kwis

If your ops/DevOps guys are experienced pros, they're probably going to be pretty close to compliant, just out of habit. That said I guess it's not terribly hard to envision a scenario where there's no firewall, bad user access controls, and a host of other crap that could be painful to fix if you only have junior-level ops talent.

You basically just need to follow some reasonable security standards. Firewalls, ssh/ssl admin terminals, no shared credentials, and then follow a basic security policy.

Given Spreedly's current prices of the lesser of $0.20/transaction or 2%/transaction, this minute quantity of work is currently providing us with a return of approximately $12,000/mo. (We had over 60,000 transactions in March.)

Cost: approximately 3 man-days.

Benefit: currently sitting at approximately 1 man-year/year and growing.

It's true that if we'd gone of business within 25,000 transactions, we would've been better off with Spreedly, but given the time, energy and money that we were committing to the business, optimizing for that case seemed absurd. As such we made a small bet that we'd succeed, and that bet is currently generating enough savings (as compared to using Spreedly) to cover an FTE. Some people might say it's a rounding error on the revenue (and I suppose that's true) but I view it as a small bet that is paying off at an enormous multiple.

I disagree with most of what patio11 said, and have found (like bryanh) that using ActiveMerchant with Auth.net was no harder than when I tried Spreedly.

As such, I'd pass on patio11's advice and instead just get an authorize.net account, integrate that, and forget about it for the next five years.

If I create a lot of value, I want to be able to capture a portion of it in my salary. I don't want to capture some average wage determined by a manager who doesn't have the guts to admit, even privately, that some people create more value than others.

I think the problem is somewhat unique to unbacked currencies. BTC has value solely because some people agree that BTC has value. It can go to zero (and stay there) for any reason.

The value has no minimum that can be defined by looking at the industrial value of a commodity (as with commodity monies). Nor is there a minimum that can be determined by comparing the money supply to the underlying productivity of a nation whose residents are required, by law, to use the money (as with fiat monies).

As an aside, if I wanted to setup competing currencies, I'd create a brokerage that allows the cheap, easy, instant transfer of ownership of fractional securities from one member to another. Then we'd have tens of thousands of competing currencies, all of which are backed by a combination of assets and productive capacity. Entrepreneurs could even setup companies designed solely to work as currencies.

I know that wouldn't appeal to those who care primarily about traceability, but frankly, I don't foresee any government allowing the widespread adoption of any mechanism that allows for untraceable transfers of large sums of money.

I made a list of a dozen or so recent, top-level financial innovations (each of which has created many billions of dollars of value), and instead of recognizing that they had massive impact, you ignore all but one of them, redefine the remaining one from 'insurance product' to a credit derivative, and then attack it because of recent, well-known issues with mispriced credit and failures to account for counterparty risk when dealing with mortgage-backed products.

That's beyond disingenuous.

Have a nice day.

Off the top of my head, I would state that the following are unquestionably larger financial innovations in the past 20 years: SPDRs, HOLDRs, ETFs, ETNs, dark pools, target-date funds, target risk funds, auction-rate securities, online b2b markets, online b2c markets, online banking, automated market-making, new insurance products, improvements in risk analysis (credit scoring), removal of information asymmetries, just... so much innovation

The bitcoin market is less than a blip on the radar screen. It's so small that if somebody were to sell 100,000BCN right now, they'd crash the price down to pennies. And if somebody were to buy 100,000USD of BCN right now, the exchange rate would skyrocket. It's a small, illiquid market of people who have, mostly for political reasons, decided that they will convert electricity into a private virtual currency.

I know that right now there are a lot of bitcoin miners, dreaming of how wealthy they'll be once their deflationary-by-design virtual currency takes over the world, but I can't envision any realistic scenario whereby that could happen. Heck, the political risk alone makes it untenable as a serious store of value as it would be trivial for a nation to outlaw it's use, thus destroying the utility.

If you don't want to store your wealth in government-issued currency, that's great. But I'd suggest converting wealth to productive assets (e.g. shares of companies, loans to companies, land and other hard assets) rather than a virtual currency that lacks both the inherent value of productive assets and the transactional ease of government-issued currency.

Punishment is overrated. The blame game is a game with no winners.

The new CEO is setting a new tone, new structure and new priorities. Getting rid of people who fail to adopt the new vision is fine and reasonable. Firing people for pre-pivot problems isn't.

Frankly, I think your suggested action would have one major effect: killing innovation.

After all, who would dare to innovate if they knew that if the project failed (no matter if the cause was them, or if it was a company-wide cultural issue) that you might capriciously fire them, long after the fact?

I was with you until you said this.

If the problem was a company-wide cultural mismatch, it strikes me as somewhat absurd to declare that the answer is to fire the people who happened to be posted near the border of that mismatch. That doesn't fix anything.

They're segmenting a crowded market (on both the investor and entrepreneur sides of the market), investing in founders they understand, and I wish them luck with their new niche.

Nordstrom's doesn't sell 2x4s. Lowes doesn't sell evening gowns. Non-designer founders don't launch from The Designer Fund. It'll be fun to see how this hypothesis works in practice.

Looking more closely, they're a strange sort of conglomerate. At a glance, I see two banks, two insurance companies, roughly two hundred industrial companies, a dozen retail shops, a dozen food-related businesses, a dozen research firms, and ten education companies.

In a way, it reminds me of Idealab, in that each new company is a new pool of equity (with the associated incentives that result from ownership), and that failures are not punished, but rather result in retraining or placement in a different firm. (for full co-op members).

It's also interesting to see that the founder was a priest who started off with a co-operative polytechnic school and bootstrapped everything from that base.

I don't think I've ever seen a corporate reorg where middle management wasn't amongst the hardest hit groups. They're expensive, and you can usually fire a huge swath them without thinking, tell the remaining ones to start working late and limp along until times get better.

You still need some form of functional management to get the right staff, make sure they have what they need to be able to do their jobs, and deal with day to day issues. This might sound trivial, but it really isn't, and somebody who does this job well will enable a lot more success than somebody who treats it as a minor task.

And you also still need some form of product and project management to ensure that the work being done is aligned with strategy, marketing, sales, finance, etc, and to serve as an interface with those groups. Failure to do this effectively creates massive inefficiencies.

As such, I really don't think any moderately intelligent competent manager is at all concerned by Scrum, Kanban, XP, TDD, Lean, or any other Agile practice.

This is a site with real-time radiation levels . The readings from this, and several other sites, have been verified as accurate.

I see a disaster, but not a coverup.

edit: http://www.city.yokohama.lg.jp/kankyo/saigai/ is the radiation report from Yokohama.

I just can't understand the parent post indicating that it's 'huge for rails consulting companies'. After all, rails consulting companies are sending out five digit monthly invoices. A $150 discount on the first month of hosting is a rounding error in that context.

Thank you for answering a question I'd had for some years now, as to how VF became a source of serious long-form journalism.

I find myself wishing I had a 'meh' flag for both your comment and my reply. Not quite a downvote or a report, but... "meh... this is not a useful addition to the conversation."

One can disagree without being snarky and disagreeable.

That said, if the target market is just 'hackers', just modify my question to refer to 'hackers' rather than 'founders'.

Or to make that more concrete, would you forward that link to multiple portfolio CEOs and suggest they take time out of their day to read it and discuss it?

1) The way they quoted the 55 mile range made it sound like the 55 mile range was more representative of normal use than the 200 mile figure. I don't recall them ever saying something like "Toyota claims it gets 20mpg, but we've worked out it only gets 3mpg on our test track". Maybe they have (perhaps they mentioned the Veyron's fuel consumption at full throttle), but it's certainly not a normal part of a review.

2) They quoted the charge time from a standard power socket, when nearly all charges would be done at a higher-power charging station at much shorter time. They didn't quote the faster charge time.

3) While watching, I seriously thought the one Tesla's engine had completely quit.

4) While watching, I seriously thought that the other Tesla's battery had gone completely dead without enough warning for them to drive it into the garage.

5) They implied that the environmental impact from the power plants is roughly the same as the environmental impact of gas anyway. (oddly showing nuclear cooling towers while talking about power plants causing global warming.) Power generation obviously has an environmental impact no matter where it's done, but the nuclear scare plus polar bear mention just felt bizarre.

6) They implied that somehow hydrogen was magical and had no environmental power generation issues.

I don't disagree with their defense, but the piece felt very political in that it seemed designed to say things that are technically true, whilst leading viewers to conclusions that are false. All-in-all, I felt like I was watching Clarkson on an anti-environmental soapbox more than I was watching either a piece of entertainment or an automotive review.

I love Top Gear, but I was annoyed by the piece, and it won't bother me a bit if Clarkson has a few obnoxious days because of it.

The review would've been 1000x better if Hamster or Slow had done it.

But whatever, I'm still excited about the Model S.