Author Archives: Will

The myth of the overnight success

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Chris Dixon says:

You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.

http://cdixon.org/2012/03/16/the-myth-of-the-overnight-success/

Raspberry Pi won’t work

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First up: I want the Pi to succeed, and I think getting more children into programming, rather than just teaching them to use Microsoft Word, is a good thing.

The Raspberry Pi however, won’t work for the purposes I keep hearing about. Here’s why: the barriers they aim to tackle with a low-cost device aren’t cost-related.

Children need teaching, support and inspiration to want to get into building things using computers. The Pi is cheap, yes, but it’s hardly convenient.

Easy, cheap (or free) routes into coding already exist; what’s to stop a kid heading to a library and hitting tryruby – learning the basics of a popular web language? Or even simpler, getting a free homepage from Google Sites and learning HTML and CSS?

An old second-hand laptop running Linux would be about as cheap, more portable and more useful than the Pi. The Pi has its uses of course, but it’s not a magic bullet.

I want the Pi to succeed, but I think the idea that its low price point alone will get more kids into programming is misguided.

 

Remove Your Search History Before Google’s New Privacy Policy

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The EFF say:

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google’s other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/how-remove-your-google-search-history-googles-new-privacy-policy-takes-effect