Venture Capitalists tend to want 80% OR MORE of equity, especially if the company is at age 0. I agree with the original poster that $5MM for 20 highly skilled programmers for 3 years seems insane.
Look, I don't know about you guys, but I'd be more than happy to pay an extra $20 or even $50/month to have faster access than my existing cable internet (which is notably faster than the DSL service in my area). My problem is that the next tier in my area is about $500/month. Tiered access makes sense; you should pay for what you use. Otherwise you have the traditional economic problems of free-riding, adverse selection, and moral hazard.
Maybe you're all upset because you've been free-riding on lower-usage members, but think about it this way -- the people who have no clue that their computers are spam zombies will presumably be the lower-paying broadband users, and won't clog your access nearly as much.
How come one reference to Mallrats gets a +5 Funny, and another gets a -1 flamebait? The flamebait is the more faithful reference, anyhow.
Re:The important lines...
on
OQO For Sale
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, no matter what vendor you purchase a PC from, you're paying M$ royalties. In order for the company to get the M$ discount, they just pay M$ $15 per "desktop" shipped (workstations and servers are usually excluded from these deals).
In other words, if you order a linux machine from HP, $15 is paid to M$ for that purchase.
How do I know? I just finished a complete survey of computer vendors to try and find one that wouldn't do this. The only ones are those that would charge you around $100 for Windows XP Home on your machine... in other words, vendors that don't have any agreement with M$.
WAP Dead? I think not...
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Interesting to call WAP dead, considering that it's supported by just about every cellphone released nowadays.
I'm a software developer for a company that delivers solutions over WAP. We have building, health, and fire inspectors pass or fail inspectors via WAP. It's simple, it's fast (as fast it would be on the web), and it's extremely cheap (existing cell phone plan + around $5/month extra for the WAP service).
The news that WAP is dead is surprising to me, especially because I've had meetings with higher-ups at three major cell phone providers in the past month about their continued support for WAP on their cell phones.
I personally use WAP constantly to check sports scores, plane schedules (and departure/arrival gates), and to check on my fantasy football team.
I also own a T-Mobile Sidekick, which is consistently reviewed as one of the best devices for web-via-phone, and frankly, compared to WAP, it sucks. It's useful for sites that aren't supported via WAP, and of course it's essential for emailing or using extensive form-based websites, but it's much faster to check sports scores and use our Inspector interface via WAP than with the Sidekick browser (or the Treo browser, for that matter).
Currently, there's simply no substitute for WAP, and I'm glad that it's here to stay.
The point of the article seems to be that one's ambition has more to do with a widely lauded and recognized life than where one goes to college. Um, Duh. However, it's interesting to note that the study quoted in the article is by a Princeton professor, which should tell you a bit about how important naming colleges is to the person writing the article (one wonders if a study would be even considered if it came out of Bumfuck state?)
Finally, isn't this all fairly obvious? Of course you can be very rich and very famous without going to an ivy league college. But we still have a couple problems with the average Slashdot Reader Response to this article, which seems to be, "It doesn't matter which college you go to at all". One, this article named two (2) people who are fairly well recognized and did not go to ivy league schools. Off the top of all of our heads, if we methodically listed all of the people who we consider to be successful in life (and nationally "known"), I think we'll easily find that the majority went to a school in the top tier (say top 50 universities or top 50 liberal arts)
Also, one attends university to learn how to think, not to learn how to be creative. Note that the people quoted in this article are primarily successful because of their creativity. If you are an incredibly creative person, not going to an ivy league college won't take that away from you (i.e., Michelangelo!). However, look at people in professions which require intelligence. Doctors, lawyers, supreme court justices, senators, and the list goes on. The top people in these fields are mainly top tier grads.
Finally, the comment somewhere here that the education at Harvard is just as "easy" as anywhere else, you just have to get in -- that's horse shit. The educational rigor at Harvard and other ivy league schools is much tougher than pretty much every other school in the nation (perhaps not Deep Springs or other experimental collegs, but those might as well be ivy league for their quality of student).
An ivy league education doesn't guarantee anything, but it certainly ups the odds.
How irrelevant can you get? Most of these billionaires come from old money, so you can hardly argue that their non-attendance of college led to their current situations.
In addition, you'll have to discount all of the non-Western candidates, since college is viewed much differently in non-Western countries (i.e., why the hell go to College if your family is already way loaded?)
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone who submits or edits posts know how to use apostrophes? How could anyone think "Google's" can be followed by a verb?
Venture Capitalists tend to want 80% OR MORE of equity, especially if the company is at age 0. I agree with the original poster that $5MM for 20 highly skilled programmers for 3 years seems insane.
Look, I don't know about you guys, but I'd be more than happy to pay an extra $20 or even $50/month to have faster access than my existing cable internet (which is notably faster than the DSL service in my area). My problem is that the next tier in my area is about $500/month. Tiered access makes sense; you should pay for what you use. Otherwise you have the traditional economic problems of free-riding, adverse selection, and moral hazard.
Maybe you're all upset because you've been free-riding on lower-usage members, but think about it this way -- the people who have no clue that their computers are spam zombies will presumably be the lower-paying broadband users, and won't clog your access nearly as much.
Think about it.
How come one reference to Mallrats gets a +5 Funny, and another gets a -1 flamebait? The flamebait is the more faithful reference, anyhow.
Actually, no matter what vendor you purchase a PC from, you're paying M$ royalties. In order for the company to get the M$ discount, they just pay M$ $15 per "desktop" shipped (workstations and servers are usually excluded from these deals).
In other words, if you order a linux machine from HP, $15 is paid to M$ for that purchase.
How do I know? I just finished a complete survey of computer vendors to try and find one that wouldn't do this. The only ones are those that would charge you around $100 for Windows XP Home on your machine... in other words, vendors that don't have any agreement with M$.
Interesting to call WAP dead, considering that it's supported by just about every cellphone released nowadays.
I'm a software developer for a company that delivers solutions over WAP. We have building, health, and fire inspectors pass or fail inspectors via WAP. It's simple, it's fast (as fast it would be on the web), and it's extremely cheap (existing cell phone plan + around $5/month extra for the WAP service).
The news that WAP is dead is surprising to me, especially because I've had meetings with higher-ups at three major cell phone providers in the past month about their continued support for WAP on their cell phones.
I personally use WAP constantly to check sports scores, plane schedules (and departure/arrival gates), and to check on my fantasy football team.
I also own a T-Mobile Sidekick, which is consistently reviewed as one of the best devices for web-via-phone, and frankly, compared to WAP, it sucks. It's useful for sites that aren't supported via WAP, and of course it's essential for emailing or using extensive form-based websites, but it's much faster to check sports scores and use our Inspector interface via WAP than with the Sidekick browser (or the Treo browser, for that matter).
Currently, there's simply no substitute for WAP, and I'm glad that it's here to stay.
The point of the article seems to be that one's ambition has more to do with a widely lauded and recognized life than where one goes to college. Um, Duh. However, it's interesting to note that the study quoted in the article is by a Princeton professor, which should tell you a bit about how important naming colleges is to the person writing the article (one wonders if a study would be even considered if it came out of Bumfuck state?)
Finally, isn't this all fairly obvious? Of course you can be very rich and very famous without going to an ivy league college. But we still have a couple problems with the average Slashdot Reader Response to this article, which seems to be, "It doesn't matter which college you go to at all". One, this article named two (2) people who are fairly well recognized and did not go to ivy league schools. Off the top of all of our heads, if we methodically listed all of the people who we consider to be successful in life (and nationally "known"), I think we'll easily find that the majority went to a school in the top tier (say top 50 universities or top 50 liberal arts)
Also, one attends university to learn how to think, not to learn how to be creative. Note that the people quoted in this article are primarily successful because of their creativity. If you are an incredibly creative person, not going to an ivy league college won't take that away from you (i.e., Michelangelo!). However, look at people in professions which require intelligence. Doctors, lawyers, supreme court justices, senators, and the list goes on. The top people in these fields are mainly top tier grads.
Finally, the comment somewhere here that the education at Harvard is just as "easy" as anywhere else, you just have to get in -- that's horse shit. The educational rigor at Harvard and other ivy league schools is much tougher than pretty much every other school in the nation (perhaps not Deep Springs or other experimental collegs, but those might as well be ivy league for their quality of student).
An ivy league education doesn't guarantee anything, but it certainly ups the odds.
How irrelevant can you get? Most of these billionaires come from old money, so you can hardly argue that their non-attendance of college led to their current situations.
In addition, you'll have to discount all of the non-Western candidates, since college is viewed much differently in non-Western countries (i.e., why the hell go to College if your family is already way loaded?)