guinness

I've worked for a couple of startups in Montreal. Their biggest competitive advantage was always that they could do things for less. This is because wages are low and so is the cost of living.

I don't think that undercutting your competitors is a viable long term business strategy since you end up being cheap labor. This also discourages innovation since the focus is on copying what someone has already done and doing it for less.

There is already a lot of talent in Montreal but if Montreal is to become an open source startup hub, it needs to change this cheap labor mindset into one of innovation.

If you find karate impractical, try a good school of kyokushin karate and tell me that it's not useful. As for kung fu not being practical, that depends entirely on your school (kung fu covers so many different types of martial arts including wing chun). Aikido is very useful but not by itself (most MMA champs have studied aikido).

The real thing that should be said is that every martial art style is practical and what really matters is the quality of the dojo at which you study. I've studied the same martial art in two different school and can say that the quality of the school is by far the most important factor.

I think that if you are in Toronto, it's worth checking out aikido seishinkai. I used to go there before I moved and missed it ever since. They don't have a website but:

http://www.torontoparentsguide.com/spid/1400/details.aspx

A lot of people are recommending you learn emacs. I do too but I want to add that emacs is very hard to learn since it feels so foreign at first so don't get discouraged, take it a little bit at a time.

I used to use vim and tried switching to emacs to see what it was about. On my first try I despised it. After my second, I fell in love and can't stand to use anything else anymore.

ps: Control-x-c is to quit ;-)

We should get a book thread going. Shogun is definitely one of my favorites.

The price tag seems high. As previously mentioned it might be because of, low inventory volumes, new tech., etc.. What baffles me is that this technology was developed with OLPC in mind. How can you hope to sell a 100$ laptop (original price target) if a 10" screen with the same technology is 275$?

OLPC didn't have insane production volumes to begin with yet shipped for 150$ which is less than this screen. Moreover, it was specifically designed to be able to use existing LCD manufacturing technology which should keep the production cost low.

I predict that this price is inflated for early adopters since they will probably be selling all their inventory anyways. They are hopping to have an extremely high profit margin to recoup original investments.

E-mail provides no security. An e-mail can be forged simply by using telnet to connect to and SMP server (usually your ISPs) and typing the appropriate message (see wikipedia SMTP. The easiest fix for this is PGP as mentionned in previous posts. This is, however, a horrible solution since it will alienate many users (think your mother). The simplest solution that will do a good enough job is to send back an e-mail to the user with a 'preview' of his post for him to OK it since receiving e-mails is more secure.

Couchsurfing doesn't really set any guidelines for this, I've had people sleep on my couch who were moving, etc. It is really up to your host so make sure you mention this in the e-mail you send them. You might want to try couch surfing but shouldn't stay at someone's for more than 2-3 days.

I agree with what he said. Unfortunately for me, I did exactly what he said not to do and GSoC wasn't as fulfilling as it could have been as a result.

Lisp isn't a purely functional programming language, it can have side effects if you want it to but it isn't required.

The best way to see lisp is as a programming language which allows you to quickly build a context specific language to solve the desired problem. It is great for parsing data, prototyping, doing data driven design (since lisp code is data).

It is also one of the more efficient high level language and so is suitable for almost any task. The only reason not to use it is if you don't like parentheses. I recommend you give it a try, it's a lot of fun. Try reading SICP (the wizard book) and using Dr. Scheme for a nice start.

Cheers

I never gave much weight to these tests but saw myself described very well in poster's article and decided to do the test. Turns out I am also INTP. Pretty cool test.

As a side note, to solve my not finishing anything, I make a list of things I am to do during the day each morning and make sure it gets completed. It is important that the items in the list be doable in a reasonable amount of time and that they be measurable.