Nope, I'm always there on day 1 also :D. They always do such a great job, I'm always around poking installing/trying out new enhancements and sub projects for at least a week.
Textpad wasn’t bad 8 or so years ago, but it’s unfit for purpose these days due to its inability to handle Unicode. You’ve actually got to be quite careful with it, as it’ll mangle text you load and save.
There are ethical and economical reasons for low to zero-cost mp3s.
1. The artist actually gets even more of a shit deal with digital distribution than they did with physical media. You are supporting the machine, not the musician.
2. The cost of developing a quality recording has plummeted dramatically, the only substantive cost remaining is the advertising. The exception might be for faux artists like Rihanna that hire top notch songwriters to pen hits, but for lesser known musicians, mp3 distribution has been shown in studies to have a positive impact.
3. mp3s can function as the advertising medium itself. The money can be made elsewhere like endorsements, or touring. Live music can never be "stolen".
Get out of the company. Find yourself something laid back where you can see your family as much as you would like. Sounds like you have the resume to push telecommuting during hiring negotiations.
> Ideas yes. GREAT ideas? rare. Great ideas + execution? rarer.
Beatle, I think the problem is with defining what "great idea" is. looking back today at "ideas" from couple years ago websites like youtube or even myspace would look like "illegal, won't touch it" and "oh, who would have time to build groups of friends and post stupid status updates". as we both know, both were/are worth alot in a terms of $.
Take example of Pinterest and read recent article with the founder -- even he wasn't sure about his idea at first. First 8 months there was no growth so you can easily say it was a "poor idea". I am pretty sure today he knows it was a great idea, but just because stats behind it that proves it.
There was a plenty of "good ideas" that didn't take off -- not because there were not great, but either market wasn't ready or internet userbase not mature enough or investors fighting over money, who knows? The bottom line, as much as your comment sounds smart, I think you are 100% wrong.
I definitely understand why the public isn't a big fan of his anymore, but I can't help remember back to The Screen Savers, and the early days of digg, when he was really someone I looked up to.
I haven't really been involved in social bookmarking very long, but isn't Digg what spawned the voting-system type site that we see in Reddit and HN? My understanding is that slashdot based on discussion instead of a straight-up voting mechanic.
The difference between Digg and Slashdot is that with Slashdot, all the stories were placed by editors. You might have been able to submit stories to the editors, but there was no upvoting and the front page was purely up to the editors. Of course, later Slashdot added Firehose, and then awhile after that I stopped reading Slashdot.
Slashdot had moderation for comments, but no similar mechanism for stories. Digg had the voting system for stories and for comments.
I don't know the Reddit history that well, but as I read recently in a PG essay, it was originally slated to be a food ordering application on your phone.
I do not know when they pivoted, or when their idea to pivot came, but I _suspect_ that their pivot was at least partly inspired by Digg's early release.
metafilter predates both Digg and reddit by 5 years, and was enjoyable for quite a while longer than either of them. I don't think it's fair to credit either of those sites with social bookmarking.
