ooorrr

Great for Carbon. The situation for hardware design firms (right now, and often) is brutal - the degree of difficulty to consistently book enough new work to keep your talented team members employed is incredibly high, and more companies are moving this work in-house.

There are a number of these firms in the Seattle area, and all of them are struggling. Acquisition is often preferable to closing your doors, which could well be what happens to others.

I think it's saying that Douglas Rushkoff is an author, not the author of this particular app. Since they're all fabrications anyway, though, it doesn't much matter.

It's not discharging because it's plugged into 120V. It's discharging faster from the cold than the 120V is charging, so there's a net loss.

Bug #1 in the Xbox database: Playstation is not dead yet.

I can confirm this: you can basically count the number of contract engineers in the US on your fingers and toes.

Rand, I thought one of the providers (Hitwise or Comscore) started to separate out internal v. external links. Perhaps those were just pure links, like when a link at MSN.com went to a search results page?

I also don't get the Facebook reference. Google has distribution deals - Google searches in Firefox still count for Google, for example. Is it just the fact that web results are at the tail of the page?

Having gone through acquisitions myself, I've learned that BigCo tax issues are entirely different than YourCo tax issues - i.e. they're going to think about taxes (cap gains, operating taxes, etc.) with different rules than you will.

In other words, don't worry about that part. :)

Look more closely. He was hired _after_ the Digg 4 launch - likely was agreeing to a contract during the debacle, but certainly arrived afterwards.

Same story here. I liked Assembla but moved away, which was costly, and I'm not going to move back now.

You certainly can't run it in conjunction - i.e. gmail in one tab and google apps in the other - it only handles one acct (unlike Rapportive). I didn't try just a google apps account.

+1 - I'm always looking for a better simple solution for multiple domains, but I won't sign up until I know what I'm getting.

Maybe change the link that says "go back to home" to say "add another monitor" or "manage your monitors" something similar - since that's really the only action you can do anyway.

I'm with you. I think the simplest solution is best here. I do expect you'll run into scenarios where last-checked-time will be data you'll want anyway...

great feature and thanks for adding it so fast.

One little note: there's nothing in the user experience that tells me if you tie all of the monitors to the email address (i.e. is email address a unique key), so after I add the first one, I don't know if I always have to click through to settings to add another, or if I can do it from the home page.

One other suggestion -

One problem with these sorts of services is that when they're working, nothing happens, so if I don't get mails for a week, I don't know if that's because everything's been working or if you've stopped running the service.

There are lots of complex answers, but an easy one is just to have a "last checked" for each URL - it's ok if I have to go on-demand to make sure things are running. (A weekly/monthly update is nice too, just more work.)

That's totally reasonable. You might offer two emails for an outage, one to their email and one for SMS.

This looks great - perfect for the site that doesn't need 1-minute monitoring. Montastic has been ok for this purpose but I'm happy to try something else.

My feature request - 140-character SMS messages when you're down.

A much more usable (and accurate) map at http://www.idemc.org/.

I'm the guy on the other side of the table: I'm the VP of Engineering who gets brought in. The circumstances are always the same - the CEO/COO/BoD doesn't believe that the CTO is the person they can trust to build great software and great processes. (This may or may not be true, and the company may or may not be doing that already - I've seen both. This is subjective even if you know what you're talking about.)

A few simple notes, and please know I don't wish to be insulting, just clear:

--This person is absolutely going to report to the CEO. The CEO is the person making the decision, and if he trusted you to build and run the organization, he would have had you hire the VPE. (On a related note, you missed an opportunity to fill a hole for the company that the CEO recognized.)

CEOs (and any leader of a large, multi-fxnal organization) want their direct reports to be the people they can trust to get something done. You aren't that guy - the CEO doesn't want to go through you to find out how the engineering org is working, or he would have kept you in charge - so the VPE isn't going to work for you. Done.

--The CTO/VPE peer relationship is perfectly reasonable. Sometimes it's a hierarchy, sometimes it's not. Usually when it's a hierarchy, it's because the CTO also runs other groups (like ops, tech support, etc.), and so is known by the CEO etc. to be a capable manager. You are not.

So when I read your note, I can't tell if

1) you're upset because you want to keep doing the VPE job, but you aren't going to get the opportunity; 2) you're happy doing the CTO/Chief Architect job, but are frustrated/saddened by how it was handled.

You really do need to make this call. If it's #1, sorry - best you can do here is help hire a great VPE and leech on to learn from her. (Lot to be said for that.)

If it's #2, the good part is that if the VPE is the right kind of egg, this can be very good for you:

1) Many VPEs do this job because they don't want to be the Chief Architect. Some have the capability, some did once, some just don't, but you rarely have someone competing for your job or responsibility.

2) You get to wipe your hands of everything besides making sure the company technically designs great software. As a company grows, that's a huge bonus. You have to genuinely _want_ to do this job when things get ugly or when negotiations get tricky.

3) Your time with the CEO almost certainly diminishes, but that's ok, because you get to work with the people who matter more to you.

I like what I do, and when I find a great CTO, that's awesome - it means that I can help on architecture occasionally, but really I get to focus on the problems I'm there to solve, knowing that many eyes are keeping us out of architectural trouble. So, make a friend (and if you're in Seattle, I'm always available).

All of those are true. The lack of powerpoint at Amazon is not a myth - docs are the order of the day. This is more good than bad, but has some of both.

A few things for context:

1) This came up b/c somebody else publicly described the author as the inventor of EC2, which created some unintended blowback;

2) The author is well-known in the ops community and still close to a number of people at Amazon, and has no personal or professional interest in hurting those relationships.