gstar

Direct link to ZDNet: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39760362,0...

I can't help wondering if this Shalowitz guy actually believes what he's saying.

He fails my clown test - he answers a question with the one-worder "Correct".

The service itself is great, but it's getting a little bit pricy for what it does.

I really like that you get a web-based terminal for the console session, if you need one.

The host I use in the UK (Tagadab) doesn't have that - but they have absolutely brilliant phone support.

For my toy stuff, about £30 for a smallish VPS in the UK, $20 a month for the smallest slicehost in the US, and I also have dreamhost (about $120/pa) that I use to host screencasts and things. I'd never put anything critical on there, though.

Actually, I was really disappointed. The engine bay shot killed it for me, those K&N filters on top of the rocker covers, silly anodised aluminium pressure fittings and the crazy angled radiator support just lack symmetry and grace.

The whole thing says to me that it was a whole lot of work, for not a whole lot of excellence.

Still though, I bet it goes faster than my car.

It's interesting to see these opinions from someone who has been close to Seedcamp, even though at the end of the article the author discloses a bit of a vested interest in criticising.

Anyway, I thoroughly agree.

From my perspective, running a startup based in London that's been entirely bootstrapped, I'd be more interested in applying for Y-Combinator than Seedcamp. Even though we already have premises and 1 staff member, and a product virtually finished, I think we'd get miles more value for our 5-6% from YC.

There seems to be this notion in the UK that raising money and starting a business is a reality TV show. I'm subscribed to a mailing list where someone has come up with "Pitch to Win":

http://www.meetup.com/startup-fasttrack/calendar/10723535/

Defies belief. While this sort of attitude is floating around, I'm just not sure how to approach the whole funding problem in the UK.

We haven't approached any investors here yet (although we have been approached), and I am feeling like I'm going to have to look to the other side of the Atlantic to find the kind of people that I'd like to work with.

That's the most heartfelt thing I've read from Gordon Brown (or his aides) .. fantastic. I'm very pleased that the apology was made.

Probably only me - but to my mind that's a shame. It's only my opinion, but I think Flash is nuts for anything new except video at the moment. I think Flash is:

- slow

- fairly unstable, even on Windows

- a privacy nightmare (cookie system)

- being left behind by browser vendors, where there is competition

Excanvas on IE and the canvas tag are really well placed for visualisations like these. I built a donut chart in Canvas recently for something I'm working on, and I'm glad I did, because I was able to do an impromptu demo with someone just the other day on my phone.

I know it's not a critical piece of engineering, and it doesn't actually matter, but I do personally find Flash dulls my enthusiasm for otherwise very nice things!

Cute - excellent chart and interaction. Just be careful you don't offend the dons with your scraping.

One criticism: Flash?

I don't have pictures. I can describe, though.

Two disks were mounted in a frame linearly, both screwed to the frame, with the power/sata connectors toward the middle of the frame, and one drive upside-down.

These cassettes were removable as a unit for hot-swap, and were inserted linearly into a half-deep 19" rack enclosure.

That the two drives were physically connected to the same frame, and removed and replaced as a unit would make it seem as if they would be started in phase. Now I'm not physicist, but I'm not 100% sure that's so important - if you have two gyroscopes contra-rotating and firmly connected, running at the same speed, surely they resist movement by sheer gyroscopic effect?

Are your target boxes virtual machines?

I always prefer the strategy where mirroring the data happens before the disk is presented to the VM. Have a look at GlusterFS and see if that might be an option? I know it wasn't playing nice with zfs for a while there, though.

They might have missed a trick here.

To address vibration, acoustics and gyroscopic effect, what I've seen done in highly dense enclosures is to rotate every second drive around 180 degrees in a bit of a shotgun approach to balancing stuff.

Still, awesome.

In Australia, whenever I had a CT scan I was provided with a CD-ROM full of data in some kind of medical format. In my experience, patients usually transport imaging data/films between the imaging bureau and the medical practitioners themselves.

I always planned to try to read it, but I never did (it certainly wasn't a bunch of bitmaps!)

I agree - slight oversight. Thanks for all your advice, though - appreciated.

In the UK, there are any number of dire warnings on the IPO (intellectual property office) website about disclosing your invention before patents are applied for. Not sure if the principles are the same.

Thanks, Jacques.

Does your opinion change at all if this management consultant was a referral, and they have had three successful exits and are listed as an inventor on a series of patents?

First thing I looked at was the iPod touch. It said the firmware (which I read to be the OS) wasn't based on open source software.

It's not the prettiest site in the world, either.

Were you planning on making affiliate commission? I can't imagine that anyone will make a purchase based on openness of the platform in the first instance. If they were the kind of consumer that did, I doubt that they'd use your service.

I'm really sorry, but I don't have a lot of positive things to say about your site.

Ha. I double dare you to ask an Australian how you spell colour or authorise. They'd argue with you about them not being English 'details' but rather American 'misspellings', too.

Go to the US, and ask for a 'glass of water' anywhere. Honestly, hardly anyone will get it first time - and usually you have to break down and ask for a 'wadder'.

Same with Butter.

There are some major differences that aren't obvious - us brits tend to be more flexible with mangling of the pronunciation (because everyone here does), but in the US they like it their way or the highway, so to speak.

Difficult. IANAFD so this may be slightly technically inaccurate:

We got them to actually draw something (called a flat) from a half-drawn garment, draw a full flat from scratch, identify trends from a series of photos, pick textile colours from photos, identify designers from "signature" garments, have them debug a spec. to see if a garment was reasonable (say the spec called for a notion like a chunky zip on an unsuitable fabric), and a few other things.

Xapian is amazing - it's incredibly fast, and I much prefer it to Lucene and friends. I'm using Xapain with Django right now, but the framework I built to smush them together is hardly elegant.

Can't wait to try this out.

Grinning much? So THAT must be what it's like when you earn or spend $50mil!

Gruber is polarising, but that's precisely why he's so successful.

Much as I think he's a bit obnoxious, I read his blog regularly. I really admire his respect for his craft (vs say, techcrunch), as well as the niche he's carved out for himself.

Not depressing at all, completely representative of the job pool.

The technique you're using isn't common - a lot of traditional companies don't interview on skill and technique (like Google do).

Backing up your 70% of failures, we recently hired a fashion designer at our startup (we're in an interesting market!) I decided we should use the same kind of interview we would for a developer.

Everyone we interviewed was completely baffled, but it really sorted out the wheat from the chaff. At least 80% of the people we interviewed couldn't do what they said.

Thankfully though, we've ended up with someone who is really incredible. In fact, I think she has the 10x higher productivity that us developer types talk about, and her old employer is trying to hire her back.

tl;dr - looks like you've got a normal pool of applicants!

Working out sales strategy has turned out to be the most difficult thing for our startup for precisely this reason - none of us are sales people! My partner and I are both very introverted, and although we have a great product (i think), we're having a hell of a time with PR, marketing and sales.

Laundry lists like in the linked post are useful to reflect upon, but don't give great specifics. I think that sales is a very human skill and undertaking, and it may be something you have or don't have.

Does anyone have any resources that have helped them learn?

Fair point, so perhaps I should wind it down a bit: it's certainly the least ethical website I've seen launched on HN.

Sorry to offer criticism, but this is the most unethical thing I've ever seen. Not only that, the market for this sort of trading is already stitched up by eBay, and they do it better by not being so blatant about the source of the discount.

So this product actually does a worse job than eBay - that's no mean feat.

I know sometimes game-changers come about by pushing ethics around - but this is morally wrong in so many different ways I'm struggling to express it.

Purely out of interest, I'd love to meet the person or people who came up with this, but only so I could do my grumpy old man bit about the "me" generation.

This is nice validation to have. For a while now, I've been wondering if I'm just a bit precious for asserting that I absolutely need full focus and no interruptions otherwise my productivity dies.

Still, makes me wonder how on earth I'm ever going to successfully grow the business, while I've still got development work to focus on.

It looks great, but obviously I haven't been able to play with it yet.

Out of interest, is it built on Cappuccino? That'd be very YC-meta!

Ha! Indeed!

I would absolutely consider doing that if I had time. I'm kinda all-in on my own startup at the moment and I'm doing my level best to not be distracted by contracting.

And oh how right you are about it not being especially fun! You make a good point about the sort of money that I should chase to do the job properly, too.

Thanks.

Somewhat similarly, as a stopgap in '07 I built a Django (well really, Python and duct tape) Sarbanes-Oxley SOD system over a month or so.

I had to deal with well over a million records, but fundamentally it was a pretty simple ask, laying a 2d matrix of rules over user and permission records from 30 different systems. I even hooked it up to SAP and various AS400s through MQ, print queues and various other things.

It was a total stopgap move - so a whole bunch of vendors bid on the "real" system, one was selected, and now almost 3 years later and a few million dollars spent, and the "real" system still isn't working.

"Web 2.0" frameworks have a lot of applications in business, the ORM + presentation layer tools give you most of the groundwork you need, but as the article says, the key is in the polish and the business oriented design.