Aegean

I am not sure an atomic bomb is a good comparison, I have heard nuclear reactors possess many multiples of radioactive material than a bomb.

What was the name of that version control tool before CVS, RVCS? Back in 2007 I had heard one very big name hardware company using that for version control and planning to move to CVS as they thought the former was beginning to show its age.

Very old news.

I disagree. The rest of the world gets talent back at the cost of those talented individuals. You are one individual starting a startup and the government, the people, everybody is against you. You must own a strong corporation with R&D centers to be able to swim against that tide. It's not for individual entrepreneurs. I think this way because I have been through it and now closing down in my home country, moving to the U.S.

How would you fix it? The leaders in those countries should fix it.

I don't think this answer holds true anymore, i.e. the newbies who are a year old would claim comment quality is going low. I think it now has become the norm. Why not just aim for a standard near the top quality submissions?

why does he say they failed?

haha the losers are partnering up. Nice move. This was visible from many years ago. Starting from details like how microsoft windows annoys you to install updates or creates pop ups and how slow your machine gets after a while. Also take Nokia's mediocre symbian GUI with no developer/hacker perspective whatsoever on their devices.

Why do new build systems have to use some clunky old make style syntax? For me speed is hardly a primary goal. A build system must be understandable, readable and easy to debug. For starters, it should have an easy to read syntax.

If you have a build system which your users are also concerned about, readability and maintainability are a lot more important. SCons managed to achieve most of this by using a Python syntax. But its behavior can be quite unpredictable at times.

The only reason GNU/Hurd is still a popular subject of discussion is its historical fame. There is no concrete reasoning behind this project anymore as to why it may find adoption. It is not easy to write operating systems in the first place. Adoption is even harder today because the subject is very well explored and the solution has become a commodity.

The reason is it is the second best. It doesn't solve the problems the ipad solves any better.

If it tried to solve only slightly different problems, it could still have a good market share even if it wasn't as famous as the ipad.

You don't really have to have networking or files to write programs. Currently in a baremetal embedded system (I am including the RTOSes) you can write programs in C or C++. It would be very useful to be able to write programs with a main() function using python. You could write an interactive shell, device drivers, even a small operating system. So what I mean here is instead of aiming for applications, you could use python to write system software.

I think there are already lua interpreters ported in this way but python is more common and perhaps easier to use.

Interesting. What would it take to run this on a baremetal ARM processor? There are many embedded ARM processors out there and ones running linux are a small fraction of them. There is also no reliable scripting interpreter for baremetal use except Lua.

Yes I thought about this idea. For example it would be nice to have a .fpga section in the ELF files and one could load images as part of OS file execution.

It is a nice idea and I would try to push this as a technology if I was Xilinx or Altera. But it requires that momentum to become a reality because this creates a new model and ABI for software - one that doesn't exist today.

I've researched this topic for a while in university, and the idea was to keep a general purpose FPGA as a programming device, and load preconfigured images to it when needed. For example load up an encryption module when encryption intensive operations took place, or load a video encoder/decoder whenever needed.

There were a few problems:

* Each FPGA vendor has its own architecture and such a technology requires momentum from these vendors. A 3rd party cannot do much about it.

* Dedicated ASIC circuits often perform better with less power consumption. So keeping a general purpose FPGA may not bring sufficient benefit to develop the technology.

This is one of my favorite lessons learned, also covered here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I believe non-english speaking countries are hard for startups. I would personally not choose a country other than UK or U.S. How do I handle company accounts in Spanish? How do I deal with government? In UK government is easy to deal with, you can file everything online.

"These statements aren’t just true about the product — sure, they might have a crufty old VB6 app and you have the new Node.js hotness. They are equally true about the customer acquisition process. You’re competing with their business, not with their product, so you could possibly either focus your innovation on customer acquisition or, more likely, use innovation on both customer acquisition and product in a mutually supportive manner."

This is very true. You often have a more innovative product but the established competitor has a business. It makes sense to acknowledge this fact and work on it.

Codezero was a result of dissatisfaction from earlier L4 kernels and we worked through the engineering details. It is a simpler kernel with a smaller API, linux virtualization interface and source code. We also have better ARM support including multicore and focus only on ARM and Linux. See here for some of the features: http://bit.ly/ifGXxN

I think you are missing the point. The summary of the article is Microsoft may be a monopoly but it is not a danger for fragile new technology startups. They retain their existing monopoly but world domination is not in their radar anymore.

Edit: Another way to look at it, dead here means the opposite of "Stay hungry, stay foolish".

"A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead." haha that's a great sentence to start an article.

Lean or not, one big lesson I learned is not to implement a feature until somebody asks for it. This is a surprisingly difficult thing to do, if your mindset has been focused on building things for a long time. If you are not aiming for commercial success, usually building things not necessarily require validation. You can often build for experimentation or fun.

After spending weeks on building and removing features, if I now catch myself building something, I ask the question, "who told me to do this?" and often refrain from doing it.

One hidden power of not building is the simplicity that it brings. You have one less feature to maintain, and you probably save weeks of quality engineering time by not having that feature.

what is the catch with google as email hosting? we use rackspace, it seems nobody is using rackspace for email. What is the criteria in choosing email hosting?

thing is, internet is a fragile market. Especially in social, if something else becomes hot, users can go away very quickly. It's not like some manufacturing business where you build relationships over years.

Some possible risks:

* Orkut-like sites were around for a long time, now nobody uses them today. People shifted to facebook and may move elsewhere.

* It is possible that a decentralized, autonomous solution may come up for social profiles.

* The fact that the company is not mature is a double-edged sword, a new idea or feature may come up that may well make facebook a less attractive place to be.

350M income, $50B valuation? So with today's facts you get your investment back in 142 * 3/4yr = 106 years?

legacy RISC mode? last time I checked it was called the ARM mode, which is the absolute standard.

Thumb has benefits, but there are also limitations which is why I wouldn't call it a replacement.

We don't know the whole story but if you hold that much grudge in yourself this is how you end up. Bad karma brought him bad karma.

Trouble is in a startup you always try new things you are not skilled at.

How do we increase the chance to get sitelinks to show up on google?

This is typical of a sales story I read from books. You were on a sales mission and it seems like:

1) You reached the wrong people. The focus of power in your case (CEO) was not the one making purchasing decisions (the HR guy)

2) You did not solve a pain in your prospect's business or, you could not sufficiently communicate what problem you would solve as an employee. You should have focused on this in your conversations.

I wouldn't say they used you, and you shouldn't be angry. It just did not make business sense for them and you could not make a sufficiently attractive sales pitch to the company as a whole.

Web programming is hard but not necessarily intuitive. That's what I dislike about it. Its a heap of different technologies put together in unstructured fashion. This applies to individual technologies as well, take CSS and see how unintuitive a syntax it has.

Web programming is popular because it drives the web. I don't necessarily find it an intuitive programming experience. This way of thinking is the biggest obstacle ahead of the likes of me (hackers for pleasure) for business success, i.e. primarily focusing on what's interesting from an engineering perspective. This approach is sure to fail in business because people always care about the end result. Technology is just a tool to get there.

I guess part of the problem is when you study computer science or engineering in university, you try to learn the best engineering approaches out there and improve on your engineering skills. Then you face real life where the result matters. I cannot really say CSS or javascript is the best technology out there, but they play a crucial part driving the web.