During our work on Our Future in Space video project we learned (I don't know how) that the entire Kickstarter team is, like 6 or 10 people, all of whom are running around with their hair on fire trying to keep everything running. They don't have a lot of time for improvements. Although with the money they're raking in (5% off the top), I would think they should be able to hire a couple more developers.
Actually bubbles have been identified back 2000-3000 years. There are some interesting things about tech bubbles (as opposed to government manipulation, federal reserve, inflation and other non-tech bubbles). Typically at the peak of a tech bubble there are many, perhaps hundreds or thousands of companies in the market (viz. PCs, dotcom, the auto industry, plastics fabrication, maybe 3D printing? - and arguably the rise of the quants and high speed trading are both technological advances associated with bubbles ). When the bubble breaks 70% to 90% of those companies fail, get bought, disappear one way or another leaving what we'll call 'the most robust'. The cool part is that for essentially every tech bubble that has been studied, 10 years after the bust the market is at least four times as large as at the peak of the bubble. For a recent example, look at the dotcom bubble of 2000, and compare the Internet then to the Internet now. The present Internet as a market is probably an order of magnitude larger than it was then.
So the lesson is, bubbles happen. Tech bubbles are not overall a bad thing, although they can be painful as the disruption caused by the new technology spreads through the system. It's part of life. And in the long run it generally works out for the better as we enjoy the benefits of the technology.
In fairness it's also a marketing/presentation layer. And nontrivially, their structure encourages some discipline about actually putting together something that might work. So just going through their hoops you are more likely to have a project that might get funded, and even might get done. But their backend (from what I've heard) is pretty painful to work with.
He is right: it's almost impossible, browsing their catalog, to find which are good projects and which aren't, given how many projects there often are (you can do it, but it's quite a lot of work).
Interesting - one might call this the 'inverse network effect' - which would act as a damper on the growth of some types of social network activities, once the network gets to a certain size. An economist might be interested in research on how this relates to the much-vaunted 'economies of scale' model which has been so overused. IMHO most multinational companies are well past the point where economies of scale are overwhelmed by the costs (economic, social, externalities, etc.) involved in just being a big network of sub-corporate entities.
My associates at Space Finance Group recently assisted National Space Society in their successful Kickstarter campaign, "Our Future in Space". Without telling too many 'secrets', there are some fundamental ideas to keep in mind. A good campaign needs publicity, and a network of people who already know about the project and want help out, a great video and KS website page, and a killer set of rewards. There are some websites (kicktraq.com is one) that provide useful data about specific projects, and about how the whole thing works - sorry I forget the others. Basically, your project is going to depend very strongly on how many of your network are motivated to go to Kickstarter, sign up and pledge. And make sure the rewards appear to be 'worth it'. We just looked at an IndieGogo campaign where a $4 trinket was the reward for a $100 pledge. Sorry, nobody's going for that.
And, assuming you succeed, be aware that KS takes 5%, Amazon takes 8%, and your rewards (if you have good, attractive rewards) are going to cost on the order of 30%. With other miscellaneous expenses, your real return will be close to 50%. (Funny, that's approximately the 'cost of sales' in most businesses.) Plan your project accordingly. Of course, if the reward is the product, then that helps your costs.
Re:When will we get it from an ethical bank?
on
Has Kickstarter Peaked?
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· Score: 4, Informative
non-profit banking associations thaf obviously won't even think about playing on stock exchanges
Here in the US, they are called Credit Unions. Most CUs are ethical. They work by lending their own members' deposits to members. Some/most (all?) are managed in part by members, at least in the sense of having an annual meeting where whoever shows up can vote. Generally CUs must be tied to a particular group - employees at a business, residents of a certain area, etc.
Re:what almost became 'The Great KDE Disaster Of 2
on
Too Perfect a Mirror
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· Score: 1
Could be worse - Unity, Gnome 3,... I'm playing this on KDE 4, trying it out. All I really want to do is run Compiz and some other stuff in my highly tuned environment - I use the Desktop Cube, with a transparent desktop, and Cairo Dock. I left KDE back about 6-7 years ago, but right now it's closer to what I want and am used to than anything else. I have Bodhi/Enlightenment running on another machine. It's nice too, but right now I'm like a man without a country.
I recently read an article (sorry, don't recall where) that said that Git was a 'functional data structure' akin to a functional programming language, and that was why it was so reliable.
'destory' - I like that. It should be a word.:) Like the opposite of history? The removal of one's history. In fact, it applies rather well in this case. "The repository was destoried."
AFAIK the major difference between European and US style options is that US options can be sold at any time up to the expiration, while European options can only be sold at expiration. So US options are much more flexible. Thus I don't know why Icahn would use European options.
Example: FOO (ticker for FooCo) is trading at $10. I buy an option to buy 100 shares of FOO at $10 six months from now, and I pay $.10 per option. I'm betting that FOO will be worth more than $10.10 in the next six months. For example if FOO goes to $10.50 I my option is now worth $.40 so I can make $.30 = 3 times my money. That's the basics of a 'call' option. (If the stock doesn't go up, the option expires worthless after six months, and I'm out the entire $.10 per share.)
But let's say after 3 months, while the stock is is now $10.20, there's a cloud on the horizon. I think before the six months is up the stock will be back down below $10, making my option worthless. In the US I can sell my option immediately, making only $.10 but avoiding the predicted loss of the entire $.10. In Europe I can not do that, I must hold the option until the bitter end.
Note: options give the opportunity to make a lot of money, but also the opportunity to lose 100% of your investment. Some options ('puts' - selling short) have the opportunity to make a lot of money but the opportunity to lose several, or many, times your money - you have an unlimited risk.
It's been a while since I was into this and I never was particularly good at it so I may have some details wrong but I think I have the gist.
True that. A fellow founder of a startup I was involved in got caught doing some shenanigans after we went public. It cost him big. If we were still private it would not have been such a big deal, but once you are public the rules change.
Longer version - he was the head of sales, and had been padding his expense reports for a long time but we put up with that. He also found ways to take 'short cuts' to vacation spots on the way to legitimate business events. But then he went to our our new East Coast distributor for a week to do training and such, to be paid for by the distributor. So he filed his expense report and we sent it on to the distributor for reimbursement. His expense report included a lot of expenses that the distributor's accountant thought were a little 'shaky', but then the head of distributor company pointed out that he had expensed $60 for 'lunch with the distributor' - on Memorial Day, which he spent on the distributor head's boat! So he was caught in an out-and-out fraud. When you are an officer in a public company you can not do that. (You shouldn't for any company, but in a public company it's possibly felonious.)
He was gone the next day, and he was forced to sell back his shares in the company for the original purchase price. Last I heard some years later, he was working in a 7-11 store. IIRC we also lost the distributor.
The classic cathedrals of Europe were all built using the compressive strength of stone, without any significant tensile elements. So it is possible to build domes and vaults of essentially arbitrary size without rebar. And the moon does not have significant issues with the ground shifting under the structures. Having said that, I won't argue that's the right way to do things!:D But it certainly might be for the early structures. I don't recall who, but some university is already experimenting with a '3D printer' that builds room-sized structures out of something similar to moon dust.
My own group, Space Finance Group, is considering putting together funding for some experiments related to this.
Back in 1978 I worked with a Perkin Elmer machine that used the last 170 milliseconds of power in the capacitors to save the system state to disk. So you could literally pull the plug from the wall, plug it back in, and the machine would pick up where it left off. Of course this was easier with a non-networked, 16 bit, 16K word RAM machine with a single-processing OS...
It's partly a cultural thing. back in the early 1990s I built and sold network fax servers. At that time the computers were run by the IT folks, and the telephone systems were run by the facilities folks. The IT folks usually thought nothing of sending out an announcement that "the servers will be down for an hour to install a new toy we just bought, so we can try out the new hotness". Asking the facilities folks to cycle the power on the telephone system elicited looks of horror and dismay.
Which reminds me - Erickson telephone switches used to be running Erlang, which can run hundreds of thousands of threads and can have the entire 'OS' (an Erlang instance or instances in the case of multiple processors) replaced without rebooting. I suspect that there are phone switches out there that haven't been rebooted in 10 or 20 years.
Well, except the couch wasn't subject to an EOL and mandatory replacement ("or else someone might steal your house") two years after you bought it. You could in theory continue to have the couch cleaned and occasionally rummage around and collect the spare change out of it for decades, without the windows falling off the walls of the house!:) [boy, can I stretch an analogy or what?]
the deal is, it's a lot of work to keep any desktop functioning the way you prefer. When things are constantly changing "for their own sake" ala Ubuntu, or win8.. and you have to fight to revert stuff how you're the most productive until it's no longer possible.. there comes a point when it's much less frustration and time to just bite the bullet and control things how you want.
Nail, meet hammer. This is the essence of the problem being discussed here.
I want my 'furniture' to stay where I put it, as long as I live in this 'house'. Or, in my car, I don't want the seats replaced with the new wraparound slings just because some guy at the service place thinks they're cool. If/when I want that, I'll trade my car in for a new one.
Especially how they just stopped making 30" displays just because (insert BS excuse here).
Today I just happened to see a bunch of 30" displays. I basically searched for '2560 monitor' to see what kind of extreme HD hardware was out there. Turns out there are lots of 27" and 30" 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 displays available. On E-bay there are even ones from Korea that are only about $400 (but may have a few dead pixels, no speakers, only DVI, or other weirdness). I kept seeing the names 'Catleap' and 'Yamasaki' (IIRC). Many of them are using the exact same IPS panel as the Apple ones. So let Google or whatever be your friend, and you may find happiness.
I haven't used a Mac regularly since the late 1990s. There are two things from back then that I recall with fondness - the Eudora mail system, which I don't recall very wall so by now Thunderbird and/or Evolution may well have passed; and a time tracker thing whose name I forget - I think it was called "Watch-It". It was perfect for logging my time on different projects and the user interface was great. I don't think the Mac OS X GUI was as good as its ancestor, NextStep.
Unix was described as "like a toolbox of small, sharp and well-honed tools that do precisely what is expected of them; no more, no less."
I wish that were still true. On the command line it's still mostly true. The once-and-ever big thing of Unix was that these simple, reliable, straightforward commands like 'cat', 'echo', 'ls', etc. could be combined into programs of arbitrary length and complexity - basically the shell environment could be considered as the inspiration for Perl and many scripting languages. But these all-consuming GUI Desktop Environments like KDE and Gnome have a different purpose, and a different model. And while I was a cheerful Gnome user for quite a while, I think these environments have Lost The True Way. X11 is, of course, problematical and possibly was the essential negative inspiration
So I think the way forward for me is going to be one of the very simple window managers, with additional support for 3D visualizations (e.g. Desktop Cube) and compositing, each of which are also simple features in their own way. Think of them as filters of the visual field comprised of the collection of windows. In that sense they can be added to the simple environment and taken away with minimal impact on anything else that doesn't depend on them.
Well they did manage to run something like two years without the EU-required Browser Option Button, apparently by mistake. It's about to cost them $600 million for this one line code error. So I would argue that somebody forgot to check with the lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
During our work on Our Future in Space video project we learned (I don't know how) that the entire Kickstarter team is, like 6 or 10 people, all of whom are running around with their hair on fire trying to keep everything running. They don't have a lot of time for improvements. Although with the money they're raking in (5% off the top), I would think they should be able to hire a couple more developers.
The 'mom' was never pregnant. It just divided. Unfortunately the other half got all the DNA!
Actually bubbles have been identified back 2000-3000 years. There are some interesting things about tech bubbles (as opposed to government manipulation, federal reserve, inflation and other non-tech bubbles). Typically at the peak of a tech bubble there are many, perhaps hundreds or thousands of companies in the market (viz. PCs, dotcom, the auto industry, plastics fabrication, maybe 3D printing? - and arguably the rise of the quants and high speed trading are both technological advances associated with bubbles ). When the bubble breaks 70% to 90% of those companies fail, get bought, disappear one way or another leaving what we'll call 'the most robust'. The cool part is that for essentially every tech bubble that has been studied, 10 years after the bust the market is at least four times as large as at the peak of the bubble. For a recent example, look at the dotcom bubble of 2000, and compare the Internet then to the Internet now. The present Internet as a market is probably an order of magnitude larger than it was then.
So the lesson is, bubbles happen. Tech bubbles are not overall a bad thing, although they can be painful as the disruption caused by the new technology spreads through the system. It's part of life. And in the long run it generally works out for the better as we enjoy the benefits of the technology.
The internet is an existence proof of the need for editors! :D
In fairness it's also a marketing/presentation layer. And nontrivially, their structure encourages some discipline about actually putting together something that might work. So just going through their hoops you are more likely to have a project that might get funded, and even might get done. But their backend (from what I've heard) is pretty painful to work with.
I think $15 might get you oh, 1/30 second. Hope one frame's enough! :D
He is right: it's almost impossible, browsing their catalog, to find which are good projects and which aren't, given how many projects there often are (you can do it, but it's quite a lot of work).
Interesting - one might call this the 'inverse network effect' - which would act as a damper on the growth of some types of social network activities, once the network gets to a certain size. An economist might be interested in research on how this relates to the much-vaunted 'economies of scale' model which has been so overused. IMHO most multinational companies are well past the point where economies of scale are overwhelmed by the costs (economic, social, externalities, etc.) involved in just being a big network of sub-corporate entities.
My associates at Space Finance Group recently assisted National Space Society in their successful Kickstarter campaign, "Our Future in Space".
Without telling too many 'secrets', there are some fundamental ideas to keep in mind. A good campaign needs publicity, and a network of people who already know about the project and want help out, a great video and KS website page, and a killer set of rewards. There are some websites (kicktraq.com is one) that provide useful data about specific projects, and about how the whole thing works - sorry I forget the others. Basically, your project is going to depend very strongly on how many of your network are motivated to go to Kickstarter, sign up and pledge. And make sure the rewards appear to be 'worth it'. We just looked at an IndieGogo campaign where a $4 trinket was the reward for a $100 pledge. Sorry, nobody's going for that.
And, assuming you succeed, be aware that KS takes 5%, Amazon takes 8%, and your rewards (if you have good, attractive rewards) are going to cost on the order of 30%. With other miscellaneous expenses, your real return will be close to 50%. (Funny, that's approximately the 'cost of sales' in most businesses.) Plan your project accordingly. Of course, if the reward is the product, then that helps your costs.
non-profit banking associations thaf obviously won't even think about playing on stock exchanges
Here in the US, they are called Credit Unions. Most CUs are ethical. They work by lending their own members' deposits to members. Some/most (all?) are managed in part by members, at least in the sense of having an annual meeting where whoever shows up can vote. Generally CUs must be tied to a particular group - employees at a business, residents of a certain area, etc.
I use CUs for all my business where possible.
Yes, I think you are right.
Could be worse - Unity, Gnome 3, ...
I'm playing this on KDE 4, trying it out. All I really want to do is run Compiz and some other stuff in my highly tuned environment - I use the Desktop Cube, with a transparent desktop, and Cairo Dock. I left KDE back about 6-7 years ago, but right now it's closer to what I want and am used to than anything else. I have Bodhi/Enlightenment running on another machine. It's nice too, but right now I'm like a man without a country.
I recently read an article (sorry, don't recall where) that said that Git was a 'functional data structure' akin to a functional programming language, and that was why it was so reliable.
'destory' - I like that. It should be a word. :) Like the opposite of history? The removal of one's history. In fact, it applies rather well in this case. "The repository was destoried."
AFAIK the major difference between European and US style options is that US options can be sold at any time up to the expiration, while European options can only be sold at expiration. So US options are much more flexible. Thus I don't know why Icahn would use European options.
Example: FOO (ticker for FooCo) is trading at $10. I buy an option to buy 100 shares of FOO at $10 six months from now, and I pay $.10 per option. I'm betting that FOO will be worth more than $10.10 in the next six months. For example if FOO goes to $10.50 I my option is now worth $.40 so I can make $.30 = 3 times my money. That's the basics of a 'call' option. (If the stock doesn't go up, the option expires worthless after six months, and I'm out the entire $.10 per share.)
But let's say after 3 months, while the stock is is now $10.20, there's a cloud on the horizon. I think before the six months is up the stock will be back down below $10, making my option worthless. In the US I can sell my option immediately, making only $.10 but avoiding the predicted loss of the entire $.10. In Europe I can not do that, I must hold the option until the bitter end.
Note: options give the opportunity to make a lot of money, but also the opportunity to lose 100% of your investment. Some options ('puts' - selling short) have the opportunity to make a lot of money but the opportunity to lose several, or many, times your money - you have an unlimited risk.
It's been a while since I was into this and I never was particularly good at it so I may have some details wrong but I think I have the gist.
True that. A fellow founder of a startup I was involved in got caught doing some shenanigans after we went public. It cost him big. If we were still private it would not have been such a big deal, but once you are public the rules change.
Longer version - he was the head of sales, and had been padding his expense reports for a long time but we put up with that. He also found ways to take 'short cuts' to vacation spots on the way to legitimate business events. But then he went to our our new East Coast distributor for a week to do training and such, to be paid for by the distributor. So he filed his expense report and we sent it on to the distributor for reimbursement. His expense report included a lot of expenses that the distributor's accountant thought were a little 'shaky', but then the head of distributor company pointed out that he had expensed $60 for 'lunch with the distributor' - on Memorial Day, which he spent on the distributor head's boat! So he was caught in an out-and-out fraud. When you are an officer in a public company you can not do that. (You shouldn't for any company, but in a public company it's possibly felonious.)
He was gone the next day, and he was forced to sell back his shares in the company for the original purchase price. Last I heard some years later, he was working in a 7-11 store. IIRC we also lost the distributor.
The classic cathedrals of Europe were all built using the compressive strength of stone, without any significant tensile elements. So it is possible to build domes and vaults of essentially arbitrary size without rebar. And the moon does not have significant issues with the ground shifting under the structures. Having said that, I won't argue that's the right way to do things! :D But it certainly might be for the early structures. I don't recall who, but some university is already experimenting with a '3D printer' that builds room-sized structures out of something similar to moon dust.
My own group, Space Finance Group, is considering putting together funding for some experiments related to this.
Back in 1978 I worked with a Perkin Elmer machine that used the last 170 milliseconds of power in the capacitors to save the system state to disk. So you could literally pull the plug from the wall, plug it back in, and the machine would pick up where it left off. Of course this was easier with a non-networked, 16 bit, 16K word RAM machine with a single-processing OS ...
It's partly a cultural thing. back in the early 1990s I built and sold network fax servers. At that time the computers were run by the IT folks, and the telephone systems were run by the facilities folks. The IT folks usually thought nothing of sending out an announcement that "the servers will be down for an hour to install a new toy we just bought, so we can try out the new hotness". Asking the facilities folks to cycle the power on the telephone system elicited looks of horror and dismay.
Which reminds me - Erickson telephone switches used to be running Erlang, which can run hundreds of thousands of threads and can have the entire 'OS' (an Erlang instance or instances in the case of multiple processors) replaced without rebooting. I suspect that there are phone switches out there that haven't been rebooted in 10 or 20 years.
I always thought it was pizza. And beer.
Well, except the couch wasn't subject to an EOL and mandatory replacement ("or else someone might steal your house") two years after you bought it. You could in theory continue to have the couch cleaned and occasionally rummage around and collect the spare change out of it for decades, without the windows falling off the walls of the house! :) [boy, can I stretch an analogy or what?]
the deal is, it's a lot of work to keep any desktop functioning the way you prefer. When things are constantly changing "for their own sake" ala Ubuntu, or win8.. and you have to fight to revert stuff how you're the most productive until it's no longer possible.. there comes a point when it's much less frustration and time to just bite the bullet and control things how you want.
Nail, meet hammer. This is the essence of the problem being discussed here.
I want my 'furniture' to stay where I put it, as long as I live in this 'house'. Or, in my car, I don't want the seats replaced with the new wraparound slings just because some guy at the service place thinks they're cool. If/when I want that, I'll trade my car in for a new one.
Especially how they just stopped making 30" displays just because (insert BS excuse here).
Today I just happened to see a bunch of 30" displays. I basically searched for '2560 monitor' to see what kind of extreme HD hardware was out there. Turns out there are lots of 27" and 30" 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 displays available. On E-bay there are even ones from Korea that are only about $400 (but may have a few dead pixels, no speakers, only DVI, or other weirdness). I kept seeing the names 'Catleap' and 'Yamasaki' (IIRC). Many of them are using the exact same IPS panel as the Apple ones. So let Google or whatever be your friend, and you may find happiness.
I haven't used a Mac regularly since the late 1990s. There are two things from back then that I recall with fondness - the Eudora mail system, which I don't recall very wall so by now Thunderbird and/or Evolution may well have passed; and a time tracker thing whose name I forget - I think it was called "Watch-It". It was perfect for logging my time on different projects and the user interface was great. I don't think the Mac OS X GUI was as good as its ancestor, NextStep.
Unix was described as "like a toolbox of small, sharp and well-honed tools that do precisely what is expected of them; no more, no less."
I wish that were still true. On the command line it's still mostly true. The once-and-ever big thing of Unix was that these simple, reliable, straightforward commands like 'cat', 'echo', 'ls', etc. could be combined into programs of arbitrary length and complexity - basically the shell environment could be considered as the inspiration for Perl and many scripting languages. But these all-consuming GUI Desktop Environments like KDE and Gnome have a different purpose, and a different model. And while I was a cheerful Gnome user for quite a while, I think these environments have Lost The True Way. X11 is, of course, problematical and possibly was the essential negative inspiration
So I think the way forward for me is going to be one of the very simple window managers, with additional support for 3D visualizations (e.g. Desktop Cube) and compositing, each of which are also simple features in their own way. Think of them as filters of the visual field comprised of the collection of windows. In that sense they can be added to the simple environment and taken away with minimal impact on anything else that doesn't depend on them.
Well they did manage to run something like two years without the EU-required Browser Option Button, apparently by mistake. It's about to cost them $600 million for this one line code error. So I would argue that somebody forgot to check with the lawyers.