I dropped out of college couple of years ago and it was the best decision I ever made in my life.
While I am not as (financially) successful as some of geek drop-outs who inspired me. I have done better (financially) than most of my friends who did graduate from the same college I dropped out from and most importantly I enjoy what I do. Do you need to graduate from a college in order to be successful in life? If you can open a book and read, there is absolutely no reason why you can’t have the same knowledge you will get by graduating from a college. The only difference is a piece of paper that will cost you ~50-100k (if in US) and 4 years of your life.
Ok maybe its a bit simplistic view against college but its not very far from the truth. When I dropped out of college I constantly needed inspiration from success stories of geeks who made it big but never finished college. These are the five successful geek personnel who inspired me the most:
1) Michael Saul Dell:
Geek Creed: When he was 15 he used to take apart Apple II computers and rebuild it just for the hell of it. He dropped out of University of Texas to run PC’s Limited (now Dell) at the age of 19.
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Over the last 12 months or so I was starting to like Microsoft a bit because of their efforts in trying to connect to the users by opening up IE and Windows7 developers blog and taking inputs from everyone on what features and improvements they want to see on future versions. That takes some balls considering the fact that many people were furious with IE & Vista in general. They took a lot of these user suggestions and implemented on Windows 7 and IE8 (not enough). So, lets give them credit where its due: Windows 7 is the best Windows yet (unlike Vista) and IE8 is the best IE yet (unlike IE6-7). They are not better than the alternatives but its their best effort yet.
Recently they doubled up on their efforts on IE8 promotion. First the Browsing For the Better promotion where MS will donate 8 meals for each IE8 download (partnering with Feeding America). Even though its a bit shady, I am not going to sit in the comforts of my home and criticize something that will help those in need. Their second effort is in the form of an online competition dubbed “Ten Grand is Buried Here”, where you download and install IE8 and follow their twitter account to play a treasure hunting game. You get hints to look for the location of $10k somewhere hidden online, apparently it only works with IE8. Another shady move, but even on this one I am prepared to give them a pass, a lot of companies use this kind of promotions to get users.
But, then came the LIES.
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Work on HTML 5 started in 2004 and even after 5 years of work we are no where close to having a final draft. According to the co-editor of HTML 5, Ian Hickson, we might have to wait till 2022 for the final proposed draft of HTML 5. But thats no reason to be discouraged, HTML 5 will be a major improvement over previous markup so changes are likely to come in small increments. Since the release of the first draft in 2008, most major browsers (yes including IE8) implemented some of the features proposed in this draft and it is already generating a lot of interest from developers. Today we will look at 5 of these exciting HTML 5 features and its implementation.
1) Web Workers: Think of it as Hyper-Threading for web browsers. Separate background threads are used to do processing without effecting the performance of a webpage. This can be very useful for web applications which relies on heavy scripts to perform functions (among other things). Firefox 3.5b has the best implementation of this proposed features. Opera and Safari also supports some elements of this feature.
You can try out the in-video motion with Web Workers on Firefox 3.5 or calculate prime numbers with Web Workers, with Safari 4 and FF 3.5
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Even though Opera is the most popular mobile browser in the world, in the desktop market Opera is the most under-rated browser despite having created many innovative features. Which were later copied by other browsers.
Its hard to understand why Opera has only ~2.2% browser market share while IE6 still boasts a whopping ~14.5% market share. Maybe the Opera developers were so busy developing solid browser features that they forgot that they need to do some promotions in order for people to use it. In contrast IE developers were so busy shoving their crap browser down people’s throat they forgot to make a half decent browser. Whatever is the case, the internet is a better place today thanks to some of the innovations that started from the Opera camp.
Source (with a grain of salt)
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Today Google released Quick Search Box for Mac, which is developed by the same person who wrote Quicksilver (Nicholas Jitkoff works for Google now). As expected it works more or less the same way quicksilver does. According to Google, QSB is an evolution of Google Desktop for Mac. If you are a long time Quicksilver user you will fit right at home with QSB, minus the large number of plugins and configuration options with Quicksilver.
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