I have found that any art does the trick for me. Over my life I've played Viola, crafted pottery, attempted to paint, and done photography. Of those two were wildly expensive (photography, oil painting), and the others were cheaper. I think the main draw of modern photography for programmers is that a great deal of our technical skill transfers into every part of photography except taking a good picture -- so we don't feel baffled when we first start.
That said, if you want to take up music or some other art, it's never too late. Music lessons are fairly cheap and honestly indispensable (I held my viola wrong for six months of practice before I started lessons). Painting is a much freer art and you can produce decent works on your own without instruction. If you do painting, I personally found oil painting an amazing medium because it allowed me to constantly improve my paintings no matter how bad they started =p.
This guy suffers from the "schools are job training" mentality that I've noticed has grown in popularity recently. He expects students from the university to be able to work on his development environment without significant retraining, when he is not using the development environment that the universities are teaching.
The fault here is in the business owner expecting freshman grads to be skilled in highly specialized software development specific to their business. The schools are pumping out students who are perfectly good programmers, and if he actually trained them to use his tools, they would be good programmers for his environment.
Edit: To be clear, if the were a university teaching only Java to the students, it would be a bad university. Such a university doesn't exist. If he wants formal methods, he needs to higher Masters students or higher -- or optionally donate a few $$ to a CS department in exchange for adding the course to ugrad.
Just so you know, if you plant an apple tree from an apple you buy at the grocery store you will likely be sued for patent infringement. Though, it's probably sterile anyway.
I like the facebook redesign. I think it's snappy and I can still easily get to all the information I need when looking up contact info. Further, the AJAX loads pages considerably faster, and in many cases incrementally (e.g. pictures), radically decreasing the effective "response time" of the site.
I really have to wonder why we're even talking about it in a controversial way instead of an analysis of the technological changes and their effect on the site. It seems this is the wrong site for a controversial facebook design argument.
It took me a very long time to learn how to hack without smoking after I got used to it. For those that have never done it, there is a real measurable performance increase for smoking while programming. It comes at the cost of killing you years earlier, and making you chronically unhealthy, but it does make you hack faster.
I eventually found that when I took wellbutrin to stop smoking it had the exact same mental effect for hacking. You may want to see your doctor and give it a try.
That said, don't start smoking, ever, for any reason. It's a terrible habit that takes forever to quit, costs thousands of dollars a year, and can easily start with just one smoke.
In good news, the security conscious part of you needs to stop browsing the web in a graphical browser now, because all the competitors were also hacked in a similar manner :).
I agree it's worth discussing (especially if you're unsure about future malleability of the web framework to your needs), and I apologize if I was excessively curt.
As I see it, if we get enough traffic to be worried about scaling issues we'll deal with it then. Django isn't terribly designed and going in and hacking multi-db and sharding in should take less than a week from a competent developer.
Discussing this before starting a startup sort of feels like trying to figure out how to do salary for hundreds of employees before getting your first one.
iTunes TV is insanely expensive, for instance I recently watched Heroes on Hulu (I had to borrow a few episodes when I fell behind because NBC "didn't want me watching" the show on a channel that made them money). Total cost to me for casual TV viewing: $0 and a few targeted adds that I liked.
iTunes wants $37.99 for a DRM'ed season, and I would need to buy three of them for $113.97. This is an absolute deal breaker, I would never buy anything that expensive with non-broken DRM on it. Actually, I take that back, I would never pay much more than about $10/season for a reasonably well produced but overall forgettable television show.
So, basically, the idea of charging for television content per show isn't going to happen unless everyone abruptly cancels their cable service tomorrow and inexplicably spends the exact same amount on TV shows al-a-carte while somehow maintaining their casual television viewing habits that make it such a golden advertising medium.
I find the title highly sensational and misleading. Of course it was hacked in seconds given a prepared exploit, I would be shocked if it took the computer longer than that to execute the exploit code.
I don't understand why I would want C++ syntax when I could have python syntax for the same task? I checked and the python code for that matrix multiply is significantly shorter and arguably more readable, and that's without making a Matrix class!