Things about management and business on a smaller scale, and economics on a larger one.
Another person copies Caitlin.
It hurts me too.
She and I spent days creating a set of core values which drive the copy that she puts on her website. There are many compromises and issues that come with creating your own company, and without a moral compass, it becomes easy to make bad decisions that might not be evident why they are wrong until it is too late.
Believe it or not, those three paragraphs the person copied have all four of her core values in it.Continue reading
There was some discussion via e-mail about Warren Buffett’s recent donation to the William and Melinda Gates foundation. I don’t want to concentrate on that, except to state the inevitability of a man like him donating money on the sure-bet charity created by one of his favorite bridge buddies. Oh yeah, before we go all Nora Ephron on Buffett and Gates, how come nobody has mentioned the Walton family? Certainly the poster family of what I want to talk about:
“It a very equitable tax. It’s in keeping with the idea of equality of opportunity in this country, not giving incredible head starts to certain people who were very selective about the womb from which they emerged.”
—Warren Buffett, on the estate tax
As is widely known but was denied by some, Warren Buffet comes down again on the side of keeping the estate tax.Continue reading
Listening to NPR on the way to work, the program was about job prospects for high school graduates.
The first person interviewed was a kid who was selling Cutco knives for Vector Marketing. I’m sure Mark will get a kick out of that.
Though I was spared the opportunity of thinking selling knives was cool, I do have a book with a lot of holes poked in it by a Cutco money clip knife thrown by someone less fortunate than me.
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I get e-mails often of companies looking to hire me or find a hot-shot front-end Ajax-style PHP coder. It’s very difficult to help and I don’t know who to recommend.
My policy is to cast a wide net and then grill the people in interviews until they break in order to see where their real knowledge is. Others can’t be so luxurious because they’re not me. Anyone who can string a web page together with MySQL can (and often does) call themselves a “front-end PHP coder.” The variance in quality is very high, so high that I often recommend a good solid C programmer over a PHP one, because the former can learn PHP if need be.
The problem here is this doesn’t work well for a front-end UI developer because the web is a tricky business.
Ben mentions a different problem. What should the going rate of such a person be?Continue reading
Crumpler has updated their website to celebrate their 10th anniversary.
They also added a quirky product: The 10th anniversary with this wierd embroidery on the inside:
I was at Costco today and noticed that they now have the kit cameras in boxes out. Normally, you have to write down a number of pick up a flag, take it to a register to pay for it, and then pick it up behind the counter. Now you just pick up the box on some cameras.
If your box is big enough, I’m sure this will help sales. Those extra 20 minutes of gratification when you know it’s “yours” make a big difference.
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There has been a lot of comments about the glossy finish in the new MacBooks, many of them link John Siracusa’s article approvingly.
This is a reminder why a Mac fanboy like myself hates Mac zealotry: “Reflections! Glare! These are not good things!â€
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During the boom, if you asked any startup in the Valley when they planned on going public they’d tell you “about 18 months.â€
Come back in 18 months and you’d hear the same talk. This continued until IPO’s become radioactive. Post boom you hear these same people espouse having a “path to profitability,†which is a sure barometer for the fact that they actually have no such plan.
After working at four startups, I can see clearly from the inside that most of these strategies are wishful thinking tied together with two matchsticks: that’s why luck is so important.
A lot of startup people spend an inordinate amount of time messing with their Excel spreadsheets of revenue and growth projections until the numbers say they’re going to be profitable. When you read, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,†a startup person knows this is what you get when you elect a CEO president: someone simply forgot to prefix the word “failed†in front of his title.
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If you remember from an earlier post, I pointed out that Creative’s strategy just doesn’t understand the iPod market. With over $1 billion in iPod-related accessories sold last year alone, the iPod is not just a device, it is a platform.
It seems Creative has given up trying to compete with Apple, and is suing Apple on the “Zen Patent.†This smacks of desperation to me.
One thing not noted by a lot of blogs linking this lawsuit: although the patent was only recently awarded, Creative applied for this patent before the iPod existed (they applied for the patent in January 2001, the iPod was released that October). Back then, Creative had the Nomad: a shitty player if there ever was one—I borrowed a friends at the time and decided to stick with my Rio and wait it out. It was probably the first hard-drive based MP3 player (there may have been one other).
It is fine debating prior-art and the triviality of the patent (how else are you going to navigate a hierarchical menu except sequentially?), but don’t dismiss the lawsuit out-of-hand.Continue reading
It’s making the news now and really should have come as no surprise if you have been following the news. It’s a reducto ad absurdum of the Administration’s “creative†interpretation of the Constitution.
If you parse the up-to-date denials and spin, you will see they’re not denying it. The only claim is that the profiles are anonymous. Their interpretation of the law seems to be as long as its not tied to your social security number, no warrant is needed and the 4th is not violated. (There is this separation in their minds between “unreasonable search and seisure†and “probable cause†along the lines of “these are terrorists, this is war, it is not unreasonable to search these records without warrants in times of war.)
I’m not interesting in talking about the legality of that. Instead I want to think about two things: 1) Why the outrage now? 2) Even if you take the most restrictive definition of what that database does, how useful is it?