is not the government which should be taking those risks, since (as others have pointed out in this thread), governments really don't know what they're doing in that regard.
You're right, not to finance competitors. There are maybe 3 or 4 companies that matter in defense, each making many billions while others get an order of magnitude less. So, no...there is no funding competitors in defense. There isn't much competition to speak of.
But this is not to say the machines Boeing makes are not amazing.
My comments are from working on military contracts. They're enough to make a reasonable person run for the hills.
That is a billion dollar question: how do you get the military to buy my awesome product. The answer is usually absorb the culture and lower your productivity.
You need to do an order-of-magnitude idea check. Wireless video broadcast is extremely intensive, and radio technology is expanding at a sub-linear rate.
There is a problem with Moore's law vs. 2D images: making more transistors on an imager will only be half as effective as the extra cpu power needed to crunch it. A doubling of density turns a 320x240 into 640x480. This means twice the computation for four times the image size.
The point is that bandwidth will always matter. Video is the kind of application that will make it matter.
I think BlackBerry users would beg to differ. I've seen some people typing pretty darn fast on those things, and I wouldn't have thought it possible. It's all about habituation.
If you really want to accomplish as much as possible in your life, you could start by throwing out your prejudices. Computer languages aren't religions, they're tools, get over it.
Throwing out predjudices is always good advice. However, Paul Graham and others have argued (convincingly) that a language is not a tool. A compiler is a tool. A language is the actual medium that a programmer works in. It will effect every aspect of a software project, including the way in which the programmers think.
Sucks to your Sapir-Whorf hypothesis! That said higher-level languages do have real, non-mythical advantages over lower-level ones if one is trying to work quickly and with minimal effort. Good luck with your decision.
My point is that there are many really good, legitimate and numerically quantifiable reasons for using a high-level language that have nothing to do with the mythical, unprovable Sapir-Whorf justification.
As for the "tradeoff" I mean that high-level languages are particularly useful if one is primarily interested in minimizing development time possibly at the expense of other variables. Examples of "other variables" include processing time, memory usage, ease of hiring cog-like but adequate developers to maintain the system, company politics, etc. Such other factors are used everyday to justify the higher-effort solutions.
Does that make more sense? Sorry for any confusion.
Saying that the programming language conditions how you think is not equivalent to Sapir-Whorf. Think of it this way: an expert Lisp programmer using C++ will be very aware of the shortcuts, simplifications, generalizations, ... that he could be implementing with higher order functions, closures, macros, etc. He can have these thoughts even though he is using C++, so no Sapir-Whorf here. But many of these thoughts will only serve to cause him pain, since the required techniques are impossible or not worth it in the less expressive language.
Processing time is a real tradeoff, but you can go a long way if you get good at identifying the bottlenecks and translating the critical code to a faster language. I work in a massively multiplayer online game, which is a very performance sensitive application both client and server side, and most of our code is Python (and I think a good part of our C/C++ code could be ported to Python without significantly hurting performance).
Theoretically, high level languages should eventually perform better, not worse, than low level languages, as compiler technology improves, because the compiler has more information and freedom to perform optimizations. OCaml is a high level language which claims performance on the order of C.
Re: memory usage, I'm not convinced the overhead of higher level languages is a big deal, except for apps in very restricted hardware. Unless you mean cache coherency, which goes back to speed.
Re: easy of hiring, in my company we had some graphics guys picking up Python and contributing useful code in a very short time. We also had C++ programmers picking up Python easily, although I must admit C++ habits and idioms die hard.
That said, ease of hiring cog-like developers and company politics is not what I'd look for in a startup.
I admit I cheated by mentioning Lisp, OCaml, and Python to reply different points. Lisp and OCaml are less mainstream and not as trivial to pick as Python, which in turn is not as powerful or as efficient as these.
So yes, there are tradeoffs, but I wouldn't pick C++ as the pragmatic compromise, not even for big business. IMHO, Python + C (via ctypes) for close to the metal stuff would be it. For personal/startup work, I'd go for Scheme, and be happy to limit my hiring choices to people willing to learn that.
If you read my replies carefully you will realize that we are likely in agreement on many points and that you are putting words into my mouth.
As for the Sapir-Whorf argument the relevant case is not what the Lisp programmer thinks while programming C++ but what the only-C++ programmer thinks while programming C++. Are there thoughts he is not capable of thinking because he has not been exposed to Lisp (or any other non-C++ language)? I do not believe this is the case. How would Lisp have been invented if only Lisp programmers are capable of thinking at that level of abstraction?
Sorry if I gave that impression. I realise some of the things I said in my latest reply may come across as trying to refute arguments which you of course didn't make. My intention was to go deeper into what you said about the tradeoffs involved. I admit my arguing for high level languages was a bit out of place in that context; I guess I got carried away by the tone in the rest of the thread. In particular, in my last paragraph I didn't mean to imply that you were proposing C++ as a pragmatic solution, esp. for startups. So please accept my apologies.
With the Lisper-coding-C++ example I was trying to convey that even if you could think such thoughts, it wouldn't help you much for practical purposes unless you can express them in a convenient way. So, even if we discard the Sapir-Whorf argument in the literal sense, for practical purposes you may just as well pretend it's applicable.
That said, I find different languages do shape how you think about programming.
The people that invented Lisp were mathematicians, which of course were used to thinking at a pretty high level of abstraction. It's not strictly impossible to come upon the same ideas on your own, just as it's not strictly impossible to come upon ideas that are not expressible in your natural language, even if you accept Sapir-Whorf. After all, somebody had to invent the words of natural languages too.
But there is a huge leap between learning a concept(+) and inventing it. Natural languages evolved over thousands (millions?) of years; modern mathematics took a couple thousand years to discover. Yet most children learn their native languages effortlessly, and a high school kid learns centuries worth of mathematical advances in a few years.
So yes, you could think of the thoughts that higher level programming languages afford without having ever been exposed to those languages, but that would be an exercise of lucidity comparable to finding a bunch of significant new mathematical theorems, or to inventing new words for concepts that can't be readily expressed in English, without having learned about those concepts in French or Japanese before.
I completely agree about learning rather than reinventing.
And I think learning different languages in particular is valuable because it helps to intimately introduce one to various useful concepts.
But in general the most valuable of those concepts are both simple and language independent. Typically you can map such concepts used in one domain onto another domain and leverage them there as well.
I don't see the "languages" as being as important or as absolutely dominant over thought as the Sapir-Whorf style arguments imply. Plus I don't believe the arguments in an absolute, philosophical sense. And I've seen the argument made too many times in a way that tends to insult some of our fellow programmers for no good reason.
Anyway, I think we're probably in agreement about a lot of things but perhaps the Internet is getting in the way of our communication. Interesting talk, take care and good luck!
Firstly, very nice. Your color scheme reminds me of slashdot. I like the fact that the site is fairly usable without login. The only thing I can recommend is getting a widget out.
I don't mean to be harsh but the design of the site is sorely lacking. It looks like your design was trying for zen-like simplicity but instead just looks amateurish. There is much wrong with the design, and instead of posting a short novel on the subject I would recommend googling "basic design principles" or going into your local Barnes & Noble and finding the same.
Beyond that, I would also criticize your choice of domain name. It is good that you are using real words in your domain name, but the words "ourdoing" has nothing to do with photos, time or email, which I take it is the essence what you are offering. A domain like "bestphotoemail.com" would serve you better even if its not your brand name.
I do like your logo, conceptually at least. It needs work and should be more prominent.
Well there's nothing wrong with a simple design. As long as it helps get the user what they want. It's got that craigslist feel to it. I just think (s)he needs to improve the usability. As a user I wanna be uploading/sharing/viewing pics in as few steps as possible. I found the demo lacking and I had to log out of the demo, then go back "hosting plan" to sign up, then wait 20 mins for my email before I could start using the service. That being said, keep up the good work. As for your business model, I don't think I'm qualified to comment on that.
This is very useful feedback; I wish I could mod you up twice. I'll put it at the top of my list of gaining-new-customers features. Making existing customers happy is higher priority, though, and I have a few things on that list to get out of the way.
The site is most useful for photos that help tell a story, e.g. of travels, or of kids growing up. My private family site is on there, and chronicles our doings over the past several years. The name wouldn't fit the timeless artistic photos you find on webshots or flickr, but that's not what this site is for.
Glad you mostly like the logo. I might at some point make it more prominent on the front page. On people's sites within ourdoings.com, I plan on leaving it less prominent. I want them to feel ownership. Having my logo take the primo real estate of the upper left corner would not serve that purpose.
A novel about design might not serve me well, since I don't have enough design sense to tell what advice to accept/reject. If there's a basic, obvious principle or two I've violated, I might actually fix it if you tell me specifically. Design isn't likely to be my highest priority any time soon, though.
The idea that only twenty somethings have what it takes to be entrepreneurial is downright ridiculous. Yet it is an idea that keeps on popping up (recent nytimes article for example). The reason may simply be that there are more people in that age group starting companies. A larger starting pool results in a larger pool of success. But as is the case with any statistic it seems, people mistake it for truth. So in conclusion, no, 30+ is not too old to start a company. But if you want to use it as an excuse to sit on the sidelines, by all means, do so.
