The upgrading process seems easy
Just have to send your IP address, root user name, password, and license key through a form...and you can do it through the fast http scheme rather than the slow https.
Facial recognition is still treated like some magical technology, like the "zoom in, enhance" feature much mocked about on TV crime shows. I bet Facebook's technology is ahead of law enforcement's in terms of data, algorithm, and refinement, and yet it still stumbles on pretty obvious faces (if you have the default auto-tag feature left on)
"This whole time, I worked on the platform source code. I feature-creeped for at least 5 years. I didn't have much of a portfolio to show for it either. "
Congrats on persevering for that long but I almost think this is a case example of the downside to being a single founder...no one to rein in your feature creep time.
I thought it was a play of "This next round's on me"...as in, Louis CK is himself responsible for his jokes -- or, in this case, the distribution of the jokes. I thought it was clever :)
Landing page fail: the only info you have is a video to show the product, and that video has a 30-second beer ad you ahve to watch before you can see the product video. Do you really need the ad money that bad that you'd kill the first impression of your own startup?
Halo was a standout because of it brought multiplayer to console, wasn't it the first console game to have 16 players? The coop campaign was also really fun.
Maybe the article-writer thinks that Halo made FPS too mainstream? Unlike Doom/Quake, it was cleaned up enough in a pretty blockbuster-wrapper to make it the new model of gaming to follow?
From the article: Since the game’s release, in 2009, Minecraft has sold in excess of twenty million copies, earned armfuls of prestigious awards, and secured merchandising deals with LEGO and other toymakers. Last year, Persson earned over a hundred million dollars from the game and its merchandise. Persson—better known to his global army of teen-age followers by his Internet handle, Notch—has a raggedy, un-marketed charm. He is, by his own admission, only a workmanlike coder, not a ruthless businessman. “I’ve never run a company before and I don’t want to feel like a boss,” he said. “I just want to turn up and do my work.”
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He sounds like a modern day Woz, except he was successful despite not wanting to get involved in business. (by that I mean, Woz was successful, but we don't know how he might have turned out if Steve Jobs didn't push him to cofound Apple)
This senior is getting an early lesson of how far BS on a resume can go in the real world. I think this quote is funny:
"I also probably should have started a fake charity. Providing veterinary services for homeless people's pets. Collecting donations for the underprivileged chimpanzees of the Congo. Raising awareness for Chapped-Lips-in-the-Winter Syndrome. Fun-runs, dance-a-thons, bake sales—as long as you're using someone else's misfortunes to try to propel yourself into the Ivy League, you're golden."
If you set up a site called "savethecongowithbongos.org", copy and pasted the correct affiliate code and HTML for Amazon.com's catalog of bongo and bongo-like instruments, posted it on your Facebook page, and then donated the meager proceeds to some Congo-related charity, why couldn't you credibly claim in an application essay:
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"As a sophomore in high school, we learned about the great need of the impoverished in the Congo. But I felt unsatisfied about writing just reports about the problem. So I built a HTML5 website, using Twitter's latest bootstrap technology, and partnered with Amazon.com to crowdsource funding using a Kickstarter like model to Congo charities in need.
While most of my friends were at the swimming pool in the summer, my charity, Save the Congo with Bongos, received hundreds of page views, thanks to a successful viral and grassroots social media campaign, and delivered to Congo charities donations from places as varied as Tokyo, Japan to Boise, Idaho.
Since starting Save the Congo with Bongos, I've become more greatly aware of how the world is tied together through today's networks and I hope to continue to harness these amazing connections to save the Earth."
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Now this is not a bad project, maybe. but it's not even close to this-kid-could-make-the-next-facebook-in-her-dorm-room quality, and a lot less work and character-building experience than the typical teen summer job. But I bet it'd be a killer story for a application essay
"Superfund" is synonymous with "toxic place" but I agree, the problem is that "Superfund" sounds a little too much like "super fun" and not enough like "uncontrolled hazardous waste site that needs federal funds to cleanup"
Why does Facebook have to share this data to data aggregators? At some point, the creepy corporate use of FB data will scare people from using FB to the point that the bottom line is hurt. FB just has to shut off the firehose of data, if they have any foresight
A list on Github (or anywhere else) is an inefficient format for this...why not a google spreadsheet that anyone can edit, so that you can sort by city, category, cost, etc?
If this many Reader users converted in so short of time, then it is amazing that Google could't find a way to monetize the service or at least keep it revenue-neutral, or even have it be a useful loss-leader
The costs of running a server with even 20x the expected traffic for a few weeks is more than all the time and moey it took to develop the game? This does not pass the smell test at all
FTA: "We also had one unfortunate incident where a student started saying disparaging things about transgendered people at the same table where one happened to be sitting. "
Good for them for calling this out...but it's a weird statement where its vagueness just makes things weirder...either an awkward attempt to downplay a really horrific show-stopping comment, or blowing out of proportion someone's attempt at a joke.
edit// I think my problem is with the word "unfortunate" incident and "where one happened to be sitting"...as if it were unfortunate that such comments were made inadvertently where a transgendered person could hear them. Either way, "unfortunate" doesn't seem like the right adjective here when "unacceptable" seems more like it. (i.e. it's strange to describe "disparaging" remarks towards African-Americans/women/any-other-group as "unfortunate")
Just kidding. You could always do a drawing. Ask for a donated ipad. everyone who answers 100 or more catchpas correctly are eligible to be in the raffle.