Steve Jobs the Alchemist

According to this article, How to use the concept of Alchemy to improve your writing (or any creative action), alchemy relies on

-- reducing base metal to its materia prima prior to it being transmuted into gold.

-- reducing a writing idea to its essence

-- dissolving impurities


In another example, we have  1,500 types of stretches or 60+ Yoga poses or 120+ Tai Chi moves

versus

the following 12-move exercise.

Wherever there is complexity, there is underlying deep simplicity.

Steve Jobs made his name with kicking out the fluff and the chaff from his products.

See alchemic principles in action at CANDOPI.com.

Facebook and Google Plus Rants --- E-learning

E-learning is a truly virgin soil. No one has conquered it. It is at a free-for-all Wild West land grab stage.

E Learning Web Sites

http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/1/khan-academy-checkbook-scaling-to-6-million-users-a-month-on.html

    But YouTube is not interactive and a big part of what they want to do is present a learning tree to users, give quizzes, manage results, etc. So they first tried a self hosted Java based site, which was crushed under the load. ...

  The more control you get the more likely you are to shoot yourself in the foot and do something wrong ...

  They don’t carry pagers, don’t worry about replication, don’t have to restart instances, and don’t apply OS patches. There are a lot of things they don’t have to do with GAE. ...
  
  Khan Academy has successfully leveraged App Engine to scale to millions of users without hiring a single sysadmin or spending too much time worrying about anything ops-related ...

    To deploy the site, any developer (or our friendly CI bot) can simply run our "deploy.py" and wait a few minutes, then get back to spending time on the product. We haven't had to think once about whether or not the database can handle the write load we throw at it; the App Engine Datastore is uniquely worry-free in that regard. ...

  Offload as much work as you can to somebody else ie. GAE.     ....

  At a group size of 2 - 5 people don’t focus on scalability issues. Focus on features. Make your product great. Get people coming back to it.     

   Keep things simple both technically and in the product until you know absolutely what you need to build. A lot of the features they’ve built to solve and edge case turned out to cause real problems in the long run. It’s hard to turn things off once you build them.    

  Be lazy. Use other people’s tools. Until your business is doing really well don’t be afraid to use other people’s work
 

E Learning

I watched the Khan app just 1 or 2 min and reached that conclusion. I regretted my hasty conclusion. Now I have seen
 http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/depth-first-traversals-of-binary-trees/934024358
and
https://github.com/Khan

And I arrive at the same conclusion, with a higher degree confidence. I have a blog, but why bother promoting my blog.

Superior E Learning and Feature Release

A current online learning app typically has about 500 features. Combine the best/top 5, you get about 900.

I can easily think up 20,000 features.

But will users find all of them desirable? e.g. Vary your lessons according to learner's learning/cognitive styles? What does NLP say about a student looking up/down or right/left? We can capture user's eyes and gesture with Kinect, or some other game SDK's, but should I?

So, I number such features Feature Number 10,001 etc. What does Vygotsky say, Shaolin monks say, Feynman say, James Watson say, Carl Jung say ...... ?

Ok, Features Number 12,001 and 3 and 4.

A journey of 20,000+ features starts with 3 features, huh, so lonely! So exciting!

Whatever it takes, anything within morality bounds, ... I can and will dance, sing, talk, cajole, threaten, plead, .... code, test, deploy, design, debug, refactor, prefactor, re-architect, .. ok ... ok till it becomes World Class!

Real Fun Begins -- The Customers -- Part 1

Learning is easy, you are just window-shopping what others are up to and consuming what you fancy.  Producing is different, there you have to make some effort and what you produce may not have any taker. Endowed with an almost inexhaustible amount of laziness, our team never suffers from solutions that then need to go looking for problems.

Maybe Relentless, maybe some other books on Japanese marketing. It says that a small market segment you've found in your locale, most likely exist in other parts of the Globe as well.

Guy Kawaski, maybe in The Art of the Start,  keeps saying that the customer of One is a lot better than 100 market research reports!

Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, a Nobel Peace Prize winning microfinance organization and community development bank, was once asked in an entrepreneurial program by an aspiring social entrepreneur, about where to begin with her rather ambitious project. He replied that his gradually-big project began with just "one woman who was trying to escape from loan sharks"!

I, by instincts and by hard-won experience, know  that if one person truly enjoys your snacks, they stand a very good chance of doing well town-wide, then region-wide and so on.

This is exciting and fun! I've got more than one customer!

Of course, I won't be able to satisfy even this one customer completely, right now. ( My resources will have to grow in response. They will.)

But, who, which company  has satisfied you completely? Google? Apple?

This is exciting and fun!

We're Having Fun -- Cruising Levels

We are having fun at cruising altitudes. What we are doing is fun-easy for us and for our customers as well. Join us! We have an exciting journey ahead.

Aviation Analogy

Don't let turbulence freak you out says

Airplanes pass through turbulence all day, every day, and how often have you heard of an airplane actually crashing because of it? At cruising altitude, it just doesn't happen. And in other stages of flight it's, at most, very, very rare. It takes a lot more than bumps along the way to down a plane.

When you're in a turbulence, you get out of it by getting to your cruising altitude. To get there, you may go up or down.

We're now at our realistic, pragmatic altitude, and therefore having fun making meaning.

Investment Analogy

J.P. Morgan’s “The Sleeping Point” says:

A worried investor asked J. P. Morgan this question in the early days of the Depression: “What should I do about my stocks. I can’t sleep nights.”

Morgan replied: “I’d sell down to the sleeping point.”
 

That doesn't mean we are reducing our stake. We have just reduced our unnecessary emotional baggage. As cognitive psychologists like to say, when emotional involvement becomes balanced, when you become relaxed and loose, your cognitive immersion can go up and so can your creativity.

We're now at our realistic, pragmatic "point", and therefore having fun making meaning.

Please join us!

It's fun --- useful meaningful profitable fun!

Product Strategy : What is Strategy? -- 2

I asked a very young reader to give me a very brief summary of a previous post What is strategy? He replied: "Everything is leverage."

I realized at once that I had failed to write clearly. Still, I joked: "Oh, yes, making the competition believe that everything is leverage is a good leverage too ... because, as Sun Tzu says, when you defend everywhere, you're not defending anywhere."

Yesterday, we asked: "Are beans in bamboo containers strategic for your army? " and answered "Yes" to that question.

But not all bags of beans can be strategic. They are when they meet the following conditions:

1. The competition sort of relied on their cavalry. What if they came in boats, on elephants, or merely on foot?
2. Their horses were poorly fed. What if the other side's commander got wind of you plan and prepared properly for that?
3. You can take advantage of the ensuing chaos in their cavalry. What if you were far too outnumbered?
4. The other side's commander would not adapt quickly. What if they dismounted and shot with their arrows, as the Mongols would/did?
5. Even the weather would be on your side: If it rained too heavy,  if the wind blew too hard, their horses would not be able to catch the enticing smell of your steaming beans on the grounds.
6. The other side's horses would not come with mouth guards.
7. The other side did not use some medicine to de-sensitize their horses' sense of smell.
8. Maybe many, many more factors.

These are trash, hoarding, OCD(Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), not strategic assets.

When Do Trash Become Strategic Assets?

You need the big picture, the mosaic, the collage where each trash becomes a component, an element, a cog the wheel, a brick in the cathedral, and so on.

How Do You Get the Big Picture, the Mosaic, the Collage?

Two methods as far as I know:

1. Your parents have coup d'oei in their DNA
2. You hire McKinsey, Bain, Booz, Accenture, HopeHero etc.

Product Strategy : What is Strategy?

I've been burned so many times. So I learned.

I learn that you must obviously sound and look humble in online communication, discussion etc. So, here I am ---- humble both by nature and by discipline.

What is strategy?
I don't know clearly.

I don't even have a clear answer for: What is strategic?

I only have stories, anecdotes, case studies, fragmented impressionistic data. Maybe too simplistic for Harvard/Standford Profs and for you too.

1. Are beans in bamboo containers strategic for your army?
2. Are trumpets strategic for your army?
3. Are drums strategic for your army?
4. Are silk vests strategic for your army?
5. Is medicine for cracked winter feet strategic for your army?

Yes, according to military histories of the Chinese and the Mongols and  Punic Wars .

1. Are dental chairs strategic for your army?
2. Is winning hearts and minds strategic for your army?

Yes, according to military histories of the British.

What About Software Business?

1. Is "pizzazz" and "sizzle" strategic for your websites?
2. Is "design" strategic for your websites?

Yes to Question 1,according to Don’t Make Me Think, if your site is entertainment(movies, musics, games), pure branding(cereal), or -- I forgot this last one ;-)

Yes to Question 2, according to this Fast Company article

"A reliance on design-driven innovation poses a challenge for the companies that live by it: You can’t easily patent how something looks, or the feel of a user interface. Features, subtleties, and finishes spawn imitators with unprecedented speed. That means that design-led companies must innovate constantly to maintain their edge. And that’s exactly what makes the stories in this issue so interesting."

So What Is Strategic?

They say that leverage can be found in "strange places". What kind of "strange"? What kind or kinds of places? Why strange places?

Leverage, a beautiful word, indeed. Especially in deeds.

Product Strategy : Military History Emphasizes its Importance

Reading "Agile Experience Design," I noticed the following quote on page-52.

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

The source is Sun Tzu's "The Art of War":

I've read different versions of and addendums to Sun Tzu. But I've never seen this before. However, the concepts are in line with his spirit and philosophy. So, I'll regard them as authentically put down by the Master himself.

We're taking our own medicine. Our strategy&UX  campaign may be just a mere noise before it dies out. However, we are attempting in  some other fronts, too.

Creating Original and Non-original Softwares

The Original School

 "ambition,""revolutions," "revolutionary"
"original," "radical"
"creativity," "innovation," "lateral thinking,"
"invention," "reinvention," "disruption,"
"leadership," "platform leadership," "leapfrogging," "blue ocean strategy,"
"positioning," "re-positioning,"
"market domination,"

The Non-Original School

Copycats
Fast Seconds
Entrepreneurial Judo
Busting profit pool a la Michael Dell, Dell CEO
The margin, the opportunity a la Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO.

The Honest School

1. Einstein (in paraphrase) : Originality is nothing but forgetting one's sources.
2. Scott Adam (in paraphrase) : Originality = theft + lack of talent + time
3. Bruce Lee (in paraphrase) : Origin of the technique doesn't matter. Just express yourself honestly, truthfully.

The Deep School

1. An old German tract that suggests , for three whole days, shutting out the world, listening to one's own thoughts and recording them faithfully. 
2. Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows: Rainer Maria Rilke

Product Strategy : Useful Astrology Apps

This happened about 15 years ago in Myanmar. This is also happening with many softwares today.

At that time, I had taken a 4-weeks course in Visual Basic, and another 4-weeks course in Visual C++. I had already rented a Windows PC at home.

I knew a bit of many kinds of astrology techniques, those kinds you can read in magazines and can master in a few minutes.

I was eager to code those astrology techniques into some GUI/desktop apps.

Before I started coding, I looked around. I read in some Myanmar magazines about some theses on astrology at our Computer University. Their calculations were thick,deep and complex. That's fine.

What was not so fine: their outputs were also very hard to understand.

I also checked out some Astrology CD's written by Myanmar programmers, selling at about K 400. Their outputs were of the same kind as those of the theses. (At that time Don Norman hasn't written Living with Complexity. He hasn't proclaimed that "Make output understandable.").

I couldn't learn from them, and so I coded my own design.

Front End

1. 1 text box to enter user's question
2. 1 button beneath it

Back End

1. Read the user's question.
2. Throw a 6-sided dice 6 times, since this is I Ching.
3. Using the result from the dice throws, read from a table of answers.
4. Show the answer to user.

I padded the answer with some folk psychology. I tested the app on my students, and I watched them discreetly from a distance.  At that time, "Usability Testing" was not even in my vocabulary.

My cost to create this was about 8 hours of coding and 8 hours of reading. And users liked it a bit.
Compare this to the other software makers' costs and the users' reaction to their softwares.

Product Strategy : Simple Research 1

Searching "user experience"  on Google gave this to us.

Searching "product strategy"  on Google gave this to us.

Searching "software product strategy"  on Google gave unsatisfactory results.

Searching "product strategy + software"  on Google also gave unsatisfactory results.

Searching "what new software to create"  on Google also gave unsatisfactory results. 

Searching "how to think up new software"  on Google also gave unsatisfactory results.

Our conclusion right now is --- such topics are unpopular.

Some Reasons for Learning to Write Software

on August 6, 2011

This is a kind of brain-storming with myself, and thus they were jotted down in no particular order.

1. to express myself in products, rather than in poetry, paint, dancing moves or tune etc.


2. to father many a virtual world, where schools really behave like schools, kids behave like kids, lessons behave like lessons etc.


3. to exploit market opportunities, technological opportunities, etc


4. to get ease and speed in self-expression


5. to join the conversations and movements of fellow programmers


6. to do some research


7. to own something hard to take away from me


8. to reuse codes written by others


9. to save kids from bad e-learning. Recalls what Bill Gates said in "Road Ahead": Bad processes, when computerized, do more damage faster!

Oh, even that lowly robot is helpful and lovely, isn't it?

E-learning, the Skills Training Angle

I'm summarizing an article in The Straits Times on January 19, 2013: "Teaching Know-How, Vocational Skills Can Trump Varsity Education" by Ayesha Khanna.

Why Vocational Training?

1. New technologies happen, and spawn new industries. e.g Robotics, Big Data
2. Workers need to acquire new skills to "manage robots and analytic products."

How We Can Do Vocational Training

1. Vocational education can provide "critical thinking skills" too.
2. We need to digitize vocational learning.

Possible Digitization Tools

1. demonstration videos
2. interactive games
3. simulations
4. "haptic touch sensors"
5. holographic and gestural interfaces

My Concern 1

Somewhere in some MIT Technology review articles, I've read that humans should specialize in what machines could not do:

1. Taking initiative, this includes entrepreneurship as well
2. Asking/ formulating the questions, defining the problems to solve
3. Programming the machines since they cannot program themselves right now or in near future

My Concern 2

Then, I 'am a bit worried about costs in producing educational games, simulations etc.

Product Strategy : Will You Get Noticed in an Online Discussion?

In a previous post, we described how bad contributions crowd out good ones and how good ideas get drowned under the overwhelming weight of bad ones. Here we're going to make some design suggestions for this problem. From the perspectives of both product strategy and user experience.

Just yesterday, we read Team Geek, by 2 famous Google engineers. When they were developing Subversion, they had a similar problem. In their email list, they found that just one participant was using up 70% of the core project contributors' responses. They concluded that their "energy and focus were being sucked away"(on page 98 of the book.) by this single participant.

They were discussing technical details of an open source version control system. The percentage of population who can and will join such a discussion, is severely limited. Imagine who and how many will join if we discuss such general topics like, "Goals of National Education," "Meaning of Life" etc.

Parkinson(of Parkinson Law's fame) had to say this: Whether to open a 5-million-dollar plant can be decided in 5 minutes. The decision as to whether to open a 500-dollar canteen or bicycle shack needs far, far more time, simply because there will be more participants.

Team Geek/Subversion's solutions:
1. email that person, asking him to stop
2. phone that person, asking him to stop

It was then, now is many years later. And they were not Forum business. Developers in Forum business can do better.

I am very encouraged by the following advances: Vanilla identifies bad people and keeps them out
and Gamification drives user reputation and abilities.

Our Solution 1

You're right if you decide not go full AI. Still you can use NLTK or other tool kits. You can word-count, check themes/sentiments behind forum posts, group/cluster posts similar in tone or content, and so on.

Our Solution 2

You can check who are posting most, most frequently. You can alert moderators or other users to check the quality of such participants' contributions.

You can stall or ban such participants.

Our Solution 3

At least, you can tweak your user interface to crowd some posts while elevating some posts at the same time, and you can do it randomly. Sigh.

Thinking Up New Products and Thesis Topics

on October 14,2011

1. Steve Jobs once said that he's proud of products that he had done and maybe even prouder of products that he had chosen not to do yet.
2. According to Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money, searching for business opportunities and great products is like mining: out of 10, you get 3, and out of those 3, you dig into 1.

1. Is thinking up new products tough?
2. Is thinking up thesis topics tough?

Thinking up thesis topics is(well, at least, was) easy.

Thinking up new products is even easier. Here's how:

1. In academic world, if Student Number 138765 has registered to do "Abraham Lincoln's Logistical Problems in the American Civil War," the prof won't allow me to do that.
   
   In real world, after Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and Google+,(if I chose,) I am still free to do MyFriendsterSpaceBook+, right?
   
   
2. In academic world, the devil is in the details.
   
   In real world, it is even more so. All Intuit founding team needed was the "47th mover's advantages." Then, Mint.com that Intuit bought out must have "57th mover's advantages."

Online banking, online teaching, social networking, job sites ... are all today's offerings 100% complete, perfect? All the necessary inventions have been done?

As Mr Henry Ford remarks, whatever you think is right.

Now, I am writing letters to Singapore software development companies, asking them to customize Moodle for independent private tutors.

Moodle is too good to be let go to waste. And it is easy to customize.

But then, the devil is in the details, and even more so in the software world.

Craig Mundie,Microsoft, and Expensive Business Lessons

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, during a recent visit to Singapore, shares these pithy business and technology lessons with us.

Before I discuss his lessons, I suggest he/MS change his job title to "chief strategy and research officer". That they have not done so already implies that they haven't learned or taken their own lessons seriously.

1. MS has 900 Ph D scientists., "the world's largest R and D unit."
2. It has many very strong and cutting edge technologies.
3. MS was sort of the first to invent tablets and smartphones.

1. MS failed to exploit their pioneering inventions of  tablets and smartphones in early 2000s. The products were "heavy" or "cumbersome."
2. MS failed to do "great execution in some categories " of their product lines.
3. Specifically MS failed to  coordinate different research groups, to design lusty products, to market well.

Now, why is Mundie still called "chief research and strategy officer"? Is research still more respectable than strategy in our beloved Microsoft?

Product Strategy : Accidental Longevity of This Blog

In a previous post,I lament that

Our strategy&UX  campaign may be just a mere noise before it dies out.

I got that thought after reading "Agile Experience Design," that quotes  Sun Tzu on page-52.

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

That made me sad. My blog has already gone through at least 4 reinventions:

1. Testing-how-blogging-works stage
2. Personal diary stage
3. Personal Effectiveness or Life Coaching stage
4. Product Strategy and User Experience stage

I've nothing to say about Stage 1 and 2. They cost me nothing, and so perfectly natural and fine.

Stage 3 was done as an indirect approach. It went as intended but it remained "indirect" for far too long and its benefits are invisible to the readers/users/intended customers.

Stage 4 becomes more direct. It is just one step away from coding, where I am more likely to end up. Its benefits become more visible: in pictures, photos, screenshots, mockups, wireframes, flow charts, UML sequence diagrams, etc.

Still, I am getting impatient day by day. Ready and willing to code.However, this blog in this current thrust is to stay.

I can talk about lousy software product/service/applications for life.

I can talk about new, or better software product/service/applications we need to do for a long, long time.

This is not by design. It's more by instinct, by honesty, by innocence, or by pure luck.

Product Strategy : Every Thing Has Been Invented

Do not assume :

1. A fellow Myanmar or Singaporean cannot invent
2. Such inventions belong only to America, Europe or Japan.
3. Everything has been invented.

Here's my stake on everything already being invented. Let's limit our discussion only to human beings' need to communicate.

The Mouth

I wish I were the one who invented the mouth. Every time you speak, make phone calls, shout, sing to your girl friend, make speeches, you will be paying license fees to me!

The Alphabet

I wish I were the one who invented the alpahbet. Every time you text with your phone, scribble your shopping list, email, type, you will be paying license fees to me!

The Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Facebook Mail

I missed them.

The QQ, Instant Messaging, The iPhone, The Twitter

I missed them.

The Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest

I missed them.

So, with all these inventions, are we now in communication heaven or Nirvana?

You can communicate anything you want to anyone you want anywhere in any manner you want, in any language or dialect, in any tone you want?

Language barrier has been broken? Culture barrier, generation gap barrier, all other barriers have been broken?

What about Jhonny Mnemonics and his brain dump techniques? What about how people communicated in ancient folk tales and myths?

Are we there already?

Mao Zedong's Guerilla Warfare, So What?

on March 16,2010

Afghanistan in 16 characters,a news article, states:

By May 1928 the basic principles of guerrilla warfare ... had already been evolved; that is, the 16-character formula: The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." Mao Tse-tung, 1936

I've been studying Mao Zedong for years for fun. I didn't think much of this formula at first. Only now, after reading this article a few days ago, I suspect that many people may be still awed by this stuff.

There's no reason for such an over-respectfulness. We can find a way out of this mantra rather easily. Let's reformat the mantra to see its constituent parts more clearly.

The enemy advances ----- we retreat;
the enemy camps ----- we harass;
the enemy tires ----- we attack;
the enemy retreats ----- we pursue

This shows the yin/yang or what he fondly calls Dialetics clearly.
There are 4 ways out of this rhyme:
(1) Negate the Left Hand Side
(2) Negate the Right Hand Side
(3) Affirm the Left Hand Side
(4) Affirm the Right Hand Side

I'll demonstrate my approach only for the first line of the stanza, as,
(1) Negate the Left Hand Side. => I won't advance, I'll do something else.
(2) Negate the Right Hand Side. => I won't allow them to retreat.

(3) Affirm the Left Hand Side. => I advance but in a way beneficial to my side.
(4) Affirm the Right Hand Side. => I do allow them to retreat but in a way harmful to them.

As far as I know, I am the first to solve this riddle. Perhaps Gordian knots can never survive playful strikes.

If you are over-awed or puzzled by some formulas, send them to us. We have a few bits of our brains to spare in solving some stuff for you. We will solve it if it is fun.

Whatever the search engine thinks ("it's a little-known blog," "the post is too short," "there are no keywords," etc ), this is a remarkable post. If the engine doesn't pick this up, it just shows their algorithms' quality. More of this to come later.

Programming - The Answer , My Friend, is ...

on August 11, 2011

My Own Failures

1. I wrote an application in a Ruby web framework 1.x.x. Everything worked, fine. Then the 2.x.x. version came along and I upgraded and my app broke in many places. I fixed them somehow.

Then the 3.x.x. version came along and I upgraded and my app broke in many places again.

That is not the framework's problem. The real problem is I had used too many plugins.

2. I wrote an application in a PHP web framework 1.6.x. Everything worked, fine. Then the 1.7.x. version came along and I upgraded and my app broke in many places.

This is not the framework's problem. The real problem is I had used too many PEAR's.

3. Before all this, I worked for a project that migrated from EJB1 to 2 to 3 etc.
And for another project, where the project managers took years to move from Struts 1 to 2.

Other Failures

1. Netscape's spaghetti code that cost the company its battle against Microsoft.
2. Friendster's social graph that slowed the site to a crawl.
3. MySpace's "technical debt" that ruined the site.
4. Ruby on Rails framework --- Its lack of hosting (Maybe their developers don't care or it is their blind spot). And its handling of data management; if they don't know this part well enough, they should leave it alone e.g. PHP has no ORM and has been doing just fine.
5. Microsoft alone has a dozen or more data access technologies from 1998 to 2008, according to a book by Joel Spolsky. I don't have time or experience to know such stuffs.

My Own Successes

1. Porting RedBlack tree, AA tree etc from Java to Ruby is easy.
2. Porting shortest path, quick sort etc from Ruby to Python is easy.
3. Porting Regular expressions, string/text handling etc from PHP and Perl to Ruby is easy.
4. Porting higher order functions amongst Perl, Python, Ruby is easy.
5. Porting any plain domain or business object from any language to any other language is very very easy. From Java to Pascal, from Perl to PHP, from Ruby to C++, whatever.

6. Modeling or making mental representations or doing objects, classes and APIs for Law domains, Insurance domains, Education domains are very very very easy and fast.

7. Dreaming, going into trance, seeing in my mind eyes some apps end to end from the users' point of views is extremely easy and fast. "Easy" doesn't mean I do these activities well because, often, I even forgot to do them at all!

8. Writing domain objects is very easy.

9. Combining those objects is very easy.

Other Successes

1. Real programmers code everything by themselves. A paradox because they do and they don't.
2. Real programmers don't trust others' codes. A paradox because they do and they don't.

3. Excel team wrote even their own compiler, and killed off all dependencies.
4. Algorithms are very infrequent. They come once or twice in a decade.

5. Facebook is using many programming languages. So is Twitter.
6. Google founders didn't learn HTML etc on purpose.

The answer

If you can't find Apple-style appealing packaging, sell your stuffs, your wares raw, plain, uncovered!

Have fun!

Information Wants to Be Expensive

Newsweek will be out of print after all these 80 years.

Reader Digest is getting thinner and thinner, both physically and content-wise.

French and Brazilian newspapers want some monetary compensation from Google and other search engines.

John Gapper, in a recent Financial Times article, predicted more and more toll fees to sprout on the Information Superhighway. He cited metered pay walls on news sites like New York Times, Financial Times and even on some blogs.

Most insightfully, Gapper pointed out what we have been missing all along.

1. Most of us have been seeing this quote all over the web and in print too: "Information wants to be free..." We don't check out the source, just take it at face value as valid, and demand that all content creators and owners give up their rights and let us enjoy their stuffs for free. Why does the information want to be free? ".. because the cost of getting it out is getting lower."
   
   Yes, distribution costs are coming down, almost free, YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr, Blogger, Wordpress, what else. But what about the creation cost? Can we make another Titanic or Avatar for less than 50 million?
2. Gapper then pointed us to that infamous quote's corollary maxim to the opposite effect : "information wants to be expensive because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes you life."

I don't believe good codes (software programs) can be free everywhere and for all the time.

I don't believe good teaching, good lessons can be free everywhere and for all the time. Some one who can invent a business model that rewards teachers well, will carry all of the field  in online learning.