I keep forgeting to keep reminding myself not to take certain things for granted (at Karoi)
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I keep forgeting to keep reminding myself not to take certain things for granted (at Karoi)
Poloniex Adds “FCT Factom” (Factoids) To Their Exchange
We are thrilled to announce that Poloniex is the first cryptocurrency exchange to have added support for factoids software tokens. After our software sale, our supportive community has been eager for a platform on which to trade factoids (FCT for short).
We have released binaries and installers for the Factom client to make it easier for users to transfer tokens as they wish. You can find our guides together with the installers for Windows, Mac, and Linux here: http://factom.org/howto.
Poloniex has chosen “FCT Factom” as the clearest way to list the Factoids on their platform, given many people aren’t aware of the technical details of the Factom Network or its use of “Factoids”, but know the project simply as “Factom”.
“Poloniex has a talented team of developers and it was easy working with them on the Factom integration for their exchange.” Stated Paul Snow, CEO of the Factom Foundation.
“We are excited to add Factom to the Poloniex platform as part of our commitment to bringing innovative new projects to the market.” Continued Tristan D'Agosta, CEO of Poloniex Exchange.
Thanks again to our awesome community of open source contributors and volunteer supporters.
32 facts everyone should know about whisky
You should never mix ice or another drink with whisky because that ruins both the aroma and the flavor. (Although for some whiskys, that may not be a bad thing).
It is okay to add water to your whisky. Experts advise to drink Single Malt Whisky pure or with a tiny bit of water on room temperature. This is because of the maturing process that has taken place in oak casks for 10 – 15 years. If you drink it with ice or mix it with another drink this whole process was useless.
The word “whisky” comes from the Gaelic “Uisge Beatha” or “Usquebaugh”, which means “water of life”.
Whisky has two legitimate spellings: “Whisky” and “Whiskey”. The Scots spell it without the “e” because they believe more vowels waste good drinking time.
Scotch is scotch. If it says “scottish whisky” it is probably made somewhere else than Scotland.
If the bottle is written whisky it is precisely manufactured in Scotland, if whiskey, then where else, but not in Scotland.
The body or lightness of whiskey is primarily determined by the size of the grain from which it is made; the larger the grain, the lighter the whiskey. Whiskey can be made from wheat, barley, corn or rye.
Approximately 2-4% of all whisky in the world “stored in a wooden barrels” evaporate into air. This is known as the Angel’s Share.
The age on a bottle of whisky refers to the number of years it was stored in the barrels before bottling.
A whisky stops maturing once it is bottled.
A closed bottle of whiskey can be kept 100 years, without losing the taste of the drink.
After opening a bottle and it’s half full, whisky can be kept for 5 years without losing the taste of the drink.
Whisky must be matured for a minimum of three years in Scotland in Oak barrels to earn the name “Scotch”.
90% of the Single Malt Whiskys comes from Scotland.
The barrels made from American White Oak have been claimed to produce the tastiest whisky.
Single Malt Whisky comes from a single distillery and a single grain. However, it is possible that it underwent maturing in multiple casks.
Blended Whisky is called Blended Whisky because of the mixture of Grain Whisky and multiple Single Malt Whiskies.
Whiskey was only made by monks until 1541 when King Henry VIII dissolved all the monasteries.
The are five basic classifications of whisky are: Irish Whisky, Scotch Whisky, Bourbon, Canadian Whisky and American Whisky.
Mctears Auctions in Glasgow is the most famous auction house for rare bottles of whisky
India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of whiskey
Before drinking, give your whiskey a good sniff first so that you do not miss the flavor.
Jack Daniels will sell you a barrel of whiskey for about $10,000. Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey
During Prohibition era in the United States, Pharmacies sold “Medicinal Whiskey,” much like today’s Medicinal Marijuana. Medicinal whiskey and “The Loophole.”
For the first two days of processing whiskey and beer are the same. The basic ingredients of the two are also the same with an additional ingredient (hops) in beer. It gives beer its bitterness.
Whiskey was used as a currency during the American Revolution. The government levied a new tax on people who used whiskey that led to the Whiskey Rebellion
This one should have been number 1 - Drinking malt whisky can help prevent cancer. Some researches say that drinking whiskey has greater benefits than drinking red wine.
Initially, when whiskey/scotch is produced, it is colorless (just like Vodka).The classic Golden brown color of whiskey/scotch comes from the color of the wooden barrels in which it is aged. The wood expands and contracts with the change in temperature, making the movie in and out of the wood. The compounds from wood give whisky its dark color.
There are more than 5000 types of Single Malt Whisky! That’s a lot of whisky out there that you haven’t tried yet.
Whisky can be called Whisky only when it matured for a minimum of 3 years in oak casks.
Around 90 percent of all Single Malt Whisky comes from Scotland!
Some claim that whiskey was invented in Ireland as long as 1,000 years ago and carried to Scotland by monks. Explains their wisdom, I suppose.
Why it's important to listen, understood, and check with customers every once in a while
Marketing Department
Add unnecessary value
Add complexity, bells and whistles, embellish,
Put their own mark onto things
Be fanciful, impractical, untested, untried
Creativity for creativity's sake
Subjective not objective, theoretical not practical,
Clever ideas
Think they know what's best for the customers even if the survey feedback is utterly clear
Fail to consult with engineering, production and anyone else in the organisation.
Management will
Cost-conscious
Process-led rather than output-aware
Failure to understand and interpret real issues and implications
Failure to ask questions
Committee decisions produce impractical solutions
Removed from reality
Detached from customers and front-line staff
Failure to consult with users and functional departments.
Engineering
Technical interpretation rather than practical
Unconcerned with aesthetics and ergonomics
Consideration stops after the 'can we build it?' stage
Lack of consultation with specifiers and user representatives
Meets specification but doesn't work properly
Inappropriate materials and absence of styling.
Manufacturing
Production specification over-rides design considerations
A law unto themselves
You get what you're given
Any colour you like as long as it's black
Detached from users, specifiers, designers, and everyone else except other manufacturing staff
Unconcerned with usability or functionality
Certainly unconcerned with bells and whistles and added value
Totally focused on production efficiency, cost and time
Lack of liaison with all other departments.
Maintenance
Necessity is the mother of invention
Very big tool-boxes
Huge stocks of parts and ancillaries, materials, nuts, bolts and all other fixings known to man
Happy to work all hours, especially evenings, weekends and public holidays at treble-time-and-a-half with days off in lieu
Never consult with specifiers or customer specifications
Enjoy quick-fixes, sticky-tape, mastic, bending bracketry, planks of wood and extended tea-breaks
Never liaise with any other departments and think management are all useless idiots who can't even change a plug.
of customers
If only we'd listened, understood, and checked with them once in a while......
Build software better, together.
A Short Lexicon of Italian Gestures
via New York Times
Why you shouldn’t worry about people stealing your idea
The biggest fear of the Tech Entreprener in Africa, well at least most of the many I have met, is that if they share their idea with people, someone is going to steal it. This is how I used to feel a few years ago but the longer I stay in the game, the more I learn that keeping your idea secret so that no one else will steal it is pointless, and that an idea alone it holds no value (so you can't expect to be able to sell it either) .
Don't get me wrong here: I'm not saying that Intellectual Property protection is not an important issue. It is but the best way of protecting your idea is by building implementation of it than anyone else. The reason for that is that execution is by far the harder part of any venture. And here's why:
1. Your idea is worthless
As Derek Sivers so brilliantly put it: the most brilliant idea in the world with no execution is only worth $20.
The first thing every entrepreneur should know is that: “Ideas are worth nothing. What matters is the execution. And execution is (almost) everything.”. In the global, connected world we live in, there is an overabundance of startup ideas. The value of a startup is therefore created not from the idea, but from the execution of that idea and all those hours put into making the idea come to life.
2. You may need to think about pitching to invetors
And no serious professional investor will sign any kind of NDA and the reason for that is because it would completely hogtie them from operating their business.
The large VC funds receive 5,000 - 10,000 business plans each year, and probably 90% of them are duplicative (remember, even that would leave you with 500 - 1,000 completely unique ideas, which simply doesn't happen.)
They won't to agree to sign an NDA with you because they know that another another company with a similar business plan may come along and so they, at best, will have to constantly self-censor to remember what they can talk about with their portfolio company, and at worst, they are putting a big sign on the door saying "Sue Me!".
For that reason, VCs and serious angels will simply not sign NDAs, and asking one to is a hallmark of an amateur entrepreneur.
3. Your idea is probably going to have changed by the time it goes to market
Most likely, the idea doesn't work the way you have imagined until and unless, you have done a resourceful research. When you finally take the implementation of your idea to market, you shall be constantly going through a process of discovering and validating the right market for your idea, building the right product features that solve customers’ needs, testing the correct model and tactics for acquiring and converting customers, and deploying the right organization and resources to scale the business. This process is known as Customer Development.
In the end, what you end up with is something very different from the idea you had originally.
4. If your idea is going to be the next big thing, it's probably too ridiculous for people to take seriously anyway.
If you don’t believe this, put yourself in the shoes of the VCs who first heard the following ideas (which were originally put by Michael Wolfe on Quora) and tell us in the comments below if you would have invested in them:
· Facebook - the world needs yet another Myspace or Friendster except several years late. We'll only open it up to a few thousand overworked, anti-social, Ivy Leaguers. Everyone else will then join since Harvard students are so cool.
· Dropbox - we are going to build a file sharing and syncing solution when the market has a dozen of them that no one uses, supported by big companies like Microsoft. It will only do one thing well, and you'll have to move all of your content to use it.
· Amazon - we'll sell books online, even though users are still scared to use credit cards on the web. Their shipping costs will eat up any money they save. They'll do it for the convenience, even though they have to wait a week for the book.
· Virgin Atlantic - airlines are cool. Let's start one. How hard could it be? We'll differentiate with a funny safety video and by not being a**holes.
· Mint - give us all of your bank, brokerage, and credit card information. We'll give it back to you with nice fonts. To make you feel richer, we'll make them green.
· Palantir - we'll build arcane analytics software, put the company in California, hire a bunch of new college grad engineers, many of them immigrants, hire no sales reps, and close giant deals with D.C.-based defense and intelligence agencies!
· Craigslist - it will be ugly. It will be free. Except for the hookers.
· iOS - a brand new operating system that doesn't run a single one of the millions of applications that have been developed for Mac OS, Windows, or Linux. Only Apple can build apps for it. It won't have cut and paste.
· Google - we are building the world's 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being commoditized money losers. We'll strip out all of the ad-supported news and portal features so you won't be distracted from using the free search stuff.
· Github - software engineers will pay monthly fees for the rest of their lives in order to create free software out of other free software!
· PayPal - people will use their insecure AOL and Yahoo email addresses to pay each other real money, backed by a non-bank with a cute name run by 20-somethings.
· Paperless Post - we are like Evite, except you pay us. All of your friends will know that you are an idiot.
· Instagram - filters! That's right, we got filters!
· LinkedIn - how about a professional social network, aimed at busy 30- and 40-somethings. They will use it once every 5 years when they go job searching.
· Tesla - instead of just building batteries and selling them to Detroit, we are going to build our own cars from scratch plus own the distribution network. During a recession and a cleantech backlash.
· SpaceX - if NASA can do it, so can we! It ain't rocket science.
· Firefox - we are going to build a better web browser, even though 90% of the world's computers already have a free one built in. One guy will do most of the work.
· Twitter - it is like email, SMS, or RSS. Except it does a lot less. It will be used mostly by geeks at first, followed by Britney Spears and Charlie Sheen.
· Fedex - We're going to buy a fleet of jet airplanes, the biggest-ticket items in the world and we're going to fly every package through Memphis even if they're going across the street
Review: Google Chromecast “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Via: Matt Berg
Github is an online service that helps programmers share and collaborate around software they create.
"In an effort to help promote, highlight and grow Africa coders we’ve created this map which shows the location and density existing GitHub users (primarily...
An example of how not to do SEO.
Their developer is going straight to hell for this one
The Herald. Zimbabwe's most popular daily newspaper
Indigenisation and Empowerment minister, Saviour Kasukuwere on Wednesday accused Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Gideon Gono of being the country's most corrupt person.
Indigenisation and Empowerment minister, Saviour Kasukuwere on Wednesday accused Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) governor Gideon Gono of being the country’s most corrupt person.
Event Postponed - Important information RE: RHoK 'Hacking Against Corruption' Hackathon
Due to the unprecedented popularity of the original event scheduled for April 27th & 28th 2013, we have decided to postpone it to June 22nd & 23rd because our resources are not enough to accommodate everyone who has expressed interest in participating in this event. Th next couple of month will give us enough time to acquire enough resources to accommodate everyone who wants to take part, bring a bigger event and thus make a more significant impact.
We apologise for any inconveniences we may have caused. It was a difficult decision!
#RHoKHarare
Samaita, Manjenjenje, Ganda Ravasikana (by Phil Mlanda)
Powerlessness and silence go together. We should use our positions not as a shelter from the world's reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used.
Margaret Atwood