(Agree - no reason not to name names at this point).
Question is - work with whom? While I personally find patronising material off-putting, I suspect that may be my inner geekness showing, and "normal" people don't mind as much.
One example is the "XXX for dummies" book series. No matter how interesting the XXX was (Quantum Physics! Neurosurgery), I could never bring myself to buy those books - I was mentally bristling "Oy, who are you calling a dummy?". Millions do, though.
Another example - I roll my eyes quite a lot at some of Evernote's material ("Oh I can use a note and clipping service to collect cooking recipes from the Internet? You don't say! Good thing you told me of else it would have never crossed my mind! Tag S for Sarcasm!") - but I suspect they are very successful for doing that.
My gut reaction is that you put off fewer people than you attract - but I can't prove it.
> One example is the "XXX for dummies" book series. No matter how interesting the XXX was (Quantum Physics! Neurosurgery), I could never bring myself to buy those books - I was mentally bristling "Oy, who are you calling a dummy?".
Reactions to those titles are interesting.
I certainly have some of that "inner geekness" you mention, but I don't have any problem with the "dummies" series. My thinking is that, before such books were produced, if you wanted to learn, say, plumbing or fishing or football or beer making, then you learned from your parents while growing up, or you learned by working with an experienced practitioner, or else you never learned them. But now we have introductory material for adults, aimed at bringing them to the point where they can enjoy or be productive at some activity. I think it's great.
On the other hand, someone I know, whom I would consider rather less geeky than myself, feels very insulted by those titles.
I doubt a magnet that small would cause any problems. I'm not sure about the new MacBooks Pros, but the old ones had an embedded magnet that I think was used to detect the screen closing.
As far as I'm aware, all Mac laptops now use magnets to keep the screen closed. Quite strong ones, really, they easily keep it from being accidentally opening.
That said, at least some of them have put the HDD in the back now, instead of near the front (don't know if it's all). It could be that the magnetic closing was part of the decision to move them.
Hard drives have two extremely powerful neodymium magnets in them anyway, attached to the arm which moves back and forth. Millimetres from your platters. I have a hunch that a fairly steady magnetic field is probably fine, it's erratic/alternating magnetic fields which are likely to kill things.
Can you give examples. Also the good thing about nyc is the startup scene. There are lots of networking events which I've found very useful and also I'm single so I need a little social life.
In Lincoln, NE you can get a one bedroom apartment with utilities included for $425 and if you are happy with 15' x 20' one room apartment you can get one for $275. There is a college here so finding interns is fairly easy and there are lots of small startups. However, once you start growing you might have trouble hiring enough people since there just aren't as many people who want to be in Lincoln as there are people who want to be in Silicon Valley or the east coast. I'm not very social so I don't know how good the socializing is here.
Back in 2004, when I was living in St. Louis, two guys in a 3 room apartment near the Wash U shuttle line in a neighborhood which was 20-something friendly was $400 a month each. If you were content with the college kid lifestyle you could easily do it on $800 ~ $1,000 a month total.
Another option is doing the startup part time while working, which tends to make the difference between $800 and $1,200 pretty immaterial.
If they wanted an Objective-C web framework it seems like they would have been better off improving GNUstep Web. From looking at the site I don't see what makes this special other than using Cocoa. It might have some compelling features that GNUstep Web doesn't, but they don't make it easy to find out what they are.
Running on Mac OS X with the newer, shinier ObjC 2.0 runtime is greatly preferred to running on GNUstep. Not to mention GCD or Core Data (GNUstep Core Data is primitive in comparison. Not to mention, you know, basically a dead project).
Of course, I'm more likely to just use Ruby or Cappuccino if I need to make something more complicated than a basic website. But I can see the appeal in this sort of framework.
Running on Mac OS X is a pretty tough sell, though. Ultimately, it's far more expensive than comparable servers running Linux or even Windows. Most of this is that there aren't many people offering OS X based server solutions, but even if you're willing to run your own hardware, Xserves are on the expensive side of things.
Getting the power to the US from a large third world nation is probably not as cheap as easy as building them in the US. There is also lots of land in Arizona that isn't useful for very many things.
I wasn't suggesting that we should route the power to the US from the third world. I was saying third-world nations should build these plants, and the US should build other kinds.
Which is where carbon-trading comes in. We give third-world nations extra money so they can build these instead of coal plants. They give us their carbon credit so we can continue to drive stretch Hummers. Win-win!
