algoshift

Your analogy is incomplete. Imagine that you spent $250K having a programmer write code for you only to see him take the code with him to a competitor and actually use it.

Opportunity acquisition isn't free. If a company invests hundreds of thousands of dollars developing contacts and relationships they belong to the business, not the employee.

I gave the example of the trade show. Think of it this way: you spend $120K at a trade show in four days. At the end of four days you have, say, 2,000 prospects and 50 great quality VIPs. Now imagine that your sales guy goes to work for your direct competitor and hands over the list.

Sorry, non-compete agreements are not legal in California.

And, yes, we used Salesforce extensively. It doesn't fix the problem.

I've had the experience of having company contact data stolen via a Linkedin account.

I hired a salesman for one of my businesses. He had limited sales experience but I was willing to train. His Linkedin account had maybe on or two dozen contacts. I watched as he systematically added contacts to the account over a year. Nearly all of these contacts came out of our business activities. By the end of the year he was in the hundreds of contacts. The relationship wasn't working out and I had to let him go. He went to work for a competitor. Not only was he armed with the knowledge from this one year "training program" but now he had a who's-who of the industry in his LinkedIn account. Business can really suck sometimes.

Some of these contacts were developed after non-trivial financial and monetary investments. For example, we were spending about $250K per year going to tradeshows. Some of these contacts came from relationships built over making contact with people repeated times at various tradeshows spread over several years. In some cases the tradeshow activity was followed-up by in-person visits at the customer site. One could easily argue that some of the contacts easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to develop.

Who owns these contacts and relationships? I think it is very clear that the business does. I also understand that this is not a trivial problem. These days it is nearly impossible to control the exodus of internal data, be it contacts, code or design data (electronics, mechanical). One personal Dropbox account and an employee can move hard drives worth of data out of your business. Agreements not to do so are only worth the paper they are on. In the end it might just be a matter of personal morals and ethics.

I've been studying this peripherally for the past year or two. Nothing too scientific but, yes, methodical little experiments here and there. I might put-up a website to see if my thoughts help others.

I think I would say that my first finding is perhaps an obvious one: The very first requirement for weight loss is behavior modification. Obvious from the outside. But I think the reality is that from the inside, if you will, a person can focus too much on the wrong behaviors.

For example, if you need to work out for an hour a day, five days a week to loose weight the entire endeavor is destined to fail from inception. That is not a sustainable modification in behavior but for a few individuals for whom the new regime becomes a fun part of their lives. Health clubs make their money by signing-up ten times more people that will fit into their buildings and they can do this because they know that people will not stick with the program.

The other finding might be that fast weight loss is another formula for failure. My opinion is that fat loss should take one to two years. Many reasons for this. Perhaps the most important of them is what I mentioned above: behavior modification. Without permanently changing the way you do things, failure is guaranteed. Slow weight loss allows you to have a long "conversation with yourself", if you will, where you explore strengths, weaknesses, desires, success, failure, ideas, methods and, in general, converge on a path that is sustainable.

And that's the third idea: Converge on a long term sustainable solution. No solution is worth the effort and expense if it makes you do things that you can't reasonably do for the rest of your life. Signing-up for programs that ship you food on a weekly basis is not a way to live your life. What if you travel or don't have the money? Going to the gym 10 hours a week is ridiculous for most of us. That is not a long-term solution. Living on beans and lettuce and diet drinks is, well, not living.

A long and carefully managed process of converging on a sustainable solution has major benefits that can and should last for the rest of your life. You should be able to pig out during the holidays and have that slice of cheesecake or ice-cream when you want to. However, your long-term modified behavior should kick-in with enough regularly to guide you back onto that sustainable long-term path I was talking about.

I don't know what the motivation behind a lot of these studies might be. Sometimes it seems that all they are after is a pill or a new surgery they can sell you. Humans don't need any of that to maintain healthy body composition, they just need to do the right things, nature and biology will take care of the rest.

> strong justification for policies to keep people from getting overweight to begin with

Thinking that legislation is the solution to everything is part of so many problem in the US. You can't stop fat gain with laws any more than stopping people from driving over the posted speed limits on highways (which are government legislated and policed).

Education and free market effects are the only real and long-term solutions to these and other problems.

Educate people and they will vote with their actions. Food quality will improve overnight if Walmart shoppers stop buying everything with corn syrup and a myriad of unrecognizable chemical cocktails added for flavor, looks, preservation, whatever.

Finally, one needs to recognize that a certain percentage of the population will be fat no-matter what. I don't know what that number might be, but the key point is to face the reality that one can't fix every life. It's an individual choice.

If health insurance costs were paid directly by the policy holder and the market was free and open across state lines you might just see insurance policies that say things like "if your body fat content is over 20% your deductible increases by 100%, if it's over 33% your coverage is cut in half." or some such thing.

People react immediately to things that affect them directly. This sort of a free market approach is proven to motivate people to change behaviors. Your automobile insurance gets more expensive if you accumulate speeding tickets, therefore you slow down.

Keep government out of it. Almost everything they touch turns into an ugly mess.

How about FORTH then?

Well, it seems that this one went over a few heads. I won't spoil it by describing what happens in the movie. Watch it. It's a good one.

The quote from the film, in the context of having watched it, describes, with great brevity that actions such as the one being discussed in this thread can actually have negative results. The permutations are many and complex. I'll go over a few:

1- Don't file patents. As someone said. Google tried this. Didn't work.

2- Don't sue. Lot's of companies take this approach. I can probably imagine that a company like IBM has so much covered that they could have a whole department doing nothing but suing other companies. They don't seem to be in that business. Then again, companies like Google have tried to remain outside the fray and, ultimately, had to invest in a $12 billion dollar arsenal to have some protection. Twelve billion dollars. So much wasted.

3- We all have patents and we all sue. Global Thermonuclear Patent War (GTPW): I sue you for everything I can and you counter-sue me with all you got. We go at it for years. I win sometimes and so do you. We burn through tons of cash that could have been used for far more productive pursuits. Progress slows. Nobody wins. Some loose in monumental ways.

4- Innovators with great ideas and drive become afraid of getting anywhere close to the GTPW and instead choose to focus their efforts elsewhere or simply abandon the field.

5- The GTPW is fueled by the failure of the patent system and ignorant politicians to do the right thing. Patents (the weapons of war) are granted to all participants at an ever-increasing rate. The wars escalate and, very soon, it is quite literally impossible to innovate. Attempting to innovate means to create an exposure to litigation and becoming embroiled in your own GTPW.

6- Investors begin to pull back because new ventures --and the money that went into them-- can evaporate in a microsecond if they even skirt the edges of the GTPW.

7- The Chinese don't give a crap about any of this so, while we are all engulfed in GTPW they continue to copy, learn, grow, experiment, build, invest, innovate and advance. Check mate.

8- Western political systems can't get out of its own way to save our own lives, so the situation continues to escalate until there's total meltdown --at which point it is too late.

9- Even in the face of having the gun to our own heads and the trigger partially pulled the western world refuses to act as the adults in the room and we continue, little by little, to pull the triggers that will ultimately destroy our way of life for decades, if not generations.

Then comes the realization: "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

So, you can see now that this short little quote from a geek movie actually is very relevant and excels at summarizing a wide range of scenarios that I've only glanced at. The failures of the patent system and what companies are doing to each other is but one of a myriad of problems created by incompetent governments around the world.

AT&T just had to spend three billion dollars because the government did not want to let it buy T-Mobile. Three billion dollars. What you hear is the huge sucking sound of innovation, jobs and growth leaving the room.

Someone, somewhere, somehow has to take a really good look at what is going on in the western world and start fixing problems right now. The path we are on leads to absolutely nothing that is good. In many ways it might already be too late.

"Greetings, Professor Falken."

"Hello, Joshua."

"Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

> A fraction of an industrial machine makes zero napkins.

Well, that assumes that this is the only individual in India that could be interested in the market segment. There are plenty of people in India for whom USD $500K is not a lot of money, particularly if a solid case can be made for the investment.

He could have invested four years trying to raise money to buy a number of industrial grade machines rather than doing what he did.

Here's another interesting data point. According to this site (http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power...) the average nuclear power plant in India produces 200MW of power. Deploying enough machines to provide napkins to the TAM would consume around 6% of the power output of a single nuclear power plant. An operation based around industrial machines would require about 4%. It's interesting when you can measure things in terms of the percentage utilization of a nuclear power plant.

I looked through the various responses to my post. Lots of good points. Of course, the infrastructure in India is something I cannot have a good grasp of from my vantage point in suburban Los Angeles. When faced with something like this I always fall back to one of my favorite Mark Twain sayings: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way". This inventor held that cat by the tail. Hard to judge from the outside. I'll have to leave it at that.

Wait a minute...

According to the article and his website the machine costs $2,500 each, can produce 2 napkins per minute and requires 746W of power. Each machine employs a crew of four people.

A full scale industrial machine is claimed to cost $500K and, from a quick bit of google-ing can produce 350 napkins per minute and requires about 80KW of power. Each machine seems to be operable by a small team of five or so, but let's double that to ten people.

In order to match the production rate of a single industrial machine you would need:

Machines: 175

Cost: $437,500

Power: 131KW

Workers: 700

According to this (http://mahadiscom.com/emagazine/jan06/india1%5B1%5D.pdf) electricity cost in India runs around 1.5 rupees per KWh for residential and 3.5 rupees per KWh for industrial applications. Assuming ten hours per day (for easy math) the power costs compare as follows (converted to USD):

175 low cost machines @131KWh in household settings: USD $37 per day.

Industrial machine @80KWh in industrial setting: USD $52.87 per day.

The industrial machine cost a little more to run (power) but it produces 175 times more product per machine. Put a different way, around USD $0.03 of power is required per napkin with the household machine. The industrial machine --even at more than double the electricity cost-- only requires USD $0.0003 per napkin in power.

In terms of labor costs --assuming $1 per hour-- the household machine would cost about $0.033 per napkin while the industrial machine runs $0.0005 per napkin.

According to the linked statistic the TAM (Total Addressable Market) is around 300 million women:

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-01-23/india...

If his dream to "make India a 100% napkin-using country" is fully realized you would need to produce a minimum of 1500 million napkins per month (assuming five pads used per period). The solutions compare as follows:

Assuming that the machines are run 24 hours per day for 30 days.

- Household solution

Machines: 17362

Cost: $43,405,000

Power: 12MW

Labor cost per 30 days: $25,001,280

- Industrial Solution:

Machines: 100

Cost: $50,000,000

Power: 8MW

Labor cost per 30 days: $90,000

Unless my numbers are grossly wrong (please check, I threw them together quickly) this is not as good a solution as it has been made out to be. In fact, it looks like a really bad solution to a large scale problem. The costs are staggering. Power consumption is at least 50% greater. I'll bet that product quality and consistency also suffers a great deal. And, of course, we haven't even covered maintenance costs and MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 18,000 low-cost machines versus 100 industrial grade machines.

Good job. Lots of work. But I'd invest in a used industrial machine out of China over making thousands of these low cost household devices.

> FPGAs have been the next big thing for at least 15 years

It's a tough equation. They are certainly not aimed at or geared towards a commodity co-processor slot next to the CPU in a consumer PC.

What I am arguing or proposing is that if Intel acquired Xilinx and got Microsoft and Apple behind the idea of integrating an FPGA as a standard co-processor for the i-whatever chip we could see vast performance improvements for certain applications.

Per my example, I can take a $100 FPGA today and process 1.5 billion 32 bit pixels per second through an FIR pipeline. That same hardware is instantly reprogrammable to implement a myriad of other functions in hardware, not software. The possibilities are endless.

Many years ago I was involved in writing some code for DNA sequencing. We wrote the software to gain an understanding of what had to happen. Once we knew what to do, the design was converted to hardware. The performance boost was unbelievable. If I remember correctly, we were running the same data sets 1,000 times faster or more.

GPU's are great, but I've seen cases where a graphically intensive application makes use of the GPU and precludes anything else from using it. Not having done any GPU coding myself I can't really compare the two approaches (FPGA vs. GPU). The only thing I think I can say is that a GPU is denser and possibly faster because it is fixed logic rather than programmable (it doesn't have to support all the structures and layers that an FPGA has).

What I'd love to see is an FPGA grafted onto a multicore Intel chip with a pre-defined separate co-processor expansion channel via multiple MGT channels (Multi-Gigabit Transceivers). This would allow co-processor expansion beyond the resources provided on-chip. If the entire thing is encased within a published-and-supported standard we could open the doors to an amazing leap in computing for a wide range of advanced applications.

Let's see, Intel market cap is around $120 billion and Xilinx is somewhere around 8 billion. Yeah, let's do it.

FPGA's is where parallel processing is alive and well.

I've done a lot of real-time image processing work on FPGA's. The performance gains one can create are monumental. One of my favorite examples (one that parallels yours) is the implementation of an FIR (Finite Impulse Response) filter --a common tool in image processing.

How it works: Data from n pixels is multiplied by an equal number of coefficients, the results are added and then divided by n. There are more complex forms (polyphase) but the basics still apply.

Say n=32. You multiply 32 pixel values by 32 coefficients. Then you sum all 32 results, typically using a number of stages where you sum pairs of values. For 32 values you need five summation stages (32 values -> 16 -> 8 -> 4 -> 2 -> result). After that you divide and the job is done.

Due to pipelining this means that you are processing pixel data through the FIR filter at the operating clock rate. The first result takes 8 to 10 (or more) clock cycles to come out of the pipe. After that the results come out at a rate of one per clock cycle.

If the FIR filter is running at 500MHz you are processing five-hundred million pixels per second. Multiply that by 3 to process RGB images and you get to 1.5 billion pixels per second.

BTW, this is independent of word width until you start getting into words so wide that they cause routing problems. So, yes, with proper design you could process 1.5 billion 32 bit words per second. Try that on a core i7 using software.

For reference, consumer HD requires about 75MHz for real-time FIR processing.

A single FPGA can have dozens of these blocks, equating to a staggering data processing rate that you simply could not approach with any modern CPU, no matter how many cores.

This is how GPU's work. Of course, the difference is that the GPU hardware is fixed, whereas FPGA's can be reconfigured with code.

My point is that we know how to use and take advantage of parallelism in applications that can use it. Most of what happens on computers running typical consumer applications has few --if any-- needs beyond what exists today. When it comes to FPGA's and this form of "extreme parallel programming", if you will, we use languages like Verilog and VHDL. Verilog looks very much like C and is easy to learn. You just have to think hardware rather than software.

The greater point might also be that when a problem lends itself to parallelization a custom hardware approach through a highly reconfigurable FPGA co-processor is probably the best solution.

The next major evolution in computing might very well be a fusion of the CPU with vast FPGA resources that could be called upon for application specific tasks. This has existed for many years in application-specific computing, starting with the Xilinx Virtex 2 PRO chips integrating multiple PowerPC processors atop the FPGA array. It'd be interesting to see the approach reach general computing. In other words, Intel buys Xilinx and they integrate a solution for consumer computing platforms with API's provided and supported by MS and Apple.

It's disturbing to see that this is an all-too-common pattern with the large internet companies. Stories abound of companies like Google, eBay, PayPal, Facebook and Amazon closing down accounts with what I would characterize as "violence". No explanations. No recourse. No way to reason with a human being. The approach seems so "anti-internet" that it is hard to come-up with justification for the behavior.

One argument is that they have to deal with so much fraud that they have no choice but to be somewhat pragmatic and, yes, totalitarian about it. The counter argument to this is that if your company is so big that you have to hurt honest customers because you can't afford to do it right, well, maybe you are too big. I've red about cases where an individual's only source of income was summarily cutoff overnight with no recourse whatsoever. That's plain wrong.

The problem is widespread. Lots of businesses have horrible sites. It's what I call the "cousin web-developer syndrome".

What's worst is that if you bring it up, more often than not, you get a response like: "We don't get much business from the web anyway".

Duh!

Every visit:

1- Bring the system drive you cloned last year after doing a clean install

2- Swap system drives

3- Data is on separate drive, no issues there

4- Install updates/upgrades as needed

5- Create new system drive image

6- Clone to the old drive

7- Swap system drives again so you always keep the drive with the least run time as backup

8- Create and save new data drive image if desired

10- Ensure that user account has no administrative privileges

11- Let them know that some of the cheese moved, for the better.

Do this on an yearly basis.

It's easy.

Everyone will get used to it.

You'll sleep well at night.

If you install Chrome on your parent's computer and make it the default browser you are making a serious mistake:

All of their logins and passwords are now available in plain text with a few button clicks. If they ever ask someone else for help or take the computer to a store their entire lives can be up-ended in an instant.

I use Chrome almost exclusively. I can deal with this issue. My guess is that 99% of the public has no clue.

I don't understand why Google refuses to fix this.

These easy definitions always bother me. "The only purpose of corporations is to maximize shareholder profit." Really? The only purpose? Shareholder profit or value is a side effect of producing products or services that people want. The purpose of a corporation is to focus on what it does and do it well. Shareholders benefit from this activity.

Anyone who starts or runs a company and says "My only purpose is to increase shareholder profit" is probably going to fail to deliver.

The other one is this issue of "corporate greed" or this idea of outsourcing to lower cost manufacturing centers in order to make more money. As someone who has the scars to show for it, I can tell you that "greed" is never a part of it.

Imagine, if you will. That you are making widget A in the US or Europe. You are doing well. Everything is manufactured in house or locally. Profits are good.

Now, imagine that a competitor decides that they can beat you at your own game and make widget A for less money if they outsource their manufacturing to, say, China.

Their list price is now lower than yours by a bunch. You don't want to loose market share, so you lower your list price. Only to discover that now your profits can't support your US-based operations. Just can't do it.

What are your choices? You can't automate your way out of the problem because you are already as efficient as you can be. You could leave the market altogether and move on. Lay off everyone in that division and lick your wounds.

Or, as it is more often the case than not, you can follow-suit and find your own manufacturing solution in China. Now you can lower your prices to match or improve upon your competitors's pricing and you've restored balance to the force.

Or so you thought. At this point nobody is making as much money as they used to. But, a race to the bottom ensues. Very soon Asian manufacturers enter the fray. Not only are they the beneficiaries of low-cost manufacturing, they also benefit from a far lower regulatory burden as well as not having to deal with progress-killing unionized labor and their ridiculous rules and costs.

The race to be bottom continues. Only that you and your local competitors are now at a serious disadvantage with respect to your Asian competitors.

What to do? Well, again, you could leave the segment, fire everyone and move on. Maybe you license IP and life is grand. Or, you could take it a step further and become a brand behind a product that you barely touch. Sure, you have to slim down the ranks but the business continues to exist in some form.

At no point in this slippery-slope is anyone thinking about getting rich. In fact, the effect can be quite the opposite. Profits become thin and the business suffers for it. You've taught your competitors how to make your products and have very little more than a brand to use as an advantage over them. You can't make anything any more and simply don't have the equipment, facilities, process, skill-set, network and people to even attempt to compete with anyone.

And life goes on.

To say that these corporations are "greedy" and that their "only purpose" is to provide shareholder value is, in my never-humble opinion, to be utterly ignorant of the day-to-day realities they have to face.

The reality of the situation is that, over the last 50 years, we have collectively opened Pandora's box. Consumers have voted with their buying power to overwhelmingly favor product that can only be manufactured in places like China due to cost structures. Given this, closing Pandora's box is as close to impossible as you can get.

MBA's and corporations cannot force consumers to behave altruistically and support locally made --higher cost-- product when they can drive over to Walmart and overdose on product at much lower price points and, yes, very good quality in most cases.

There's that scene the "Outsourced" movie that kind of encapsulates the whole phenomenon: A caller wants to buy a bald eagle statue but complains that it is made in China. The operator indicates that they have US-made versions and she'd be happy to sell him one. Only that the US-made version is over $200 when the Chinese version is $20. The caller goes with the Chinese version.

Attention Walmart shoppers: You reap what you sow.

These are just tools. Each has its place.

Example: I wrote a GA-based solver in Objective-C. It worked but it was painfully slow. I re-coded in nice-clean C. The plain C version was incredibly fast and efficient in every way. Best of all, it is highly portable too.

Here's a video: http://www.horizonhobby.com/ProdInfo/Files/EFLU4780.wmv

OK, build a sphere around the $200 VTOL plane I linked to above and you have that too.

Also nothing new. You can buy one right now for about $200. Here's one example: http://www.horizonhobby.com/Products/Default.aspx?ProdID=EFL...

Not that impressive if you are familiar with the technology.

As someone mentioned, this is, at its simplest, an RC helicopter inside a sphere.

RC helicopters have had off-the-shelf 3 axis gyros and 3 axis accelerometers available for quite some time. There are probably well over a dozen such systems in the market today.

As far as cost is concerned, the numbers are on par with what was mentioned. My smallest helicopter system probably runs about $2,000 or so ready to fly. This includes carbon fiber rotors, skeleton, 3-axis stabilization system, radio, etc.

If you dared get close to an RC heli with a stabilization system and push it you'd see exactly what you saw in this video: The heli would recover to its prior attitude. In real life wind gusts do this all the time.

No doubt they are writing additional code to take advantage of the spherical platform.

If you are interested in seeing what a modern high-performance RC heli can do today check out this seven year old kid flying one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHJs1gBLiuQ

Here's another example of what these machines can do today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgbXcb1P6eU

Yes, they are dangerous. Power systems can exceed 10KW on the high performance helis.

Here's one of the many commercially available 3-axis flight stabilization systems in the market:

http://www.digitalflybar.com/products/sk720.html

Time to take apart one of the helis and build a sphere around it!

IBM: Watson.

Now, if Apple could buy IBM...

Let's see, for $250 you can spend $10 per room in sensors. Let's say you have 10 rooms. The remaining $150 can easily cover the cost of a fairly intelligent controller. That would be a better system with potential for far more intelligence, particularly if coupled with a simple zone system modification to the AC ducting (valves that can route air where it is needed and prevent it form going where it is not).

Something like that would have a far greater effect on the cost and efficiency of controlling an environment than a single expensive thermostat in one room.

That's what bugs me about these kinds of products. They never address the real problem. They are only there to find a niche that you can sell a gadget into with some pretext that may or may not exist, like the idea that thermostats are hard to program. OK then, try this one, it's cheaper:

http://www.smarthome.com/30429/Venstar-T5800-ColorTouch-Full...

The thermostat is not the problem. Homes (and buildings in general) are wasting energy because we are still approaching thermal management they way it was done 50 years ago. Here in the US it is not uncommon to cover the top of a commercial building with black tar (for waterproofing purposes). And then you wonder why it cost so much money to keep that building cool. These outdated ideas and methods need to change.

That's the problem.

> I think a little creativity in the payment model could help this problem a lot.

100% agreed.

The "Nest" is simply the wrong approach. By itself it is nearly worthless (my not-so-humble opinion) for anyone but the most technologically incompetent thermostat users out there. And even then, you'd have to wonder. Where is the data on how many people can't or don't program their thermostats?

Now, some people might buy it just because it looks cool on the wall, and that's OK.

A real thermal management system for the home does not start with a high-design thermostat on the wall. You need multiple types of sensors in every room and multiple outdoor points.

You need to change the way airflow can be channeled around a home.

You might even need to change the paradigm and heat/cool objects that can provide thermal inertia (like the floor or walls) rather than just air.

You need to be able to selectively inject other heat sources or sinks into the system.

You need solar thermal panels and geothermal heat exchange system in the ground.

As far as control, a very simple embedded PC board running embedded Linux would be the "lazy" way to build it. It would actually be overkill, but there's an argument to be made for the COGS aspect of it.

Any number of relatively low cost embedded boards running very simple embedded software could monitor the sensor array, make decisions and activate valves, fans, etc. as needed.

I guess what I am saying is that you really can't fix the problem without engaging in a fundamental pivot from what we've been doing to thermally manage homes for the last, say, 100 years.

Having said that, it is a lot easier to sell a cool looking $250 gadget than asking someone to spend $5,000 to modify their home. Even though the gadget is very likely to not do much and the more extensive home modification is almost guaranteed to save the home owner thousands of dollars per year.

Talk about an opportunity for government stimulus!

Well, I am not doing an off the shelf whole house fan. Clearly some of the issues you mentioned are very real. Dust can be easily handled with filtering. My summer long experiment proved that you can cool a house and avoid using the AC unit for a whole summer. This is at least true where I live.

The next step is to come up with a plan for next year. Since a fan outside the downstairs kitchen window worked just fine, I don't have to rush to put in a commercial system. I can use all of next summer to experiment and find a better solution.

You can cool my house during the summer for about $10 per month. That's the baseline from which I'll judge all other solutions.

Ridiculous.

Depending on where you live you can save more money by simply using a good size fan blowing cold air into the house at night during the summer. We did just that this summer and did not have to use the air conditioner at all, even during days where daytime temperatures reached well over 100 degrees. On some nights we could get the house down to 65 degrees overnight.

The $250 fan paid for itself in less than a month! Total cost of running it 6 to 8 hours per day was less than $10 for the month.

This was an experiment to determine whether or not a whole house fan would be a worthwhile investment for next year. Obviously, it is.

Next on the list is converting the A/C and heating system to what's known as a "zone" system. Why heat or cool several thousand square feet of a home when you only need one or a few rooms to stay warm or cold?

Next would be what I would call "intelligent flow" management. This is of particular value if you live in a two story home. How is a single thermostat on a wall in the family room downstairs going to make decisions about what is best for heating or cooling the upstairs bedroom? Well, it can't.

What you can do is have sensors in every single room as well as a way to pump air to and from various locations. Cold air will accumulate downstairs. Hot air upstairs. When the downstairs is comfortable in the winter the upstairs is boiling hot. By using this "intelligent flow" concept the system would simply look for suitable sources of what it needs, say, hot air, and choose to use the least costly source before moving on to a more expensive solution.

If the upstairs has three really hot rooms and only one room is occupied, you can pump that hot air back downstairs rather than engaging the furnace. If the sun is keeping the solar collectors nice and hot, use that instead of burning fuel.

Following that is some combination of geothermal and solar assist. A simple $20 microprocessor board with some relays and a few sensors can easily manage a set of valves to select a heat source or sink that is more energy efficient than using a compressor or a furnace.

Granted, some of the above would cost far more than a $250 gadget to implement. However, it should be obvious that they would more than pay for themselves in relatively short order, particularly the first couple of options.

The greater point, I think, is that home energy efficiency is a much larger problem that cannot be addressed in an meaningful manner with a wifi-enabled gadget on a wall, no matter how cool it might look.

The good news is that, if we take a serious look at how we build our homes and change the approach the savings can be absolutely monumental.

The reason you get head nods when you relate this experience, in my opinion, is that versions of this sort of thing are all too common when hiring sales people. Sorry to be biased, but I'll go as far as saying that there's a certain separate species in the sales world. By now I recognize a lot of the signs, but it cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lot of lost business to get there. Just ask fellow entrepreneurs "What's the secret to hiring a sales person?" and watch as the first reaction is eyes rolling.

If business where easy everyone would be doing it. Don't give up, you'll figure it out.

I guess I am interpreting things differently. On learning that the "+" button is now used as the camera shutter button and that a number of people where having trouble with it I decided to run a little experiment.

I gave the phone to about a dozen people and, after explaining that they could press "+" to take a shot, asked them to do so. I did not suggest an orientation and went out of my way to not telegraph how they had to hold the phone.

Every single person placed the "+" button on the upper-right. And, every single one of those shots would display upside-down if you emailed it to someone right from the phone (and if viewed through other means).

My thinking is that the device is intelligent enough to know the orientation. There is no reason whatsoever for the image to be stored upside-down. OK, there's one reason: That's what the user wants. That unusual case ought to be covered with a suitable option. Otherwise the phone should always use the available sensors to store the image using the correct orientation.

Furthermore, and perhaps more fundamental than anything else: Why don't they allow the user to define where "up" is for each orientation. There really is no reason whatsoever to have a "mothership" impose this upon all users. This holds particularly true if you believe in that EXIF will save the world. If we take that as the truth, then let me define "up" as I wish and life is good.

The reason this came to the surface is that we were studying the design of an accessory where it would be desirable to have "up" be landscape with the "+" button on the upper-right. The fact that images end-up upside-down is making things a little less than ideal.

I think context is important here. I don't think I am wrong in saying that most YC startups consist of 20-somethings, perhaps even in their low 20's. At this age few are truly prepared for the stress, conflict and issues that running a business could bring to the table. And, in this context, it is probably far better to have more founders rather than less.

I've been an entrepreneur ever since I can remember. And, retrospectively, I know that I did a lot of dumb things when I was younger. It takes a while to develop the business smarts, thick skin and, if you will, intestinal fortitude a business requires. I've experienced business issues as I got older that I know would have totally decimated me when I was younger. You are simply not prepared for that sort of thing. Particularly things like impending catastrophic failure, when you need to be mentally and emotionally in your strongest mode.

Barely-out-of-teenage-years entrepreneurs (not meant with disrespect at all, just chronological fact) need a support system in order to stay the course, learn and not derail. That's why I think that in these cases the multiple founder "rule" is probably a very good idea.

I would say that older solo founders with previous skin in the game are probably a good bet (all else being equal). One young founder thrown into the jungle that business can become is probably a formula for almost certain failure.

While, of course, there are always exceptions to every rule, I do think that what I am saying is a reasonable characterization of the problem.