Geeks are so incredibly negative it's why I end up trying to convince friends to find a better career filled with happier people whenever they ask how to get into the tech field.
There's nothing more pathetic then that guy who is the born skeptic and can't see beyond his own inability to find success, constantly putting down every idea his friends give him. I'm told that's what it's like trying to do a start-up in England.
That's a very good point; I'm very much that way myself, and more so every year.
Part of it is cynicism from being at the bottom of a pecking order that puts the braying salesman and architypal PHB at the top and consistently having advice and ideas ignored, while given impossible deadlines because people don't know how to manage a development process properly.
However there is also a very negative vibe among geeks in general, especially (but not exclusively) in the UK. No doubt American geeks suffer from the same idiots in charge, but say the hell with it, and go start their own companies. Here there is more of a resigned shrug of the shoulders.
It's not a univeral British trait; people in other walks of life seem to have a more positive attitude.
Is this is general geek trait? I have a (very good) friend who always rubbishes my ideas as unworkable, impossible, idealistic, or whatever. He earns a much better salary than me but the funny thing is, I got him into tech and taught a _lot_ in the beginning. He gravitated towards the Microsoft ecosystem and I gravitated towards open source so that whenever we find something we would both like to work on we can't agree on the tools! Groooan. He's one of the smartest guys I know and he's always coming up with ideas (as am I in my own way) but whenever I say, come on, let's do one of these he always demurs. (Not that I'm much better.) I love tech and coding but I'm in the process of giving it up to a certain extent for a stint in academia.
Only in te music industry could somebody do enough coke to simultaneously attempt to sue your company out of existence while investing $100m into it. If there's one thing I agree with PG on it's don't do a music start-up.
I'm reminded of Japanese intelligence gathering methods in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor. This would be a hell of an intelligence gathering tool, the best part of it is that you could gather data in such a fractioned and distributed way that individual people wouldn't be able to guess what it is they're doing.
If you've read, "Catch Me If You Can", by Frank Abagnale Jr., then your opinion of Swedish prisons might be that they're country clubs where you get to sew parachutes and go to school for free, in comparison to those in the US. This doesn't sound so terrible, considering that this is a large scale criminal organization (whether you think what they did is a crime or not, the Swedish legal system has officially deemed it one).
The owners would have far more personal protection from legal in the US, though.
Living in Seattle was brutal for me, it left me incredibly depressed and I ultimate fled back to San Francisco for my sanity. Even SF is pretty rough, so I only live in the corporate apartment complexes in SOMA where I can lay in the sun an hour a day after swimming, it keeps me quite happy (and tan!)
If you're open to suggestions, right now I feel that there's a huge market opportunity for a SaaS Splunk killer with more reasonable pricing. Having a great analytics UI is 1/4 of the problem there.
Mixpanel is a great tool, and I think their niche is gaining popularity because start ups want an easy way to see their data. Data visualization is very interesting to me. Have you started working on a mobile component?
If you mean gathering data from mobile devices my answer is:
Any cloud-based app or any mobile app that has a cloud component can leverage the RESTful API.
Also see, http://www.localytics.com/ for a vanilla mobile analytics solution.
If your question is 'is the dashboard mobile device viewable' then:
Not really. Most of the javascript that powers the dashboard isn't touch-screen compatible, sadly.
Probably, but with a good pricing model and an easy to use system (maybe a ssl-wrapped caching proxy or an ssl vpn) to send the logs over the wire for processing and storage would attract the attention of the devops world (which is worth about $3.50) Then you could just tell everybody, "it's like splunk, but in the cloud, and affordable". Fame, fortune, and the critical logs of hundreds of new startups would quickly be yours.
I'm curious if any lawyers from the EFF have put themselves through this so that they have good grounds to sue the federal government for violation of constitutional rights?
Never heard about EPIC, but the EFF is part of the engineering community. Our community solves the problems that the rest of the world creates. The EFF should be involved .. maybe somebody can get arrested for planning flash-mobs at the airports Tuesday and Wednesday to decimate holiday travel plans and put the issue into the national spotlight. That's something a bunch of hackers could put together.
