cedsav

well, I don't feel too bad for designing my product logos myself now.

I'm not a native English speaker but the wording of "Ask a Question of Cyberdyne Customers" seems odd. Did they mean "to Cyberdyne Customers"?

Also, "People-Powered Customer Support" doesn't really convey what they say it conveys. All customer support is people-powered. 'Community-Powered Customer Support' or 'Customer-Powered Support' would be more accurate.

And as others have suggested, "Get Satisfaction has no affiliation with X" is much better that 'X is not yet participating'

Users end up on GS because of a Google search. Does that necessarily mean that they looked for and couldn't find a proper support channel first? I don't think so.

I'm sure there are plenty of people (me included) who google first, and navigate the site to a support page as a last resort.

Every business should be a "lifestyle business". If don't know what a non-lifestyle business is, but it sounds like something that's unsustainable, that doesn't make you happy and thus doomed to fail.

That would still count as solving a very hard problem for 99% of people.

It's even a hard problem for me, not because I can't set up svn/apache/webdav and whatever, but because I need to actively avoid doing this kind of things and focus on higher order issues.

What I find hard to understand is why he did not even try to invest the money.

He had a parallel, successful and legit investment business, so it's not like he didn't know how to do it. He could have prolonged the scheme (and made it harder to detect) by doing real trades and just inflating the rate of return.

Was he just trying to get caught all these years?

You make a good point. However the author goes beyond just taking a pseudonym. He pretends to have 12 years of experiences with parrots, when the reality is zero. This is where overcoming bias turns into deceptive marketing practices.

good point... I fear we're at that stage :-)

To me, you just did everything right. The idea of releasing early & often is to learn about your market, understand what your users really need and what your product should be. Could you have done your 'grand scheme' release without the experience gained during those 2 years?

They migrated 5000 workstation out of 90k. Presumably, they started with the easy ones first. I bet they'll keep a number of windows machines for those cases where no OO equivalent is available.

Everyone in the media/blog industry write with an eye on optimizing advertising revenues. The difference I guess is how much you care about what you write and how much you care about your readership (your integrity if you will).

I wouldn't be surprised they tested it. I agree with you on that.

That's not a made-for-adsense site. It's heavy on SEO, and looks indeed like high quality content, but for a different purpose. The content on a made-for-adsense site is designed to look good enough to fool Google, yet not helpful enough so the visitor has to click on a ad link to find something better.

I think he or you are overstating the importance of the domain name. There's nothing inherently special about the Nike swoosh. It just happen to be on shoes that people like to wear.

He's not providing any useful service. He's taking traffic and ad revenues away from legitimate sites while providing low quality content, which wastes people's time (hence they navigate away clicking the only links available: ads).

CPU time may be cheap, but Google has billions of page and images to index. If they were able to extract text from images, they'd probably use it for their image search. I'm also not convinced that the header image is a good indicator of relevancy.

I can't really blame anyone for making money on what is essentially arbitrage, but the bottom line is that they add no value to the system and they make it harder for legitimate sites to get advertising revenues (by preempting traffic and ad $$).

I was surprised too. I don't see why Google would spent cpu time on this, and I can't think of a way one would be able to validate that claim.

If you promise a reward based on 'success', then your friend was right to get a contract from you.

For such a small contribution though the whole thing sounds rather silly. Better to pay something upfront and/or ask for pro bono.

Official explanation:

http://community.norton.com/norton/board/message?board.id=ni...

a bad software update, and a weird attempt at removing 'spam' from their forum.

I guess the point is that very early on, having $0, you're better off trading time for knowledge.

I've been through the exact same stages (I guess I'm at #7 now). I couldn't emphasize enough the importance of hiring part-time help if you can and then moving them to full time if things go well.

You're going to make mistakes running your first business. Once you start hiring, the stakes get much higher. It's just not about you anymore. Someone's else livelihood is on the line. Take your time. Use abundance of caution with your first hires.

I don't disagree with that. I'm just doubtful about this particular tax issue having a real impact on people willingness to work more or less

The higher your income, the lower your work incentive should be anyway (regardless of tax situation). You can afford to slow down and enjoy life.

I don't believe that people change their work habit, or choose to work less, just because of a relative tax increase. However, they may be more inclined to find more tax efficient schemes.

And Buffett doesn't single out bailout money. He just says that the crisis makes government-backed entities, such as FDIC-insured banks, safer for lenders. Not really surprising.

Quote: "Funders that have access to any sort of government guarantee -- banks with FDIC-insured deposits, large entities with commercial paper backed by the Federal Reserve, and others who are using imaginitive methods (or lobbying skills) to come under the government's umbrella -- have money costs that are minimal."

I found the article inspiring, so thanks to the OP.

As an entrepreneur, I sometime struggle with the idea that everything has been done, all the great ideas have been implemented, and I'm one step behind, trying to get by on the long tail of history.

Of course this is not true. There still are lost cities to be found in the 21st century, and an infinite number of opportunities for those willing to work hard enough to discover them.

second that. Maybe something similar to ySlow? http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow

yep, loading javascript libraries from CDN is more and more common. I'd suggest you add ajax.googleapis.com and yui.yahooapis.com (there's probably more)

[Edit] you mentioned googleapis.com already.

That could make sense if cats weren't the type of pets who absolutely need to be on your lap when you're trying to use your laptop. Not a good location for a repeater.

Bank ('debit') cards in France kinda work like US credit cards. The bank will happily let your account balance go negative and then charge you fees+high interest rate.

I've been in the US 7 years and I haven't quite yet understood why credit cards companies and banks are separate entities. (regulation?)