TimGebhardt

I'm a Mac owner. They make great products. But people don't know about great products without great marketing (the tech-startup entrepreneur's trap). Great products don't just speak for themselves, people need to know about them.

I'm tired of people thinking that Apple divined the design of the iPhone out of the ether like Einstein did for his theory of general relativity.

They iterated on some great ideas, combined them with a lot of stuff that existed before, refined them, and sold them.

Somewhere out there, the guy who invented the Handspring Treo is sitting in a rocking chair yelling at his TV: "Apple didn't invent anything! They stole my ideas!"

Get over it. Apple stood on the shoulders of giants and has the best marketers in the world.

Did you actually read the story? It's not that the books were low priced. It's that they were priced predatorily. Preditory pricing is bad for consumers in the long run, and in every industry outside of software is seen as a bad thing. In the software business that seems to be the standard VC-backed-company model.

But there is a big benefit: you know what the price of the item is. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Think about Apple gear: your gear-head computer friends scoff and say "I'd never pay the Apple tax, they're not worth the extra price".

More transparent pricing is always better for the consumer. It forces the market to price their items more competitively.

Now imagine if everyone got their Apple at a different price based on the mood that the Genius Bar guy was in that morning.

Related to this: It drives me up a wall when someone responds to something someone else did with "Wow someone has too much time on their hands." And just what were you doing that was so important that you hardly had enough time to put that person down? Or are you just jealous?

Will people stop referring to share price when talking about company value? Share price isn't comparable over time due to stock splits and buy outs and other shenanigans. Please refer to market capitalization instead.

But those contributors... they gave them $50 bucks. It should be whatever they think it should be!

Yes, but they had been developing the NT product line for years, so it wasn't a full start over. Then they had the Windows 2000 release which was their first stab at a "merged" kernel for desktop and pro/server. XP was the full cutover after Windows 2000 validated that it'd work.

One of the dirty little secrets is that a lot of all the easy money was made a while ago. The media's just kinda catching up now. The increased cost of playing this game means fewer and fewer firms are able to chase fewer and fewer dollars.

They're squeezing themselves out of the market. It's like any other thing in the market: as people see profits they get into a market and accept a lower profit target until the market stabilizes on the marginal cost to produce the good. In this case the good is liquidity for the market.

Just give it time to play out. The "problem", if there is one, is kind of taking care of itself. If you want to direct your energy at a real problem, focus on the old-boys-network of getting stuff done in banking: commoditize the crap out of the financial sector's business by breaking down the moats and walls that allow high finance to run scams like the dotcom bubble, the housing bubble, and manipulating the LIBOR.

Anyone else find it funny that 2 of the 5 are working on education related projects?

I had no idea that this was a new feature of the newer Ubuntu releases and I was pretty excited to stumble across this. It's pretty darn cool.

I use Mozy for full backup and Google Drive + Picasa for photos and videos. Hopefully both of them wouldn't fail me at once.

Eh, don't feel bad. If they're not denim or button down there's really no difference in kids' day-clothes vs. their pajamas. "Convention over configuration" I think we tend to call it in our industry :).

Sure, but things change.

My grandfather used to beat the crap out of my dad with his belt. My dad decided he didn't want to do that to me. I'm deciding to be a more involved dad than father have by historical standards. I don't think I'm alone.

The linked article is saying there are a lot of other dads out there like me but the rest of society hasn't caught up yet.

Oh man, please let me steal that response from you. That's fantastic.

You could have taken six weeks off. You were legally permitted by law to take up to 12 unpaid weeks and still have your job waiting for you when you got back (assuming your employer had 50 or more employees and you had been working there for a year IANAL). Most people don't know that you can actually take up to 24 weeks, but if you do take more than 12 then your employer is not obligated to give you your exact job back, only a comparable one. You also didn't have to take it immediately after your child was born, but that you had up to one year to take your baby leave.

I wasn't paid for all 6 weeks. My wife and I had to save up a cash cushion (and her leave was paid because her company had wayyy better benefits than mine). It was a decision and an expense that was important for us, so we saved up for it because we knew that my wife would probably be out of commission for the first six weeks our boys were born and the first 4-6 months of twins is a crapton of work.

I never felt guilty when I came back to work. Once you really internalize that people in a company are replaceable, you just start preparing people for when you leave on vacation or baby leave instead of worrying about it.

And there are mothers who absolutely cannot function as a caregiver to their own children.

I think the article is asking why mothers are assumed to be good parents and everyone assumes fathers are lucky if they can get pants on their kids in the morning.

Most school systems are underfunded right now because our state governments are still recovering from the 2008 financial crash.

I was in the same boat: My wife carried twins and had a rough non-delivery followed by a C-section. She couldn't hardly walk for the first three weeks, and I took six weeks off total, so I pretty much did everything that didn't involve mammary glands (but I did have to wake to feed them extra milk from a bottle).

And not that I kept track, but it took a looong time for my wife to catch up on the diaper count.

I remember reading an article (can't find a link, it was the local paper) that highlighted that when my mom and dad when to college (1975) the average college student could pay approximately 44% of all their college costs by working part time and during the summer. That figure has dropped to 17% now, and that's why students are taking on more and more debt.

The problem is that colleges know that magic statistic that on average people with a college degree earn about 1 million dollars more than those without. So they can raise costs because it still pays to go to college and they're taking a bigger share of that future 1 million dollars in income.

Or you "need" to buy a house now (circa 2006) before all the good ones are bought up and you're out of the housing market boom.

Man, if I could go back in time...

I get the same thing too, but people seem hyper-scared for our family when I'm at home with our twin 18m boys: "Well is your mom (kids' grandma) going to help him? No!? I can't believe you'd leave him alone like that."

I'm about |---| this close to start responding with highly offensive responses like "Well, I can't believe your husband trusts you with a credit card, because women are bad at money and math". My wife gets just as offended as I do when her friends say stuff like that to her.

Expecting some downvotes, but unless someone's said it to your face or your wife's told you some of the things her friends say, you can't know how infuriating it is when people don't think you're capable of taking care of your own kids.

Shh, if you keep pointing out that the system isn't broken then people will think they don't need to always continually try to make it better.

Use a credit card as a debit card and get charged the cash advance rate? No thanks, I'm glad people ask!

Here's a great rule-of-thumb that I've gotten by with: Never ever compare the cost of your standard of living to someone else's. You just don't have enough information to do an accurate comparison.

My in-laws buy a lot of stupid stuff (IMHO) that saps their spending money. Do you think they're going to stop buying stupid little knick-knacks when they're retired? Probably not. Should they? Probably. But humans have a hard time changing their behavior.

So what this woman is proposing is to work with and solve the problems we have, not try to magically wish them away or pretend that we can easily change the behavior of the 400mil Americans overnight, and I tend to agree with her that it's a good idea.

200 lines of code is the average. What's the standard deviation? There may be some days I write 20 lines of code, and there may be some days I crank through 1000 links of code.

'Oh that's neat so Puppet's kinda like Group Policy?"

"I'm not sure I've ever heard of Group Policy"

It cuts both ways. There's an infinite number of things to learn and a finite amount of minutes in a day. People that are too broad and know everything may never end up developing a deep understanding of a few things to be really productive.

There are certainly people that can straddle both worlds of *nix and Windows, but really how is a user of Microsoft's cozy development ecosystem any different than a user of Apple's cozy ecosystem? People seem to love the latter's setup but chastize the former.

I second this. I noticed my MBA running hot and I figured it was because I was photo editing. I stopped but then it continued to run with fans full speed ahead. I looked at Activity Monitor and saw KiesOverWifiAgent running at 100% CPU. Uninstalled...

Hardware manufacturers are the WORST software makers.

Interestingly, German doesn't really have a concept of small talk. It was a problem translating Paddington Bear from English to German: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13545386

So they're successful because they're holistically thinking about the entire supply chain, rather than just think that a cool product will sell itself?

Wow, sounds like another company I've heard of...