JGailor

I highly suspect very few will ahve to tear it out. It'll cost more money to replace than it would to pay license fees for many companies. Developer time costs money.

That is the strategy companies are using to monetize these sort of projects. Give it away for free and then charge when a company has to make the choice of spending money to get rid of it and to replace it or to just pay for it. The lesson to take away is that any open source supported by a company will potentially become something that will have to be licensed commercially, so if anything will create an incentive to not use open source.

If they're not just homebody introverts in the first place, they may already have a pretty saturated schedule/network without many suitable people around to pair off with.

Then they really don't have the time for a relationship. Maybe they just want a hook-up, but that also takes time to connect with people and build relationships for something casual. It's all just work, at the end of the day, and a lot of people are unsatisfied with that answer. Things like being on the high-end of attractiveness are like cheat codes, but those people still have to put in effort to connect with people before they get to the fun part.

The problem with these articles is that they never go into exactly what parts of the message and metadata is actually encrypted. It can't all be encrypted (or at least I'm not aware of how that would work in practice), so it would be useful to know that, for instance, while the message is encrypted, the sender and receiver metadata is not, which certainly wouldn't make information about who is communicating with who private.

Well, given how many people Zynga is buying vs. the mass exodus that seems to be happening in S.F. from them, I'd be interested in seeing their recruitment numbers.

I understand your point completely, and I agree with you. It still doesn't change the fact that when you give up your Facebook account information, you are not just surrendering up your personal information, you are giving up the personal information of everyone in your network that has chosen to share with you. It's a breach of trust with that network.

Facebook played the Friend card in their press release, and did it really well. If you are giving up your Facebook password, you're not just giving up your information, you're also giving up your friend's information as well.

If any potential employer asks for your Facebook account information, just inform them that your social network would not appreciate giving out their information to a 3rd party, and you think it would be a violation of their trust in you.

Agreed. At this point he needs to start looking at SOA designs and figuring out if he can break this application out into services that can be individually tuned and managed.

I took a professional ethics class in college, and the professor was a personal friend of Roger. The whole class was about Challenger, and the incredible failure of judgement around it's demise. Roger came into one of our classes and spoke to us late in the semester.

After listening to tapes of the trials, interviews, reading transcripts, and reading articles it was very apparent to me that this was a failure of management. The lead engineer, during the discussions of whether to launch the night before, was arguing that the engineering evidence did not support a launch under the temperature conditions projected for the following morning. He was told by Morton-Thiokol business reps to "take off your engineer hat, and put on your manager hat".

Evidence points to this failure happening because NASA needed a PR boost for funding, and M.T. wanted to continue doing business with them delivering solid-state boosters.

Because Roger Boisjoly spoke to Congress during the hearings he was black-listed from his industry. At no point during the decisions leading up to that disaster did good engineering practices that could have prevented this destruction come into play.

I find it a little annoying when anyone promises something like this in the headline, and then provides no direct action to take on it.

I was basically ready to open my wallet and at least try it for a few days, but just throwing a signup form means I'm pretty much going to forget about and never look again having been let down once already.

I'm not in love with the design, or how big and out of place it feels just appearing in the top left corner, but it's a great start and I hope they keep pushing it forward.

I hope developers of Alfred for OS X look at this and try to apply some of those ideas going forward. App-specific, contextual Alfred would be great.

I co-founded my first company @ 30. It was pretty scary, but me and my co-founder kept working on our day jobs until we felt like we had the momentum to go raise some money. As soon as we did, we both quit and went to work full-time.

It was scary, but we did specifically did not burn our bridges. We kept in touch with all the people we could so that if we needed to have some bridge funding via consulting work, it was always on the table for us.

The strongest counter-argument I can make for saying "You need to be doing X,Y,Z to succeed" is that the failure rate for startups is over 90%, so no-one knows what really works or doesn't. There's a combination of execution, luck, and recognizing good timing that comes into play. I've seen companies/individuals hit it big with the most laid back attitude toward the product because they found the right thing at the right time (PlentyOfFish), and people who work insanely hard who just disappear (the list is huge here...).

There are plenty of examples to counter your argument in the startup community. FriendFeed is an easy one. It was built while each of its founders had day jobs until they had a viable product to shop around.

I take issue with these kind of quotes because, to be quite frank, they are completely out of context and make no sense in the myriad of ways people try to make them apply to unrelated contexts. It sounds like nothing more than marketing hype, as opposed to a message of substance.

This is really awesome advice. Thanks. Living in the Bay Area sometimes means you're in an echo chamber. I hope that as people travel for the holidays they will take your advice and bring it up to friends and family that may not be exposed to this kind of information.

Just added it to the posting. Thanks for pointing this out, but beyond the release itself, I feel like it's hard to make someone who's generally apathetic about news or politics understand why something like SOPA could be so damaging to the freedom of expression and information the Internet had engendered. There seems to be some sort of social/psychology need to tie things up in neat packaging to make it easy to consume, and "weaponized censorship" really galvanized me.

When I first heard this, all I could think about was "Amber Alert".

This is a great point that is often overlooked in the startup work environment. In 8 years of working at Startups I have only ever been in one place where anyone actually worked a solid 8 hours (everyone happened to pair-program there, which was one of the biggest contributors to this IMO). In most places people spend somewhere between 25-50% of their time surfing the web, reading personal email, hanging out in IRC rooms, socializing, etc. At this particular startup we really did none of that during the day. We all just felt really strongly about what we were working on, as a team we worked with the business guys to set a strong direction for the near-short term, and for four hours in the morning and four in the afternoon we worked. That was it. At 6 pm we left basically feeling punch-drunk for the mental exhaustion, and we went and followed our respective personal pursuits. The result?

The first place I'd worked where we launched on schedule with no overtime worked, with all of the features that business wanted for the big 1.0 (well, web-app 1.0... Really just a euphemism here).

My point is that while Arrington goes on about working insane hours, everyone always seems to overlook how much time in the office isn't actually productive for the product. I've been at places where people "worked" 16 hour days, at least 6 of which were spent playing Starcraft LAN games.

I'm a little surprised I haven't seen this on TechCrunch yet.

Good advice, although from my experience (in San Francisco), getting to know the staff is the easiest way to ensure a free -> cheap working environment. Local places with a lot of people means you can get away with 1 - 2 cups of coffee for the day, which will run you $4 - $7 depending on how swank the place is.

Also, buy a couple of $5 power strips and leave them at the places you frequent. Give something back to the community that's supporting you (whether they know it or not).

That is definitely an interesting quirk.

The first one seemed pretty decent of them. It would have at least given me a warm feeling about not getting an offer based on concern for my well-being.

Ah. I don't think it was a case of me being too "old" as maybe me being "too uptight" or something along those lines (although I'm still pretty young I guess I've recently slid outside that 20's sweet-spot, and as most of my friends will attest too I'm probably not uptight-enough at times).

It's sort of the reason why I found it to be such a weird response, only because it seems an interview is not necessarily the best place to judge how someone acts personality-wise once they've integrated into a team and become comfortable.

Someone else brought up the age discrimination thing to me, but honestly even if that was the case these are good people and I think as a founder of a company you do need to make the best decision you can for the well-being of the business.