Totally Agree. I own the original Apple Mac Pro and have been very happy with it for 5 years odd; till I discover I can no longer upgrade the OS.
Now for a year I've been holding out for this new machine and F**** was a disappointment. I was hoping for 16 cores, nope. Worse, half the good stuff inside has gone; so where do I put my my mirrored 3TB hard-drives. I doesn't even come with a CD; so now I'm expected to buy this peace of junk and pack around it a bunch of plugin modules. So much for the neat all in one Macs; I'll have to go back to cables cluttering more desk.
There is nothing professional about this kit; for business its junk. I don't care what it looks like; I want something practical. So now I'm off to research a Dell and see if we can't configure it in such a way so I can run OSX. Yes the OS is good and frankly it is the only reason left for owning an Apple. If Adobe build their suite for Linux, that rational will be gone also.
Thanks god I switched to Android ages ago so I don't have the same problem with their useless phones.
We run a small numerical website (www.codecogs.com), nothing the size of RentaCoder but never the less, we frequently get direct request or forum postings for C code that's very clearly homework - deleted straight off.
What gets me, is some don't even have the intelligence to disguise the problem they need solving with us often receiving the exact text from their course work, i.e. "Question 10, Write a program in C to extract...."
Furthermore I'm struck at how bloody rude these people tend to be, esp given they are cheating. You'd think that if this is your approach to getting through Uni, then the first two words of the English language you might learn are 'Please' and 'Thank you'.
So far I hope we've not helped anyone. Cheers Will
You don't have to take my word for it.. Talk to you local New Business Adversers. However think about this: You try finding 3 people, all willing to invest and give up their day jobs for some new idea. Collectively they'd be very critical of the business aims etc, and as a result it'll have a much higher chance of success.
Secondly, Banks don't give out unsecured loans on businesses, esp new ones.. Thats why small companies look for angels to get VC etc + look for funding from various Government trusts etc. However I know from experience that banks use the number of directors (along with educational background, cash being injected into the business, type, experience etc) as a measure of how much their going to help you etc.
As for your last point - not sure where your going with that. Of course having 3 directors doesn't mean you can sit back and relax. However if you have 3 people with a shared interest, it makes the hard times easier and each director can live a much more normal life. For example, when one is ill, visiting a client or on holiday, there are 2 others to keep things going, etc. Running a company as 1 director is 10x harder. And thats ignoring the fact that 3 people can come up with better solutions than 1.
I think you have a very pessimistic view of new businesses. ok few will be millionaires, but the vast majority of UK companies are small companies, with no other aim other than to support their immediate families. The majority have under 10 people working within them and collectively they represent the majority of the UK economy and shouldn't be scoffed at.
Yep.. Thats been our experience also. Take a look at CodeCogs. Over 10000 downloads in 4 months, great customer comments, yet only 1% pay for the software within a commercial environment, and few than 30 people have contributed back into the system.
Ok, maybe this site is one big fuck up.. Fortunately our aim isn't to directly make money from this site, we're really just opening up our own internal library to attract critical feedback and thereby improve the quality of the softare. Plus its our little bit for the world. However, we do find it a little discouraging how the community talk at great lengths about sharing, open source etc, but invariable do nothing of the sort.
You can also add Apples OSX operating system, based entirely on Berkley Unix. From using this system I wouldn't now touch an operating system that was now open-source.
Now Apple sell their operating system, packaged with a bunch of other stuff, but the core underlying operating system can still be downloaded and free. The reality being that I've not the time to recompile an entire operating system - even if I did know how - so I've rather buy it done for me in a box. And this is very much part of their business model and it works..
Hi,
I'm not sure thats entirely correct. The stats behind business success, depend very much on how the original company is structured. A new company with one director has a 25% chance of success. A company started by 2 people, suddenly had a 65-70% chance of success. 3 people raise this to about 80-90%, again I forget the exact numbers of last year in the UK, but I'm sure you'll get the picture.
If you have a distributed management style you can also raise your chances; its all about that fact that one person is unlikely always to be right.
Equally most companies don't fail because the idea was flawed or because they didn't work hard enough. In reality its because they predicted impossible rates of growth and don't have a strong cash flow..
As for your final point about selling stuff. Your absolutely right and so few people new to business seem to ever realise this. Doesn't matter how sexy or how great your idea, if nobody uses it, its as good a worthless. I'm reminded by friends who tell me that their 5 year old digital CD-player is worth $1000 (the price they paid) - no I quietly remind them, its worth about $10, since you'll never find anyone willing to pay you more for it.
Incidentally, when when we started CodeCogs, the website behind our business, the income from the site was never part of the budget plan (aside from development costs). In actual fact are stated aim is to recycle all revenue from the site into paying others to expand the websites contents. Now we not white knights or anything, we have to make a living, but our own income is based around Consultancy, which goes well. CodeCogs (as an opensource library of C/C++ code), is just another great resource from which we can pluck code to use in our work. We could have kept it internal, but we felt it would also be useful to all developers and we hoped the software on it would be more critically tested and analyzed. Further more its also another spoke in our advertising machine.
All the best and Happy Christmas
Will
Director of Zyba Ltd.
Slashdot Mirror
Totally Agree. I own the original Apple Mac Pro and have been very happy with it for 5 years odd; till I discover I can no longer upgrade the OS. Now for a year I've been holding out for this new machine and F**** was a disappointment. I was hoping for 16 cores, nope. Worse, half the good stuff inside has gone; so where do I put my my mirrored 3TB hard-drives. I doesn't even come with a CD; so now I'm expected to buy this peace of junk and pack around it a bunch of plugin modules. So much for the neat all in one Macs; I'll have to go back to cables cluttering more desk. There is nothing professional about this kit; for business its junk. I don't care what it looks like; I want something practical. So now I'm off to research a Dell and see if we can't configure it in such a way so I can run OSX. Yes the OS is good and frankly it is the only reason left for owning an Apple. If Adobe build their suite for Linux, that rational will be gone also. Thanks god I switched to Android ages ago so I don't have the same problem with their useless phones.
We run a small numerical website (www.codecogs.com), nothing the size of RentaCoder but never the less, we frequently get direct request or forum postings for C code that's very clearly homework - deleted straight off.
...."
What gets me, is some don't even have the intelligence to disguise the problem they need solving with us often receiving the exact text from their course work, i.e. "Question 10, Write a program in C to extract
Furthermore I'm struck at how bloody rude these people tend to be, esp given they are cheating. You'd think that if this is your approach to getting through Uni, then the first two words of the English language you might learn are 'Please' and 'Thank you'.
So far I hope we've not helped anyone.
Cheers
Will
You don't have to take my word for it.. Talk to you local New Business Adversers. However think about this: You try finding 3 people, all willing to invest and give up their day jobs for some new idea. Collectively they'd be very critical of the business aims etc, and as a result it'll have a much higher chance of success. Secondly, Banks don't give out unsecured loans on businesses, esp new ones.. Thats why small companies look for angels to get VC etc + look for funding from various Government trusts etc. However I know from experience that banks use the number of directors (along with educational background, cash being injected into the business, type, experience etc) as a measure of how much their going to help you etc. As for your last point - not sure where your going with that. Of course having 3 directors doesn't mean you can sit back and relax. However if you have 3 people with a shared interest, it makes the hard times easier and each director can live a much more normal life. For example, when one is ill, visiting a client or on holiday, there are 2 others to keep things going, etc. Running a company as 1 director is 10x harder. And thats ignoring the fact that 3 people can come up with better solutions than 1. I think you have a very pessimistic view of new businesses. ok few will be millionaires, but the vast majority of UK companies are small companies, with no other aim other than to support their immediate families. The majority have under 10 people working within them and collectively they represent the majority of the UK economy and shouldn't be scoffed at.
Yep.. Thats been our experience also. Take a look at CodeCogs. Over 10000 downloads in 4 months, great customer comments, yet only 1% pay for the software within a commercial environment, and few than 30 people have contributed back into the system. Ok, maybe this site is one big fuck up.. Fortunately our aim isn't to directly make money from this site, we're really just opening up our own internal library to attract critical feedback and thereby improve the quality of the softare. Plus its our little bit for the world. However, we do find it a little discouraging how the community talk at great lengths about sharing, open source etc, but invariable do nothing of the sort.
You can also add Apples OSX operating system, based entirely on Berkley Unix. From using this system I wouldn't now touch an operating system that was now open-source.
Now Apple sell their operating system, packaged with a bunch of other stuff, but the core underlying operating system can still be downloaded and free. The reality being that I've not the time to recompile an entire operating system - even if I did know how - so I've rather buy it done for me in a box. And this is very much part of their business model and it works..
Hi, I'm not sure thats entirely correct. The stats behind business success, depend very much on how the original company is structured. A new company with one director has a 25% chance of success. A company started by 2 people, suddenly had a 65-70% chance of success. 3 people raise this to about 80-90%, again I forget the exact numbers of last year in the UK, but I'm sure you'll get the picture.
If you have a distributed management style you can also raise your chances; its all about that fact that one person is unlikely always to be right.
Equally most companies don't fail because the idea was flawed or because they didn't work hard enough. In reality its because they predicted impossible rates of growth and don't have a strong cash flow..
As for your final point about selling stuff. Your absolutely right and so few people new to business seem to ever realise this. Doesn't matter how sexy or how great your idea, if nobody uses it, its as good a worthless. I'm reminded by friends who tell me that their 5 year old digital CD-player is worth $1000 (the price they paid) - no I quietly remind them, its worth about $10, since you'll never find anyone willing to pay you more for it.
Incidentally, when when we started CodeCogs, the website behind our business, the income from the site was never part of the budget plan (aside from development costs). In actual fact are stated aim is to recycle all revenue from the site into paying others to expand the websites contents. Now we not white knights or anything, we have to make a living, but our own income is based around Consultancy, which goes well. CodeCogs (as an opensource library of C/C++ code), is just another great resource from which we can pluck code to use in our work. We could have kept it internal, but we felt it would also be useful to all developers and we hoped the software on it would be more critically tested and analyzed. Further more its also another spoke in our advertising machine. All the best and Happy Christmas Will Director of Zyba Ltd.