I can't really see a business case where these guys would make a profit before their billionaire club gets bored. I don't think images from hundreds of little cameras are going to be equal the image from the Hubble or its replacement, the Webb. I hope these guys won't be another Iridium.
I don't understand why you came in here to say little more than "this costs money, I don't like it", while taking a shot at people who have earned disposable income.
Do you really think Khan Academy is free? It's only free if you have electricity, a computer, and a broadband internet connection. Knewton really adds only a tiny amount of money on top of that massive infrastructure cost.
Even if you think "oh, just go to the public library!" I would respond, "how, with what money or means?" That's not free either.
None of these things are "free". I feel that you've simply taken an arbitrary ideological stance where a company producing materials and asking for money to compensate them is somehow less "preferable".
I think like you that the fact that this company makes money from users rather than receiving from rich benefactors, is not sufficient for disliking it.
As yurylifshits points out, their ads make me feel like their product is awesome, and maybe it really is.
Only that I would not know, till some users points out what are the pros and cons, with Khan Academy as second term of comparison.
I, as eu universitary students, cannot afford to pay 400$, only to see if their products fits my needs.
It's a pity I bet.
This type of faux-populist attitude is bothersome, especially since it's so popular on HN. Why dichotomize attempts to change education along monetary lines?
Khan is changing education from without, and Knewton is changing it from within. What's wrong with either approach?
We can like them both. For-profits have often been better at rapidly exploring the beneficial-interactions opportunity-space than pure non-profits and charitable organizations.
Take more interesting classes (Evil & Decadence in Literature), less classes that I thought would help my career (Management in Engineering).
Hang out with more people who are interesting. Spend less time with people who are just fun w/o much substance. Don't waste effort on being friends with assholes because they seem cool.
Don't fall behind coursework.
Waste less time with stuff I cannot really remember: watching sports, TV, lectures by professors who cannot teach, video games, ...
I think this is the downside of intelligence. You see so many patterns you start to believe that everything falls into one. New ideas are assumed to be no better than old ones.
I don't think it should matter where an idea comes from. I read an article from Fred Wilson that mentioned (in a good way) how surprised a CEO was to find so many good ideas coming from customer service reps (who have the most direct experience with customers). I won't assume you ignored interns, but I think stereotyping by position is a good recipe for overlooking opportunities, just to save yourself some mental fatigue.
At my former employer (a commercial software division of a major electronics manufacturer) my managers were dumbfounded when I suggested we ask the tech support people for input when we did feature planning for the next version.
That was around the time I started thinking about finding somewhere else to work.
By that you mean authority level attached to the idea? thats what I've noticed, brilliant people without any authority get laughed at, and the converse people do what idiots command as they have the authority.
Myself I'm somewhat of a creative anomaly (I have psyhc tests that put me in the top 0.1% of people on the planet). When I start a new project I go through this flow very quickly, I start by being laughed at as a crazy man, far out ideas. I pull a few tricks out of my hat, and within 2-3 months I'm the go to man for entire business.
That said I shift jobs every 18 months or so as I get sick of fighting with people constantly. Being creative can draw the worst out of people you are working with, unintentionally you belittle them, or expose them as frauds or whatever, some people are just jealous, others lazy and just offload hard work your way. You end up polarised very quickly.
I now run my own business because of this (as opposed to contracting which I was doing for a long time), and the majority of my ex employers still come to me for advice, some 10 years later still phoning me up with questions or inviting out for lunch/beers etc... I even have open ended job offers sitting there if I ever want to come back.
But as this article says its hard being creative in a world that out right rejects it.
Being creative can draw the worst out of people you are working with, unintentionally you belittle them, or expose them as frauds or whatever, some people are just jealous, others lazy and just offload hard work your way.
Thinking of yourself as part of the top 0.1% people on the planet may lead to an attitude that makes people feel belittled or antagonistic.
If you treat people like idiots or mindless sheep, of course they'll reject your ideas.
Worse than that, focusing on oneself is toxic to creativity in the first place. Wile E. Coyote's business card says "Genius". But it's the Roadrunner who is in a state of creative flow.
Really good ideas often don't seem like much even to the person who's having them. They're fragile. It takes tolerance and suspension of judgment to allow them to survive even for half a second. This is a form of listening, one that goes hand in hand with the ability to listen to others, which makes sense since creativity is also a kind of other.
Wait doesn't the Roadrunner just go "Meep, Meep"
... and the Coyote come up with elaborate traps that fail with tragic irony. The Coyote seems more like in state of creative flow, right?
The fact is I shy the hell away form confrontation because creativity vs society problems has existed my entire life.
As a kid I was treated really bad by there children. Teased constantly as ebign a weirdo because I thought differently, physical attacks from kids as the awards kept piling in. I remember getting a maths award, had to get up on stage to receive it. On the way out of the auditorium I was punched in the side of the head and some other kid ripped up the paper certificate. It wasn't nice, I was scared of other kids and went very quiet/introverted and focused on escapism... which ironically probably made the creative as I spent all my time imagining, drawing, reading.
I have boxes of awards, I think I've won some sort of award every year of my life without trying. This year I won an advertising award. I've never worked in advertising, I just got approached as I was running an online news team. I suggested an idea, prototyped, it sold, industry choked on how left field it was, and now I have an award for being the top advertising creative person of 2010.
I'm quite an extrovert these days as I got past most of that sort of stuff... but its still there. University changed me heaps, when all of a sudden all the girls liked me. I got my confidence back, became somewhat of a people person and cavalier amongst the ladies.
Most people who know me outside of work wouldn't even consider me as employable. The crap I went through as a kid has stayed with me, I never like to expose any true abilities I have unless I have to.
Most as people know me as a comedian, drunken musician, and an artist. Very few people could guessed I have been a contracting and designing major infrastructure projects for governments, telecommunications projects. I have no formal training in computing at all. All I know I picked up as a child, and through short term contract work. My tertiary training is in conceptual artwork and minoring in music production. To look at me you'd probably call me a stereotypical hipster. Stretched ear lobes, tattoos, and a suit at a board meeting with directors of multinational corporations is a bizarre mix ;)
I didn't know I was in the 0.1% until recently, went more or less my whole career just trying to be average Joe blogs who had good ideas and got promoted quickly. To be honest most of the time I would show my manager something (or suggest it), and then they would force me into a situation where I would have to take me idea to the business, sell what ever it is, and defend it from criticism etc... I would usually try and get out of it if I could but often people don't quite understand the concept enough they don't feel comfortable making the sell.
It was only working on a project and management decided to do a team building day. They brought in psychologists to do pshycho-analysis so we could see each others benefits and flaws, and they where blown away by my results and offered me to participate in some other tests they had (as I turned out to be an anomaly and they don't often just stumble across prime research people).
The anomalous stuff just popped up in the team building stuff.
They displayed the results and I wasn't normal, intact my results seemed like they might be completely wrong. At the time I was working for a large courier company, in an IT department, improving delivery tracking systems. To get someone off the scale in metrics not generally found in an IT department is an anomaly. Maybe if it was a group of artists I may have just been elevated and overlooked, but I guess the context was important for making me stand out.
I don't know what the tests where. I just took an afternoon off and went down to there offices and did the tests they presented. Its was on a computer and lots of behavioural questions and IQ type puzzles. I thin I did around 5 tests that after noon. They rang me back a week or so later and went throughout eh results with me, and then emailed me a series of figures and graphs.
Are they accurate I dunno? but the last set of figures which they went through had that creativity figure. But to tell a story of accuracy I'll tell yo a story about my friend who is in Mensa.
He worked out that the mensa test he was given was time based. So he paid his fee, answered the first few questions, then skipped all the rest and finished the exam in a few minutes. When all the weighting was put together he had scored extremely high on the IQ scale by doing this.
Is he a genius? I dunno. If its a genius move to outsmart mensa then yes. But he didn't really sit the test, he intact just spotted a flaw and abused it.
As for awards and validation. I think I've associated awards with the potential for negative thing to happen later. In my last position when I won the advertising award, a new pressure to be the best this year suddenly appeared... after all I was now recognised as the best in the industry... My daily work became more difficult because expectations are imposed on me that I didn't want or need. Hell running a news team + site is enough hard work without being expected to be an advertising maverick as well.
So its usually other people either that notice things I've done or put me forward, I never nominate myself. I hate awards.
I just want work and solve problems. I get pleasure from taking something that doesn't exist, thinking it through, and making it a reality. My house is full of useless inventions, toys, prototypes. I can't help myself. People often note on my inability to relax, I relax by indulging myself in ideas, which to others is the opposite of relaxing.
Seeing the results from those tests made me realise a lot of the problems I had been experiencing where probable never going to go away. Lets be honest (entrenched) IT is one of the least creative industries out there. Its generally very goal/problem focused, that often only has one or two possible outcomes. It gave me the motivation to pack up my 6 figure salary and walk out the door. Currently I'm going week to week scraping money together for food, but I haven't been happier. Got a few products close to launch, so the trial by fire is about to begin. Exciting times ... just need to stay off hacker news and reddit LOL
Mensa always struck me as just moronic. How intelligent is it to care about that? One of the funniest things I ever saw was when someone got hold of a "Mensa" bumper sticker and put it on his car upside down.
Anyway, good luck with the self-validation and back away from those awards.
Do not hire as employee. The collective cost of dealing with the annoyance will far outweigh the geek's contribution.
However, consider hiring him as an on-call "consultant" for "special projects" in case the team falls behind schedule. It might motivate them to get ahead. :)
I am really grateful that I had great friends who were able to notice when I was totally burning out.
They talked me into taking some time off to go on a road trip with them and pulled me out of a dark and ugly hole. I had to deal with the wrath of the boss when I returned, but getting out of the hole gave me the right perspective to look for something much better. I was out of there within a few weeks.
Cheers to great friends! And, please don't forget to be one.
My personal experience is that about 20% of bosses (I'm including my boss's bosses) were so often out of line that there were employees hoping to meet these guys in a dark alley. 70% of my bosses were varying degrees of competence/incompetence. And, only about 10% were respected and liked.
Maybe the military is funding them: http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/Space_Enabled_Eff...