brown

N900 runs it swimmingly. <3 my N900

The sentiment here seems to be overwhelmingly positive. Call me a cynic, but this reminds me of "magic_quotes" all over again: a "feature" that tries to help, but masks the fundamental problem.

I think Java developers everywhere were happy that Sun opened up Java, but does anyone think it was a good business decision?

He refers to the Powerpoint presentation that you would show to VC's or other potential investors. It includes the high level objectives of your company, why you're different, market size, plans, etc.

Refer to Guy Kawasaki's famous blog post on the 10/20/30 rule for a good intro: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html#axz...

I also prefer to have about 20 backup slides at the end that address most common questions. Usually these will be deeper drill downs into market sizing, competitors, financials, short/medium/long term plans.

The successful entrepreneurs who I've worked with are almost fanatical about the investor deck. They obsess over every word on every slide. It's both incredibly inspiring and utterly painful.

How heavy handed will they be? Are you concerned that they'll interfere with your productivity or is this more of a small incremental step?

Yes, they do.

In my opinion, the biggest cause of this is the artificial caps on the number of doctors graduated every year. Only a small fraction of qualified med school applicants are accepted each year. (In my idealism) more doctors would create more of a free market. The market would find ways to identify high quality doctors who deserve $1m a year, but there would also be the $200k/yr doctors for normal middle class and $50k doctors for low income areas.

The cynic would say it's because the medical community is being protectionist. The conservative would say it's those pesky liberals worrying too much about our safety. The doctors I've worked with speculate it's because of the "priest" like status that doctors have historically held in society.

For hackers... well, let's just say there's a lot of money to be made in medical software. Doctors value their time very much and are willing to pay silly amounts of money for modest efficiency improvements. Most hackers are scared away from medical software because of concerns of excess regulation and complexity. That's a fair concern, but that doesn't mean there's still not good opportunities.

I'm currently operating in Manila. Low cost of living. Extremely cheap local labor (hiring system admins for about USD$5k per year). People speak English well. Very American-ized environment, so minimal culture shock. There's a growing call center culture here, so bandwidth is pretty reliable. VC community is small but active. Manila lacks a big talent pool of software engineers. We've been experimenting with setting up an office in India as well to remedy that problem.

I was in Beijing for about 6 months. I would not recommend that unless you either (a) speak Mandarin fluently or (b) plan on staying there for the long haul. Engineers were highest quality I've seen though.

One of the biggest advantages of Google's pure hosted play was that the backend is immune to piracy. Once MSFT opens this door, it can't be shut. MSFT has always had a love/hate relationship with piracy, fully knowing that they can use it to gain market share and struggle to monetize it later. To me, this move indicates they're willing to accept a little piracy in order to entrench the market.

[off-topic, nitpick] To anyone who plans on writing a blog post with graphs: please differentiate data sets with actual colors as opposed to closely related shades of blue.

This is a really interesting follow up to a great Atlantic article I saw a couple weeks ago:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/ideas-tax

The general concept is that the only thing that should be taxed is behavior we don't want, which is unproductive assets. We should encourage people to work, so income tax is bad. We should encourage commerce, so sales tax is bad. We should encourage people to accumulate wealth, so basic property tax is bad. BUT, we should discourage unproductive assets, so we should tax them.

A negative deposit rate is essentially a tax on unproductive assets. Maybe this is the way of the future.

I highly recommend Process Explorer (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.asp...). It is like the default Windows Task Manager on steroids. It is the tool most preferred by Microsoft devs. It is very lightweight and powerful. I have long hoped for a Process Explorer clone for linux (maybe a side project for someone with lots of free time...).

The hacker in me feels great sympathy. That is a painful bug. The software engineer in me cringes at the thought of upgrading a production system without testing in the lab first.

"Not capable" can have two meanings. First, you could mean that Microsoft engineers lack the skill and ability to make a better calculator or text editor. Second, you could mean that Microsoft's hands are tied by a variety of reasons (legacy support, antitrust concerns, etc).

I know it's popular to assume Microsoft's incompetency, but that's not the case here.

Many engineers internally have proposed changes and provided patches that could drastically improve the functionality. However, the gatekeepers are incredibly conservative. Not only do they have to consider the legacy issues, but they also have to consider all of the ISVs who would kick and scream about anti-trust. The subset of the customer base who would truly appreciate a better notepad do not justify the risks.