You need to consider what you want out of that money -- if you really want a fiscal return on your investment then you should stay away from startups. But if you serious...
First you should probably not consider being a simple angel investor unless you really know what you're doing. Unless you fully expect to lose all that money, with little to show other than a business card. The experience of being an angel investor will only really benefit you if you expect to have another infusion of cash in 6 months that you can blow through.
A more prudent course is to find a partner who might have an idea and an advisor who has been through the world of startups and stock before (they could be the same person, but just make sure the partner is not taking you for a ride). Then build it! Know that you can go for sometime without raising money, paying your bills out of the savings. Odds are you will still lose your money, but you will have learned a lot in the process -- including some learning that will really help you to be an angel investor in the future.
Yeah, theres definitely some details to work out. I was kind of throwing it out there as a seed of an idea and hoping people would either thrash it or expand upon it until it made sense.
I was also thinking about the trust schism that could occur. Many commercial entities would lose faith in those dns providers, they would over time need to build in business resumption plans that included working around a dns block. But that would be good right? It would commoditize the ability to work around SOPA, right?
Change your Windows power settings? Are you freaking kidding me?
Maybe they should have put included "Make sure the janitor doesn't turn off the desktop", "Getting slow? Reboot!" or "Ignore those snobby tech guys saying MS-Access isn't a real database".
Maybe the article should have been titled "Database helpz your salez LOZL"
Paypal was aware of it, as they claim its written into their policy.
They should stop worrying about the 'important people' and just simply 'do the right thing'. Start with retraining the customer service people to not be belligerent jerks. Next if you're going to stand behind some regulation to monitor accounts, staff it appropriately so innocent people don't get randomly locked out of access to their own money for 6 months.
The only way to get SEO these days is great inbound links or great unique content. If you don't have really great inbound content, then you better have a ton of really high profile sites linking to you.
Its been a while, at one point EngineYard was pretty awesome and really moved a lot forward in the RoR community. They've lost so many great people (and theres still some great people there), they've been moving more and more away from their developer roots, and in a series of baffling moves have been pushing away boutique customers in favor of highly commoditized cheap hosting. But PHP, really? I guess this is really the nail in the coffin for EY as a serious developer platform.
Its interesting, and now that I understand the game it makes sense and is cool.
But it literally took me a few minutes to figure out why male 'C' liked woman 'b' better, and I kept thinking "what am I missing?". Its the order of the bubbles on the side, and as an educational game it would be useful to describe this
Gads, its unfortunate that the site hosting this article is so filled with spammy ads -- the full screen intro is acceptable, but the full screen popup is not, and having both is just nuts. I like not using adblock, so site can get some impression revenue, but sites like this continue to make me think adblock is needed.
If you are representing this on an HTML page you'd need to Base64 encode the bugger, adding a lot more overhead.
Honestly I'm not sure why you wouldn't just simply use gzipped/JSON. My test show nearly no difference (1-2%) in performance with MessagePack, yet you get to leverage all kinds of things that already understand JSON.
"Idea Guys" make me laugh. Theres the old sayings about "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration", "the devil is in the details", etc are usually ignored by the idea guy, they think they get away with just spouting a few ideas and be done.
Ideas are cheap, theres a billion of them and 99% of them have major problems. Theres basically no such thing as a successful idea guy; theres project managers, business development people, developers, money people, etc and lots of them have ideas. Start working on business plan, raising money, building relationships, get in and figure out the subtle details of those ideas.
I'm a perl hacker from way back. I put a few things in CPAN back in my day. But honestly I've not written perl in a decade, so when I got a really amazing job offer for a position doing Perl, I gave it some thought.
Perl is not only not the sexiest/hottest language, but watching and waiting for Perl6 and getting the OO model cleaned up is like waiting for "Duke Nukem Forever". So do you really want to ride on that train? Do you think it will look good on your resume, improve your skill set, or help you think in new and better ways? For all practical purposes the language is dead (FINE, a perl6 implementation is out, but still if the growth is that slow it IS all but dead).
I get offers pretty much constantly to do work in Python, Ruby, and even Java. It would take a lot to make me want to backtrack to an environment that wouldn't help me to grow and evolve as a developer. So the answer for me was "No thanks, thats not really what I want to be doing".
First you should probably not consider being a simple angel investor unless you really know what you're doing. Unless you fully expect to lose all that money, with little to show other than a business card. The experience of being an angel investor will only really benefit you if you expect to have another infusion of cash in 6 months that you can blow through.
A more prudent course is to find a partner who might have an idea and an advisor who has been through the world of startups and stock before (they could be the same person, but just make sure the partner is not taking you for a ride). Then build it! Know that you can go for sometime without raising money, paying your bills out of the savings. Odds are you will still lose your money, but you will have learned a lot in the process -- including some learning that will really help you to be an angel investor in the future.