Something interesting I read on Steve Woz's site As yet another engineer working in Silicon Valley, it seems that with
all the Internet startups and dot-com millionaires, no-one is out to create
exciting, innovative products and technologies here anymore. Instead of
"How can I change the world?", it's "How can I go IPO ASAP and get rich
quick?" I see PhD's leaving high-tech to work on yet another search engine.
I see folks reading The Wall Street Journal who used to read Byte. Do
you see this trend worsening? Can hi-tech get out of this dot-com mind-set
and back to innovation? Will there ever be anything close to a technical
revolution again? Woz:
I do see this trend increasing. A lot of the problem is that small guys
with something attractive have a much more difficult time getting recognized.
This is largely due to the spending of large companies, ensuring that
their territory is not easily eaten into. You have a good point. Where
are the engineers and scientists these days? All we hear about are CEO's.
Typically they attended business schools and weren't inspired by science
fiction.
I have come to a realization. Any project, no matter how small or big,
should have a way to measure how sucessful it is. We should be able to
define the metrics which would make a project sucessful and ways to
measure those parameters. There should be a objective way to measure
these metrics defined before we start the project. I am using the term
project in a generic term - it may be something as mundane as learning
chess (in which case the metric can be - I should be able to defeat
the chess program at level 4) or something as challenging as losing
weight.
RFC 1984 is Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) Statement on Cryptographic Technology and the Internet.
Somethings I have observed,which are indirectly related to topic (well
more to the topic of ideas really) are:
Now a days, more than ever, even if you implement an
idea/prototype which you do not yourself believe in much or consider
low-impact; people may find it interesting and find out a new way of
using than what you could not even think. Somethings become popular
just like that:(. (This is not to suggest that popularity is
necessarily a measure of cool ideas)
It is difficult generally in practice for people to reject an
"new" idea which is implemented (tangible) and available to play
with; than an idea presented in theory/verbally. I mean both can get
rejected, but it relatively takes greater time to reject the former
than latter unless someone has implemented very badly(in which case
even a good idea can get rejected quickly).
A good measure of finding a person which you mention, quickly, is
how fast and right that person understands the concept of "po". After
explaining "po", from the other persons reaction, you can make out
how close he is to the perfect guy. I have seen that some guys do
not bothered to listen; then there are those who nod their head and
say they understood ; but the closest are those who just start
building upon an idea from where you left or branch out from it or
start another path. Basically, if idea has any
inspiration/possibility they seek before giving it up immediately.
It means they give due consideration before judging it black or
white. Most of the times I have seen that both people involved
come out with something slightly or completely different than the
original.
Some people develop "disagreement" as a coolness trait, assuming it
to be a characteristic of an "independent thinker". They generally
are successful in drawing a lot of attention. It is in my opinion,
important to cross-check them, by looking at their cool
ideas/reasons/explanations carefully and having your own opinion
about it. It is sometimes easy to fall in the trap of
pseudo-disagreement friends too:)
Did Shakespeare inspire Douglas Adams for the answer 42?
Take thou this vial, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease:
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes, thy eyes' windows fall,
Like death, when he shuts up the day of life;
Each part, deprived of supple government,
Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death:
And in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two and forty hours,
And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.
— Shakespeare, Act 4, Scene 1.
FRIAR LAURENCE gives Juliet the vial
The problem with MediaWiki is not the lack of documentation, but the
lack of well organized documentation. Here is a useful bit of
information I found out. Suppose you want to change the sidebar that
appears in the MediaWiki site (the one of the left, which has some
navigation links in it). You can do that by going to the
MediaWiki:Sidebar page i.e. suppose that your wiki is installed on
http://example.org, then your sidebar will be accessiable by going to
http://example.org/index.php/MediaWiki:Sidebar . To edit that page, you have to be logged in as a WikiSysop
