Windows 8.1 can open ISO files directly.
211 karma · joined August 4, 2011
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Your marketing effort should start BEFORE the product gets built. If you start with the product, you run the risk of building something that almost nobody needs.
It's that "almost" that will get you.
You can build just about anything and find people who think it's great. The feedback from this group of early adopters will be infectious but it may not be a market.
The trick is to find something that a lot of people think is great, that's a market and you can build a company on that.
http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/resources/stop-perfuming-t...
Waiting kills startups.
Put up a landing page, build 1.0, start figuring out if anyone would really buy your product/service. If you can't get anyone to bite, maybe the idea isn't ready. If you get any traction then you know the market is there.
Living in "small town" NS has some advantages. You probably have a decent internet connection and your current paycheque goes a LOT further than it would in the big city. If you decide to quit your job and dive into your startup full time you'll have a longer runway.
You are NOT alone. You ARE part of the world. You can make connections HERE (you've already started) or reddit or just about any other place where other people in the same situation as you hang out.
Professors are not teachers, and they shouldn't be. They are there to expose you to knowledge and you are there to absorb it and expand on it if you can.
Don't go to university to get a degree so you can get a job. Go because you want to learn. If you do it for any other reason you're going to end up in debt and disappointed.
The commercialization of higher learning has perverted it. They encourage people with poor life planning skills to pursue degrees that just leave them poor and bitter.
What was the last true innovation from Apple? I claim it was the iPod. The miniaturization of music. Everything since the iPod has been purely derivative of that miniaturization theme.
They've ridden the "Miniaturize all the things" wave hard (and successfully) by adding more features like accelerometers, GPS, faster chips, more colors, etc. to keep the fanboys horny but nobody has been really impressed with a new iDevice for quite some time. Apple is getting stale.
Apple needs a new hardware win that shows that they haven't exhausted their idea bank AND that they still have the marketing savvy to make people want what they've got.
Apple has NEVER been a software company. They are definitely struggling if Swift is the best new things they could come up with.
Where's the hardware?
<crickets>
The reviewer I spoke to was the one who handled all our claims, so it didn't hurt that he already knew about us. It made his job, and mine, a lot easier.
Wait... okay, found a link to the services they offer and Account Executive is still in there, plus a bunch of others...
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/srvcs-eng.html
If you're at all uncertain about what you can/should be claiming then you should definitely talk to a SR&ED professional or use one of these services to get definitive answers from the source.
SR&ED will cover a percentage of capital expenditures essential to the work and a percentage of $ paid to contractors so it's salary plus SOME eligible expenses. Salaries make up the biggest part though. I got about 65% back, using the proxy method - a simpler way of calculating SR&ED overhead on eligible salary expenses.
The R&D effort does not have to advance "the world's" state of technology, just your company's.
It can't be obvious or routine engineering BUT work that is required to complete the R&D work (but not directly R&D) IS eligible and you can claim it.
The 3 core requirements of SR&ED eligibility (for software anyway) are (1) there has to be technical uncertainty, (2) you must use a systematic approach and keep records a notes and (3) you must achieve a technological advancement.
The 3rd item catches people because it doesn't require a successful outcome. You can fail and still claim the project. If you knew in advance (or it was obvious to anyone in the field) that it would fail (or succeed) then there was no uncertainty and it would not qualify.
SR&ED is really not that difficult to navigate. Consultants can help, but they'll take a big chunk of your claim. Most of them work for a percentage that runs anywhere from 15% to 35%. That's big money for very little value. I wrote my own claims for many years and they were all successful.
When I started there was no limit on the write ups, now they put some severe character count limits on the writes ups. That makes them harder for us but less confusing for the reviewers. You really have to be able to distill things down to just the essentials.
Any Canadian software company that doesn't at least look at SR&ED is just throwing money out the window.
So, what? You just stop once you eliminate the known possibilities?
That last possibility REQUIRES experiment, investigation and thought to verify. If you discover a new possibility then you apply the process again.
The approach is not a one-shot deal, you MUST keep applying it. The current laws of physics are models that we use to explain what we observe and (if the model is good) predict what we might observe.
This by no means implies that that the models describe what's really going on. It is possible to have a model that describes a system that works but is not complete. The deeper we dig, the more we learn.
The fictional quote was meant to describe a deductive approach to investigation, not a rigid method. How often did Holmes dig up new facts and change his mind after eliminating possibilities?
Apple's utter contempt for backward compatibility is why people who care about their sanity hate developing products for OSX. Which API is Apple going to deprecate and screw me over with today?
Microsoft always went above and beyond the call of duty to support hardware and software (with runtime code modification and more). This allows programs should have failed epically to run flawlessly on everything from Windows 95 to Windows 7.
If Android even attempted a fraction of what Windows did, fragmentation would not be a problem. Android is a perverse mix of Apple and Microsoft though. It's a pain in the ass to maintain products for Android and it's even worse for iOS.
People aren't forced to choose bad programmers, they don't know bad programmers from good ones or even barely competent ones.
What do you have to do to get hired as a coder?
Put a few buzzwords on your resume, spout them back in an interview to someone who has no idea what they mean and frantically google whatever you don't know on the job.
This is why everyone wants you to take a whiteboard test before they'll hire you now. It's all the due diligence they can afford. Sadly, a simple FizzBuzz test would disqualify most "coders".
It sounds a bit stupid when it's put that way doesn't it?
That's essentially what "everyone should learn to code" boils down to.
There just isn't going to be any meaningful return on the mental investment unless coding is going to be your new career.
Realistically, there is a segment of the population that will never be able to acquire skills that good coders have, or have acquired, regardless of how much you try to teach them. The "Hello World" crowd. I went to university with some of them.
If you stop and REALLY think about it "everyone should learn to code" makes about as much sense as "everyone should learn to repair their own car". Would everyone like to be able to repair their own car? Sure. Would this be a useful skill to have? Sure. Is everyone capable? Absolutely not.
How about this.. go and spend a few hundred hours to acquire a skill you may never use again. It has to be one with which you have had no previous exposure or proficiency. Sounds a bit stupid when it's put that way doesn't it? That's essentially what "everyone should learn to code" really sounds like.
There are a lot of people out there who will never be able to produce anything beyond "Hello World" and some will struggle to get that far.
What if we focused early on identifying kids with good problem solving skill and other aptitudes that might make them good programmers and encouraged them to explore those areas. What if we did that for every discipline?
No, that would mean taking an interest in kids instead of just herding them into classrooms where they can be safely ignored until they're 18. Let's keep doing that.
You are right about the level of IT capability of most small shops, maybe I "crippled" would have been better than "destroyed".
But elitist?
Have you ever considered working on your home furnace? There are people who can do these things. The ones who THINK they can do it are Darwin Award winners.
The downside of an amateur rolling their own solution in Notes was not life threatening but it certainly wasn't smart.
Notes gave people who had no idea what they were doing the confidence to build solutions that were fine for personal use but completely unsustainable at even small office scale.
The "experts" who adopted HC and Notes were the ones who did the real damage though. These folks (and I knew a few) were just a step above the guy in the office who refilled the toner in the photocopier. They created half-working systems and then moved on. They didn't have to live with the technical debt they left in their wake.
They set unrealistic expectations for what good IT solutions should cost and left guys like me trying to clean up their mess for years.
Maybe it was just bad technology or a bad implementation.
If it was really that good (it wasn't) then it would have survived. The fact that nothing of any consequence works this way today is telling.
You could only go so far with HyperCard before running into limitations and that's deadly.
It was easy for beginners but offered no advantage to experts. Once you graduated beyond HyperCard you could never go back.
Market death.