I believe this is true, and I have a theory that these public spectacles are fuelled and perpetuated primarily by the simple fact that anyone with well reasoned, rational responses tend to keep quiet in fear of being drawn into an ugly discourse - leaving the metaphorical inmates to run the prison.
Thanks ig1. We're located in Vancouver BC. Unfortunately, neither of us are particularly schmoozy and generally don't have a lot of time on our hands. VCs and similar don't tend to visit the conferences here anyway, and we're quite a ways past being in an incubator (600k seed, imagn.com, 2 cofounders - 1 technical, 1 business).
To be fair to John Hammond, I'm not sure creating a (albeit massive) social networking service is in the same league as reverse engineering 65+ million year old, fragmented DNA strands, then bringing the dinosaurs not only to term, but healthy adulthood, and finally housing them in a multi-billion dollar facility on a leased island.
Facebook has roughly 4x as much source code as Jurassic Park did, and probably can't be run from a single room for up to three days with minimal staff.
Also, if say, Facebook Profiles breaks down, the profiles don't eat the users.
This seems like a very cynical article. On the behalf of everyone in Canada, the UK, and Australia, it's very common for people to reciprocate this sort of courtesy and genuinely mean it. In fact, I'd go as far to say that most people would be downright offended if you didn't reciprocate.
Similarly, most people go out of their way to thank transit drivers, and everyone holds doors. Perhaps an American could share some insight.
Would love to get some insight into how and where you did this, local news isolation has been a real pain-point for me. Brilliant project, by the way - very clean.
Great to see more people exploring the world of wearable interfaces. How does it compare to existing gloves like the Peregrine? ( http://theperegrine.com )
Whilst 37signals does use this bit of creative IP to generate revenue, the page itself isn't actually the product - so copying it creates neither a reduced demand for the page itself or 37signals' services, nor does it impact their bottom-line in any obvious way (curebit and 37signals aren't in the same product-space).
Although the page itself is defensible IP for 37signals, the chances of them taking legal action on it (see above) is so remotely slim that it puts this whole thing into the realm of creative and professional courtesy rather than copyright infringement.
It's more like a stranger coming into the town saloon, getting drunk, and spilling his beer on the local bad-ass.
Simple answer - the vast majority programmers rarely see more than rudimentary math on most projects, unless those projects are specifically math orientated (actual sciences, for example).
The rest of us working on our sites, platforms, apps and what-have-you usually only see anything resembling math when dealing with things like UI and Interaction models, or typically soft-math areas like rating systems and segmentation.
Possibly inflammatory, but perhaps a better question would be: why do most programmers work so hard at pretending they're engineers?
I personally don't consider circles/spheres to be extremely novel, they're just in there to highlight the design process and the fact that there seems to some unexplainable similarities in naming.
I do consider the interactive planner to be novel, as with currents which share the name as google currents.
More so than this, we have developed a system for identity management called Personas which we demo'd in Beijing a couple of months ago. All signs point to google releasing this system in the very near future despite claiming they wouldn't. I predict it will have the same name also.
http://www.snopes.com/science/microwave/plants.asp