Competition isn't necessarily a bad thing, imo. A lot of companies and successful businesses enter a field where there is a proven demand and need and find a way to stand out.
Thanks, the kind words mean a lot. To be honest, I am not sure why the website has done so poorly in terms of search, but that is a good idea to reach out and try/get it on some top lists of web 2.0 name generators.
Thank you. Actually, in testing, the Namebird has been able to generate multiple names that are actual medication names. So there is something there, maybe I could modify it and make a version for use by pharmaceutical companies.
The hosting isn't too bad, but I'm paying for a somewhat powerful server as I am a bit of a perfectionist and only want to run the software at maximum capacity, so to speak. It's not much, but over the years, it adds up.
It allows you to make words that are fairly awesome and are great startup brand names. It even let's you make words via regular expressions - r.* im .* a creates words like retima and rimbra. (no spaces)
It didn't get a great HN response and in the 2 years since launch, I have spent a large amount on hosting and gotten no return whatsoever. I keep it up because it is incredibly powerful software and I hope it is helping at least some people.
Personally, I am a huge fan of Guy Noir. I wonder if he ever found out the secrets that the city was trying to keep from him - or if he found the answers to life's persistent questions... Guy Noir, Private Eye.
Yes, and as the wise narrator of this parody series points out, "What is most remarkable about this story is not that the dolphin knew the woman was sick, but that it knew she didn't know already."
If anything, I think lowering the barriers to entry should result in higher quality hit songs. For a hit song to occur, it has to become popular, which means a certain amount of oomph.
So with 1000 songs to choose from for the hot 100, you'd expect OK songs, but with 100,000 to choose from, you'd expect in a meritocracy much better songs.
Of course, the hot 100 is hit and miss. An example of a song which was made using affordable DAW software is, I believe, Crank That by Soulja Boy which is a song I personally dislike, take that as you will.
I don't. I think the dragon and angel references are there not because of an understanding of the game but rather to make it sound like what a powerful card should be. Obviously, to the reader who doesn't know MtG a rare dragon is more powerful than a rare flower, after all.
Reddit is a great site in what it does. And due to its nature, it has tremendous amount of niches, some of which are worth a lot of money if handled properly.
For instance, /r/watches is an active area for discussion of watches. The people who post there often share their new Rolex or their treasured Patek Phillipe. /r/watches is just one of many, many such niches on the site which have a lot of potential value.
My thinking has been that reddit could focus on developing the value in its many product oriented subforums.
Also, interestingly enough, reddit has already sort of created its own new cybercurrency - dogecoin. Though it may not be doing well, I think most of the value in dogecoin was how easy it was to use on reddit.
reddit does need to find a way to monetize. I think it could do so quite successfully due to the nature of it having many high value niches.
I say all this as a big fan of the site and have even been considering making a subreddit finder (so that someone who is a fan of the TV show Suits, for instance, can know that there is /r/suits to discuss the show, which they would have simply no way of knowing if they just landed on reddit's homepage with pictures of Very Round Eggs, to use a current example).
Java doesn't seem too popular here but used right it can work pretty well, imo.
For instance, I use Java for the backend of a name generator web app. It's astonishingly fast and displays results almost instantaneously despite running a good amount of backend calculations.
This speed became an issue because you'd push the go button and the names would update - but it seemed like nothing happened. So I ended up adding an artificial delay twice (the first time it wasn't enough of a delay).
On the other hand, its structure and methods can at times be frustratingly complex.
Ensuring quality when you randomly generate things is hard.
I made a word generator tool. In doing so, for just 6-14 letter words, I had to develop a large amount of quality regulation formulas that would detect unnatural patterns ("xamxo" for instance might be a questionable pattern to have in a word).
Anyway, the thought of coming up with a generator to make a whole book (at least one that is coherent) is an interesting one - and much, much more challenging.