edgesrazor

One thing I don't see mentioned frequently when articles talk about equity is the concept of trigger events in regards to vested shares. Equity is a great motivator, and is terrific for rewarding (or even keeping employees) but most strategies don't cover vesting and trigger events. I've seen several excellent employees at another job get completely screwed because they were given equity, but their shares didn't vest until a specific trigger event (such as a buyout or a VC investment). The contract stated the employee had to be working at the company during the trigger event, so the easiest way to save money was to fire those people right before it happened. Not here during the trigger event? No vested shares and therefor no money for you. It's a terrible strategy and quite immoral, but not illegal, so I encourage anyone who is contemplating taking shares in addition to (or in lieu of) pay, make them be very specific about the trigger events, and more importantly - if there's any amount of those shares that are automatically vested on Day 1.

When we formed our company, we specifically stated automatic vesting for specific employees so they knew they were guaranteed money during the trigger event - whether they were still with the company or not. Those numbers are low, but it gives them faith we're not going to screw them over.

I'm seeing quite a few comments across the web from people saying they were in the 1.5%, which makes me wonder how accurate that number is. Then again, Gmail has a LOT of users, so that could be a very accurate number.

We use Google Apps for Business and were experiencing delays of several hours, and I did receive some bounces when sending to others within my organization. Strangely, most of this happened when using Outlook with Google Apps Sync - not when using the web interface.

Still, we've been very happy with the service - things like this happen every once in a while. We made do until it was straightened out.

My biggest annoyance with LinkedIn is the Endorsement feature. I have people I barely know endorsing me for skills I barely have. Right now my highest endorsement total is for PostgreSQL. While I'm proficient with Postgres, there's other skills I know way better that only have 1 or 2 endorsements. If a recruiter were to contact me (I'm not looking), I'm assuming it would be for db work. It would be a waste of both their time (to contact me) and mine (to respond and apologize that some of my contacts don't understand my job).

I was hoping to find something in the EXIF data of the image of NSA HQ on the page, but I think I'm trying way too hard...

I'm curious as to the evolution of the bacteria and other organisms inside the bottle.

As I read the post I wondered the whole time, "Does he have any photos to share?"

With the coverage the Bitcoin exchange rate has been getting, this was just a matter of time.

If DRM is inevitable, I'd take a properly implemented DRM that's been through community scrutiny than another Sony rootkit fiasco any time.

Thank you - so good to hear something positive.

"...we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways"

That's what I was referring to. There's so many things that could have been done differently on all sides, but I can't help but wonder the real reason the employee was terminated so quickly. With as much as this has escalated, I think a lot of people are owed at least that.

I only wish PlayHaven had released something this thorough as well. Maybe a lot of this could have been avoided, or at least less vitriolic.

I think Playhaven owes everyone involved with this a better explanation on exactly why this employee was fired. Were they just looking for a reason to get rid of him in the first place, or did what happened at PyCon really justify his termination? Let's not forget - there's a lot of Sendgrid customers who have become collateral damage in this fiasco who have nothing to do with any of it, and probably still have no idea what's going on.

I agree that rdio is the better service, but unfortunately since they dropped their free tier, I think most people will just grin and bear it with Spotify. Let's be honest - probably the majority of Spotify's users don't even know what upload bandwidth is, let alone why they should be concerned about it.

EDIT: I made one of my typical decimal blunders - we are paying $0.0018 per megabyte. Big difference.

We're using Encoding.com right now which works off the AWS infrastructure. We pre-paid and got our pricing down to $0.018 per megabyte. The drawback to this method is that encoding charges you for MB in AND MB out, whereas Amazon and Zencoder are charging just by the minute of output.

I'm pretty happy with Encoding.com but after running some test files through AWS, I have to seriously consider switching - AWS seems much faster (not a controlled test, more is needed) and in our case it's much easier to predict costs by going with a per minute model than a per MB in/out. An added bonus - boto already has support for it.

I 100% agree with you. It's a 127 page book on UX design written by someone with what appears to be a great deal of knowledge on the subject.

The bottom line is when you're trying to run a business, leads and exposure cost money. They wrote a book and asked for an email in return. To me, that seems like a fair trade - especially for something as critical as UX.

I'm glad this was said in a much larger avenue than my paltry Twitter account. To bundle a toolbar installation in with a major security fix is not only dishonest, it's unethical and who's to say that toolbar isn't the next piece to contain a security hole?

We've been using it for nearly a year now and have been pretty happy with it. Very little problems, and anything that has come up we've gotten very fast response on. We're small, so it's just not cost feasible to have a full-time DBA on staff. This is the next best thing I've found.

What about the organizations that can't afford this pricing model? There are quite a bit of non-profits and small businesses I follow that simply can't afford to sustain this. They're not spamming me if I voluntarily chose to Like their page. I did that so I can get updates, coupons and specials. Costs will force them back to email marketing, and if that's the case we all lose.

Interesting... I'm still trying to figure out how a smaller page I like (~2000 likes) and interact with - which I know has very little spam reports has almost completed stopped showing up in my News Feed, yet every time I log in I'm told to Like Mitt Romney.

Probably the wrong choice of words. He did help bring in a lot of creative people, however. I'm just wondering if this will follow the same line of thinking - there's quite a lot of talented people who work for the Lucas properties.

Let's not forget they paid that 7 billion in 2006. I can almost see this as Disney trying to replace the eye for talent and negotiating power they lost in Steve Jobs' passing, along with an amazing IP acquisition.

Edit: Thought of better terms than "creative force".

My major annoyance is that I'm not seeing the majority of Pages I Liked posts, but yet I see every individual friends' "Likes and Comments". I really don't want to see that my friend Liked a picture of a dead baby that 100,000 other idiots Liked because the text told them if they don't another kid will die.

Best part is, the only way to change this is to shut it off for each individual friend - not exactly convenient.

It's already common knowledge that not every child learns the same way - it's a product of both genetics and environment. My wife teaches in a district that has a good mix of middle-class and disadvantaged students. When summer is over, the teachers see huge discrepancies between the kids whose parents worked with them over the summer and the ones who didn't - and the economic class isn't what's dictating that discrepancy. It's unfortunate that some parents can't accept the responsibility of continuing their child's education outside of school, but if that's the case, maybe the best bet is to let the districts - not the state or federal governments dictate the curriculum and schedule.

This would put more responsibility on school boards, superintendents and administration. Underperforming administrators no longer can just sit back and play with politics and cronyism - they will have to accept the responsibility of creating and maintaining an environment that most reflects the community demographics, or they're gone. Blaming the teachers has to stop - it's the same thing that's happening with law enforcement - "We're going to pass more laws that make your job tougher and more involved, but you're going to have to do it with less money and support. Good luck."

This is a great idea, thank you.

I think I might have to set up postfix and do some experimenting. One of the strangest things I've seen is that some domains are rejecting emails with links to our site in them, but will accept them if the links are removed (plain text or HTML).

I swear, someone could make a good living handling this for companies looking to handle transactional email internally.

Thanks! This is a great walk-through for those using a solution with only 1 or a few IP addresses associated with little chance of that IP changing. Do you have any experience for those using services such as Amazon SES or Google Apps?

Setting up the PTR records for reverse DNS lookups are very tricky since Amazon and Google are always rotating the IP addresses for their mail servers. We've been fighting with this in our application for a little while now (using Python, not Ruby).

We're getting about 90% of our emails through, but some are getting denied for no reason whatsoever. The worst part is, they are server-side denials, so the emails aren't even going into the spam folders of the users.

Also, I second adding the DMARC section. DMARC is extremely simple, and it's very easy to implement gradually.

One thing I've learned over the years is that you can't take it as gospel when a customer says "I want X". When following a customer request to the letter, most times you'll end up regretting the decision.

For us, the better way to handle when the customer asks for X, is to sit down and create a persona and ask ourselves why they are asking for it, and who else would want it.

I find we get a much better result when building requirements based off the customer's pain rather than just giving them what they want. It helps maintain usability by avoiding confusion over additional features and functions.

Then again, in a startup environment this is a tricky balancing act. You can't forsake sales for a drawn out product management/development process, but you also can't just add every customer feature request either.

I agree with the mountain out of a molehill argument. There's an easy solution to this - if the profs don't like this, sell their own notes on the site for the minimum amount.

Most of these sites let you name your own price. Set the price insanely low and donate the proceeds to the university or a charity.