490 karma · joined August 7, 2007
In any case, I wish that people would find partners that they could actually, you know, trust. I am as cynical as the next guy, but damn people.
I understand the warnings and I'll protect my interests, but I certainly am not going to lawyer up aggressively.
But this is basically the plan. Equity doesn't really mean anything unless the business sells, but when the business gets to the point where it can support founders drawing decent salaries then that'll be happening. He knows what I make now and what it would take to shift my focus and it's all within reason.
Right now, I want to get the business to the point where he can start drawing a decent salary to support his family. Remember, he's a long time friend first, partner second.
I have a pretty easy response to unreasonable customer demands: "Some customers aren't customers that you want." My partner agrees and so far it's kept our head in the right place.
We also are targeting some of the smaller clients so that we can a) polish our offering b) get some "street cred" and c) just make sure that we can make money in this space :)
No seriously we are supporting the IYP industry.
If someone steals your card (or number) with a credit card and spends money with it, the credit card company is out the money.
If someone steals your card (or number) with a debit card and spends money with it, YOU are out the money until your bank is benevolent enough to return it.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have someone steal Visa's money than my money.
When I was in college I worked full time but used credit cards the wrong way (and paid for it over the course of a few years).
Now just about everything goes onto a credit card (NOT a debit card) and it's paid off monthly.
Having a good credit opens a lot of doors and helps lower a lot of costs. Car insurance -- a huge factor in this is your credit score. Security clearances -- bad credit = harder to get security clearance.
Also if you ever need to self fund a start up, having good credit is important.
Ah yes, was an article about data being more expensive to text than to send to the hubble: http://www.physorg.com/news129793047.html
In any case, a google for sms megabyte turns up a ton of hits for this, most of them at least 6 months old.
Good job TechCrunch!
(is that sarcasm I smell?)
There are about 2-5 hedge fund jobs that have been open for at least a year that just can't find someone willing to work their butt off for $110k and 50+ hours a week.
Then again, I'm in Dallas, so take that with a grain of salt :)
There is a huge amount to programming .net that has nothing to do with the {}'s of C# and all to do with the .net framework (which won't translate to Ruby at all).
That said, a good/sharp programmer is more than a monkey slinging code so they should be able to work well in any language.
1. Look at the MVC framework for ASP.NET 3.5 as it makes ASP.NET act more like Rails
2. If you're going to use ASP.NET, use 3.5 so you can use LINQ and all the new 3.5 features. It makes your life WAY easier.
3. There is no real scaffolding for ASP.NET like there is in RoR. Well there is a kind of like it thing that was put out (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PuttingASPNETDynamicDataIntoCo...).
Now, here's my take... if you learn ASP.NET/C# you will have marketable skills in most non silicon valley markets that you can use as a consultant or employee as need be. There are significantly less corporate jobs that are RoR than there are C#/ASP.NET.
Also make sure you look at Python/Django (which is normally what is argued with RoR).
Honestly I find the OSS community to be very weak here since most developers are corporate type and they know either Java or C# or VB.NET. Every OSS (Python) meeting I've ever been to has been populated by back room tinkerers and people that "haven't done it" (tm) so they aren't any help to me with my real world questions and problems.
Now if you expect any college to put out good developers you have the wrong expectations for what college does. They are not Devry (which you should never hire a developer from Devry). Colleges teach theory not practice (which has been beaten like a dead horse on the net).
Honestly, MSFTs licensing schemes give me a huge headache.
I was under the impression that Amazon's cloud required the client image to be linux?
Frankly, for smaller sites, you can get shared hosting for $10 a month that might be sufficient (and you can grow to a $50/month slice and then a $300 a month dedicated then to $$k for many dedicated). All prices are from Webhost4Life.
Since running a single EC2 instance = $70 a month if left up full time, I think there are vastly cheaper options out there.
Here's the typical example: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture
In my experience, virtuals/slices do not scale well for app servers in the MSFT stack.
1. People tend to lurk rather than participate (on most large forums, something like 1% generate 90% of the traffic)
2. People as a whole have very poor writing skills and "crowdsourcing" editing and revisions will likely result in works with poor grammar and structure.
I've thought about an idea like this, but more like a 'Choose your own adventure' type crowdsourcing/entertainment site. I'd make it wiki style where each "page" would have multiple paths to go down.
The hard part is keeping the pr0n out (there's actually a huge demand for text based porn of all things).
I got my first "programming" job as an intern at Cessna (in 1996). The job sucked (Fortran on a mainframe), but it was awesome resume fodder for the next few years.
Plus I can say that I worked in Fortran ;)
Sharepoint is pitched as the consumer facing glue for your enterprise.
You need document templates? You need to discuss a project? You need to collaborate about something? You need to have a workflow around tasks/forms/documents? You want a company portal for all information?
It is the definition of "Enterprise Software" and is pure overkill for the small business unless you are using the free WSS version that comes with Windows Server 2003.
That said, there are some very cool things that you can do with it when you integrate MOSS with Office 2007 like multiple shared calendars and task list integration.
You will have to ignore the magic behind the scenes though!
Oh... one more thing... skinning Sharepoint to something less than boxy is very difficult, especially if you have a large portal.
You setup your load balancer with the names of all of your hosts and it will direct traffic to the appropriate one.
Really though, the postings from last June pale in comparison to the poor posts from the past 60 days which include thinly veiled shills for products.