I have seen Damian's amazing presentations and I still feel sad for what's happened to Perl since he became a strong influence.
I believe he is the one who has most encouraged the tendencies which led to the Perl 6 debacle. His strong charisma has made it acceptable to have the following attitudes in the Perl 6 effort:
- Actual use by mortal programmers is boring; satisfying your desire to be brilliant and clever is what matters
- Complexity and obscurity are fun. Perl is good or popular because the language is complex, therefore the next version of Perl should be even more complex.
Perl 6 really has nothing to do with Perl 5. It's more like those movies that say "a movie by the producers of $THING_THAT_WAS_AWESOME" which neglect to mention the script and the director are different.
True story: I was at an OpenID developer meeting some time ago and BradFitz was asking people to explain all this crazy nomenclature, because even he can't quite follow it any more.
OpenID is a simple idea that was seized upon and overwhelmed by a large number of asshats who wanted to embrace and extend the concept with dopey shit like XRIs.
Unfortunately, those people have way too much influence on the written spec. This is not to denigrate anything daveman692 is doing and BradFitz did, it's the other people that I wish would fall off a cliff.
I think the banks also know that accounts are such high-value targets that criminals have better ways to steal, anyway. Straight up identity fraud is way more of a problem than account hacking.
Unlikely. The person on the phone doesn't have the right to make judgments like that. Furthermore, if they were to allow it, that means that everyone who writes gibberish can have their account compromised by someone who guessed that it's gibberish.
Whenever i need to open an important account (say, with the power utility) I make up answers and record them on paper. Simple. Effective.
As far as I know, the only benefits of being Canadian are the TN visas and a slightly faster route towards H1-B status. But both of those are for professionals working for some sponsoring company.
Can we discuss health care without the science fiction and doomsday scenarios?
I realize that the USA is used to looking inward for solutions, but other governments are solving these problems, better, today.
Every discussion I have with Americans about healthcare leads directly to these imagined totalitarian futures, as if "everybody" knew that this was what happens. I don't understand it. Where did you all learn this narrative? Was there some nursery rhyme about the evils of socialized medicine?
Well, I don't know what you mean by "doing business" in SF. If you mean the LLC is technically founded in Canada and just happens to have an SF branch, maybe that would be fine. But, that seems legally dubious to me.
The reasons to stay in the Bay Area are mostly personal. I have more friends here than back "home" now. I can demo to people every day of the week if I want. I like the city and the culture. And this is an amazing area for the concentration of talent that I'll eventually want to bring on board.
I have lived in Vancouver and I'm not going to knock it, all kinds of cool things have come out of there, and the lifestyle is great too. But where is my Maker Faire? My functional language discussion groups?
To me, this is an attempt at lifestyle design. If I just wanted to grind away at something without my friends and preferred hangouts in close reach... well, that's not enough right now.
Perhaps the idea of 'lifestyle design' is incompatible with starting a new venture. I suppose I have to just sacrifice everything for the good of the idea?
Form a consortium that aims to get drugs decriminalized as long as the government approves certain suppliers, and get them to write the law such that your clients are the likely beneficiary. This is worth billions in investment. Target an American state which seems to be on the tipping point and you could be very rich.
Except for the fact that existing drug cartels would kill you before you could succeed.
No, not liars, but sometimes inattentive to this aspect of their lives? Wishful thinking?
If it's just me, I'll be happy to be wrong. But the irony here is that my day job involves helping people schedule their leisure activity. I've seen research on what people actually do with their time and it's freaking dismal. After college people fall into a rut of work/sleep/TV.
People say things like "dinner parties" because that's the last thing they remember doing, but if you probe a bit further, this event is usually months in the past.
By "sustained effort" I wanted to distinguish a hobby from mere pass-times like television watching. I think 3 hrs/week is plenty. And tabletop wargaming is an activity that at least exercises the imagination, so I wasn't really talking about people like yourself.
It could be argued that the idea of having a hobby is some outmoded bourgeois affectation, an imitation of the Victorian idle rich. So, neither do I want to impose the necessity of having a hobby on anyone else. But I do feel the lack of one in my own life.
Am I the only one who wants to call "bullshit" on some of these claims of having a hobby?
A hobby is something you can actually get better at. Watching TV is not a hobby.
A hobby is something to which you give sustained effort. Some people claim to be into cooking and have dinner parties, but if you do that less than twice a month I don't think that counts. I realize that many of us have been ruined by modern convenience living and the programmer lifestyle, so it is an effort to get a meal for four or more together. But cooking for other people is supposed to be normal; it's not hobby material.
And photography: everybody has a digital camera now. Get real. Unless you have gotten in a vehicle with equipment specifically for the purpose of photographing something and no other reason, you're not really a photographer.
I hesitate to call MMOs a hobby. They do meet the definition, but the physical experience -- sitting in front of a computer , collaborating with others in virtual spaces -- is very close to the sort of work most of us do for eight or more hours a day already. I think if you garden or do bicycle couriering, you're allowed to claim that MMOs are your hobby, but otherwise no.
Please understand that I'm not condemning anyone, but I think a lot of us are deluding ourselves. We don't want to admit how narrow we are, and how we really spend our leisure time. I'm willing to bet that programmed entertainments, like TV, movies, games, or pornography top the list of actual hours spent. It's sad, because at the age of 80, I don't think anyone's going to look back on their lives and say "DAMN! If only I had gotten through all my Galactica DVDs...." Maybe RescueTime should do something about this.
As for me: I used to have hobbies, but now I don't. It's a serious problem and I think it contributes to an ongoing low-level depression. I do read an enormous amount, but as stated above, this is not a hobby. It's a really bad situation. I think my hobby is dreaming up startups which, for visa and other reasons, I can't do much about.
If anything, this article paints a rosier picture than reality. The Yahoos who think current management has any clue could fit into a telephone booth. There are Yahoos who have faith that Yahoo is indestructible, due to its sheer size and still-mighty audience share. But that optimism doesn't come from faith in the executives.
Top execs complain it's hard to get stuff done at every company. In reality, Yahoo's internal regrouping around the Y!OS strategy is fast and pretty bold. The problem isn't that Yahoo is making slow decisions, it's that Yahoo is making stupid decisions. Corporate politicians and intellectual frauds are defeating the creative and competent people.
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/resources/2007/07/scoble-ipho...
If the tech world is a big family, Scoble is the youngest kid whose incessant bids for attention have the older ones rolling their eyes.