1. I'm not a programmer 2. If you remember how you wrote that compiler, you know what a linker is 3. I discount an entire group that has very few good programmers in it to save myself quite a giant lot of time.
If you're the right kind of company that consistently sells a very high quality product, you have enough breathing room in every case to say "no" to a customer who's asking for things that will destabilize their product.
I do it all the time, and I've never once lost a customer doing so.
Which is precisely why I would *never* in a million years hire a programmer under 30, and rising.
I interviewed someone who became proficient enough in computer programming to get a masters degree from what was, when I was in school, an amazingly advanced Comp Sci program -- who didn't know what a linker does.
No one ran away when Gmail was losing thousands of users at a time, irrecoverably. No one ran away when.mac (now.me) blew up for almost four months. And no one ran away when Microsoft started sucking (round about 1983).
No one will run away. Not even people who say people will run away, will run away.
Yes, how very elite of you. In my experience, the vast majority of people who roll the way you do have no idea what the hell they're doing, but they appear to in public forums.
Which is really whats important.
Me, I keep my data safe in such a way that it doesn't matter whether it's in some insecure "cloud", or on a truecrypted thumb drive.
The stuff that needs it that is. The other thing I've noticed about your ilk is that almost without exception, you don't have the sort of data in which no one would have any interest in the first place.
I'm opening a second office in Dublin next year. My first is in New York City. It's breathtakingly easy to have a presence in Ireland, and they make it very well worth one's while to do it.
Any company of any size and any dexterity can have an office in Ireland if they want one. I'm even familiar with a company of a single individual who has an Irish presence so that he can use it to legally wrangle EU clients from the States. (he works in cryptography, so the legalities are complicated)
All Dell has really done is shown everyone that they're incapable of providing decent work at a decent wage.
Is anyone else really sick of these things being called "town hall meetings"? If I wasn't from the US, I'd think we were all tobacco chewing cowboys who transform into angry, torch bearing mobs at night.
Actually I run a pretty busy network security company entirely with OS X, top to bottom. But I don't do it for political or social reasons. I do it because it fits the needs of my business the best.
One of the reasons that it's so handy in my line of work is that it's been certified as a Unix by the Open Group. These certifications do actually mean quite a lot, for better or worse, and they often figure deeply into these sorts of decisions.
But if it's not for you, then that's fine. Computing needs vary, as do therefore computational environments, including hardware, software, and operating system. If I want to play some sort of beautiful, cutting edge FPS, I know that for an excellent experience I'll find myself building a 10,000 dollar gaming machine with four video cards running Vista. If I want my machine to never, ever crash while it's running Postfix and a DNS server, I'll use Open or NetBSD.
If I want my Oracle installation to be able to chomp into 6 terabyte databases with as little latency as possible, I'll run them on Solaris with a heavily tweaked kernel.
And if I want a good balance between shallow ramping, ease of use, compliance to common standards and a certification that allows my customers to breathe easy (for whatever reason), then I'll use OS X.
I'm not quite sure why you have a problem with that.
Would your response have been different if I'd said "And that's why I use netBSD"?
I bet it would, since really no one admits to using netBSD (though why I don't know). I chose to say OS X because 1. it's true and 2. It was funny in the context of the rest of the post and 3. it was a statement of utter irrelevancy.
You're absolutely right, it doesn't matter at all what OS *I* use. It matters what YOU use, and that's none of my business, really. Me saying "And that's why I use OS X" was certainly inviting argument, and its true that that's part of why I said it. But it's also true that I invited argument with something that I believe is irrelevant from top to bottom. I don't care if you use OS X or not.
I only care if I do, and now you have my personal reasoning for it, should you find it interesting or useful. I like knowing why other people choose what they do, whether its on operating system or a good cantaloupe. Then when it comes time for me to choose again, I might have a little more insight insofar as how my needs dovetail with my choices.
*were* among the most intelligent human beings in the world.
I think what you're not considering is the fact that you yourself have aged, and therefore your opinions and perceptions have changed as well. Most people mellow out of the "raging 20s" where everything seems like a social injustice, even if it's some guy in a coffee shop using an OS that they think "sucks".
It seems to me that it's a problem of relativity. The people you seem to be referencing are very likely right around the same age you were (and I was) when we were ferocious about such things. I was an Amiga person too, and then a rabid Mac owner, then an elite NeXT user, then a smartass Linux user, but eventually I decided, just like you, that it really is just a computer and that there are far more important things to worry about and spend time dealing with.
Stupidity IS a lack of funding. Pay the salary of someone smart enough to handle your data correctly if you have no interest in becoming smart yourself. Simple.
Its not that its not legal, but it *definitely* is not enforceable anywhere in the US, period.
And no, none of it is really worth the service of a company that sells mined data to third parties and needs to launch a viral marketing campaign on slashdot just to make their numbers next quarter.
No, none of us have been living on Mars. This is just the latest permutation of viral marketing, it seems. But this one is kind of weird, because it combines all the "bleeding edge stuff" we've seen before with the oldest of old school hawking techniques, which is this:
"IF Y'AINT SEEN THIS THEN Y'AINT SEEN NOTHIN!"
Which is pressed and kneaded as needed to "you have to have been living (under a rock | on mars | in a laundry hamper) for the last (year | ten years | few decades | all your life) if you haven't heard of (this amazing company that can solve all your problems | this great company who has this incredible product | this stupendous chamois which can soak up over seven thousand times its own weight in water).
Last.FM is pretty OK, but I would much rather do business with a company which doesn't have a co-founder who calls it "fun" to play with my personal data.
And they all have draconian NC contracts. It's actually rather sad; I've run into dozens of ex-Illinoisians (sp) here in NYC who simply don't understand that they can negotiate a NC agreement. And none who would ever dream that in many circumstances here in NY and NYC, you don't have to sign them at all without any risk to your employment.
I started my tech career in Illinois, and I'm glad I did. It was incredibly competitive in Chicago in the early and mid 90s, and I learned more there in six years than I could have ever learned anywhere else in twice the time.
But I'd rather sling coffee out of a truck in Union Square than ever move back to Chicago and work in the tech industry there. It's unnecessarily brutal.
Apple has competitors in its own market already. You can tell that right away by noting that their market share is still in the single digits. Somehow the "reasoning" applied to psystar's defense never includes this little bit of information.
And, apple charges a lot for their computers. So? So go buy a Dell or something. The beginning and end of the whole wonky argument is that you want to run OS X and you want to pay exactly what you feel like paying to do so.
I remember those mac clones. I had two of them. My educated guess about why Apple stopped allowing clones once Jobs got back in is the same reason that I stopped buying clones well before that:
The hardware was cheap garbage, and broke all the time.
Ultimately the allowance of clones made Apple look bad, just as allowing Tatung to make Sparc clones in the 90s made Sun look bad. There are very vocal people who get confused and mistake crappy hardware for buggy software and then everyone on both sides lose.
So Apple wants to control what hardware the operating system runs on. The only people who seem to be upset by this are the ones who get angry about Apple's hardware pricing, and assume that instead of just going and buying some other kind of computer, they have some sort of inalienable "right" to have whatever kind of computer they want, and further that they have the "right" to pay whatever they like for it.
Whether or not Dark Flow exists is mired in bad science at the moment, which you of all people should understand, Mindkata, assuming that your experience is what you imply.
You just wanted to mention something cool that no one had come up with in thread yet, namely "dark flow". For those of us in the know (really, those of us who acquire knowledge from a variety of sources and not the single source of Wikipedia) it's quite painfully clear Sasha Kashlinksy is not interested in doing real science; he is interested only in his 15 minutes of physics journal fame.
His math is flawed and he has a very, very weak grasp on the very basic building blocks of the models that he's working with, such as confusing R-J brightness temps with Planck's.
At this point, the existence of "dark flow", positive or negative is irrelevant, since exactly no good science has been done to date on the subject. Do let us know when that wiki page says that some has though.
I started my company by myself. It doesn't have to pan out the way you described -- it depends very much on what your product is and what the margin on that product in the responsive markets is, and how that margin changes over time.
Pretty much business 201 there. If you're doing hardware repair then no, you probably can't start a company on your own that does just that. The margin is too small in most markets. However, if you choose a thing like security consulting the current margin is ridiculously huge enough to really get something viable going with one single person.
That doesn't mean that the breaking point (where you have to hire someone else or risk either ending up on nitro glycerin or thorazine) is any easier with a very high margin product. In fact I think it makes it even harder; the tendency is to wait much longer than you need to when you see the kind of profit you're bringing in by yourself. It's death to a number of one person operations every day, having bad timing in that moment.
Slashdot Mirror
1. I'm not a programmer
2. If you remember how you wrote that compiler, you know what a linker is
3. I discount an entire group that has very few good programmers in it to save myself quite a giant lot of time.
And you know what time is.
You know, once you GET to 30, you do immediately understand why you should never trust anyone over 30.
It's because we know how fulla shit people under 30 are. Don't worry, you'll agree before ya know it, champ.
You must be under 30.
If you're the right kind of company that consistently sells a very high quality product, you have enough breathing room in every case to say "no" to a customer who's asking for things that will destabilize their product.
I do it all the time, and I've never once lost a customer doing so.
Grow some fucking balls.
Which is precisely why I would *never* in a million years hire a programmer under 30, and rising.
I interviewed someone who became proficient enough in computer programming to get a masters degree from what was, when I was in school, an amazingly advanced Comp Sci program -- who didn't know what a linker does.
No one ran away when Gmail was losing thousands of users at a time, irrecoverably. No one ran away when .mac (now .me) blew up for almost four months. And no one ran away when Microsoft started sucking (round about 1983).
No one will run away. Not even people who say people will run away, will run away.
Yes, how very elite of you. In my experience, the vast majority of people who roll the way you do have no idea what the hell they're doing, but they appear to in public forums.
Which is really whats important.
Me, I keep my data safe in such a way that it doesn't matter whether it's in some insecure "cloud", or on a truecrypted thumb drive.
The stuff that needs it that is. The other thing I've noticed about your ilk is that almost without exception, you don't have the sort of data in which no one would have any interest in the first place.
Should have been:
"From the no shit! dept."
--from the Grow A Pair dept.
I'm opening a second office in Dublin next year. My first is in New York City. It's breathtakingly easy to have a presence in Ireland, and they make it very well worth one's while to do it.
Any company of any size and any dexterity can have an office in Ireland if they want one. I'm even familiar with a company of a single individual who has an Irish presence so that he can use it to legally wrangle EU clients from the States. (he works in cryptography, so the legalities are complicated)
All Dell has really done is shown everyone that they're incapable of providing decent work at a decent wage.
BeOS lost the OS wars long before Palm bought it. They lost by doing the worst thing that they could have possibly ever done:
They made a lightning fast, small, good looking, stable, awe-inspiring operating system that didn't actually run anything useful.
"setting up a town hall meeting"
Is anyone else really sick of these things being called "town hall meetings"? If I wasn't from the US, I'd think we were all tobacco chewing cowboys who transform into angry, torch bearing mobs at night.
Actually I run a pretty busy network security company entirely with OS X, top to bottom. But I don't do it for political or social reasons. I do it because it fits the needs of my business the best.
One of the reasons that it's so handy in my line of work is that it's been certified as a Unix by the Open Group. These certifications do actually mean quite a lot, for better or worse, and they often figure deeply into these sorts of decisions.
But if it's not for you, then that's fine. Computing needs vary, as do therefore computational environments, including hardware, software, and operating system. If I want to play some sort of beautiful, cutting edge FPS, I know that for an excellent experience I'll find myself building a 10,000 dollar gaming machine with four video cards running Vista. If I want my machine to never, ever crash while it's running Postfix and a DNS server, I'll use Open or NetBSD.
If I want my Oracle installation to be able to chomp into 6 terabyte databases with as little latency as possible, I'll run them on Solaris with a heavily tweaked kernel.
And if I want a good balance between shallow ramping, ease of use, compliance to common standards and a certification that allows my customers to breathe easy (for whatever reason), then I'll use OS X.
I'm not quite sure why you have a problem with that.
Would your response have been different if I'd said "And that's why I use netBSD"?
I bet it would, since really no one admits to using netBSD (though why I don't know). I chose to say OS X because 1. it's true and 2. It was funny in the context of the rest of the post and 3. it was a statement of utter irrelevancy.
You're absolutely right, it doesn't matter at all what OS *I* use. It matters what YOU use, and that's none of my business, really. Me saying "And that's why I use OS X" was certainly inviting argument, and its true that that's part of why I said it. But it's also true that I invited argument with something that I believe is irrelevant from top to bottom. I don't care if you use OS X or not.
I only care if I do, and now you have my personal reasoning for it, should you find it interesting or useful. I like knowing why other people choose what they do, whether its on operating system or a good cantaloupe. Then when it comes time for me to choose again, I might have a little more insight insofar as how my needs dovetail with my choices.
*were* among the most intelligent human beings in the world.
I think what you're not considering is the fact that you yourself have aged, and therefore your opinions and perceptions have changed as well. Most people mellow out of the "raging 20s" where everything seems like a social injustice, even if it's some guy in a coffee shop using an OS that they think "sucks".
It seems to me that it's a problem of relativity. The people you seem to be referencing are very likely right around the same age you were (and I was) when we were ferocious about such things. I was an Amiga person too, and then a rabid Mac owner, then an elite NeXT user, then a smartass Linux user, but eventually I decided, just like you, that it really is just a computer and that there are far more important things to worry about and spend time dealing with.
And that's why I use OS X.
Stupidity IS a lack of funding. Pay the salary of someone smart enough to handle your data correctly if you have no interest in becoming smart yourself. Simple.
And that's why your IT department actually needs funding. Sleep tight.
How is Pandora lying to me?
Who had live preview icons in an app in 1989 exactly? Source please.
Its not that its not legal, but it *definitely* is not enforceable anywhere in the US, period.
And no, none of it is really worth the service of a company that sells mined data to third parties and needs to launch a viral marketing campaign on slashdot just to make their numbers next quarter.
No, none of us have been living on Mars. This is just the latest permutation of viral marketing, it seems. But this one is kind of weird, because it combines all the "bleeding edge stuff" we've seen before with the oldest of old school hawking techniques, which is this:
"IF Y'AINT SEEN THIS THEN Y'AINT SEEN NOTHIN!"
Which is pressed and kneaded as needed to "you have to have been living (under a rock | on mars | in a laundry hamper) for the last (year | ten years | few decades | all your life) if you haven't heard of (this amazing company that can solve all your problems | this great company who has this incredible product | this stupendous chamois which can soak up over seven thousand times its own weight in water).
Last.FM is pretty OK, but I would much rather do business with a company which doesn't have a co-founder who calls it "fun" to play with my personal data.
And they all have draconian NC contracts. It's actually rather sad; I've run into dozens of ex-Illinoisians (sp) here in NYC who simply don't understand that they can negotiate a NC agreement. And none who would ever dream that in many circumstances here in NY and NYC, you don't have to sign them at all without any risk to your employment.
I started my tech career in Illinois, and I'm glad I did. It was incredibly competitive in Chicago in the early and mid 90s, and I learned more there in six years than I could have ever learned anywhere else in twice the time.
But I'd rather sling coffee out of a truck in Union Square than ever move back to Chicago and work in the tech industry there. It's unnecessarily brutal.
The wonky part of the reasoning is this:
Apple has competitors in its own market already. You can tell that right away by noting that their market share is still in the single digits. Somehow the "reasoning" applied to psystar's defense never includes this little bit of information.
And, apple charges a lot for their computers. So? So go buy a Dell or something. The beginning and end of the whole wonky argument is that you want to run OS X and you want to pay exactly what you feel like paying to do so.
That is precisely *not* how capitalism works.
I remember those mac clones. I had two of them. My educated guess about why Apple stopped allowing clones once Jobs got back in is the same reason that I stopped buying clones well before that:
The hardware was cheap garbage, and broke all the time.
Ultimately the allowance of clones made Apple look bad, just as allowing Tatung to make Sparc clones in the 90s made Sun look bad. There are very vocal people who get confused and mistake crappy hardware for buggy software and then everyone on both sides lose.
So Apple wants to control what hardware the operating system runs on. The only people who seem to be upset by this are the ones who get angry about Apple's hardware pricing, and assume that instead of just going and buying some other kind of computer, they have some sort of inalienable "right" to have whatever kind of computer they want, and further that they have the "right" to pay whatever they like for it.
This is pretty wonky reasoning if you ask me.
Whether or not Dark Flow exists is mired in bad science at the moment, which you of all people should understand, Mindkata, assuming that your experience is what you imply.
You just wanted to mention something cool that no one had come up with in thread yet, namely "dark flow". For those of us in the know (really, those of us who acquire knowledge from a variety of sources and not the single source of Wikipedia) it's quite painfully clear Sasha Kashlinksy is not interested in doing real science; he is interested only in his 15 minutes of physics journal fame.
His math is flawed and he has a very, very weak grasp on the very basic building blocks of the models that he's working with, such as confusing R-J brightness temps with Planck's.
At this point, the existence of "dark flow", positive or negative is irrelevant, since exactly no good science has been done to date on the subject. Do let us know when that wiki page says that some has though.
I started my company by myself. It doesn't have to pan out the way you described -- it depends very much on what your product is and what the margin on that product in the responsive markets is, and how that margin changes over time.
Pretty much business 201 there. If you're doing hardware repair then no, you probably can't start a company on your own that does just that. The margin is too small in most markets. However, if you choose a thing like security consulting the current margin is ridiculously huge enough to really get something viable going with one single person.
That doesn't mean that the breaking point (where you have to hire someone else or risk either ending up on nitro glycerin or thorazine) is any easier with a very high margin product. In fact I think it makes it even harder; the tendency is to wait much longer than you need to when you see the kind of profit you're bringing in by yourself. It's death to a number of one person operations every day, having bad timing in that moment.