simonsquiff

See Barrkel's post below http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022642 - it's not something you can always negotiate. I don't care if others choose money over time - I'm saying many just don't have that choice.

Coming from the uk, whilst I'd love to work for a US based tech company something that would strongly make me reconsider is the terrible lack of paid vacation. 20 days is the minimum here - many (including me) get 25 and that allows for some proper breaks: a weeks skiing, two weeks for a long vacation, a long stretch off at Christmas and still enough for the odd day here and there. I'd be lucky to get half of that in the US, a big disincentive.

The opposite would be really good for designers - augmented reality of what a colour blind person would see. Would be good to check if your design is going to make life difficult for the colour blind.

Their old names were great.

Word, Office, Windows, Outlook - all great names.

I don't think the argument is that they are not faultless. It's that they see the Western faults (treating their elderly relatives so poorly) as so much worse than their faults in a related area (treating animals poorly). It's a valid observation - that our complaining of the poor treatment of sentient animals is rather undermined by our poor treatment of a much more closer to home sentient animal.

It's interesting how cultures differ on some of these.

I was speaking to a friend who works in China. He says he often discusses with the locals their appalling treatment of animals, which can be genuinely shocking to Westerners. He says this is usually met by a swift rebuke "How on earth can you criticize us for our treatment of animals when your culture treats your elderly relatives - your own family! - so horrifically, shipping them off to be ignored in a home for the rest of their lives?". It's a fair point - people in glass houses...

The UI looks very impressive from the video. Very slick and fluid, the multitasking animation in particular is lovely.

Will be interesting if this is the real UI or not - it might just be a mockup like that infamous Nokia N97 promotional video vs the terrible reality: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231464

Why would he do that? This makes no sense to me.

Why not take the options and just give to money to charity rather than let it lapse? I don't believe taking the options would impact Apple much, just add a (minor) dilution to existing shareholders who would never begrudge this being done for Jobs. Even if he doesn't care for the money I'd have thought he'd see the positives of becoming a large philanthropist.

"I doubt Facebook has a lot more growth ahead of it"

Don't confusing lack of user growth with lack of company & profit growth. But I don't think even user growth is anywhere near static.

"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." Eisenhower - one of my favourite quotes that sums this up well.

Surely it is the malaria parasite that is the killer, rather than the mosquito?

Here are some examples with hardware acceleration on (left) and off (right)

http://a.imageshack.us/img231/5900/firefox42.png

Obviously the header text here is completely messed up. But the normal text is horrible too. Look at the N and the D at the beginning of the first posts - previously nice and sharp 1 pixel lines, now 2 pixels. The T on The on the third post runs into the h, rather than having a gap. The text was previously sharp and crisp, now it looks blurry.

http://a.imageshack.us/img291/9493/firefoxbeforeafter.png

Look at 'sebastianmarshall.com' on line 4 - it's so much more compressed. In fact, before it is 139px wide, with acceleration it is only 132px wide: it's not just the look, it's actually changing the dimensions of the text!

Ok, better example:

http://a.imageshack.us/img231/5900/firefox42.png

Obviously the header text here is completely messed up. But the normal text is horrible too. Look at the N and the D at the beginning of the first posts - previously nice and sharp 1 pixel lines, now 2 pixels. The T on The on the third post runs into the h, rather than having a gap.

The text was previously sharp and crisp, now it looks blurry.

It's a pretty poor example. I'll try and put some others up. But look at 'sebastianmarshall.com' on line 4 - it's so much more compressed. In fact, before it is 139px wide, with acceleration it is only 132px wide: it's not just the look, it's actually changing the dimensions of the text!

Unfortunately, the hardware acceleration makes the text rendering horrid. Text is less sharp, black text looks dark grey, the spacing of small fonts is compressed...I really found it unpleasant. Fortunately turning off the acceleration makes it look normal. I hope they can sort it out as it, as it sounds like a good move, but not at the expense of everyday readability.

Here is a comparison shot - not the best example, granted - normal is left, accelerated is right. Look at the H on line 5 - it fits the pixel grid normally, but doesn't with acceleration on.

http://a.imageshack.us/img291/9493/firefoxbeforeafter.png

In the US maybe - the UK has neither Netflix nor Hulu and that goes for the rest of Europe too.

Apple has global reach and will be getting in early in a lot of countries.

It's interesting that this is only for music. You can see this being just as applicable for movies and tv shows - and of course apps. Presumably this is a toe in the water and they'll extend it if it works. But this certainly has lots of potential for extension.

Those trying to hunt down the section, it says this:

"3 This camera module is known to be mounted upside-down in some notebooks. Applications that use the libv4l library should display the video correctly, as libv4l detects upside-down cameras and rotates the image automatically. See Hans de Goede's post on the linux-uvc-devel mailing list for more information. For applications that don't use libv4l, try holding your computer upside-down. "

And a simple little number next to the topic or comment donating its worth. Karma is a wonderfully simple concept with remarkable outcomes - its a teacher, a rewarder, a punisher, an encourager...it helps make the community work (a very complex problem) but is wonderfully simple.

I've completely changed my mind about mosquitoes. I now think they provide a really important, fairly unique ecosystem role and it would be a disaster to get rid of them.

What is it? Well they help recycle the food chain. Those that feed on us are taking energy from the top of the food chain (us) and they then are at the bottom of the food chain. The amount of animals that directly feed from mosquitoes is vast - insects, birds, fish, bats - who then also are part of the food chain themselves.

It's a great role, for a bottom of the food chain animal to feed off the top of the food chain one - especially an animal (ourselves) that causes such ecosystem problems.

If we get rid of mosquitoes what happens to the animals that feed of them? They need to eat something else, something that isn't getting part of its nourishment from the vast, untapped population of top of food chain animals.

People down-modding controversial comments is my only criticism of HN - if you disagree you shouldn't downmod, rather write a reply explaining why you disagree; the karma of each post will show where the consensus lies.

The guidelines do indicate things should work this way - using only downmods for comments that are negatively adding to the conversion - but this doesn't seem to happen enough in practice.

Indeed, the timeliness is questionable - I wasn't impressed with the slide saying the number of days since the issue was raised, as all that time there had been silence (not even "we're looking into it and getting back to you soon"). But ignoring the response time I think the approach to the response was the right one - i.e. data driven, and that is a good lesson for those in a similar finger pointing shit storm albeit on a radically different scale.

I can relate to this bit "More than once in my career I’ve been in a situation where something has gone wrong, sometimes catastrophically wrong. During situations like that, when every available hand is on deck trying to fix the problem, the most enraging thing in the world is a chorus of people who have no data, no real understanding of the issue, or even an understanding of the principles involved with the issue demanding answers NOW!"

It's frustrating when people in the company point the finger of blame without the data to back it up. Development teams are often those who suffer from this the most as they are where the buck stops - e.g. after a major software release there are issues that might be caused by installation errors/poor implementation/poor support response/user error but development get immediately blamed on 'poor product'.

I like that Jobs went down the whole clearly presented 'hard data' route to try to get to the heart of the problem; this is a good lesson on how to defend from criticism from those without knowledge of the real issues.

Completely agree with all of the above. And completely agree that a tech person is not the ideal person to go into sales. But a lot of presales people are not tech people - they are product people. And these people can make the transition to sales well.

What I'd add to your list above is passion. The best sales team are those that really believe in what they are selling. Of course, great sales people can sell anything even when it's rubbish - but for that you need a superstar sales person. For mere mortals passion is key - and that often comes from those who knew the product inside out- ie SE.

What I haven't mentioned is those that made the SE transition to sales very much left SE behind. They could do their own demos but they don't. They need to transition to all the stuff you have above. But if you can retain the product passion - and the marketing/benefits/product knowledge background, you have a good advantage.

It would be a real shame if where I work is an anomaly. SE to sales is a great move in that it makes for a great sale person, and as I say our top sales guy came from that transition (the one year he wasn't top, the guy who was was also previously from SE). This is mainly because they have extensive product knowledge. That is a rare thing in sales and immediately buys you a huge dose of credibility. Clients will then be more likely to believe the more salesy aspect of the process too (where people are more naturally sceptical).

Don't get me wrong, not every good SE will be good at sales - as you say there is a magic element to being great at sales - generally it is the non technical people who make this move. The more technical ones like me go down the product route.

Disagree about the tarpit comment - where I work about half the sales team came directly from the SE department- including the guy who has been top salesman in the company for 4 out of 5 years.

SE (or presales as many places call it) is a great job as you can move into almost any direction you want very easily. You are essentially the ultimate all rounder - you must have extensive product knowledge, great communications skills, good sales awareness, marketing skills, work with the development team and services too - so you can then go into any of these directions actually very easily. I worked in presales for about 6 years and personally moved into product management which I love. If I wanted to I could move into development but I don't had those skills - but if I found a developer with a presales background I would snap them up immediately - would be a killer skill set combo; or a perfect startup founder.

So yes, I completely agree that SE or presales is the perfect job to do to get exposure to nearly all functional areas of business. And that is ideal for 'founder training' or simply if you don't know where you want to end up so want to learn what each part of the business is like.

The guardian live blog is hilarious and well worth a read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/jun/23/wimbledon-2010-t...

"7pm: What's going on here? Once, long ago, I think that this was a tennis match. I believe it was part of a wider tennis tournament, somewhere in south-west London, and the winner of this match would then go on to face the winner of another match and, if he won that, the winner of another match. And so on until he reached the final and, fingers crossed, he won the title.

That, at least, is what this spectacle on Court 18 used to be; what it started out as. It's not that anymore and hasn't been for a few hours now. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it is long and it's horrifying and it's very long to boot. Is it death? I think it might be death.

42 games all."

The fifth set alone was longer than any other tennis match in history...incredible.

And with hardly any paragraph breaks too.

Document formatting is kinda like ui design - get it wrong and people don't want to get to the actual content. I took one look and thought 'I can't put the effort in to read that', in the same way people will leave a website if it's too confusing or ugly.

I found this bit the most interesting :

'Joshua Topolsky, Engadget's editor, recently called for tech companies to create what he calls the "continuous client," a system that will enable you to leave one device and "pick up your session in exactly the same place on the next device you use,"'

I really think this is the next big step. It's become to me quite an obvious issue since I got my iPad. I want to be able to play a game on my iPhone and then pick up exactly where I left off on my iPad. Or do the same with videos; newspaper apps etc. The devices should just be a different window into your same data world.