gs8

Web hosting talk forums are a great place hosting deals.

Why is this getting downvoted?

Rackspace isn't anymore reliable than any other reputable provider. Every network/host will go down, the main question is how fast can they recover and how good is your backup strategy. You could save a lot by looking elsewhere. The last time I checked their pricing I would have been able to host at two places for what Rackspace wanted.

Tell: Maybe. Depends on my relationship with the client and the situation. Responsibility: NO.

My general rule is I am not their business advisor or market analyst (unless they hire me for those roles), something that looks crazy to me might be a great business idea/wish. I don't want someone to shy away from their dream because I can't view it from their perspective.

If I was giving advice and if New York times would have come to me for their paywall, I would have said not a good idea, but than I would have lost a $40million project and lost any credibility as a good business person because I said no to a great business opportunity.

Although I have lots of business experience, when I am getting paid to be a Developer or Designer that is where I should limit myself to.

Do you need that many meetings? That seems like too much of a time commitment for simple discussion which can happen via IM or phone.

Also if you live in the same complex and you have no idea as to why your partner missed the meetings, than your communication needs some work.

If all you are doing is just meeting to prepare for a business proposal, than most likely your idea isn't going to go anywhere. Start working on implementing your business plan rather than putting your business plan together.

Didn't know you were in UK. Colo/Dedicated server costs are definitely higher than here in the US. You might want to look for another dedicated server provider rather than the cloud.

The best way to get good disk IO from EC2 is setting up using a medium or larger instance and setting up a software raid.

For most projects you won't save money by using AWS or Rackspace. You are better of with dedicated/colo servers, unless you have managed servers or rackspace servers.

For CPU intensive tasks AWS is a good option, for CDN AWS & Rackspace are both good choices depending on your needs.

I am currently using AWS, for our next project I plan on using a hybrid solution VPS/Dedicated server-AWS CDN-Rackspace CDN.

Having used dedicated servers, AWS, and Rackspace. This is how I see AWS & Rackspace.

AWS

Pros:

- Easy to add/reduce capacity

- Very powerful configurations available for CPU intensive tasks

- Inexpensive CDN with SSL & CNAME support

- Disk space can be expanded without additional RAM/CPU

- Good load balancers

Cons:

- Poor disk read/write performance [i.e. slow DB performance]

- Very expensive compared to hosting yourself (if you can afford to buy hardware)

- Disk space is very expensive

- Bandwidth is very expensive

- Instances are expensive

- No Customer Service (i'm not talking about technical support just basic customer service) unless you pay for expensive support contracts

- RAM/CPU can't be expanded without upgrading into a package you might not need

- Limited to 1 IP address per instance, which means you are limited to 1 SSL site per instance (you could use SNI, but many browsers still don't support it)

Rackspace

Pros:

- Easy to add/reduce capacity

- Better disk read/write performance than AWS

- Inexpensive Akamai CDN

Cons:

- Very expensive compared to dedicated/colo hosting yourself (if you can afford to buy hardware)

- Disk space can't be expanded without purchasing more RAM/CPU

- Cloudfiles (file storage) hosting is very expensive

- Bandwidth is very expensive

- CPU/Bundles are expensive

- CDN doesn't yet support CNAME

- IP Addresses are expensive

(This is off the top of my head, I might have missed something.)

If you are based in California, you still have to incorporate as a foreign corporation even if you are incorporated in Delaware.

If you are starting out and based in California just incorporate in California and save yourself a lot of money. Once you grow or are about to be funded you can always merge/sell/dissolve a corporation into a foreign corporation.

This applies to all states where you do business, have employees (not contractors) or locations. You must always incorporate as a foreign corporation in that state, for most bootstrapped startups (based in USA) it is a bad idea to incorporate in Delaware. Not only are the initial costs higher but you have additional legal requirements (docs/filings/records) which you must maintain. You can always merge/dissolve/sell a corporation into another when you need to just consult a tax expert when you need to do that to prevent unnecessary tax burden.

The reason a Delaware corporation is preferred is because Delaware is more business first-consumer second laws whereas California (most states except Delaware/Nevada/South Dakota[for financial institutes]) is/are consumer first-business second laws so if your business might be affected by that then you should incorporate in Delaware first, for 99% of startups this isn't a problem.

PHP is powerful, it just isn't the new tool on the block, so it isn't as popular. Like what has happened to Perl.

I guess the VCs think that if Color can get their patents the worst case scenario will be that Color can become a patent troll.

The $41mil shouldn't even be a topic right now because the VCs that funded them are some very experienced betters in the game. If they made this bet they must have seen something. Honestly I don't see anything of value right now, but then again I'm not into sharing photo's with strangers thing.

I also think they are not a social company like Twitter/Flickr but are hoping to generate enough data using their mobile apps to be able to identify various locations without gps and sell that data, sort of like that one company which maps out locations using WiFi access point names.

As for this new bubble debate and Color's $41mil, no matter what the situation you will always have a few people saying the market is good and a few people saying that the market is too weak/strong. It's like the glass half/full debate that can never go away.

Never had any problems with Toshiba laptops.

It is but BN should improve the specs little bit and market/sell it like a tablet.

I stopped buying overpriced Sony tech sometime ago, about 10 years ago. After I bought a Vaio from them and they couldn't even provide proper drivers for it on their website. How difficult is it for a company to provide some drivers on their own website? When it came to deciding between a PS3 or XBox, we bought a Xbox.

My Sony purchases since then have been some CDRs (on sale) and an auto time setting alarm clock (couldn't find any other, and I need one that day).

I actually hope BN is able to make money with the Nook, especially with the Color Nook, it's a good device.

Maybe BN should introduce a Color Nook Pad, with slightly better hardware, and enter into the Android tablet market. They already have a large retail network. There is a big opening for tablets priced under $500.

His attorney says:

Hotz's attorney, Stewart Kellar, told Threat Level and IGN that Hotz has not fled to South America and that the missing components have been provided to Sony.

Its just Sony trying to declare him guilty in public.

He's on vacation: http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/03/fearmongering.html

If you don't want to read the article,

The US solicitor general, which represents the federal government in the Supreme Court, on Friday filed an amicus brief in support of i4i, saying that the US Patent and Trademark Office should not be second-guessed by a jury.

(Microsoft winning this is a good thing.)

I should have phrased it better.

They do that but still spend resources on actually developing proper product.

They don't look for a "rockstar developer" and turnout a awesome app/game with a budget of $1,000.

For a console maker it's a good policy. Not only will it keep "fart apps" away it also is a good incentive for game publishers to invest in a game rather than turn it out asap at the lowest cost possible.

Today's News Summary:

Apple = Trademark Troll

Microsoft = Patent Troll

AT&T = Monopoly

If Amazon fights this they could win and it could be good news for everyone, except Apple.

p.s. Yes I know Amazon is a patent troll as well.

The pricing you were quoted depends on what requirements you gave and whom you contacted. It can vary greatly.

It can't work without an investment of $10B or larger if you want to make even a small dent in the wireless industry, due to spectrum rights (in the USA). This type of money is not VC money but more private equity firms.

MVNOs don't work because the wireless carriers hold all the cards and they don't let you in on any profits. Most successful MVNOs are owned by the major carriers for a reason. If you think retail wireless data prices are high try looking at what wholesale wireless data costs are, you can't operate a successful business with those prices. AT&T won't even sell MVNOs data, it's voice&text only. Even if you become successful carriers can shut you down whenever they want. Having been down the startup MVNO road I have learned my lessons, unless the government forces competitive wholesale pricing the best you can do is build a customer base and than sell it all back to your carrier like what Boost & Virgin did. MVNO is possible with VC funding but the success rate will be even worse than the current social apps, and there is no big payday.

WiFi networks sound great but can't work because the range isn't there, even in highly populated areas you will run into interference which will bring data speeds due to every slow speeds. There is a reason Google WiFi didn't work even in Mountain View.

The cheapest method is probably "buying" exclusive rights (franchise rights) to be the local phone or cable company, like the large telcos do one at time and building a fiber network. In most cities ATT/Verizon/Comcast/etc... will just outbid you. Than you have to convince (buy/lobby) city council members and/or mayor. To do a decent sized city you are looking at tens of millions in bootstrap mode.

If anyone out there thinks they can get VC invest in the 7 figures or higher for a MVNO or local landline/cable company project. Feel free to get in touch with me I am always interested in an adventure.

Anonymous web is perfect, communities are able to filter out trolls on there on. If some one wants to have a single identity they are able to do that in an anonymous web. But the reverse can't be done. Zuckerberg benefits financially from a single identity web and that is why he likes it.

It's amazing how much has been given to ATT & Verizon to build out new fiber networks (which they still haven't finished) and now when people start using them to their potential we will be hit with overages, awesome.

It won't get any better until the cities/localities remove exclusive territory rights for companies that provide phone and cable.

Not much here, Apple schools the marketing experts because they opened a store at an event and many people showed up.

This is called event marketing. You have a large number of people with similar interests and if they are your potential customers, you put yourself there.

The one thing Apple is great at is getting free press by keeping secrets, this article is a good example of that.

It's a shame what has happened to cnet, they used to have good tech content. Now they publish poorly written articles with catchy headlines to get clicks. From the looks of this article it seems like they also employ the same standards as the new AOL.

No project is ever finished. Once it meets the basic requirements given to you before starting, it is finished. Bug fixes are an ongoing process.

First you should ask yourself why you need a cofounder? What will they do?

If what they will do is perform a job than you don't need a cofounder but an employee.

If you already have a stable service I don't see the point of brining in a cofounder because they wont have your vision.

One thing that could be beneficial is if you have a competitor who is at the same level as you, you could merge with them and become cofounders which would help you increase your presence, provide reasonable equity, and offer similar visions.

If you just need a cofounder to reduce your workload you could always hire programmers to do the development work and manage your business yourself.

No. But there is always someone trying to pull a fast one on someone else.

RSS Feed, a lot easier than constant reloading.

Ditto. To me, it looks like hipster.

Although I have never been a fan of HP or Palm. I really like webOS and hope they become a decent player in this market. We can use competition, especially with what looks like the death of Symbian.

First you should come up with a good idea, from looking at your initial post it looks like you don't have an actual idea. Than hire programmers or outsource your development work. Without completely quitting your practice.

Just curious, how many years did you spend completing your education? A medical doctor with an electrical engineering degree is quite rare.