Lowendbox.com is a great way to get cheap VPS service, and anything <$10/mo is hard to complain too harshly about.. but my caveat to using companies from there is to make sure you have decent backups, handle email/DNS somewhere other than your VPS, and try not to care too much about 100% uptime :)
Is "no long term increase in sales" amidst "the worst recession the country has seen" actually as bad as it sounds? Maybe Groupon actually saved them from a decline in sales?
I would strongly recommend you do NOT use OpenX. I used it for a few years, but eventually got fed up with the constant security problems. They do not promptly release patches for known security problems, so after seeing a particularly widely available remote exploit go unpatched for months early this year, I had to replace it with DFP.
Additionally, things you or I may find easy are often difficult for large quantities of people who would be willing to pay for it. I've recently become more self-aware of this, after seeing lots of examples of successful companies created to solve problems I thought were easy to solve. I'm a sysadmin, so things like Git repository hosting seem easy to me, but are certainly seen as genius by GitHub's thousands of users.
It seems interesting that they identify people as moving from historically marrying for "financial stability" towards marrying for love, yet divorce rates have increased. Although it is perhaps slightly counterintuitive, I think it actually makes a lot of sense. If you are relying on a spouse for financial stability, you are more likely to stick it out through the hard times of a marriage. Love is a bit more fickle.
There is a big difference in efficiency across people and startup teams, in terms of what they might achieve in <X> amount of time. A solo founder with no experience as an entrepreneur, little technical prowess, and few useful connections would generally take longer to be successful.
For example, look at YC companies' varying degrees of progress at demo day. They usually have at least two founders -- if they are working 80 hours/week, they would roughly be putting in 1,000 hours per founder after 3 months.
Granular access controls are nice under certain scenarios, but adding a basic ACL isn't hard. "Can use Splunk" and "Can't use Splunk" is enough control for me at the moment, fortunately.
I use Splunk, and am a big fan of everything except the cost. It works well, but it gets very expensive, very quickly when you grow beyond the 500MB/day free limit. I'm basically only collecting very limited usage log type information, because of that limit.
Jordan is quickly becoming a log guru amongst mortals. Keep an eye on logstash! I'm definitely looking forward to an alternative to Splunk, which is great -- but incredibly expensive at large scale.
I sent an email to the address listed in your profile. I'd be happy to help point you in the right direction to resolve your immediate issues, just check your email and shoot me a response.
I don't follow kernel development extremely closely, but it fascinates me that people are still actively working on the kernel's scheduler and achieving a "huge improvement" like this.
I don't know that I agree with your assessment that "designers are the core" of Apple's business, but even so, Apple's current state seems to be rather irrelevant to a discussion about a combination of founders for a startup. Wouldn't looking at Apple's structure when they were a startup be more useful?
Aside from that, there are a lot of founders who have some level of design skills -- they just also happen to do other things, since that's how startups work. When you have limited resources, having a dedicated designer is generally going to be inefficient (unless design/UX are crucial to your particular startup in the early stages).
Also, non-designer founders have a lot of options regarding design -- they can outsource it, find/use a template, hack together some html/css, etc.
I don't know of anything that will give you anything even close to Gmail as far as an interface/search/chat. Also, running your own email server is basically saying "sign me up for an endless source of pain". At my current job, when we were hosting our own email, I was spending 4-5 hours a month on email issues on average. Google Apps is either free or $50/user/year - although it is a bit less flexible, it is well worth it to me.
Yep! That's why I went there the first time. It was amazing, so I went back again on my next trip to Atlanta. Interestingly, he was in the "kitchen" (at the woodfire grill, actually) cooking both times -- most well-known chefs are more restaurateurs than chefs.
Buckhead is a really great area. If I had to compare it to somewhere in the SF/SV area, it would probably be most comparable to Palo Alto. I've been in Atlanta twice over the past year, and spent most of each trip in Buckhead. There are tons of great restaurants, but my two picks so far would be Woodfire Grill for dinner and Buckhead Diner for brunch. I really can't say enough good things about Woodfire Grill -- it was probably the best meal I've ever had.
It may be harsh, but here's some honest feedback: I don't see the value of WikiTorrents. (That probably doesn't mean anything, as I wouldn't have considered Twitter to be a huge winner either, but it is a data point for you nonetheless.) The name is non-intuitive, as it doesn't have much to do with torrents - or wikis in the traditional sense. Manually compiled/user-submitted lists of videos seems to be easily duplicable, meaning there is little competitive advantage.
The amazing part of Chapman's 105mph fastball is hearing hitters describe how different it is trying to hit it versus other pitchers' 95-100mph fastballs. You wouldn't think 5% faster would make a big difference, but it apparently does.
I paid $510 for the Asus UL20A-A1 last December, on an Amazon promo priced at $585 with $75 Amazon gift card included. It looks like Newegg has it NIB for $575 or open box at $452 right now. I upgraded the memory to 4GB for ~$40, but haven't bothered with a SSD. I chose the UL20A-A1 over other makes/models specifically for the SU7300 processor. The SU7300 supports virtualization and has an extra 1MB of L2 cache compared to the SU4100.
I have a 12.1" Asus UL20A that I bought last December. It isn't as thin as the new Air, of course, but it is a great alternative if you want to spend less and aren't set on a Mac.
Although it might not fit with your requirement of being inexpensive, if you want something with a real CPU, light weight, small form-factor, and great battery life, I have the Asus UL20A-A1 (~$575) and love it.
I would actually argue that Microsoft has actually become a more consumer-oriented company over time. Xbox was only released 9 years ago and the Zune was only released 4 years ago. Prior to that, what was Microsoft's consumer focus? Their primary products, Windows and Office, have traditionally focused on selling to businesses (OEMs, VARs, etc). The majority of consumers do not go out and purchase Windows directly -- it is included on their computer.
Whether they're all 100% altruistically motivated or not, if they are providing legitimately useful help for free as offered, I don't see a problem with it. As a possibly familiar example, speakers come to users groups/meetups to talk about things -- there are obvious benefits to the speaker, but we certainly don't vilify them for that.
I saw your reply where you said you were running automatic submissions. What was your point in doing that though? Gathering up lots of interesting stories and avoiding having to submit them manually? Trying to auto-submit the ever-popular Atlantic, NY Times, and TechCrunch articles to increase your karma? Spamming HN for profit? Or, just to see if you could? (As you allude to..)