288 karma · joined May 21, 2009
Maybe change the copyright year to 2011. I'm pretty it's 2011 everywhere on the globe by now :-)
Why do you think it's a great market to get into? Is it the size of the opportunity? Your first three paras outline why it's a difficult market.
BTW: Your description of the small business market is spot-on. I have also done small-client work (and still do) and agree with your assessment. It's just that your last statement seems out of synch with the sentiment of your comment.
Are they hoping to just take over as the new Geocities until someone else comes along? Is this market segment, with this kind of product, worth fighting over or does it get passed around when the current market leader gets tired of dealing with it?
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0DF1738F...
(sorry for the long link)
Reads like many of the "publishing will die" stories circulating today. States back then that merchandising accounted for 50% of revenue.
I attribute my code reading abilities to navigating my own GOTO spaghetti while trying to recreate ZORK.
A good editor is someone who knows good writing and will tell you if you're producing crap. They should also be able to tell you if you're writing to the current zeitgeist.
There's value to having good editorial support but, IMHO, it's not worth signing over all your rights and earning potential.
You can outsource all phases of editorial and production, the big houses already do.
I think you are missing the fleitz's point. From his post:
"It ok for Tazo to have a crappy landing page"
They are omnipresent in meatspace. I'd say they overspent on the website. They could have gone with a one-pager that said something like "We're Tazo Tea. You can find us everywhere. Go buy some."
He wasn't saying that is OK their site is non-functioning but that they really don't even need a website.
Even if you lie and say it's your brother's idea, how many strangers will believe you? It's such a cliché premise.
People don't like being duped, even if it's for their own good. You're likely to get more "f--k you's" than "thank you's".
If you want to teach someone a lesson, you don't start out by telling them they are stupid.
To create some real, lasting value you could have created the app and then said something like, "Hey everybody! I made this fake marketing web app that will steal your information and show you how it's done step-by-step. If you want to see how web scams are done, follow this link: ..." Then make some fake Google accounts for people to use (instead of their own).
"... you have to wonder if the collective value of the information given up does not exceed greatly the value of the goods they are shipping."
+1 for that sentiment. If your info wasn't more valuable, they wouldn't be doing it.
It's like DNS except individual identifiers can be managed independently (imagine if example.com/foo and example.com/bar were managed by two different companies).
One problem that it does not address is human-friendliness. Identifiers all start with a handle prefix that's a number like 10.1109/ or 10000.1/.
Though, the latest release of the software will map DNS names to handle prefixes.
It's interesting technology and quite robust. For $50 a year you can host as many handles as you want.
I guess that depends on your motivation. Being your own boss is one reason to launch a startup.
But, being a boss doesn't give you the right to impose your value system on your employees.
After discovering rsync wouldn't work I would have just said "I don't know, I've never worked at that scale," and reframed the conversation from one where I'm trying to guess the right answer to a conversation with more give-and-take.
Think about what you're doing for people and maybe you'll get more ideas.
You're helping people by making it easy to clean up their unwanted clutter and then magically, they get money and peace of mind because they're not surrounded by stuff they don't want :-)
You'll probably hear this a lot but, you should build something to show potential employers. It will also raise your confidence so you consider yourself better than mildly capable.
Network a lot until you find a niche where your language skills/cultural knowledge are advantageous.
Understand the labor laws of where you are.
Try to get a programming job in the industry you worked in. Domain experience matters.
Don't correlate your age with where you think you should be in life.
When I finished grad school I subtracted 10 years from my chronological age and declared it my career age. I picked 10 b/c that's the difference in years between my graduate and undergraduate degrees.
Nowadays, when I get hung up on where I think I should be in life (office, better salary, etc), I think how I'd feel if I were my career age. From that perspective, I always come out ahead.
If the busiest time is during working hours you maybe want to avoid it if you are taking in money during that time.
Another good reason for doing maintenance during working hours is that's when your network admins are also working - or anyone else outside your group whose help you might need.
I think graduating high school seniors are held to a different standard than working adults - which the author technically was.
But, the strategy is good. I did almost the same thing. I took graduate CS classes and was later accepted into SEAS at Columbia. I ended up going to another school that worked with my commute better but, if you are set on going to a specific school, establishing a relationship there will help you - but only if you get good grades :-) You still have to prove you are serious about the education.
What would historians say about my several neglected webapp domains?
"Here's a web site for an idea someone had but never executed. So sad."
Zeitgeist of the times maybe?
Of course, it also too soon to say what will be relevant 100 years from now.
I'm impressed about the size of the data.
"The groups have already collected several petabytes of data (a petabyte can hold roughly 10 trillion copies of this article)."
When you use astronomical sums to describe even more astronomical sums you know you have a lot of data.
One observation though. While I was talking to the creator, via the robot, the people around me were talking really loud, like there wasn't another person there. Made it hard to have a conversation. It's easy to dismiss the robot as a piece of furniture if you're not interacting with it. We haven't developed the social cues for robot interaction yet.
I telecommute, but I don't know how much a telepresence robot would help me. I don't have to move around the office (which is another problem altogether :-). All of my work is at a keyboard except for occasional meetings where face-to-face interaction is important.
"On this first World Statistics Day I encourage the international community to work with the United Nations to enable all countries to meet their statistical needs."
Could also be:
"On this first International Talk Like a Pirate Day I encourage the international community to work with the United Nations to enable all countries to meet their linguistical needs."
I actually LOL'd when I read that. Which is kind of embarrassing since it's really quiet in the office today :-)
Great post. I get analysis paralysis all the time when I think of new web apps. The idea that I won't have the perfectly scalable architecture (horizontally AND vertically) with all the cool infrastructure is enough to overwhelm.
That's because I also skip to the scenario of "What if my app gets real popular and then starts crashing all the time, and then everyone stops visiting while I try to learn how to set up nginx with memcached and ... ad nauseam."
Sometimes it gets me stuck and sometimes I remember to take baby steps like you wrote about.
Will a rift occur between the in-office personnel, who have lots of face-time, and the remote employees?
37signals has been a great example of how you can be successful without being co-located. The article says more employees are coming into the office though. I think a bias toward working more, and more effectively, with the people you can see is unavoidable. I've seen it happen.
Mr. Horner's site seems even more reverse than a reverse application - does that make sense? He seems to be saying, "First, decide if you like ME. Then, decide if you have a job for me."
EDIT: I should have said "industry" instead of "thing" in my second sentence. He's stated he wants to be a generalist, not a specialist. He would fare better by targeting a specific industry.
I didn't see anything I'd call unprofessional in his application.
People with jobs often feel overly entitled to define what constitutes professionalism. (NB, I'm not addressing you personally, just the amorphous "they".)
To me, the larger point of the article is how difficult in can be to break through the arbitrary and diverse standards each HR department and hiring manager has.
Sometimes it just feels better to state what you want and hope they find you.
Only if you completely trivialize what reporters actually do. The good reporters will give you the story behind the witness accounts, with well-crafted, spell-checked, and edited copy. They will also synthesize the various witness accounts to provide a complete (as possible) picture. Just printing what other people say is called gossip.
I think it's important nowadays to separate the job of reporters with the business of newspapers.
Yes, you can get volunteers to do it -- as long as it's not the only thing they do.
Some simple, "If you see message X, it means Y, so you should do Z. If that doesn't work _then_ call me."
Your debug-level messages can be esoteric but, make your error-level messages reflect what's broken from the perspective of the SA, who hasn't seen your source code.