254 karma · joined November 15, 2010
Thank you for producing such an awesome piece of software. I have been doing my local development on a Vagrant box for about a year now and in that time I have been able to move from OS X to Linux almost seamlessly thanks to Vagrant.
The only problem I have with it is the slowness of the default shared folders mechanism. Guess I need to bite the bullet one of these days switch to NFS.
One downside of CM raising money is that they will have to go for high impact initiatives as a must-have than as a welcome side-effect of the stellar work that they have already been doing. Guess they will eventually go the route of CM phones or phones that come with CM pre-installed. The money they raised does not make sense for building a purely software offering.
From the story: "The unauthorised copying only came to light after a US Army official mentioned "thousands" of devices running the software during a presentation on technology."
"Apptricity is now incredibly energised to use the settlement resolution as a catalyst for aggressive investment in our team, our solutions and our untapped market opportunities," said Randy Lieberman, Apptricity's chief financial officer.
When problems creep up on a product like this, the user will get shafted badly in the end. Google will refuse to help (cue complaints about Google allowing potentially destructive apps in Play store) as they don't support either the software or the phone, the manufacturer will also wash their hands off it, CM does not provide support for this from what I understand.
I have been using Android phones since 2010 (rarely on a stock ROM) and even now flashing anything is done with a prayer on my lips. There are just too many things that can go wrong with the way it is done right now.
The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana felt more like he was trying to test you, in each of those books, to see if you are worthy of consuming the entire book. Every time you feel you have a reasonable grasp of what is going on, he'll descend into a phase where you'll be lost again.
The Prague Cemetery, on the other hand, was utterly fascinating. Really enjoyed it.
As much as it is celebrated and desired in the valley, a large number of businesses don't have the mystical hockey stick as a viable option for growth. Throw enough money at it and any business can hit the hockey stick, but it won't last for too long. For every big exit that we read about, there are probably ten companies out there that attempted it and failed.
I have been a fan of Google and have used a lot of its products over time. The company has been changing for a while now and a significant part of that change is that it is making the transition from being someone in the background (the advertising business), to someone who wants a front seat in everything digital. Consequently, its product line will also start to reflect that change.
And one of the obvious outcomes of such a change is that a lot of us who have used Google's products extensively from the early days are no longer the primary target group for the company. Early adopters rarely form the mass market and it is the same in the case of Google. Products like Gmail were never front line products. These happened to exist by leveraging existing tech within the company. With Glass, Android etc., these products are now moving to the front lines for the company.
I still use Gmail extensively, most of my video is consumed on Youtube, I still use search, Android and Drive (for online docs & Keep, not file sync). My main Google account does not have G+ on it and while things are not perfect, it is so far usable. I've rarely commented on YT, can't rate anything anymore on Play Store, but I can live with all that, at least for now.
I fully expect the situation to worsen for people like me in the years to come on Google, but that is OK. It will eventually lead to newer products coming into the market and that is always a good thing. Email will be the first thing I will switch and I think that will happen before the second half of 2014 swings around.
All said and done, I have been happy with Google being around -- they revolutionized search, made email an enabler than a pain (better storage & spam management) and every now and then I discover something awesome on YT that makes so grateful that it exists. It has given me much more than what it (and NSA ;-)) probably has taken from me.
Irony in all of this is that all this while everyone has criticized Google for being an ill-organized one-trick-pony! Maybe the OTP was a better company after all, eh?
"Working from the tracking numbers IDC released two weeks ago".
Extrapolation, like this, has very limited use and is vaguely indicative at best and nowhere close to being reliable for anything other than fancy-sounding talking points.
Most people seem to hit trouble when they have a G+ account or have accepted any of the changes that Google suggests. Which is really lousy user experience and Google should really know better.
So far, keeping out of G+ has kept things usable for me on Google. I am heavily dependent on Gmail, consume a lot of content on YouTube and use Keep extensively. There is a different G+ account that I use for Hangouts for work.
But I don't see things getting better from hereon. In fact, I fully expect Google to mess this up even more and I am saying that as a fan of the company. That's the day I'll pack up and leave. It has been a good 10-year run, and all good things have to come to an end someday!
No, was not asking about lead sourcing. More on the lines that I'd consider an e-commerce company a digital company, while I'd think of an FMCG company as primarily non-digital.
In digital companies, the product awareness tends to be higher, so product education is a smaller chunk of the sales process. It mostly boils down to commercials. Non-digital, education forms a big chunk. This results in different approaches/cycles -- is what I have seen. Thus the question :)
One of the reasons why they have not done well is that the founders rarely have a technical background and the products are a torture to use. So, familiarity itself is not a problem.
The big issue is that the market needs to see tangible benefits without major turnaround times. That is impossible with even a relatively simple CRM/ERP product. It is hard (often impossible) sell to convince owners that it will take 3-months to complete the roll out.
The alternative is to no attempt a direct entry. Have a smaller product, or a modular feature in the main product, that they can use from day one and reap the benefits of. Get that buy-in and move laterally in pushing your main product.
Congrats. That's quite a neat achievement! There seems to be a bunch of companies quietly plodding away and doing good like this out here.
Would love to see what kind of margins are you hitting, but I guess that would be asking for too much. Quick back-of-the-envelope scribble says you could probably be doing 1-1.5 cr in profit before taxes etc. etc..
A question you can answer: What kind of mix are you seeing in the customer base - digital/non-digital, SME/Large Enterprises?
Exposes a lot of settings, including dock positioning, in a sensible manner.
People have different circumstances, levels of understanding and fifty to the power of three other factors that determine their choices in life. We want to ignore all of that and dismiss every person who does not see the same merits that we do. And that is sad beyond what can be expressed in words.
Can you imagine in a world in which it makes sense to have both the Apple and Google approach? If you cannot, you should step out and see a lot more of the real world. Choices, no matter how disagreeable or flawed, are welcome in a more open world. I hope we will all, eventually, understand that, even if we don't like what that understanding allows for.
Nations can rarely afford to have mutually exclusive streams of work. You don't see the U.S waiting till they solve their economic crisis to figure out what to do in Syria.
One of the major problems with the rank generalizations in both domestic and international media about India is that it reduces the problem to a simple combination of inept leadership, useless bureaucracy and abject poverty.
The fact, though, is that there also a lot of good people doing good work at levels (government, leadership etc.), but there is also a large number of people who are doing crappy jobs.
And as far as something like poverty goes, the causes, extent and solution for it differ from region to region. The concept of India is one of the greatest abstractions the world has ever seen. Take away the tricolour, cricket and the movie industry and you'll find people who rarely have much to identify with each other at a national level.
Consequently, any solution will take time and it will be chaotic; at least until a better genuinely progressive leader emerges, which looks unlikely for a long time to come. Waiting for all that to fall in place till measures are taken to ensure data security and privacy may well mean those won't happen in my lifetime.
p.s: The state of IT in the government is terrible in India. Any smart citizen have to live under the assumption that everything is compromised, by the state itself and by other states.
Unfortunately, the debate is mostly centered around if crypto is broken, while the question to ponder is why is the state suddenly forcing well-meaning people to start thinking like people who have something to hide.
This is a product that has been long due, but for some reason never gets built. 5-6 years ago, driver support etc was the main reason, but it is no longer the case. If this has to work, it has to work exceedingly well for all the possible use cases out-of-the-box.
If it can't do what it is meant to do at the first go, make sure you put up simple and clear instructions as to how to go about it.
The moment you hit the legendary "show me your lspci output" point you would have lost the game, no matter how good the specs are.
That said, a week of fiddling and my dev platform is the same as the one that I had on OS X. So, it is not like it can't be done.
Good luck :)
It boils down really to who do you think can be a suspect, just because they have locks on their doors.
If all crypto users are potential criminals, then all gun owners, knife owners or any person who owns an item that can maim another human being is a suspect. A state that suspects almost all of its citizenry, is a state that has bigger problems than terrorists.
Even worse, a state this does this, sooner or later, will convert a large chunk of its perfectly good citizens into behaving like bad ones because they are no longer sure what exactly constitutes bad.
At the heart of a democratic society is the social contract that the state will, largely, do things that will keep most of the citizens safe and un-harassed; while, on the flip side, the citizens are largely expected to behave in a manner that is not detrimental to the state.
What you see play out right now is that contract being broken.
Important question is, what is the right price to pay in freedom for what is deemed to be adequate security?
There's nothing wrong with being a small successful company, there are tens and thousands of that out there. But building a big successful company at scale is rarely done without taking on external investment.
Uncompensated users are a different issue altogether. I'm sure people have various reasons to keep contributing content there even after knowing that fact.
The die has already been cast in Quora's case, from what it looks like from the outside (I'm speculating wildly here), it looks like the company realized a while ago (around the time of the Charlie Cheever ousting saga) that they're growing at a pace much slower than what is expected out of them.
A $11 million series A to $50 million series B usually fits the profile of a company in hyper growth stage.
Is Quora a company that fits such a profile? All pointers (admittedly imperfect) say 'no'. Even going by their latest feature, blogs, it would appear that they're also running out of tricks. Such a feature is often a clear indicator of the flattening of user growth, leading companies to chase down usage growth aggressively to make up for the decline in the former.
But a $50 million series B should fly in the face of such an assumption. Well, maybe not. Money can either help you unlock known avenues for growth or it can help you explore unknown avenues. Either option buys time, but with different ends in sight. DAngelo putting up some of his own money certainly points at the latter. It looks like an attempt to buy time to explore.
While it is hard to wager what their burn rate should be, it is probably not enough to burn $11 million in two years. Even with the really nutty assumption that they have actually burnt $11 million in 2-years, with the current round they should be good for another 2-3 years. That's enough time to focus purely on how to massively grow the product without having to worry about how will you pay the bills in the coming week.
With that perspective in mind, it is easy to see why they're less interested in being a warm-and-cosy small community with great answers that pushes all the right buttons with the power users.
Their road ahead is a choice that's already been made. Where they will get to on that road, I don't think anyone knows yet.
One thing is certain, though. They'll either win really big, or will flame out pretty badly. They've already boxed themselves into a place where there is little space in-between.
Till recently, it was pretty stable and a brilliant release. There was some issue that led to awful battery drain as I kept progressing through the daily builds in the past few weeks. Resolved it by going through a full wipe than just cache wipes.
My phone is 2-years-old now and it has been a good run. For its ruggedness (multiple and frequent drops, couple of dunks in water, clumsy usage), I just don't want to give it up, but it seems like they may have trouble doing CM11 on it.
Do turn off zRAM in the performance options for better stability.
And it is not that he's not a sharp cookie anymore. He runs the household, still consults on his civil engineering projects, tinkers frequently with various things electronic/electrical, but GUIs stump him and his predicament has only gotten worse with the newer iterations of operating systems. For my generation, who grew up with the modern computing paradigms, this is unfathomable, but it is a real problem too, one with no real solution.
I have found my eventual solution in doing Teamviewer sessions for most problems. It is heartbreaking to make aged parents feel incompetent because they can't seem to grasp easily the same concepts we can grasp without even half a thought.
Groklaw and PJ are very opinionated, but it is not her or the site's fault if the people who read it choose to consume everything published there without using their own judgement. To be honest, they don't make any bones about how opinionated they are about the issues they cover.
> Groklaw is in the position to influence people on the most important subject of the 21st century, and I think they are doing a poor job of it as well as making whatever motives/resources might exist transparent.
They are one of the few sources that cover IP litigation in software in detail. They are biased and far from perfect, but I am glad they are there doing what they do. Over my years of reading them I have learned what to filter out and what to retain while reading the site. But that is my responsibility (as it is of others who read the site).
The site's mission statement makes for interesting reading, especially point number three:
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2004092304...
"Third, it's an antiFUD site. We strive to present solid facts in rebuttal to attempts to smear FOSS with fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), as well as to correct well-meaning but inaccurate portrayals of Linux, GNU/Linux and the FOSS community."
They are honest and upfront about this agenda. If people choose to ignore that and take everything published there as the golden standard, it is certainly the fault of the reader.
The problem is not limited to engineering. I have often had to push back with product guys responding to feature requests from users to address edge cases.
The trouble with doing so in social networks is that the potential for the law of untended consequences to strike is much greater in it as it is nearly impossible to test for every permutation and combination available.
Had an account which I disabled end 2010 and deleted end 2011. I'm addicted to mindlessly clicking away on the internet and, unfortunately, I wound up doing that with FB too. I do have another account which is required to admin a company page, but it has no friends in it, near-zero discoverability and I rarely login there.
For a while even I raged against Facebook and people on Facebook, but the fact was that the problem was with me that I could not use it without bringing out some of my worst qualities.
Of late, that narrative has been wearing a bit thin. They're adding users at a crazy pace, but monetization has not kept pace and by the time the IPO comes out, by virtue of more actual information being public, the buzz around the company will take even more of a hit.
Instagram is only step towards shoring up that narrative and once they go public, I'll expect more such deals to come through. They did not acquire the company because they were scared of it.
With that, I'll end my amateur attempt at mind reading :)