It seems that recently, anything can take down the cloud, or at least cause a serious disruption for any of the major cloud providers. I wonder how many more of these it takes before the cloud-skeptics start winning the debates with management a lot more often.
You can only argue that the extra costs and admin involved with cloud hosting outweigh the extra costs of self-hosting and paying competent IT staff for so long. If you read the various forums after an event like this, the mantra from cloud evangelists already seems to have changed from a general "cloud=reliable, and Google's/Amazon's/whoever's people are smarter than your in house people" to a much more weasel-worded "cloud is realiable as long as you've figured out exactly how to set it all up with proper redundancy etc." If you're going to pay people smart enough to figure that out, and you're not one of the few businesses whose model really does benefit disproportionately from the scalability at a certain stage in its development, why not save a fortune and host everything in-house?
Without direct democracy, parties can simply win elections on "big issues" and completely and utterly disregard the will of the people on such "small issues".
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That is the basic flaw with the political system in many (most? all?) of the major Western powers today.
There are a number of reasonable ways of fixing this problem, or at least dramatically improving the situation, but of course it is not in the interests of most people in power to promote those alternative approaches. Thus the vicious cycle will continue until either we accidentally elect someone with a conscience or something happens that brings down the whole system for whatever reason, in which case how to do things in future becomes an active choice rather than something where most people lack the inclination or awareness to demand anything other than the status quo.
Blair, despite pushing this odious treaty, was re-elected in 2005.
By 22% of the population, and without even winning the popular vote in England. He was re-elected only because our electoral system is about as democratic as the military leadership in Egypt right now.
Short of violent revolution, it's going to take time to fix that, but we're working on it on several fronts already.
People seemed to have few concerns with Blair dragging the UK blindly in to war
Aside from literally millions of people taking to the streets in the biggest protest by the British public in living memory, you mean?
Blair had plenty of faults, but if you're going to have a dig, kindly don't imply that most of the "good people of the UK" supported him. It simply isn't true.
The article also points out comments from Steve Metalitz, a lawyer who represents members of the entertainment industry: "Most countries in the world already have this option at their disposal to deal with this problem. If site blocking broke the internet, then the internet would already be broken."
In that case, if site blocking were effective in preventing piracy then surely these activities would already be measurably and very clearly falling in all those other unspecified countries that have that form of censorship.
That said, I don't think this is a completely black-and-white issue. A lot of people object to censorship of some/all kinds of speech on principle or feel that blocking is overkill for an activity such as copying a piece of information. However, probably many of the same people would not object to shutting off a command/control site for malware that was bringing down millions of PCs at a staggering economic cost, or to isolating a group who really were trading child porn. Fundamentally, on a technical level, either someone has the ability to block sites or they don't, but on an ethical level it isn't even close to that simple.
He suggests rephrasing questions about the need for the license in terms of medical practice.
It is a poor analogy indeed. If someone really did manage to practise surgery for many years without a licence and get 100% positive results, they would demonstrably be far more qualified to judge competence than most people who are officially certified.
It's a silly, extreme example. In reality, no-one gets perfect results, and the important thing if you're interested in developing the profession to do better in future is that you understand why things went wrong and whether anything could be done better next time.
Answering those questions in medicine is hard, but at least there is a vast body of empirical data and shared experience to start from in most cases. Answering them in software is something we simply don't know how to do yet, because we just don't have that many success stories to compare against.
The problem is that most states (and countries for that matter) aren't exactly in a rush to provide some sort of licensing process for software engineers either.
Good. They shouldn't be.
I don't know of a single authoritative definition of the field, but engineering is fundamentally about using systematic, repeatable processes to produce results of acceptable quality within realistic constraints. Everyone in the entire world who knows how to do that when writing safety-critical software could probably fit on the same train, assuming you accept that any such experts exist at all. If the people pushing this new exam think 80 multiple-guess questions in an open book test taken in a single day can identify who gets the train tickets, I think I'd prefer that all critical software development happened off the grid and at least ten miles away from any of those people.
This Phillip Laplante guy basically admits that these qualifications are an effective sales tool and that this is the reason some people might want one. That may be true, but if you make them compulsory or give preferential treatment for say government contracts to those who have them, they also became an artificial competitive advantage. Now your ability to get a job is no longer based primarily on how well you can do the job, and we can all see how that's going to end, particularly for the little guy. It would no doubt be very lucrative for established big businesses whose models can be disrupted far more by a small, skilled team in a field like software than in any physical engineering discipline, though, since there would suddenly be a huge barrier to competition.
I'm betting the qualification will end up looking like the bastard lovechild of physical engineers who know jack about how to write software within realistic constraints and Internet-famous consultants who know jack about how to write software that works, and that the sample questions will bemuse first year CompSci students (who wonder what anything that old is doing in a professional exam today) and make industrial supervisors cry (as they wonder how they can still reject incompents at interview without getting sued if those people have a certificate that "proves" they're competent). Anyone want to bet against me?
If organisations providing essential services to the general public can impose arbitrary conditions before you can use their services, you don't have any useful legal protection from abuse at all. That is why most first world countries have some form of statutory regulation in many key industries, such as power supply, transportation networks, communications infrastructure, etc.
My understanding is there is no expectation of privacy in public places, and personally I don't understand why there should be.
It depends what you mean by privacy.
Is there an expectation that if you're talking with a raised voice in a crowded mall, the guy standing two metres away from you might see you or hear your conversation, though you might catch him staring? Sure.
Is there an expectation that any time you leave the privacy of your own home, you can be subject to systemic remote surveillance by unseen agents of a commercial or government body with vastly superior resources, the resulting data to be recorded in perpetuity in a searchable database, corollated with any other data from any other database for purposes unspecified, processed using unknown technology to draw unknown additional inferences, and then potentially used against you because after all this automation threw up a false positive you looked a bit like a criminal/tax evader/terrorist/child abuser/political opponent before any human was even involved and without any identifiable individual actually being responsible? No, I don't think that's a reasonable expectation at all.
A lot of the problem with these creepy measures is that their defenders appeal to older standards for when privacy applies ("no expectation of privacy in public", "nothing to fear, nothing to hide", and so on) without considering the implications of newer technology for what constitutes privacy in the first place (when any little detail can contribute to a bigger but possibly incomplete or inaccurate picture that will be used by automated systems to drive decisions by disproportionately powerful organisations that very much can damage you if they make a mistake, protecting the little details becomes a much more important privacy concern).
I was more thinking in terms of understanding the dynamics and peculiarities of the relevant market. Even if you're very familiar with a particular field, and if you're starting a company to scratch your own itch because you understand why enough other people to form a viable market are going to share that itch, that doesn't necessarily mean that a VC will also see the target market as viable.
Of course you'll try to explain, within your very limited up-front time, why a certain type of person is going to share that itch and why you think there are enough of those people out there to support your business model. However, if you're in any sort of niche then sooner or later (probably sooner) it's often going to come down to whether the VC trusts that you know your own market, because they aren't going to become experts on it themselves just to evaluate your pitch. Sometimes, they're not going to have that much faith by the time they make the call and they'll probably err on the side of caution, even if they'd think your business plan was an obvious good bet given longer to become familiar with the idea and the potential market.
"If you seek VC funding and do not get it" obviously implies rejection by multiple VCs.
For what it's worth, no, it doesn't. In fact, given the context, I read it exactly as the possible outcomes from meeting one particular VC who then turned you down.
Successful VCs will, on average, make successful investment decisions, but the "on average" really matters. No VC can possibly be an expert in every field that every candidate company works in, and no expert in any interesting, fast-moving field can possibly explain all the intricate details to educate the VC fully within the kind of discussions we're talking about. At some point, it's going to come down to a judgement by the VC of whether the ideas/assumptions/resources/whatever underlying the business plan are sound.
That means it is entirely possible that a given VC will decide against funding a business, even if in fact the plan was reasonable and would have been a good investment, simply because that particular VC didn't understand the business/market/whatever and there wasn't time to get educated enough to make a better decision.
Nonsense. That's just Silicon Valley start-up wishful thinking, usually parroted by people who haven't had a really good big idea yet and think that because they are awesomely elite hackers and greedy they will make millions from the next mobile social networking gimmick that is slightly different from the last mobile social networking gimmick. These are the same kind of people who think "I've started three failed companies!" is a badge of honour.
Of course the execution matters. No-one is disputing that. A good idea with poor execution is unlikely to be a great success.
And of course learning from failures is valuable. But the value is in the success you hopefully have later, not in the failed company or any failed idea behind it.
Apple didn't rise from irrelevance to become the giant they are today just because they had a good technical team or smart marketing. They also had a series of great ideas, some of which were a bit like ideas a few other people had had but better. Just as importantly, they also wasted very little time and money on ideas that weren't great, allowing them to concentrate on the good ideas.
Google didn't become the dominant search engine because they tweaked what Yahoo and Altavista did, they did it because they had a new idea for how to generate search results that was much better than what went before. And they didn't become filthy rich just because of all their technical wizardry, they also had the brilliant insight that they could hit people with targeted advertising right at the time those people were looking for something.
When you approach a VC, the only thing you bring to the table is your ability to execute the plan you've proposed.
Well, no, you bring the plan as well. And as anyone who follows sites filled with entrepreneurial buzz can see, a lot of people's plans suck right from the concept onwards, and a lot of start-up failures were, unfortunately, all too predictable to an impartial outside observer. When you approach a VC, they're trying to spot those kinds of failures, not just the team with a great idea who won't execute it effectively.
The business climate in the US is: old, entrenched businesses fight other old, entrenched businesses in a race for the cheapest shit.
Which is, of course, why young/rejuvenated companies like Apple, Google and Facebook have never made any money and are just looking to get bought out by older and more entrenched players like Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM.
I suspect most would say this though... right up until they hear why their idea sucks. Then that person is, "just a cranky old hater trying to ruin my dreams".
Maybe so, but if my dream is going to be ruined, I'd rather it happened before my career and/or personal finances were ruined with it.
My immediate reaction to the original question, "Would you rather hear the hard truth about why your startup didn't get funded or some vague dismissal?", was that almost everyone who is ever going to succeed in business would want the hard truth, and a lot of people who were going to fail would think they knew better and didn't need to hear it.
Well, I'm from Cambridge, where our Lib Dem MP not only stood by his promise to students but also has a clue when it comes to technical matters and is one of the more prominent voices in Parliament trying to restore some sanity to this particular debate. So while I have little sympathy with the Lib Dems who got into government and then stabbed the students in the back, just as I had little sympathy when the last Labour MP here made a similar mistake and later lost her seat, I don't agree that all Lib Dems are "FUCKING LIARS". It's simply not true.
The reason is simple: the powers that be *want* this.
Even that isn't true. The Lib Dems are pretty strongly opposed to this, as are some high profile Tories, David Davis being probably the most obvious figurehead.
This is the usual power grab by police/security services/whoever, backed by the usual FUD about terrorism and organised crime. It's probably also something of a "We can still be friends, right?" from the Home Office to the police, whom the government in general and the current Home Secretary in particular have annoyed a lot in recent weeks.
Something might get through, but I very much doubt it will look anything like this by the time it's been done over by civil libertarians, ISPs who would have to foot the bill, and people who actually have a clue about technology. We as a nation might be far less protective of our privacy than I personally would like, but we're not completely clueless. Look at the way ID cards were beaten down, despite a huge push from government. More recently, look at the way the way the government at EU level has turned against ACTA, despite the national governments of almost every member state already ratifying it and publicly claiming they support it.
Even in the US, where the popular claim is that the government don't care about anything much any more, look how fast the politicians got educated about SOPA and PIPA and in many cases completely flipped their position after the entire Internet decided to teach them that these things matter. A lot of the time, the problem is that the legislators are naive and just listen to the loudest voices; never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by incompetence, as the old saying goes.
You're right that certain organisations will keep trying. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be. It's not exactly the spies' job to look out for people's privacy, after all. We just have to make sure that the other side of the debate is heard as well, and that anything that reaches the statute books is a sensible balance between the competing interests.
I'm genuinely interested to hear more about this. We went with Supermicro on that particular box because the company building the custom system for us has had generally good experience with Supermicro motherboards in high-end machines. However, their experience with IPMI specifically was limited, so we were all judging by general reputation rather than this issue specifically. We were also all a bit surprised by the poor quailty of Supermicro's IPMI tools, and even more surprised that, once we knew what to Google for, the Web was full of other people with similar bad experiences.
Could you tell us more about your experiences with the other brands you mentioned, please? Do you find them robust and reliable because their hardware and/or standards compliance is better in some way, or is this purely down to software tools? Do you use specific tools from each vendor with their own hardware, or is there maybe some much better suite of IPMI tools that works with everyone's equipment but happens to come as standard with IBM/Dell/HP systems?
That's all fine, as long as (a) the person setting up the machine actually knows that the motherboard includes IPMI and understands the significance, and (b) the password changing tools actually work. I was setting up a system with a Supermicro board recently, and the software was quite happy to let me set a reasonably secure password, but then apparently that password was too long for the log-in screen in another part of the system to accept! I was completely locked out. Yes, really. The solution required literally connecting up an entire PC's worth of peripherals and installing an entire OS just to get to the OS-based IPMI management tools -- which wouldn't even be an option for some cases where IPMI is supposed to help. Haven't these people ever heard of jumpers?
IPMI is one of those things that sounds great, and might be worth the hassle for admins who really do need to control a whole rack of machines or a whole set of blades in a rendering workstation or something similar. However, IME it's a half-baked technology (or, perhaps more fairly, the software tools rather than IPMI itself are usually of very low quality) and for most people it comes with a huge liability they might not even know they had.
Ultimately it really doesn't matter as what you should check are features and speed, not an arbitrary choice of what technology they use.
Indeed. And with that in mind, I would be very interested if anyone can cite even a single credible source that compares "workstation" and "gamer" cards objectively from nVidia and/or AMD. You'll find a load of people who parrot the line that you "must" use the far more expensive workstation cards for certain kinds of professional applications, but few can really tell you why, and even those who do generally refer to drivers rather than any difference in the hardware. And that's before you even get into nVidia doing things like deliberately nerfing the drivers on its gaming cards because otherwise they were going to show up the many-times-more-expensive workstation cards built on essentially the same platform.
I'm with the guys who want Vendor #3. Both personally, as someone who used to enjoy gaming before there was a 50+% chance of pathetic bugs spoiling the experience and at least half of them seemed to be down to poor quality drivers, and professionally, as someone who uses some of those absurdly expensive applications and needs the performance to match, I'm fed up with the constant race to the bottom in quality control and non-existent customer service. I would literally pay twice what I have paid for any recent high-end graphics card, in either a personal or a professional capacity, for a high-end card that worked reliably and came from a vendor that provided honest information to help me choose what I need and then offered real customer support for the useful lifetime of that device.
If someone could fix all these trendy new technologies like HDMI and DisplayPort so they actually worked at least as well as DVI did years ago, that would be nice too. I'm fed up with all the windows on my twin monitor set-up reducing to 640x480 every time I switch the damned monitors off, and apparently the "newer, more advanced" connection technologies used by my "high-end professional workstation" graphics card and accompanying "certified" drivers have a lot to do with it.
If a cookie is strictly necessary to do something the user has directly requested, all this new silliness was never going to apply anyway. That takes care of session cookies for logging in, shopping carts, and so on.
It's when you start getting into areas like analytics that are not strictly necessary from the user's point of view that you cross into a grey area, and that's where the whole opt-in/opt-out (or, if you prefer, explicit/implicit consent) issue arises.
It is Google and their ad-tracking that is getting run over by this.
FWIW, it seems Google Analytics is relatively sane on this count, in that the technology they use and their current use of the data are (reportedly) not as intrusive as some people assume.
On the other hand, if say Facebook wanted to track people as they surf the web by using cookies connected with content on third party sites, then Facebook and/or the sites that support them could actually be in trouble at this point, even with all the hedging of bets that is going on at the ICO. I suspect it's "Like" buttons and so on that these rules were really aimed at, not genuine analytics genuinely used by sites for their own improvement.
Whether that will stand up to the seemingly inevitable legal challenge in the European courts remains to be seen, but I suspect even the ICO think this is a dumb law behind the scenes, and their language has been softening substantially in recent weeks relative to their early advice.
And of course, jokes about similarity aside, the Tories haven't actually been the ones running the show since Tony Blair's first New Labour administration took office in 1997. The Conservatives have been the more powerful party in the current coalition since 2010, but for some reason, in the past couple of years no-one from any major UK party has been suggesting that we join the Euro any time soon.
our conservatives are so right wing that they are the most right-wing mainstream party in Europe.
I don't know how true that is, but in any case, the politics in most countries in Europe is rather strongly left-leaning by global standards, in much the same way that both the main parties in the US would be regarded as quite far to the right on a global scale.
Both of these nasty groups are overjoyed at the financial problems in the Eurozone.
Yes, because what we really need right now is for some of our closest neighbours and major trading partners to suffer severe financial problems that will keep our own economy down for a few more years without anything we can do about it. That will definitely help to advance the interests of both of the groups you mentioned, and of course to help the Conservatives to win the next general election outright as they presumably want to.
In this case, it seems to be more a case of "Do as the European bureaucracy says, not as we do, but our guys won't really go after you if you're being reasonable about the spirit of the rules anyway, as long as you don't take the piss."
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that recently, anything can take down the cloud, or at least cause a serious disruption for any of the major cloud providers. I wonder how many more of these it takes before the cloud-skeptics start winning the debates with management a lot more often.
You can only argue that the extra costs and admin involved with cloud hosting outweigh the extra costs of self-hosting and paying competent IT staff for so long. If you read the various forums after an event like this, the mantra from cloud evangelists already seems to have changed from a general "cloud=reliable, and Google's/Amazon's/whoever's people are smarter than your in house people" to a much more weasel-worded "cloud is realiable as long as you've figured out exactly how to set it all up with proper redundancy etc." If you're going to pay people smart enough to figure that out, and you're not one of the few businesses whose model really does benefit disproportionately from the scalability at a certain stage in its development, why not save a fortune and host everything in-house?
Without direct democracy, parties can simply win elections on "big issues" and completely and utterly disregard the will of the people on such "small issues".
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That is the basic flaw with the political system in many (most? all?) of the major Western powers today.
There are a number of reasonable ways of fixing this problem, or at least dramatically improving the situation, but of course it is not in the interests of most people in power to promote those alternative approaches. Thus the vicious cycle will continue until either we accidentally elect someone with a conscience or something happens that brings down the whole system for whatever reason, in which case how to do things in future becomes an active choice rather than something where most people lack the inclination or awareness to demand anything other than the status quo.
Blair, despite pushing this odious treaty, was re-elected in 2005.
By 22% of the population, and without even winning the popular vote in England. He was re-elected only because our electoral system is about as democratic as the military leadership in Egypt right now.
Short of violent revolution, it's going to take time to fix that, but we're working on it on several fronts already.
People seemed to have few concerns with Blair dragging the UK blindly in to war
Aside from literally millions of people taking to the streets in the biggest protest by the British public in living memory, you mean?
Blair had plenty of faults, but if you're going to have a dig, kindly don't imply that most of the "good people of the UK" supported him. It simply isn't true.
You mean this part?
The article also points out comments from Steve Metalitz, a lawyer who represents members of the entertainment industry: "Most countries in the world already have this option at their disposal to deal with this problem. If site blocking broke the internet, then the internet would already be broken."
In that case, if site blocking were effective in preventing piracy then surely these activities would already be measurably and very clearly falling in all those other unspecified countries that have that form of censorship.
That said, I don't think this is a completely black-and-white issue. A lot of people object to censorship of some/all kinds of speech on principle or feel that blocking is overkill for an activity such as copying a piece of information. However, probably many of the same people would not object to shutting off a command/control site for malware that was bringing down millions of PCs at a staggering economic cost, or to isolating a group who really were trading child porn. Fundamentally, on a technical level, either someone has the ability to block sites or they don't, but on an ethical level it isn't even close to that simple.
He suggests rephrasing questions about the need for the license in terms of medical practice.
It is a poor analogy indeed. If someone really did manage to practise surgery for many years without a licence and get 100% positive results, they would demonstrably be far more qualified to judge competence than most people who are officially certified.
It's a silly, extreme example. In reality, no-one gets perfect results, and the important thing if you're interested in developing the profession to do better in future is that you understand why things went wrong and whether anything could be done better next time.
Answering those questions in medicine is hard, but at least there is a vast body of empirical data and shared experience to start from in most cases. Answering them in software is something we simply don't know how to do yet, because we just don't have that many success stories to compare against.
The problem is that most states (and countries for that matter) aren't exactly in a rush to provide some sort of licensing process for software engineers either.
Good. They shouldn't be.
I don't know of a single authoritative definition of the field, but engineering is fundamentally about using systematic, repeatable processes to produce results of acceptable quality within realistic constraints. Everyone in the entire world who knows how to do that when writing safety-critical software could probably fit on the same train, assuming you accept that any such experts exist at all. If the people pushing this new exam think 80 multiple-guess questions in an open book test taken in a single day can identify who gets the train tickets, I think I'd prefer that all critical software development happened off the grid and at least ten miles away from any of those people.
This Phillip Laplante guy basically admits that these qualifications are an effective sales tool and that this is the reason some people might want one. That may be true, but if you make them compulsory or give preferential treatment for say government contracts to those who have them, they also became an artificial competitive advantage. Now your ability to get a job is no longer based primarily on how well you can do the job, and we can all see how that's going to end, particularly for the little guy. It would no doubt be very lucrative for established big businesses whose models can be disrupted far more by a small, skilled team in a field like software than in any physical engineering discipline, though, since there would suddenly be a huge barrier to competition.
I'm betting the qualification will end up looking like the bastard lovechild of physical engineers who know jack about how to write software within realistic constraints and Internet-famous consultants who know jack about how to write software that works, and that the sample questions will bemuse first year CompSci students (who wonder what anything that old is doing in a professional exam today) and make industrial supervisors cry (as they wonder how they can still reject incompents at interview without getting sued if those people have a certificate that "proves" they're competent). Anyone want to bet against me?
If organisations providing essential services to the general public can impose arbitrary conditions before you can use their services, you don't have any useful legal protection from abuse at all. That is why most first world countries have some form of statutory regulation in many key industries, such as power supply, transportation networks, communications infrastructure, etc.
My understanding is there is no expectation of privacy in public places, and personally I don't understand why there should be.
It depends what you mean by privacy.
Is there an expectation that if you're talking with a raised voice in a crowded mall, the guy standing two metres away from you might see you or hear your conversation, though you might catch him staring? Sure.
Is there an expectation that any time you leave the privacy of your own home, you can be subject to systemic remote surveillance by unseen agents of a commercial or government body with vastly superior resources, the resulting data to be recorded in perpetuity in a searchable database, corollated with any other data from any other database for purposes unspecified, processed using unknown technology to draw unknown additional inferences, and then potentially used against you because after all this automation threw up a false positive you looked a bit like a criminal/tax evader/terrorist/child abuser/political opponent before any human was even involved and without any identifiable individual actually being responsible? No, I don't think that's a reasonable expectation at all.
A lot of the problem with these creepy measures is that their defenders appeal to older standards for when privacy applies ("no expectation of privacy in public", "nothing to fear, nothing to hide", and so on) without considering the implications of newer technology for what constitutes privacy in the first place (when any little detail can contribute to a bigger but possibly incomplete or inaccurate picture that will be used by automated systems to drive decisions by disproportionately powerful organisations that very much can damage you if they make a mistake, protecting the little details becomes a much more important privacy concern).
I was more thinking in terms of understanding the dynamics and peculiarities of the relevant market. Even if you're very familiar with a particular field, and if you're starting a company to scratch your own itch because you understand why enough other people to form a viable market are going to share that itch, that doesn't necessarily mean that a VC will also see the target market as viable.
Of course you'll try to explain, within your very limited up-front time, why a certain type of person is going to share that itch and why you think there are enough of those people out there to support your business model. However, if you're in any sort of niche then sooner or later (probably sooner) it's often going to come down to whether the VC trusts that you know your own market, because they aren't going to become experts on it themselves just to evaluate your pitch. Sometimes, they're not going to have that much faith by the time they make the call and they'll probably err on the side of caution, even if they'd think your business plan was an obvious good bet given longer to become familiar with the idea and the potential market.
"If you seek VC funding and do not get it" obviously implies rejection by multiple VCs.
For what it's worth, no, it doesn't. In fact, given the context, I read it exactly as the possible outcomes from meeting one particular VC who then turned you down.
You forgot a very important one:
4) The VC made the wrong call.
Successful VCs will, on average, make successful investment decisions, but the "on average" really matters. No VC can possibly be an expert in every field that every candidate company works in, and no expert in any interesting, fast-moving field can possibly explain all the intricate details to educate the VC fully within the kind of discussions we're talking about. At some point, it's going to come down to a judgement by the VC of whether the ideas/assumptions/resources/whatever underlying the business plan are sound.
That means it is entirely possible that a given VC will decide against funding a business, even if in fact the plan was reasonable and would have been a good investment, simply because that particular VC didn't understand the business/market/whatever and there wasn't time to get educated enough to make a better decision.
Your benefit is the result of your action.
It is also a result of the opportunities you had.
Life might be a meritocracy if everyone started out with equal opportunities, but that obviously isn't even close to true.
Ideas are worthless.
Nonsense. That's just Silicon Valley start-up wishful thinking, usually parroted by people who haven't had a really good big idea yet and think that because they are awesomely elite hackers and greedy they will make millions from the next mobile social networking gimmick that is slightly different from the last mobile social networking gimmick. These are the same kind of people who think "I've started three failed companies!" is a badge of honour.
Of course the execution matters. No-one is disputing that. A good idea with poor execution is unlikely to be a great success.
And of course learning from failures is valuable. But the value is in the success you hopefully have later, not in the failed company or any failed idea behind it.
Apple didn't rise from irrelevance to become the giant they are today just because they had a good technical team or smart marketing. They also had a series of great ideas, some of which were a bit like ideas a few other people had had but better. Just as importantly, they also wasted very little time and money on ideas that weren't great, allowing them to concentrate on the good ideas.
Google didn't become the dominant search engine because they tweaked what Yahoo and Altavista did, they did it because they had a new idea for how to generate search results that was much better than what went before. And they didn't become filthy rich just because of all their technical wizardry, they also had the brilliant insight that they could hit people with targeted advertising right at the time those people were looking for something.
When you approach a VC, the only thing you bring to the table is your ability to execute the plan you've proposed.
Well, no, you bring the plan as well. And as anyone who follows sites filled with entrepreneurial buzz can see, a lot of people's plans suck right from the concept onwards, and a lot of start-up failures were, unfortunately, all too predictable to an impartial outside observer. When you approach a VC, they're trying to spot those kinds of failures, not just the team with a great idea who won't execute it effectively.
The business climate in the US is: old, entrenched businesses fight other old, entrenched businesses in a race for the cheapest shit.
Which is, of course, why young/rejuvenated companies like Apple, Google and Facebook have never made any money and are just looking to get bought out by older and more entrenched players like Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM.
I suspect most would say this though... right up until they hear why their idea sucks. Then that person is, "just a cranky old hater trying to ruin my dreams".
Maybe so, but if my dream is going to be ruined, I'd rather it happened before my career and/or personal finances were ruined with it.
My immediate reaction to the original question, "Would you rather hear the hard truth about why your startup didn't get funded or some vague dismissal?", was that almost everyone who is ever going to succeed in business would want the hard truth, and a lot of people who were going to fail would think they knew better and didn't need to hear it.
Well, I'm from Cambridge, where our Lib Dem MP not only stood by his promise to students but also has a clue when it comes to technical matters and is one of the more prominent voices in Parliament trying to restore some sanity to this particular debate. So while I have little sympathy with the Lib Dems who got into government and then stabbed the students in the back, just as I had little sympathy when the last Labour MP here made a similar mistake and later lost her seat, I don't agree that all Lib Dems are "FUCKING LIARS". It's simply not true.
The reason is simple: the powers that be *want* this.
Even that isn't true. The Lib Dems are pretty strongly opposed to this, as are some high profile Tories, David Davis being probably the most obvious figurehead.
This is the usual power grab by police/security services/whoever, backed by the usual FUD about terrorism and organised crime. It's probably also something of a "We can still be friends, right?" from the Home Office to the police, whom the government in general and the current Home Secretary in particular have annoyed a lot in recent weeks.
Something might get through, but I very much doubt it will look anything like this by the time it's been done over by civil libertarians, ISPs who would have to foot the bill, and people who actually have a clue about technology. We as a nation might be far less protective of our privacy than I personally would like, but we're not completely clueless. Look at the way ID cards were beaten down, despite a huge push from government. More recently, look at the way the way the government at EU level has turned against ACTA, despite the national governments of almost every member state already ratifying it and publicly claiming they support it.
Even in the US, where the popular claim is that the government don't care about anything much any more, look how fast the politicians got educated about SOPA and PIPA and in many cases completely flipped their position after the entire Internet decided to teach them that these things matter. A lot of the time, the problem is that the legislators are naive and just listen to the loudest voices; never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by incompetence, as the old saying goes.
You're right that certain organisations will keep trying. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be. It's not exactly the spies' job to look out for people's privacy, after all. We just have to make sure that the other side of the debate is heard as well, and that anything that reaches the statute books is a sensible balance between the competing interests.
I'm genuinely interested to hear more about this. We went with Supermicro on that particular box because the company building the custom system for us has had generally good experience with Supermicro motherboards in high-end machines. However, their experience with IPMI specifically was limited, so we were all judging by general reputation rather than this issue specifically. We were also all a bit surprised by the poor quailty of Supermicro's IPMI tools, and even more surprised that, once we knew what to Google for, the Web was full of other people with similar bad experiences.
Could you tell us more about your experiences with the other brands you mentioned, please? Do you find them robust and reliable because their hardware and/or standards compliance is better in some way, or is this purely down to software tools? Do you use specific tools from each vendor with their own hardware, or is there maybe some much better suite of IPMI tools that works with everyone's equipment but happens to come as standard with IBM/Dell/HP systems?
That's all fine, as long as (a) the person setting up the machine actually knows that the motherboard includes IPMI and understands the significance, and (b) the password changing tools actually work. I was setting up a system with a Supermicro board recently, and the software was quite happy to let me set a reasonably secure password, but then apparently that password was too long for the log-in screen in another part of the system to accept! I was completely locked out. Yes, really. The solution required literally connecting up an entire PC's worth of peripherals and installing an entire OS just to get to the OS-based IPMI management tools -- which wouldn't even be an option for some cases where IPMI is supposed to help. Haven't these people ever heard of jumpers?
IPMI is one of those things that sounds great, and might be worth the hassle for admins who really do need to control a whole rack of machines or a whole set of blades in a rendering workstation or something similar. However, IME it's a half-baked technology (or, perhaps more fairly, the software tools rather than IPMI itself are usually of very low quality) and for most people it comes with a huge liability they might not even know they had.
Ultimately it really doesn't matter as what you should check are features and speed, not an arbitrary choice of what technology they use.
Indeed. And with that in mind, I would be very interested if anyone can cite even a single credible source that compares "workstation" and "gamer" cards objectively from nVidia and/or AMD. You'll find a load of people who parrot the line that you "must" use the far more expensive workstation cards for certain kinds of professional applications, but few can really tell you why, and even those who do generally refer to drivers rather than any difference in the hardware. And that's before you even get into nVidia doing things like deliberately nerfing the drivers on its gaming cards because otherwise they were going to show up the many-times-more-expensive workstation cards built on essentially the same platform.
I'm with the guys who want Vendor #3. Both personally, as someone who used to enjoy gaming before there was a 50+% chance of pathetic bugs spoiling the experience and at least half of them seemed to be down to poor quality drivers, and professionally, as someone who uses some of those absurdly expensive applications and needs the performance to match, I'm fed up with the constant race to the bottom in quality control and non-existent customer service. I would literally pay twice what I have paid for any recent high-end graphics card, in either a personal or a professional capacity, for a high-end card that worked reliably and came from a vendor that provided honest information to help me choose what I need and then offered real customer support for the useful lifetime of that device.
If someone could fix all these trendy new technologies like HDMI and DisplayPort so they actually worked at least as well as DVI did years ago, that would be nice too. I'm fed up with all the windows on my twin monitor set-up reducing to 640x480 every time I switch the damned monitors off, and apparently the "newer, more advanced" connection technologies used by my "high-end professional workstation" graphics card and accompanying "certified" drivers have a lot to do with it.
You're conflating two issues.
If a cookie is strictly necessary to do something the user has directly requested, all this new silliness was never going to apply anyway. That takes care of session cookies for logging in, shopping carts, and so on.
It's when you start getting into areas like analytics that are not strictly necessary from the user's point of view that you cross into a grey area, and that's where the whole opt-in/opt-out (or, if you prefer, explicit/implicit consent) issue arises.
It is Google and their ad-tracking that is getting run over by this.
FWIW, it seems Google Analytics is relatively sane on this count, in that the technology they use and their current use of the data are (reportedly) not as intrusive as some people assume.
On the other hand, if say Facebook wanted to track people as they surf the web by using cookies connected with content on third party sites, then Facebook and/or the sites that support them could actually be in trouble at this point, even with all the hedging of bets that is going on at the ICO. I suspect it's "Like" buttons and so on that these rules were really aimed at, not genuine analytics genuinely used by sites for their own improvement.
People need to actively accept that you are tracking them. Just showing such text somewhere is not enough.
Actually, the ICO seems to have pulled a complete U-turn with 48 hours to go, and now says that implied consent can be enough.
Whether that will stand up to the seemingly inevitable legal challenge in the European courts remains to be seen, but I suspect even the ICO think this is a dumb law behind the scenes, and their language has been softening substantially in recent weeks relative to their early advice.
Our press and conservatives required that this happen.
Well, them and a strong majority of the British public consistently wanting to stay out of the Euro. But this is Slashdot, so let's not let facts get in the way of a good rant.
And of course, jokes about similarity aside, the Tories haven't actually been the ones running the show since Tony Blair's first New Labour administration took office in 1997. The Conservatives have been the more powerful party in the current coalition since 2010, but for some reason, in the past couple of years no-one from any major UK party has been suggesting that we join the Euro any time soon.
our conservatives are so right wing that they are the most right-wing mainstream party in Europe.
I don't know how true that is, but in any case, the politics in most countries in Europe is rather strongly left-leaning by global standards, in much the same way that both the main parties in the US would be regarded as quite far to the right on a global scale.
Both of these nasty groups are overjoyed at the financial problems in the Eurozone.
Yes, because what we really need right now is for some of our closest neighbours and major trading partners to suffer severe financial problems that will keep our own economy down for a few more years without anything we can do about it. That will definitely help to advance the interests of both of the groups you mentioned, and of course to help the Conservatives to win the next general election outright as they presumably want to.
In this case, it seems to be more a case of "Do as the European bureaucracy says, not as we do, but our guys won't really go after you if you're being reasonable about the spirit of the rules anyway, as long as you don't take the piss."