jkahn

I'm struggling to understand why ZFS makes enterprise storage obsolete. One of the benefits of the SAN is that it is shared amongst a number of servers.

How does ZFS help with that? Assuming you install SmartOS as virtualisation host, you'd still need some kind of shared storage.

[Edit:] The reason I point this out is that if you lose a host, you lose all VMs running on that host. And then you won't easily be able to get them back online on another host if you've lost your storage as well.

Currently I am using two treated pine planks balanced on four pepsi can crates as my temporary standing desk to see how I like it. It's in the office, not at home. Linkage: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17301814/IMG_0306.jpg

Works great. I love it, even though it's a bit ugly.

Wow that looks amazing? I was looking for a "pricing" info page. The fact this is free - incredible.

The Samoan companies that do business mainly with the USA are in a minority. They're also a heavily religious and family-oriented culture and aren't about to start working on Sunday. It sounds like you might be confusing Samoa with a more business-oriented culture.

I agree snprbob86, and that's what I was getting at. PowerShell doesn't know if it's a shell or an object-based language.

It's far too verbose. It's a shell, and a huge pain to type interactively. Yes, it has tab completion, but so does bash - and that's far less verbose.

It's also opaque. Because it's object-based, but you work with it on the command line, it outputs in text but there is constantly "other" information that is not displayed on screen that you can get if you pipe through to another command. That's not intuitive. Text processing is intuitive.

It reeks of design by committee. It's own execution policy. Java-like getter/setters. Super verbose syntax. About the only good thing PowerShell has done is force Microsoft to provide a command-line, scriptable interface to all their server products to get away from GUI dependency. And that's a product of their PowerShell internal policy, not the language itself.

Yes, it's better than CMD.exe. But still a huge pain. Other platforms have Python, Ruby, Perl... and dare I say it, bash.

As someone who occasionally has to write PowerShell, I can say with confidence that is an abomination of a language with a horrible syntax. I hope this never gets implemented on any other platform when there are so many superior alternatives.

2 x Intel SSDs here. No issues.

While the speed of these things can vary a lot, so does reliability - and that won't show up in a benchmark. I noticed that a lot of the mentioned SSDs are GSkill. Apparently those are cheap and unreliable.

I'm surprised I haven't had an answer to this. I thought I was the target market.

This looks like an inferior web based edition of Exchange/Outlook functionality. It was a serious question - is there an advantage to using this? If not, you might need to do some market research to better target the problem you are trying to solve.

I'm a business guy that has a lot of meetings. Why would I use this and not Outlook?

Not flippant at all. Law enforcement can track where you are through your telco even if you don't have a fancy phone. And they can do it live.

I moved from Auckland to Brisbane. The weather and lifestyle are better, people are generally more upbeat and opportunities are better.

New Zealand has a major case of tall poppy syndrome. Australia doesn't have this so much. Most people generally want you to succeed, and help you out.

New Zealand => Australia

Windows => Mac

Spinning rust => SSD

Of course, there are tons of technology changes that have been great. The things that have made a huge impact in my life are:

Pure techie => Learning sales

Employee => Business owner

Sales is all psychology. It totally changes your view of the world. It's not about how things should be, but about how things are regardless. A business degree didn't teach anything that mattered about that.

You've solved some of the hardest problems already - getting the initial traffic, a decent product, initial user base, and marketing. You need to work on profitability and market size.

I agree that you should keep the free exercises to keep traffic flowing to your site. Don't focus too heavily on these, though.

Without knowing much about your market or product:

- Estimate the size of your market. A back of the envelope exercise should help you estimate how many schools are in the Netherlands, how many classrooms at each school, how many students. That's your current market size. How can you expand that? Can you extend to universities, or to other countries in Europe? Increasing your market size gives you more potential customers.

- You need to extract more money out of each user. $5/user/year requires a huge amount of users to generate even basic profit. Can you offer a premium subscription, for $15 per month? $20 per month? Compare this to the cost of private tutoring for parents. Put high value material in the premium subscription. Offer a 7-day free trial of premium.

I think you've got a good opportunity, you need to monetize it.

$10k/mo is just a decent salary. If you're a good consultant, you're looking at more like $25k/mo. And that's accounting for slack time.

A number of these startup billionaires are paper-billionaires due to Facebook's grossly inflated private market valuation.

I expect to see a lot of these names dropping off the billionaire list as quickly as they got onto it.

It's not about making money. It's about detering those that have no interest in downloading 4-5GB in software they'll never use. There are LOADS of people out there that do that. I know many people like this. The kind that download every Ubuntu release in ISO format, yet run Windows.

Anyone that is revenue potential for Apple is going to pay. Actually, many of them are already paying $99/year anyway, so they get it gratis.

And you're mistaken about the assumption that anyone who downloads this, at any price, represents greater potential revenue. Charging a tiny nominal sum for something of value is common practice to deter time-wasters. Not just in the software industry, either. There is a psychological effect as well - if you pay for something, you are more likely to ascribe value to it, and more likely to investment time into it.

What's the bet that this comes free on the Lion disc, anyway.

I know you're being tongue-in-cheek, but it seems like a lot of others aren't.

This is only five dollars folks. You get a hell of a lot of value for that five bucks. I don't think Apple will even recoup their development and distribution costs with that. I'm guessing the main reason for the price is to deter every man and his dog from downloading it - anyone who cares can part with five bucks.

And Eclipse still sucks.

I don't agree with this whole glorification-of-failure stuff that is posted occasionally.

It's not that I see failure as particularly bad, or horrible. It's that it's not the point. The point is to WIN. When you launch a startup, and fail, try again. But wouldn't it have been better to succeed? Isn't the point to make money, or build a platform, or win the game? Not every product has a market. Not every customer call will result in a sale. But the point is to make a winner.

Why would you purposely seek out failure?

Of course, the undercurrent here is that in order to succeed - in order to win big - you must risk a lot, and risk failure. Risking failure is necessary. Making mistakes happens. If you're not risking failure or humiliation, you're not playing the best game you can.

Risking failure is not the same as actually failing.

Maybe that's just semantics, but it is a very important difference. If you're purposely seeking failure, I feel sorry for you.

That looks like trash compared to the iPad. We've seen in the market so far that building a tablet that is remotely close to iPad in terms of hardware build, let alone software, costs more.

Sounds like a good idea. I should do that right now.

It turns out that I was hit by this issue. And guess what - it was a big deal. For starters, it is a MONDAY here in Australia. There was no support information on this, and no help from Google.

Secondly, the login message was "Your account has been disabled". If I could log in, and there was a message that my email was being restored from backup because they had a failure - fine. That wasn't the case. They had disabled my Google Apps Administrator account (same account as my email), email was bouncing, and I couldn't log in to my email OR the administration interface. The "reset your password" and "unlock your account" links failed to unlock it.

Comparing an email outage to people's deaths is poor form. Of course they aren't the same. That doesn't make it an issue when email is a super important communication tool.

Awesome. Two monitors on a MBP with Thunderbolt. Now, where the hell is the adapter to buy that will actually let you connect two monitors?

Does the bulk import send everyone a resubscribe message? I've got a very small list (sub 100 people) of customers and prospects that I meet with IRL, and I don't want to annoy them by asking them to subscribe again to a list they've already subscribed to.

I'm sure this idea will help some people become more productive. Not people like me, though. Maybe I just get easily distracted, but I make small deals with myself when working through a mundane (but important) task.

Deals like:

- "15 more minutes and you can get a coffee".

- "You can't look at HN until 4pm".

- You get the picture.

A clock helps immensely with this. Sometimes a task feels like it's taking forever, but it's only been half an hour.

Does anyone know of an easy way to migrate to MailChimp from Aweber?

For me, I have to say that the high point of that article was squinting to read the small, non-clickable graph and seeing "Queensland" (Australia) as one of the universities mentioned.

Oh, the article? Pretty bland.

I think you're right - this is exactly what will happen, but it will take time. Games have been mainstream in a downloadable format for a very long time, eBooks are only just becoming popular, despite the fact that books are ancient.

I'm looking at Amazon to do this - they're best placed to right now. But when, is hard to say. I imagine it will start slowly, with independent authors publishing their own books, until a critical mass is reached where a large number of authors will switch over to self-publishing.

Good luck Kyle. It will be interesting to hear if you get any takers.

One thing I wonder is if the kind of people that would take up an offer like this have the means to pay for it. As in: do the "idea guys" that can't find technical guys have enough money?

One angle you might want to consider is the sanity check - going over the technical merit of an idea/early stage product/architecture. This could be for both the idea guy and technical guy. A company that is a bit further along would have more cash.

And for those on about the rates: that rate for two hours is not bad.

That's probably not the best example, as Blender was initially closed-source until the creators went bankrupt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)