It's not entirely unusual. I've been a member for about 6 years now and, candidly, it's in a permanent state of disarray. I've not been there in about 7 months as I've been out of London but I don't imagine much has changed.
I would say - don't let it put you off. The Hackspace is more than the sum of its tools. In any event there's a lot there including some fantastic equipment. The out of order equipment is more often a work in progress than it is abandoned kit.
Well design site. Maybe I'll get off my lazy butt and do a triathlon... or not.
How do people keep sites like this up-to-date when there are so many repositories of information and/or small players that are not standardized? Do they have go event by event or store by store? Is there a better way?
re: updating - Good question. Lanyrd did this really well with professional events and Yelp did it with restaurants. It's a unique combination of crowd-sourcing, manual work, and incentivizing the organizers of the events.
Thank you Jason. I direct a not-for-profit foreign government and private foundation incubator based in San Francisco. We just completed a one-month quasi-accelerator for companies that came to the US. None were ready for VC funding and we made this clear. Despite our best effort to get the entrepreneurs to focus on customer development, many spent their time on VCs and angel networks. They got meetings but not much else. We are going to make sure that all new companies participating in future accelerators read your post.
I wasn't a big Posterous user but I liked their mission and was hoping they would be around longer. I understand it's hard to maintain a service that aims to disrupt the incumbent. I would have sold in absence of any other option. Perhaps a solution is a crowd funding application for free service we want to keep around instead of them being acquired and shelved by tech giants. Or we could just pay for the service.
Take a look at www.minggler.com, a service myself and two others started last year. We aim to automate who and when to reach out to someone. Haven't quite perfected the formula. Would love your feedback.
I recently visited Microsoft innovation labs in Mountain View and they were really touting how cool Windows 8 would be on desktops and tablets. I've actually been using the release candidate version on a dual boot laptop with Ubuntu for the past couple of months and have not been impressed or greatly inconvenience. I did ask the presenter, a Microsoft developer, how I could easily shutdown my computer as the shutdown button is now not easily accessible as in Windows 7. His answer annoyed me as he gave me three options on how to do it but didn't address the "easily" part of my question. This may be a pattern with Microsoft, lots of feature but limited simplicity.
Ask 10 random users how they shutdown their iPad. I suspect that 9 of 10 will tell you they close their cover on the screen. Press them and say, "no, how do you actually shut it down". I suspect you'll get blank stares.
Most people never need to turn off their devices. Most people probably turn off their machine when there is no need.
Shutting down using Win 8 takes exactly the same number of clicks as in Win 7. Alternatively you could just hit the power button and it'll shut down fine.
Alt-F4 from the desktop in Win 8 still works, as well. Being that I'm in the desktop a majority of the time on Win 8 and have always used Alt-F4 if actually needed to turn off my machine for some reason (who does this anymore?), so not much change for me.
Do you think that perhaps the recent "craze" to become a developer is not founded on solid group? Are people wasting their time and money? Definitely feel there is some merit to Peter Norvig's comments.
Just reviewed the first newsletter. Good cross-section of a very hot sector. Any chance you can include a section on 3D scanning? Also interested in copyright law.
Thanks for the feedback. Right now a section on 3D scanning is possible, but it will most likely be included under the general News section. Same for copyright law.
