goofygrin

I said this very thing a few weeks ago.

CodingHorror is no longer a daily look for me. More like weekly or monthly.

If you look back, you'll see the quality of posts went down soon after Jeff began advertising on his blog. I think that the "pressure to publish" caused him to stop trying to publish important things, but to just publish liberally to get eyeballs.

I worked for a startup that used Administaff.

Administaff basically sucks. They are expensive from a company perspective. The benefits (in Texas at least) are fairly poor and expensive.

Also, with noone on staff responsible for HR functions, there was a LOT of frustration when HR type questions and issues came up.

Are you a mac, linux or windows user?

What's your budget? A budget of < $1200 basically rules out any recent mac laptop.

I've got an eee and a development box it is not.

I'm not sure what's worse.

1. That I get these emails

or

2. That the gooberment spent probably $3million for this "research"

cough searchyc.com cough

and this is why I use MythTV -- even with its warts.

yet another codinghorror post that reaffirms to me that it has jumped the shark.

Go back and look at posts from a year ago and they were significantly better than the posts in the last 6 months or so. Interestingly enough, they started to go downhill when Jeff decided to post ads on the site (not saying that ads are bad, just that the pressure to publish might be causing him to post more of the noise and less of the signal which drove people to him in the 1st place).

Wow. I know a lot of people that either work for or used to work for EDS (including my dad who's been there forever).

Be interesting to see how this plays out!

you're just posting a form to the server. You can pretend to be IE in code and send the same HTTP traffic that the browser would send (use fiddler to watch the traffic and mimic it).

0% for interns. You wouldn't give ownership to some offshore worker or a contractor. Treat them as such.

I've done a couple coding internships (gosh, it was 10 years ago this year!) and they paid me $10/hr. I shudder to think about the crap I wrote too.

awesome article.

I wonder mattmaroon's thoughts on this.

I carry a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite with me wherever I'll be for longer than a day.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...

Not the new crappy ones, but the old ones (I've got about 4 and they are all turning a nice yellow patina).

I've worked for (subcontracting) through a couple firms that have sold. They both sold at between a 3 and 4x multiple of their yearly revenue (one was $30m and the other was $3m). Both of them were run by very well connected people.

The problem is finding the buyer, but if you're in a major metroplex there are likely some middle sized companies that would buy you out. The larger shop I worked with had bought 4-5 companies over the years in order to build up their competency in other areas like app dev, system support and design rather than try and recruit the people and the clients. Try pitching it that way :)

Likely because it's installed on 99.9% of all web hosts and almost every LAMP software uses it.

This weekend I updated 2 Windows XP VMs and one XP computer. I would have eaten up my monthly bandwith allotment in 3 hours.

Great.

Edit: re-read the article. I obviously didn't eat 250gb in a month. That seems somewhat reasonable. I mean, 250gb is a lot of torrent activity!

but the fact that someone can go from 0 to 1800 "friends" in a week (assuming they are a noone like me) has to imply the lack of value of an account with that many friends (and IMNSHO the "service" itself).

$0

I just don't understand the draw of twitter. I guess it's just the old "take some old unix app and make it for the web" thing again. Hello wall 2.0.

ETA: the simple fact that you can get 1800 "followers" in a week devalues the "service" even more to me.

According to this: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1483 you could be losing 90-30% of your potential user base.

A few months ago friend of mine in the movie industry told me to buy MVL.

http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...;

Of course, I didn't have any money to put in the market at the time.

The good thing for MVL is that they are no longer just licensing their names, but actually producing the films, so they get all the profits.

According to Wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada, 75% of the population lives within 90 miles. So I was off a bit :). You're likely right about the reason though! (climate)

Canada's great and all eh (sorry couldn't help it :), but there's a reason that what, 60%+ of the population lives within 20 miles of the US border.

But from what I know, the canadian system seems more likely to be what the US could transition to than, say the UK system.

FWIW, my understanding is that Canada's system is that the government acts like an insurance company, so rather than all medical facilities being government facilities, they are private and they simply bill the government. In the UK, all facilities are government run, so there is no billing at all [well I'm sure there is behind the scenes].

but how is having an expensive workforce keeping small shops in business? I mean the really small shops like mom and pop shops can do it, but the 10-20 employee businesses must be running much tighter than they could here.

I'm not saying that our system is capitalism. I'm saying that socialized medicine (which is what other countries have) and big government flies right in the face of what this country is based upon, personal liberty, responsibility and freedom.

And show me any place in history that price controls have been an effective fiscal policy.

Look at the third world and see how well it works for them.

I lived in a place where the price of a loaf of bread was fixed at x. Well when x was a fair price and provided profit to the baker everyone was happy. 10 years later, people were so used to bread being x that when noone could make bread any more because the cost of the ingredients had gone up so much there were riots. So what did the government do? They raised minimum wage and price controlled the ingredients for bread. So all the bakeries closed down. And now a bunch of other shops closed down or fired their employees. Then what? Laws making it impossible to fire an employee.

Price controls and fixing are not the answer.

The first thing I'd try is to reverse engineer the model from the database (this is something that django can do).

As long as your database design is somewhat decent you'll likely be ok. if not... well you might want to build a new model and migrate your data :)

You likely don't go right to the manufacturer. You'll likely have to go through a reseller (think Ingram Micro).

With margins at like 1-2%, there is little money in hardware retail sales. The money will be in the service side of it. And college kids are the worst. Cheap, bouncing checks, and most of them know someone that can do it for them.

You want to know where the money is for a computer repair biz that does in home service? Suburbia. Place I live (suburb of Dallas) there are constantly people talking about their computer problems (there is a big forum for the area) and most of them end up at either the big box retailer or one of the two small places here.

So I'm going to piss off more people, but "see the list of places I don't want to live."

And I have lived outside the US so this isn't myopia.

Listen, running a business and being successful is significantly harder in those places vs. the US.

I want to live in a place where the limit to my future is me. Not what the government says is my limit.

I don't want to have to pay employees to not work, to work 30 hours weeks (and complain about it), 5-6-7 weeks of vacation. I have no idea how small businesses make it in the EU. It's silly how much they have to pay their workers between salary and benefits.

For all the drones out there, the EU is a great place. For people with aspirations it's a death spiral.

a) that sucks for them b) they need a better job

Listen, life isn't fair.

You want the benefits of capitalism without the risks? How does that work?

Like I said our system is screwed up, but getting rid of it is a HUGE ordeal with millions of jobs likely to be cut and a HUGE expense to cut over to it.

And in this country, where big pharma and big medical business runs the show (congress, etc.) it is likely that a "universal" healthcare system will result in a crappy, inefficient implementation that everyone will hate.

And this has 0 impact on the cost of my health insurance. It has a real cost in terms of long term care insurance (which is horrendously expensive, but not what the OP was asking about).