Employees aren't fungible though. You can't convert an accountant into an engineer. Or a marketer to an engineer. Or a recruiter to an engineer.
But sensationalism and click bait sells more ad impressions so let's play that up as much as possible.
1,462 karma · joined April 24, 2011
But sensationalism and click bait sells more ad impressions so let's play that up as much as possible.
And since when was Apple any good at building the platform for someone else's hardware? Motorola ROKR E1? Apple CarPlay?
The reason Apple is being defensive is because of Edward Snowden. Apple supplies smart phones to the WORLD. Putting on a strong front to the FBI is a PR boon for selling smart phones abroad. They don't want the rest of the world to make a trusted Android fork because they can't trust Google and Apple. They want them to trust and buy Apple products! Unlocking that smart phone would cost Apple billions in foreign purchase orders.
Grandstanding and networking sound like b-school entrepreneurship competitions. Who can make the best slide deck. Plenty of companies got funding with nothing more than a few presentation slides and some good talk so I agree it's a potentially valuable thing. It just doesn't reward technical prowess so why feature it at all?
Hackathons are a blend of all of this and it doesn't really do any of them well.
My main complaint about hackathons is that they are a poorer recruiting tool than most people want to believe. Corporate sponsors think they'll be able to spot top talent easier. And some participants think hackathons improve their chances of getting hired. In my brief experience, the success rate is very low on both sides. At best, I think a hackathon is a fun, creative, and social collegiate experience for the participants and another avenue for companies to market their brands to impressionable young minds.
The next level beyond that is to shift earnings into personal corporations which are taxed at a corporate tax rate and enjoy other protections. This is like what Zuckerburg recently did.
The final dodge is to move earnings overseas much like most corporations do today.
With enough money there are always loop holes to exploit. I'm in favor of closing as many as possible. If there's someone out there rich enough to found their own sovereign nation in the Pacific, there's not much we can do about that.
A few things will happen. 1) You'll get good at interviews. 2) You'll stop caring so much about failing interviews which will combat your anxiety. 3) You'll find there is a wider range of jobs available to software engineers than the kinds you've seen so far.
This was the only book worth reading when I was researching metrics for our team at work.
TL;DR: Don't use performance metrics for human beings. You almost certainly won't get what you want, and you'll probably get nasty side effects instead.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Measuring-Managing-Performance-Organiz... [2] http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780133492071/samplepa...
Apple's Maps would benefit from buying Waze because Apple would get access to 1) Waze's accumulated modifications on top of TIGER, 2) Waze's software for collecting and distributing realtime changes to maps and 3) the talent of 80 employees that have deep knowledge of mapping software.
The maps from Nokia or TomTom might be better now, but the problem is they may have very inefficient ways of keeping those maps up to date and distributing the updated map data. For example, most GPS units have static map data which get a bulk update once per year. Whereas Google Maps and Waze can get updated maps in near real time along with live traffic information.
NOK: $10B market cap TOM2: $800M market cap
Even then, TomTom comes with a lot of baggage. A savvy operations expert like Tim Cook would choke in disgust at the financial waste of such an acquisition.
Apple acquiring Waze makes the most sense. It only has 80 employees already in Palo Alto. It is still private and only has $67M in funding. Its only product is a mobile app. And its product is actually an advancement for navigation rather than stuck in the old world.
But how soon is actually soon? 5.0.2 soon? Or 5.1 soon?
I can only wonder how many app developers need to update their apps to remove unnecessary and shady looking address book access. Even worse, I wonder if any popular libraries are slurping address book data that developers don't even know about. Analytics and advertising companies in particular surely couldn't have resisted taking a peek could they? How can you even tell if someone zips up and encrypts your address book? Maybe if you have a jail broken phone modified to detect that, but that's pretty unlikely. Look how many people use Path and we're just now getting wind of it.
True, I could move just migrate the email, contact list, and calendar somewhere else. But then I would have two contact lists that need to be synchronized between my new provider and Google Docs and forward any notifications from Gmail.
Then I realized just how much I rely on Google's email search. Finding an email within tens of thousands is instant on Gmail. It is nearly impossible with anyone else.
In the end, I abandoned trying to move away from Gmail / Google Apps. After all, there is nothing stopping the admin of any email system from casually reading inboxes or being forced to turn over data to a government authority. And Google does have some history of fighting back for information requests, where I can see much smaller providers folding under pressure more quickly due to limited resources.
And the argument against self hosting has been repeated here already, but the risk of loss of service is far, far the worst thing to happen for email. If you don't care if your email becomes undeliverable for hours or days at a time, you really don't need to be paranoid about email.
For the extremely vigilant, there is always CounterMail
The threat of email interruption and snooping can't be completely avoided. Undersea cables get cut, governments change, servers crash, data centers get raided, and companies disappear. At some point the data gets decrypted and everything is retrievable unless you are any extremely hard core PGP user. Even HushMail has to bend to the feds when it's all said and done. Even savvy people realize paranoia only gets you so far with email.
Unfortunately jobs are not the stuff we often fall in love with. Those opportunities are few and far between. But I think it is a far nobler goal to try and make more places like that than to have the most competitive salary policies.
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper... (see q&a in at the end of the transcript)
With regard to the situation, I don't think Zynga gets nearly enough credit for its success. It is not that easy to copy software and get the same degree of success. Yet Zynga routinely copies and gets greater success. There is something there that deserves attention.
Zynga has operational chops that should not be underestimated. Whatever it is doing is cutting edge and enough of an advantage Zynga can even flourish doing nothing but blatantly derivative designs.
Eventually, those operational practices will spread to other game studios that do original designs and it will be harder for Zynga to do as well. But much like McDonalds, Zynga could enjoy its market superiority for a long time to come as long as it continues to innovate operationally even if it lags creatively.
Range is determined by engine, weight, aerodynamics, and, yes, battery. The Leaf could, hypothetically, weigh half as much as the Tesla Roadster S, have a better coefficient of friction, a smaller engine, and get BETTER range with a smaller battery.
It's like telling people how big the gas tank is on a car. There's a hell of a lot more you need to know to figure out the range. To give an extreme example, just because my passenger van has a 30 gallon tank and my civic has a 11 gallon tank doesn't mean the van is going to win an endurance race.
Edit: Another concrete example, the Volkswagen 1L. It has a 1.7 gallon gas tank and gets a 400 mile range. [1] Your average Toyota might have a 50 mile range on the same amount of gas.
NB: I realize Tesla buries the actual range in the middle of the page. I'm just pointing out kWh at best meaningless without taking the entire car into consideration and at worst deliberately misleading consumers a la MHz and "megapixels."
What consumers understand: Range in miles, top speed in mph, acceleration (why don't they illustrate this with a graph instead of "0-60?"). What consumers can only vaguely understand: kWh, horsepower, CC of engine, torque.
MM in Roman numerals would just be 2000. 1 million would be written as M with a bar over it. [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Large_numbers
I will echo that most OverDrive collections are nowhere near large enough for most people to care just yet. But that has been rapidly changing with so many compatible eReaders on the market. Libraries are just now bulking up on digital licenses to meet the surging demand. I would not be surprised if there are already libraries with more digital copies of a popular novel than paper copies.
[1] http://overdrive.com/news/OverDrive-and-Amazon-launch-Kindle...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
I would be surprised if Time Warner put HBO up for sale any time soon if ever.
The DVD business probably doesn't do as much for Verizon. Thankfully that's already profitable and Verizon would be getting it for free after Netflix's failed divorce tanked its valuation.
I don't think antitrust will be a real issue. The courts have been fairly permissive such as with NBC and Comcast. If anything, Verizon and Netflix is more like Comcast and Xfinity.
[1] http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/netflixs-ch...
But at the end of the day, I just write it off as an experience. I'm not paying $5 to own this book/song/software for eternity. I'm paying $5 to experience it for whatever duration it lasts. Much like paying $9 for a movie ticket to sit for two hours in a theater, I might pay $9 to read a book over several days on my device and possibly re-read it a few months down the road.
It's a different mentality. But it's one we regularly apply elsewhere without similar qualms. A nice dinner. A theme park ticket. A trip overseas.
I think the greatest argument against DRM is more anthropological than practical. It doesn't affect me that much at all today and now. But it would be sad indeed if future generations lost access to great works of the 21st century because of DRM.
The current approach is entirely oriented to give people what they think is important and what people think they want. It would probably be better to derive that from existing relationships (successes).
I would be a little surprised if people at OKCupid hadn't already thought about this. Whether there is actually any momentum to change the core matching mechanic or not remains to be seen.
You can get pretty nice results that are somewhat interactive on the device itself.
And it's not like Netflix isn't willing to pay. Netflix paid $30 million per movie for exclusive early access with Dreamworks. Previously HBO held the contract for only $20 million per movie [3].
Media companies are just telling Netflix to flat out screw off or at best pay a ridiculous sum that nobody else would be expected to pay. Each one has a different threshold. HBO has zero tolerance. Starz had quite a bit up to a point. But eventually they all put on the brakes to keep Netflix in check.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2011/03/netflix-locks-down...
[2] http://www.bgr.com/2011/03/23/cbs-will-remove-some-showtime-...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/business/media/netflix-sec...
Arrested Development certainly has risk though. It's impossible to pick up where the show left off six years ago.
Hopefully if this succeeds Netflix will consider following up by reviving Better Off Ted. A similar, critically acclaimed, and more recent show with actors that seem generally available.