manuscreationis

I do have an old (very old) dell laptop kicking around... But I would need to do some research on hardware compatibility. It's definitely nowhere near as good as an XPS-anything would be; The thing is seriously under powered.

I'll keep this in mind, thanks!

I've seen them before, but the price seems exceptionally prohibitive once you get into serious long term usage... I would imagine i'd use enough hours in a given week that before long, I would have been better off just buying a machine. But i'll admit, i'm mainly doing the math out in m head.

Also, the page has broken links when you go choose a plan, so it's hard to get more info.

But this is solid advice for someone who wouldn't need to use the system for many hours in a week.

I was hoping to do it with either a VM, but fall back to a hackintosh if I had to just to get going, then once I had some experience under my built an idea I wanted to really execute on, go buy a used mac, or a mini.

Not seeing a lot of positive experience with the VM approach, however...

Shame

My point wasn't at all to say there was a situation that warranted that kind of treatment; As I mentioned, the guy from Ocean took the cake in terms of idiocy. He was out of line no matter what the customer was saying. He also has a terrible command of the written language, and should be removed from any customer facing position, immediately, for several obvious reasons.

My point was, this customer could have cooled off, collected himself, and written a much more intelligent complaint letter. He came off sounding like a hurt child, and then trumpeted how he was taking this to the internet, as though the internet was his domain, where he would prevail (and he most likely will - and should, considering how much of a shmuck this PR guy is).

I just don't think either one of them came out looking very intelligent, or like they handled themselves like an adult. In this case, his complaint is a legitimate one, and he should be entitled to proper recourse.

All I'm saying is, I'd be embarrassed to let that particular email be my letter to the world.

The CC approach was something he taught me to use under 2 scenarios:

The initial interactions with customer service directly (which was to always be polite and professional) had failed, and you felt you were still in the right

or

They had been rude or dismissive toward your complaints, or offered no feedback whatsoever.

You never open with that, as you then have nothing to escalate to when things don't turn out well

I'm not letting the PR guy or the company itself off the hook, they're completely the losers in this case.

I just can't excuse either side when it devolves into 2 children kicking sand on each other. Someone needs to be the bigger man, or else you both end up looking like fools; Even if one fool is the bigger fool.

It's definitely more about the PR guy, no question. Above all else, those people are paid to be polite, courteous, and to relate to the customers.

He dropped the ball big time

At the risk of taking a potentially unpopular opinion on the subject, I don't think either one of those people come out looking too good.

I'm all for doing the whole "CC your formal complaint letter to several outlets in hopes that someone will take notice" approach; My brother taught me about doing this when I was a little kid. He would write letters (this was before the advent of the internet) and note on the bottom that they had been CCd to various local news outlets, as well as the better business bureau (regardless of whether or not he actually sent those additional letters). And almost always, it worked.

But I would be absolutely embarrassed to have my name attached to his complaint that got sent around. He is understandably, and in some cases justifiably, upset by the companies lack of communication and flippant nature, but this is no time to get into a pissing match. He chose to stoop to the guys level with name calling and taunting: Welcome to the internet bitch? Thats how I roll? It sounds like something you'd see on a meme, not something you want to end a complaint letter with.

That said, the guy on Oceans end is clearly the winner when it comes to idiotic behavior, as he further digs his own grave down the line. I just can't cut the customer any slack on stooping to Oceans level, however. He comes off sounding like almost as big of an idiot as the guy at Ocean.

Just my 2 cents, I'm sure others will see it differently

I have no idea what is going on in that article

Well that's a warm, fuzzy feeling for the holidays

"What THE stocking stuffer is"

not

"What A stocking stuffer is"

I'm aware of the terminology, was questioning the content of said prize.

But, in the spirit of all the foreign born readers of HN who may not know what that term meant, i'll thank you for enlightening them.

Great idea, might I ask what the stocking stuffer is?

Doesn't look as terrible as "true" waterfall, but I think this is just marketing fluff to win people over by telling them about your rock-solid practices.

If they have an arrow that looped from Beta Testing back into Interface Design/Usability/Engineering/Coding, you'd probably end up with what most shops do anyways, speaking in broad strokes.

I think his point wasn't that someone getting the short stick was illegal, but rather that shares were bought from me without my direct consent.

Not sure what "under administration" means exactly, but the company was folding, and the CEO was selling the remains (the software, a few of the people, the name if they wanted it) to an investor who owned another company, to do with what he wanted.

So it was priced at the "market" value, which he estimated to be quite low (and he was probably right, we weren't all that successful at the time).

Pretty sure it wasn't, but I didn't really have the resources nor the energy to fight it.

On the one hand, I was told before that the CEO would be buying out all the outstanding stock of people leaving the company

On the other, I was never presented with any kind of form or bill of sale to sign, which is what I was waiting for so I could contest it and attempt to keep my shares.

At the end of the day, the amount of shares I owned was so incredibly low, that I figured it didn't really matter, and that I was incredibly eager to be done with the whole place after all of the shit I had been through, that it wasn't even worth fighting for.

So on my next to last day, I was simply handed an envelope with a personal check inside, made out to me, for the amount of One Pittance.

Can there be a "Company folded, stock options got bought out from under me without my consent for pennies to give to the people who were buying the remains of said Company" option?

If so, price it at $200 dollars, and i'll vote for it.

On one of my final days I was handed a check for my shares, because I wasn't going with the new owners, and all stock was to be given to them. Was never asked if I wanted to sell, and it was valued extremely low for "accounting purposes"...

Thanks for the positive feedback!

I agree, you will probably both get an eye-opening experience as to what the other person was going through. You guys have a really rare chance to walk a mile in each others shoes

Hopefully you both remember what it was like in your own shoes during the first trip.

Best of luck!

Reminder: You have no idea if they store the data you submit through the simulated web session. So please do not use this site to test anything involving a login/password.

Sorry if i'm being paranoid, just want to warn anyone who's first thought is "I wonder how my product looks in IE6..."

I mention briefly about my girlfriends support and care during my trials here:

http://lookingbackaretrospective.posterous.com

Only mentioned in a few of the later chapters, but she was always supportive and always urged me to do what I felt was right. She was constantly by my side for the bad, as well as the occasional good.

For any "Startup Significant Others" out there, your support means more than you realize!

Thats a shame...

I'm looking into a new rig, and he's completely sold on the design. I can imagine a world in, lets say, 2013-2014 where the desktop becomes a more multithreaded environment, but that just isn't where were at today, and thats just my guess. He's convinced the overclocking aspect makes all the difference, and Intels don't OC as well, but thats not what i'm reading (nor what you're saying).

I do like the conceptual architectural changes made with the bulldozer, but current, and forthcoming, software just doesn't seem like it will make use of it. It definitely seems like more of a server-minded approach to an architecture.

So...

Are these Bulldozers really as bad as I keep reading about?

A friend of mine who is very knowledgeable when it comes to hardware insists that the issues are being overblown, and that if you get the correct configuration of hardware (ram/mobo/etc) along with the right overclocking setup, these procs are just as good, as well as more future-proof. He says most benchmarking tests are more single-threaded examples of load, which the Bulldozer obviously performs worse with, despite this being a more realistic representation of the kind of load you'd find in your average desktop, especially when it comes to gaming.

Thoughts?

Step away, man.

It seems like you can't, but trust me. Step away.

If an organization rests solely on the shoulders of one man, it isn't running properly, and it needs to be fixed sooner rather than later.

Step away

This has to be a well-executed joke...

Or someone who has severely lost track of perspective.

You know it's done well when you really can't tell.

Story of my life. Literally:

http://lookingbackaretrospective.posterous.com

He has a lot of good points

Good to know, thanks!

Also curious about this, i loved both of those works and was sad to see them disappear.

I know the HTML5 one has been re-hosted in a few places, not sure about the Python one... regardless of how the original author may feel about his works being shared without his consent.

Congrats / Condolences on losing your job. Often times, these can be blessings in disguise. Any insight into why you were let go?

If you go the wordpress route, do yourself a real favor and read up on the common and ever-growing list of wordpress hacks out in the wild.

It's not enough to build a wordpress site, you're also going to be called upon to manage and secure them as well. Wordpress is a big, popular platform these days, which means a lot of ne'erdowells are gunning for it.

Also, seconding whoever is voting for Django, since you have a python background. Double seconding the recommendation to get more active with your downtime

Booleans have 2 states - true and false. A 3 state equivalent is a Trivalent (Someone correct me if i'm wrong here).

Unless you plan on making use of the third state to indicate something in particular, just set it to 0 and call it a day. Space is cheap, and unless you want to constantly write NULL checks to handle it without the need for a 3rd case, in which case you'd most likely assume NULL is 0, you're only causing problems for yourself down the road

Just my opinion, I'm sure others may disagree

Edit: Potential Caveat

Say it's a table to hold answers from a questionnaire, you may see some value for adding it as a NULLable so you can say "Oh, this guy skipped that question", if such a thing were possible in the application.

So for that situation, i'd say the choice is more of a case by case thing

Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't stripe more of a payment gateway, where as what hes asking is more about structuring recurring billing based on a contract?

In other words, he could actually do the charge through stripe, but he couldn't generate the invoice by which he comes to the amount that he charges.

Maybe i'm wrong.