disdev

Did Microsoft hit the "jump the shark" moment with holograms?

I have an MIS degree, and generally, you're correct. They're light on technology, though I did learn some basics. I already knew a lot of that already, though... what I learned the most from were the Accounting, Marketing, and Business Management classes I took.

Personally, I always use either an auto-incremented ID or a GUID. I don't like using a real value of the object as a key. Generally, I think it's good practice, but you're right... I'd index off of that.

Best line from the write-up: It combined three of my passions: running, photography, and getting attention.

Great design!

Other cities have similar characters, I'm sure.

Memphis has Prince Mongo [http://www.1045theriver.com/pages/7337724.php?]

I grew up in Memphis. Prince Mongo had a nightclub that was the place to go for high school kids. They apparently never checked for ID's... it was known for serving to high schoolers.

Interesting to compare the Partnership for American Innovation with this list: http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2014-03-12/offshore-pr...

And, Apple and Microsoft have previously funded patent trolls (IV). And IBM has more than 50,000 patents and brings in over $1 billion annually in licensing revenue.

It's a bit difficult where I am (semi-rural)... busy roads, no sidewalks, dogs without leashes (pitbull attacks are too frequent).

But, I do the same with running. I drive to nearby trails most every day. And for the family, we do short backpacking trips with no real goal. Just hike a few miles out to a campsite, hang out, read, cook, play around, and then head home the next evening. My kids are young (7 and 12), and I think it does them a lot of good to be able to cover some distance and pack things in and out on their own.

Those arguments should only affect the damages, not the finding of infringement.

Exactly. And I think it's a potentially valid argument (without knowing all the details about the case). But, not knowing about a patent, or saying you didn't copy from a non-existent (or existing) implementation of it, doesn't mean you're not bound by it.

Let's say I patent a design for a table, something unique and interesting that's never been done before. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to building it yet, or haven't marketed it publicly. You come around after my patent and build and sell a table that is very similar to my table design... even exactly the same in some respects. Even though you may not have known about my patent, and didn't maliciously copy anything, you would still be infringing upon my patent. Even if you just built the table from someone else's parts.

The resolution would be that you either pay me a reasonable license fee, buy the patent, or argue over the validity. For the validity aspect, you either say you had prior art that predates my table design, that some other prior design existed, or that my patent shouldn't have been granted for some other reason.

I worked for a company that invented a novel product but didn't patent it. Some other company came around and made the same thing a few years later and patented it. Personally, I think they knew about our product, but that's not important. They were granted the patent and then proceeded to send warning letters to our customers, saying they were the patent holders and might be calling later to collect license fees. Then, they sent something to us saying, hey, we can proceed with collecting from your customers, or you can license it from us directly and it'll cover all your customers.

We could have gone to court to have the patent invalidated. We had prior art. But, not knowing what prior art they had, and the generally slow nature of that process, and the risk to our customers, we just paid them. It was an annual fee that wasn't too onerous and made it worth it just to pay it.

That is about the trolliest of patent trolling. But, they played their hand perfectly and make a lot of money on that license annually with no real work to get it.

Personally, I think software and process patents shouldn't exist.

I think that's kind of the point...

I guess I don't understand the significant advantage this would provide. You can accomplish some of the same functionality with other control flow libraries. Also, I could see the future declaration, with potentially cascading effects, causing as much confusion in the code as callbacks.

The point of Node is that it is asynchronous.

I just see it as removing a layer of complexity... I don't really care for having PayPal functionality, and not having to worry about the monthly fee paid to you makes it easier on me and you. You get paid quickly, and I don't have to account for another fee. The 50 cents just becomes part of COGS.

Great job! I'll definitely be giving this a shot!

Quick question, though... Do you use Stripe's Connect API for the 50 cent transaction fee you're taking (application_fee)?

Would be nice if they decided that cashflow forecasting (Microsoft Money and Quicken Online both did that well-ish) was important to add. That's the single reason I haven't gone with Mint.

I think the issue comes across pretty clearly in the initial conversations. If you're dealing with a client looking for the cheapest possible website, he's going to force the issue of price early on. If you're dealing with a solution-oriented one, there's some understanding of the cost to value relationship.

To me, that's the key. Value. A $10,000 website is a bargain if it allows them to bring in much more than that in new business or save more than that in costs. But to get that message across, you have to quantify and drive home the potential payoff.

I have both RamNode and Digital Ocean servers in production.

In terms of performance and cost, both are great. I haven't ever had any issues with Digital Ocean. With RamNode, they've had a couple of issues where there's been minimal downtime. And they had a breach back in June, but responded well.

I think I trust Digital Ocean more. The setup is easier and performance maybe slightly better.

Seems to be a theme.

I had to re-do our TeamCity integration when they stripped out the IIS Path property out of the project file in favor of publishing profiles. For a shop like ours, where we have lots of small projects, automating the deployment is pretty critical. I don't want to have to add 120 publish profiles when previously I could rely on the project settings.

Ultimately, we hacked together a fix, but I'm still wary of their changes.

Obviously that's not sustainable... but even the 60 hour version sounds pretty rough to me. Without a wife and kids, maybe. But I think if I tried this I wouldn't have to worry about a wife and kids anymore.

Am I the only one who works better and more efficiently when I have a little bit of a break in between?

A few NSA.gov.cn addresses too...

Best piece of tech satire in a long time.

Google font the header.

Groupon was offered about $6 billion by Google in 2010.

Groupon turned them down, thinking they were worth more and then went the IPO route.

Now, in late 2013, Groupon has a market cap of $6.8 billion.

Moral of the story? Take the money and run.

Exceptional?

How about "A decent phone at a decent price."

Share your email address?

I've had pretty good success with Cloud9's IDE.

I like that it's SSH based... I can secure it reasonably well and run any terminal command I need. It has decent code completion (at least for Node), a nice file tree view, can format code with indentations, etc... overall, a pretty nice experience.

The way I have it set up, is I work on a dev VPS (using their SSH). For any deploys, I check in my code, then can terminal into the production machine and git it. So, I can debug through the dev setup, then deploy to production when ready.

I've gotta say, I'm a big fan of the software. I'm excited to use it in an upcoming project!

I'd love to say there's some more nefarious work going on, like governments trying to quash Bitcoin and executing these hacks...

But my guess is it comes down to poor security.

Definitely a time-sink. And I seriously question its value as a long-tail investment. Even if you use it to document processes or a tutorial, after a couple of years or so it's out of date.

But I think you hit on the right value for someone who's not in the business of blogging: writing out the idea. We can keep ideas in our head, even code things out, but the process of putting your ideas into a blog post is a great way to flesh it out.

Daily stand-ups were the best thing I ever did for this. We had our task list on big post-it notes on the wall. We talked about which ones we were going to accomplish, what we had done the day before, and what we expected to do that day.

That way, when I looked at their check-ins and their project updates, I had context for that.

Good test.

At some point, you'd expect these arbitrary this vs. that comparisons to die off. They haven't, and I'm guessing they won't.

Basically, it comes down to picking the tool that best supports your use case, or being okay with a compromise. Like the SQL/NoSQL discussions recently... Use it poorly and you get poor results.