Sure is. I started a company with some friends. It did great at first, then fizzled. I'm assuming you will eventually want to find others to help build your company. Here are my most critical observations about my experience:
(1) How easy or difficult will it be to work with your partners? Be absolutely honest about this with yourself. Ambitious people have to have egos, but will everyone's ego drive the company forward or turn the company into a battleground?
(2) Write up a business plan. Make sure everyone agrees to what it means in terms of roles, responsibilities and expectations. This will help a lot with item (1). As Eisenhower once said: "Plans are worthless, planning is indispensable."
(3) Hire an excellent attorney to draw up the company documents before you write the first character of code. If you think you can't afford it, or worse, don't think you need to, you will regret it, and it will cost a fortune to do later what could have been done for less at the beginning.
If (1), (2), and (3) are going well, it will not be that hard to raise money. Notice I haven't said anything about the actual idea, just as Sink describes. There are lots of things that people will pay for, and between you and your partners, you can think of a few products. Debate the pros and cons of each idea, then put the best one into the b-plan. Investors will be interested in your product/service, but they will be far more interested in your team's ability to execute. A bad team won't get funding for bottled fountain of youth, a good one can get funding for an arctic ice service.
I learned of this after cleaning up a friends PC, which was cesspool of malware. An email his relative sent him finally took the machine down, at which point I fixed the box.
So, what's the first thing he does? Download Kazaa and who know what other spyware. I am convinced that over time, hackers and "willing" participants (in exchange for receiving porn/music/warez, etc) will form unwritten alliances to spam/cheat everyone else. The OS won't make any difference, either, because the willing participant will run whatever is asked as root if necessary. It's the electronic version of buying a Rolex at the docks...
The biggest problem for unemployed software engineers getting together and forming a company is financing
Surprising as it may seem, I don't think this is the biggest problem. I started a software company with some friends, and believe me I could go on about this subject. But, I will narrow my observations to what I found to be the most critical factors for success.
(1) How easy or difficult will it be to work with your partners? Be absolutely honest about this with yourself. Ambitious people have to have egos, but will everyone's ego drive the company forward or turn the company into a battleground?
(2) Write up a business plan. Make sure everyone agrees to what it means in terms of roles, responsibilities and expectations. This will help a lot with (1).
(3) Hire an excellent attorney to draw up the company documents before you write the first character of code. If you think you can't afford it, or worse, don't think you need to, you will regret it, and it will cost a fortune to do later what could have been done for less at the beginning.
If (1), (2), and (3) are going well, it will not be that hard to raise money. Notice I haven't said anything about the actual idea. There are lots of things that people will pay for, and between you and your partners, you can think of a few products. Debate the pros and cons of each idea, then put the best one into the b-plan. Investors will be interested in your product/service, but they will be far more interested in your team's ability to execute. A bad team won't get funding for bottled fountain of youth, a good one can get funding for an arctic ice service.
Would you buy a car that forces on you, A/C, Mp3 deck, and auto-tranmission?
Are you kidding? Try to buy a Ford Taurus without these things, substituting AM-FM radio for the MP3 player.
Let's see you "download" a new paint job for it, "download" interior upholstery, etc. I still maintain M$ never had a monopoly in the most accurate sense of the word, since I have never been forced to by PC with an OS I didn't want. I have always been able to download other browsers, media players, etc. PCs are far more flexible than cars.
Linus is one of the most valuable people on the face of the earth today - he certainly brings more value to the table of humanity than the blathering but closely watched G.W. Bush!
Wait a sec... If you were talking about Linus Pauling , I might agree with you. Torvalds has done something else - stumbled on to the very powerful effect of peer production enabled by the Internet. What's so orginal about Linux? It's a variant of Unix. It's important to keep things in perspective. Personally I think Berners-Lee's achievement is much more impressive, without which Linux never would have happened.
Frankel, Carmack, Jobs, Gates. What do they all have in common? They all bet big on PC technology, and changed everyone's life in ways we take for granted today. One additional attribute: They all made a lot of money.
Of course there are a number of other people who have made huge contributions: Berners-Lee and Torvalds for example, but neither made big dollars from their ideas.
In other words, people like Frankel not only innovated, but they were paid quite well for their efforts. Now that's impressive. It demonstrates that others were/are willing to pay for the things they created, which is a pretty good way to determine if you have created something of value.
It would look like those 17" lcd monitors that Dell ships out at 640 x 480... how many time have you gone to help a friend out on their computer and have to talk them into bumping up their resolution Way too many times!
On a similar note, is it just me, or have others noticed a nasty jitter in HDTV fast moving images? I used to think it was something unique to plasma/LCD monitors, but then I noticed it on a Pioneer Elite rear projection set. The thing about the big screens is that the effect becomes even more pronounced. Now I'm wondering if it has something to do with HD cameras.
If you really want to see this, try to find a store playing the Philips demo tape that shows the girl running by the sea. She runs past a few milestone markers that zig-zag past.
We are without question in greater danger of terrorist attacks today than we were on September 11 two years ago. Afghanistan has descended into an anarchy comparable to that which prevailed before the rise of the ruthless but religiously motivated Taliban.
Are they describing the country that just had constitutional convention? The one that just agreed upon a constitution?
The United States will feel the blowback from this ill-advised and poorly prepared military adventure for decades. The war in Iraq has already had the unintended consequences of seriously fracturing the Western democratic alliance; eliminating any potentiality for British leadership of the European Union; grievously weakening international law, including the Charter of the United Nations; and destroying the credibility of the president, vice president, secretary of state, and other officials as a result of their lying to the international community and the American people.
Blowback? Are they considering the fact that Libya has invited in inspectors to verify the end of their WMD programs blowback? Notice that N. Korea has invited some "independent" inspectors to have a look at Yong-byon. What about the Saudi crack-down on Al Qaeda in that country? All of this is bad? As for the EU, they can't even keep to the terms of their own agreements. As for the UN, note that it is the organization that passed 1441, as well as many other sanctions against the regime of Saddam. France and Russia were quite happy with Oil-for-Food program though, given that they got to skim off so much in "Administrative" fees, so one might question who was risking credibility.
Don't get me wrong, war is a terrible thing, and one can only regret the loss of innocent life and destruction. The U.S., however, didn't start this conflict. It would be insanity to wait for the totally compromised UN to solve the problem for us, after the enemy announced his intention to attack us, and did so, several times.
M$ now taking steps in the right direction. Makes me think the best thing that has happened to Softee in the past few years is Linux.
It may very well be the case Linux will be for M$ what IBM was when IBM was looking for an OS for the PC. People may forget that Gates didn't really want to be in the OS business back then.
I still have IE trying to download stuff on my Windows Server 2003 laptop all the time
You sure you are running Server 2003? M$ essentially shut off IE on 2K3, and they practically tell you shouldn't be running 2K3 if you want to use the browser.
Maybe you are talking about Windows Update, not the browser.
FWIW, you don't have to quit cold turkey. If you have 5 colas/coffees/etc per day, cut it down to four for a week or two, then three, then two... The other thing to know is that caffeine headaches seem to be triggered not just by quantity, but also by time interval during the day. So, as you cut down, don't just go from four coffees during the day to two in the morning - have one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
I think that the real reason Real Player died out is more or less due to a lower quality program
That's for certain. I have Winamp, Musicmatch and iTunes on my PC, but I still refuse to load Real, even though BBC and other sites only offer video in Real format. Seems to me it will be hard to make a case for anti-trust when so many sites are exclusive to Real. Hmmm... Maybe Real is the monopolist! Seems ridiculous to accuse M$ of anti-trust issues when Dell puts Musicmatch on every consumer PC and Winamp and iTunes can be had with a few mouse clicks.
The US is doing a worse job than Saddam in running Iraq at this very moment. More people are dying each day or have already died because of this war. Many of these dead people would have been much better of today if it was not for this invation and Saddam was in power. There is nothing extraordinary in that statement.
Just who is committing this violence? Saddam's supporters and Al Qaeda types. This is to say nothing of the atrocities committed by the regime during its existence.
Some of the biggest admirers of Hitler of the time was in the US.
Hardly. Stalin was a big admirer, however. As were many Brits, Vichy French... The US had many isolationists at the time.
The important thing is to learn from mistakes, you know like Vietnam.
The same country that is looking to improve business ties with the US, and whose defense minister visited the Pentagon recently. That Vietnam? The same Vietnam that had a massive exodus of refugees when the Commies took over? Ever notice that when the US goes in somewhere, many people go back to their home country to help rebuild?
I'm not suggesting US policy is beyond criticism - far from it. But I am amazed at how people might suggest brutal regimes are preferable to even flawed US and allied policy.
This will mean chaos in Iraq and probably will cause countries to isolate themselves from the rest of the world to avoid the negative effects of a US run Iraq
Remember the alternative was an Iraq run by Saddam. One can make a strong arguments pro- and con- the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but to suggest that the world would be better off with Saddam running things is a rather extraodinarily presumption.
Many in Europe thought Hilter was doing a good (shudder) job running Germany, too, and would have complained the loudest if France had gone in and stopped the Nazis when they could have. Every Iraqi I ever met hated Saddam and his regime, mainly because family members had been persecuted in one way or another.
FWIW, M$ used to have (~1998) a 3D engine code-named "Chrome" for use with browsers. They dropped it for whatever reason. The CDs are now in MSDN museums...
Re:bluetooth
on
iPod-Jacked
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Ever notice how people in planes, etc, like to see what the person next to them is reading/writing/doing/wearing? Just seems to be in our nature to know what other people are interested in.
Imagine a technology that allows people to broadcast whatever content they choose to a small area. (Actually the technology exists. The standards aren't quite there, yet.) Call it eFashion if you want, but I have a thought that this could be a big thing, because it allows people to express themselves in yet another way. Just have to let the IP lawyers sort it out after the fact.
Yes, you're wearing a tinfoil hat...Being American, you are used to the fact that American companies and the American government want to dominate the world and rake in all the wealth they can get
Hmmm, I think I see a reflection of my tin foil hat in your tin foil hat! Who said anything about American companies. Here's another article in which the royalties are discussed.
Different culture, you see.
Well, that explains why the Vietnamese are wearing tin foil non.
Maybe I'm wearing a tin-foil hat, but I sure don't believe China wants open formats. They would rather dominate the market so that they can get all of the royalty fees from other nation's vendors.
Problem with the Chinese strategy is that they don't have any content. All the major content providers won't release their content in the China-Uber-Alles format if they can't control it. Seems to me China has to depend on indie films to carry this ball, but unlike OSS, it takes more than a few pizzas and caffeine to make a flick, unless the PRC is about to flood the world with Communist pr0n...
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This is good stuff
Sure is. I started a company with some friends. It did great at first, then fizzled. I'm assuming you will eventually want to find others to help build your company. Here are my most critical observations about my experience:
(1) How easy or difficult will it be to work with your partners? Be absolutely honest about this with yourself. Ambitious people have to have egos, but will everyone's ego drive the company forward or turn the company into a battleground?
(2) Write up a business plan. Make sure everyone agrees to what it means in terms of roles, responsibilities and expectations. This will help a lot with item (1). As Eisenhower once said: "Plans are worthless, planning is indispensable."
(3) Hire an excellent attorney to draw up the company documents before you write the first character of code. If you think you can't afford it, or worse, don't think you need to, you will regret it, and it will cost a fortune to do later what could have been done for less at the beginning.
If (1), (2), and (3) are going well, it will not be that hard to raise money. Notice I haven't said anything about the actual idea, just as Sink describes. There are lots of things that people will pay for, and between you and your partners, you can think of a few products. Debate the pros and cons of each idea, then put the best one into the b-plan. Investors will be interested in your product/service, but they will be far more interested in your team's ability to execute. A bad team won't get funding for bottled fountain of youth, a good one can get funding for an arctic ice service.
I learned of this after cleaning up a friends PC, which was cesspool of malware. An email his relative sent him finally took the machine down, at which point I fixed the box.
So, what's the first thing he does? Download Kazaa and who know what other spyware. I am convinced that over time, hackers and "willing" participants (in exchange for receiving porn/music/warez, etc) will form unwritten alliances to spam/cheat everyone else. The OS won't make any difference, either, because the willing participant will run whatever is asked as root if necessary. It's the electronic version of buying a Rolex at the docks...
I'm not sure it's that easy.
You're right.
The biggest problem for unemployed software engineers getting together and forming a company is financing
Surprising as it may seem, I don't think this is the biggest problem. I started a software company with some friends, and believe me I could go on about this subject. But, I will narrow my observations to what I found to be the most critical factors for success.
(1) How easy or difficult will it be to work with your partners? Be absolutely honest about this with yourself. Ambitious people have to have egos, but will everyone's ego drive the company forward or turn the company into a battleground?
(2) Write up a business plan. Make sure everyone agrees to what it means in terms of roles, responsibilities and expectations. This will help a lot with (1).
(3) Hire an excellent attorney to draw up the company documents before you write the first character of code. If you think you can't afford it, or worse, don't think you need to, you will regret it, and it will cost a fortune to do later what could have been done for less at the beginning.
If (1), (2), and (3) are going well, it will not be that hard to raise money. Notice I haven't said anything about the actual idea. There are lots of things that people will pay for, and between you and your partners, you can think of a few products. Debate the pros and cons of each idea, then put the best one into the b-plan. Investors will be interested in your product/service, but they will be far more interested in your team's ability to execute. A bad team won't get funding for bottled fountain of youth, a good one can get funding for an arctic ice service.
Would you buy a car that forces on you, A/C, Mp3 deck, and auto-tranmission?
Are you kidding? Try to buy a Ford Taurus without these things, substituting AM-FM radio for the MP3 player.
Let's see you "download" a new paint job for it, "download" interior upholstery, etc. I still maintain M$ never had a monopoly in the most accurate sense of the word, since I have never been forced to by PC with an OS I didn't want. I have always been able to download other browsers, media players, etc. PCs are far more flexible than cars.
Wait a sec... If you were talking about Linus Pauling , I might agree with you. Torvalds has done something else - stumbled on to the very powerful effect of peer production enabled by the Internet. What's so orginal about Linux? It's a variant of Unix. It's important to keep things in perspective. Personally I think Berners-Lee's achievement is much more impressive, without which Linux never would have happened.
Frankel, Carmack, Jobs, Gates. What do they all have in common? They all bet big on PC technology, and changed everyone's life in ways we take for granted today. One additional attribute: They all made a lot of money.
Of course there are a number of other people who have made huge contributions: Berners-Lee and Torvalds for example, but neither made big dollars from their ideas.
In other words, people like Frankel not only innovated, but they were paid quite well for their efforts. Now that's impressive. It demonstrates that others were/are willing to pay for the things they created, which is a pretty good way to determine if you have created something of value.
Standards bodies and the open source community...integrated DRM...
Why do I have my doubts about this possibility?
It would look like those 17" lcd monitors that Dell ships out at 640 x 480... how many time have you gone to help a friend out on their computer and have to talk them into bumping up their resolution Way too many times!
On a similar note, is it just me, or have others noticed a nasty jitter in HDTV fast moving images? I used to think it was something unique to plasma/LCD monitors, but then I noticed it on a Pioneer Elite rear projection set. The thing about the big screens is that the effect becomes even more pronounced. Now I'm wondering if it has something to do with HD cameras.
If you really want to see this, try to find a store playing the Philips demo tape that shows the girl running by the sea. She runs past a few milestone markers that zig-zag past.
Lets see, before they had OS2. Guess the new desktop will be OSX...
Oops.
Couldn't resist. Who wants the world to run with REXX anyway.
We are without question in greater danger of terrorist attacks today than we were on September 11 two years ago. Afghanistan has descended into an anarchy comparable to that which prevailed before the rise of the ruthless but religiously motivated Taliban.
Are they describing the country that just had constitutional convention? The one that just agreed upon a constitution?
The United States will feel the blowback from this ill-advised and poorly prepared military adventure for decades. The war in Iraq has already had the unintended consequences of seriously fracturing the Western democratic alliance; eliminating any potentiality for British leadership of the European Union; grievously weakening international law, including the Charter of the United Nations; and destroying the credibility of the president, vice president, secretary of state, and other officials as a result of their lying to the international community and the American people.
Blowback? Are they considering the fact that Libya has invited in inspectors to verify the end of their WMD programs blowback? Notice that N. Korea has invited some "independent" inspectors to have a look at Yong-byon. What about the Saudi crack-down on Al Qaeda in that country? All of this is bad? As for the EU, they can't even keep to the terms of their own agreements. As for the UN, note that it is the organization that passed 1441, as well as many other sanctions against the regime of Saddam. France and Russia were quite happy with Oil-for-Food program though, given that they got to skim off so much in "Administrative" fees, so one might question who was risking credibility.
Don't get me wrong, war is a terrible thing, and one can only regret the loss of innocent life and destruction. The U.S., however, didn't start this conflict. It would be insanity to wait for the totally compromised UN to solve the problem for us, after the enemy announced his intention to attack us, and did so, several times.
M$ now taking steps in the right direction. Makes me think the best thing that has happened to Softee in the past few years is Linux.
It may very well be the case Linux will be for M$ what IBM was when IBM was looking for an OS for the PC. People may forget that Gates didn't really want to be in the OS business back then.
Might want to have a look at task scheduler...
You can get this DVD about the dark side of technology (or really bright, depending on how you think of it.)
I, for one, like the Mars technology better.
I still have IE trying to download stuff on my Windows Server 2003 laptop all the time
You sure you are running Server 2003? M$ essentially shut off IE on 2K3, and they practically tell you shouldn't be running 2K3 if you want to use the browser.
Maybe you are talking about Windows Update, not the browser.
FWIW, you don't have to quit cold turkey. If you have 5 colas/coffees/etc per day, cut it down to four for a week or two, then three, then two... The other thing to know is that caffeine headaches seem to be triggered not just by quantity, but also by time interval during the day. So, as you cut down, don't just go from four coffees during the day to two in the morning - have one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Wasn't that Walmart's battle cry for years
I thought it was "La Migra! La Migra!"
Buying American is looking better for Old Europe all the time.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a good, impact resistant laptop bag that won't come flying apart under stress?
You might try bag-modding one of these
I think that the real reason Real Player died out is more or less due to a lower quality program
That's for certain. I have Winamp, Musicmatch and iTunes on my PC, but I still refuse to load Real, even though BBC and other sites only offer video in Real format. Seems to me it will be hard to make a case for anti-trust when so many sites are exclusive to Real. Hmmm... Maybe Real is the monopolist! Seems ridiculous to accuse M$ of anti-trust issues when Dell puts Musicmatch on every consumer PC and Winamp and iTunes can be had with a few mouse clicks.
The US is doing a worse job than Saddam in running Iraq at this very moment. More people are dying each day or have already died because of this war. Many of these dead people would have been much better of today if it was not for this invation and Saddam was in power. There is nothing extraordinary in that statement.
Just who is committing this violence? Saddam's supporters and Al Qaeda types. This is to say nothing of the atrocities committed by the regime during its existence.
Some of the biggest admirers of Hitler of the time was in the US.
Hardly. Stalin was a big admirer, however. As were many Brits, Vichy French ... The US had many isolationists at the time.
The important thing is to learn from mistakes, you know like Vietnam.
The same country that is looking to improve business ties with the US, and whose defense minister visited the Pentagon recently. That Vietnam? The same Vietnam that had a massive exodus of refugees when the Commies took over? Ever notice that when the US goes in somewhere, many people go back to their home country to help rebuild?
I'm not suggesting US policy is beyond criticism - far from it. But I am amazed at how people might suggest brutal regimes are preferable to even flawed US and allied policy.
This will mean chaos in Iraq and probably will cause countries to isolate themselves from the rest of the world to avoid the negative effects of a US run Iraq
Remember the alternative was an Iraq run by Saddam. One can make a strong arguments pro- and con- the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but to suggest that the world would be better off with Saddam running things is a rather extraodinarily presumption.
Many in Europe thought Hilter was doing a good (shudder) job running Germany, too, and would have complained the loudest if France had gone in and stopped the Nazis when they could have. Every Iraqi I ever met hated Saddam and his regime, mainly because family members had been persecuted in one way or another.
FWIW, M$ used to have (~1998) a 3D engine code-named "Chrome" for use with browsers. They dropped it for whatever reason. The CDs are now in MSDN museums...
Ever notice how people in planes, etc, like to see what the person next to them is reading/writing/doing/wearing? Just seems to be in our nature to know what other people are interested in.
Imagine a technology that allows people to broadcast whatever content they choose to a small area. (Actually the technology exists. The standards aren't quite there, yet.) Call it eFashion if you want, but I have a thought that this could be a big thing, because it allows people to express themselves in yet another way. Just have to let the IP lawyers sort it out after the fact.
Yes, you're wearing a tinfoil hat...Being American, you are used to the fact that American companies and the American government want to dominate the world and rake in all the wealth they can get
Hmmm, I think I see a reflection of my tin foil hat in your tin foil hat! Who said anything about American companies. Here's another article in which the royalties are discussed.
Different culture, you see.
Well, that explains why the Vietnamese are wearing tin foil non.
Maybe I'm wearing a tin-foil hat, but I sure don't believe China wants open formats. They would rather dominate the market so that they can get all of the royalty fees from other nation's vendors.
Problem with the Chinese strategy is that they don't have any content. All the major content providers won't release their content in the China-Uber-Alles format if they can't control it. Seems to me China has to depend on indie films to carry this ball, but unlike OSS, it takes more than a few pizzas and caffeine to make a flick, unless the PRC is about to flood the world with Communist pr0n...