sielskr

that describes the OSX open-source app Notational Velocity too.

(Like it says in the OP) Zappos is not a public company, and if the Zappos board had been confident that Zappos could become a public company, they would not have objected to the direction desired by the CEO.

Of all the things in an ordinary office or home (including toilet seats and such) phone handsets and computer keyboards tend to have the most germs. One anti-germ measure I use is to replace my keyboard every year or so, but replacing the Topre every year is more than I want to spend. Replacing just the keycaps would control germs just as well as replacing the board, but where would I buy keycaps for a Topre?

What is your basis for believing that US companies cannot downsize as easily as Danish ones or that their costs in hiring and firing are higher? Were you an employee or hiring manager in both countries?

Again, if all the text I look at during a session at the computer were rendered by Plan 9, I could probably get used to it (since I ran Linux in text mode for years, and the text mode on my video card had no smoothing unless I am very, very much mistaken), but that would be impractical because Plan 9 does not have a satisfactory graphical web browser. You're not going to contest that last statement, are you? Heck, even Russ Cox does not use Plan 9 for browsing the web.

In general, I do best when all the text I view during a session at the computer is rendered by a single system, like Aqua or Gnome/GTK. My visual system is defective (exotropia and "lazy eye") but not so much that I have any restrictions on my driver's license. I can read 12-point text on OS X (and probably 10-point text, too), but when a system can handle it without complicating my life, like Carbon Emacs 22 can, I prefer 18-point text, and part of the reason that I do is probably that there is more visual information per character. (I'm a little far-sighted, and my head is usually 4'-5' from the monitor.)

For these reasons, even a lover of property rights and constitutional limits on government like myself can support network neutrality after having familiarized myself with the pro-network-neutrality arguments by people with a track record for good calls in internet design and internet policy and with the history of industries with very strong networks effects, like the railroad, telegraph, telephone, cable and residential-internet-service industries.

And I have to say that the largeness of the number of opinions arrived at with almost no knowledge in this comment section is very depressing.

Remember: the more bets a bettor makes and the more profitable a bet turns out, the less likely the whole series of bets is the result of luck. It might be the case that the probability of the "Buffet just lucky" hypothesis is so low that you would not expect to see even a single professional investor with Buffet's track record (or a better track record) even though there are 100s of 1000s or millions of professional investors if the professional investors were just rolling the dice. Eliezer's "Einstein's Arrogance" (its the first google hit) is a good explanation of this point though it takes a little work to see how "Einstein's Arrogance" applies to the present topic.

Selection effects is the most likely explanation I know of for why most rich small-business owners are rich, which makes it odd or perverse for you to hold up the small business owner as an alternative role model. (In the U.S., unlike the avg founder of a tech startup, the avg small-business owner earns less than the avg employee. Smal-business owners, like investors, though, have more opportunities for dice-rolling than employees do.) In other words, I think you have it backwards.

This is not to say that there are not small-business-owning strategies (even ones that do not involve tech development) that can do much, much better than rolling the dice -- just that most rich small-business owners probably did not follow those strategies.

These are important aspects of the demographic that uses Linux on the desktop and laptop. It and the ideological zealots are why there's no commercial software for the Linux laptop or desktop.

ADDED. One reason I expect to spend less time adminning a Mac is because some things cannot practically be changed on a Mac because of lack of source code. Also, more loose end are tied up on the Mac than on any Linux distro I can think of. Most people can probably resist the temptation to tie up the loose ends better than I can, though.

"...installing new software [on a Mac] is insanely nice._

_Upgrading_ software under APT (or Arch Linux's pacman) is very nice. On the Mac, though, each software publisher rolls their own way of upgrading installed application; do they not? But, yeah, Linux lacks proprietary applications.

The reason it turned out this way is not hard to explain: unless you are a landlord or are buying a house and participate in a "cohousing" venture, there is almost no way in American to choose your neigbhors, and it is difficult and expensive to put distance between yourself and a neighbor (because moving is difficult and expensive).

Note that a large part of human communication is "signalling" by which I mean making oneself appear as virtuous as possible and making oneself appear to have the character traits that people want in a friend or a coworker.

And note that the way I would signal virtue or good character traits in this conversational thread is to say that I always get along with everyone and that I love all my neighbors.

But I did not do that. Instead, I intentionally chose to risk leaving the (false, IMHO) impression that I might be hard to get along with in order to counteract what I see as the overly rosy picture painted by our society about the value of warm relationships with one's neighbors (relative to warm relationships with non-neighbors) -- and in order to give some of the younger people reading this the benefit of my life experience. (I am 49.)

It is of course often extremely beneficial to live with someone who loves you, I should add -- and that is worth going for because it is much less expensive to choose your housemates or apartment mates than to choose your neighbors.

Unless I misunderstand the situation in some basic way, there is a math error in the above. (Of course, even if there is indeed a math error above, that does not make the whole blog entry worthless.)

First let me restate what I take the above unambiguously to says: it says that if the company continues to grow 100% year over year, valuation a year from now == 6 times valuation today.

My math: valuation a year from now == 3 times revenue a year from now == 3 times (2 times revenue today) == 2 times (3 times revenue today) == 2 times valuation today.

Am I missing something?

"He forced the incumbent cellular providers to innovate."

The article relies too heavily on tropes like these, IMHO.