meiji

How does watching movies on a laptop rather than a TV create "Time. I have time. Lots of it". I think he's missing the part in his life where you can own something without having to use it all the damn time.

Slightly puzzled how this is a surprise. I've been amazed that they've managed to sell hardware without any of their own support for some time. Nobody else gets away with it unless it's rebadged for someone who does have a call centre

Pretty sure Google have already announced they'll release an iOS version of maps. That said it can't come soon enough. I've no idea how they've defined POIs on Apple's maps but they need to go back to the drawing board. Where I live there's a pedestrian zone which Apple say has a gas station in it. Worse is the gas station they say is in the middle of a heavily wooded park (neither of these are there obviously). Whilst I appreciate things can't be perfect, this is so far from perfect and has been since beta phases that I just think Apple is continuing their beta testing using all of us as testers.

The Google Maps app can't come soon enough; I'm only glad that I have TomTom and my car's built-in navigation to fall back on because I have no faith in the software Apple built.

I'm not sure why this is any sort of surprise. Ever since Kickstarter began there have been lots of great ideas, lots of awful ideas. Some of the great ideas have been clearly way too ambitious for small teams but people happily donate money. Given this isn't an investment and what you're doing is giving someone money to follow their dream, to my mind it's almost irrelevant if at the end you don't get your $30 lightbulb. You've lived vicariously through the Lifehacker in question and got to see something go to market or crash and burn.

He's not a UK citizen so that's not it. The Australians aren't calling for his extradition or arrest so that's not it either.

It could just be that he had bail terms set and broke them and the Swedes want a chat about those pesky rape allegations. Don't invent something where it doesn't exist.

It doesn't matter whether in other places it's not illegal; it isn't legal where he did it. Ignorance of the law is no excuse either so what you have is a rape suspect fleeing. It's not the same as the Polanski case admittedly but it's not like he was overdue on a library book

It's also a different thing. He's also wanted in the UK for breaching his bail conditions. So he not only has the extradition hanging over him but he's broken the law in the UK now.

Obviously he has every right to be paranoid about the US trying to extradite him but you have to wonder how far he's willing to go on this. I think the Assange story long ago eclipsed the Wikileaks story (look how little attention Bradley Manning gets) and if he was prosecuted and convicted of rape in Sweden and had to do jail time there, I think the story would only be remembered for Assange. No need for a very messy public trial after extradition, no need for the miles of bad press it would generate.

Lots of sales organisations do this but clearly for them, the volume of sales and customer churn are quantifiable. Quite how you rank 10 engineers in a non-emotional way is a bit of a puzzle.

Just wondering; how does this differ from products like StopTheHacker and SiteLock (amongst others)? I mean, the idea is a solid one, but there's a few players in this arena already.

From the article - "The outage underscores the vulnerabilities of depending on the public cloud versus using your own data centers."

No it doesn't. It underscores the vulnerabilities of not understanding your hosting and accepting the "no outages" slogans of ANY cloud. A single data centre is always susceptible to outages like this, it doesn't matter who owns it. If any of those sites had owned a single data centre that was hit by storm damage, the impact would be the same. I know this is supposed to be the year of the cloud backlash but even so...

I think in half the places I've worked I'd be drunk all the time and the CEOs would be bankrupt. It would definitely focus the mind of people who book in meetings that they really know they won't make but throw in there to placate people and show that they're taking something seriously.

I have to agree and it happens in all areas but actually in a slightly different form usually. To take the analogy from the post, you start walking 20 miles a day and then someone says that it seems easy to do that so why not up it to 30 miles a day. Before you know it, the 40 mile day is the expectation, off days are not allowed and you fall further and further behind, eventually succumbing to burnout and the whole thing ends badly.

Software projects are the same. Nearly every company I've worked at, a senior manager says "Well if we can get these guys doing all this and they seem to be working well within their boundaries, lets push them harder". Pushing people harder can be good if they are really just slacking, but for the most part, people can't sustain more than is comfortable for long periods of time without their work or their mental state suffering. The end result is crappy code, people who leave companies or those that become non-functioning because they're burned.

The problem doesn't just exist with small companies and startups. I've worked with C-level people from established companies who are no more self-aware; they feel the job title makes them important rather than responsible. They feel the job title means they work less rather than work more. In both cases the latter is true.

I'd take someone seriously as a CEO if they behaved like one and that includes involving your colleagues in what you do, be they the board of a fortune 500 company or a few interns for a bootstrapping startup. The arrogance that you are the only person who has good ideas is what kills companies and that goes double for startups of any ilk.

It may be they had a legitimate reason to do this (perhaps some suspicious outgoing volume, reports of abuse etc) but whether they'll ever admit this is the case is unknown. I worked at a big email provider and we'd VERY rarely log into customer accounts for anything other than support or abuse. In fact, I would hazard a guess that the only time it happened outside abuse or support was on an internal dev/test system to test updates etc.

"Cool" is undefinable and you also need to consider one thing. Look a the number of cool people you've known who are unsuccessful because they view being cool as a priority rather than other things in their lives. A lot of people I went to school with 20 years ago are in basically the same jobs they got when they left school. They earned money at that time which seemed amazing to people with no income, got to do more fun stuff because they had the money etc.

Fast forward 20 years and they're in the same place. Just the "uncool" kids have overtaken them by a long way.

It's about finding the RIGHT people to hang out with not just ones who seem cool. If you're 20, your idea of cool is different to when you're 35.

MY advice would be to hang around with people that challenge you because that is really what people need.

If you use it they have the latest version but clearly aren't updating the homepage. Also, it's Windows browsers which is not quite as much use as it might be

The issue with these postcode databases is that once they're released to a customer there's no real way of tracking if they get reused elsewhere. The contract I had with the Royal Mail in the UK mandated destruction of all media and backups of the database once the contract period expired. As we know, getting individual tables out of old DB backups isn't necessarily easy but that's what the terms state. It's easy to see why they do that because it's not really a complicated "product" and very easy to duplicate.

That said, Canada Post should have tried to talk before litigation as all this does is make a crown organisation look like a bully in front of Canadians and now the world.

Do we even have the names of companies that have done it or is it just one or two and the rest is just urban whispers making it sound like everyone does it?

I have, and will continue, to check people out on social networks using publicly available info but I wouldn't ask for account access any more than I would ask if I could go around to their house and read their mail. I will repeat though, information that they have placed in the public domain is fair game.

I was told a long time ago that if the journalist/publication IS the story, something has gone wrong (excluding genuinely serious news like NewsCorp or the journos killed in Syria). Any time someone who runs a news website and spends almost as much time trying to convince you of their value as the value of the stories they're writing you have to ask what the purpose is. In most cases, it's to establish themselves for future money making ventures, not for the journalism.

Now if only they wouldn't call it the Pirate Party, it might actually attract more mainstream attention. Self-marginalising your political ethos because of the name seems remarkably short sighted. Sadly too many people won't get past the name to see the good that is trying to be done.

Essentially, you can "sell" rights to negotiate with you exclusively. It's often used so that the seller can focus on a single party but gets a reasonable payoff if the sale doesn't go ahead for any reason. The other party therefore has to commit resource and won't just do it for the sake of doing it. I've usually seen it done when there are, say, 3 or 4 interested parties to narrow it down to 1 in the first instance. On some occasions the party that had exclusivity drops out and it's either a good thing as the other parties are still there or a bad thing as a serious buyer dropping can raise alarm bells.

Well that's the problem everyone has with competitor acquisition; how much of it is a business info harvest and how much is real. How about sitting down with them to talk, getting a feel for what they're actually about (asking if they have the money, what the terms might be etc) and then if you're still unsure, "sell" them exclusive rights for a period. It's not ideal and a lot of this is done by feel to be honest as for some companies, initial contacts are a daily thing from competitors and some are rejected outright.

Is it my imagination or is this a lot like the vision for Mozilla Raindrop. I was quite disappointed that they started talking about it and then stopped work on it almost at the same time. The ability to pump all of your messaging into a single client and have it prioritise what was important seemed a no-brainer to me.

I'd love to have rss/tweets/fb/g+ updates alongside emails for people I care about rather than maintaining increasingly complex methods of keeping up to date with each in different apps

I think there's a general myth that you can't have your cake and eat it. Startup - work 24/7 or it'll tank. Work for a corporate - work 24/7 or you won't get noticed and be in the typing pool your entire life. Work in finance - work 24/7 or you'll miss the deal that makes you millions.

The irony is, most people (but by no means all) actually realise that balance is important at a certain point and scale back willingly. The startup boom is no different from people starting small home businesses like they've done for years. We've slapped on a sexy name, told people you can become one of the world's richest people but fundamentally, it's the same as making pies in your kitchen. Some people will be happy making pies for the local market, others will want a deal to get them into a supermarket.

There's space for everyone, you just need to find the level that makes you happy. In my opinion ;)

People often assume that clearance is only given out in rare circumstances. It's surprising how easy it is to be told you need it and often when you're dealing with certain agencies it's easier for them to make sure you get it so that if they say the wrong thing then they're covered by your arrangements too.

I touch type. It's the result of almost 30 years behind a keyboard but I don't think what I do is the "right" way

I was expecting an interesting nugget of info. Too many companies employ someone to do something vague because they like the person. It rarely works out and then someone has to deal with the fallout. As loads of others have said, that was a relatively cheap lesson. People pay hundreds of times that amount to learn things sometimes.

I would have to say that as a tech person in general, the blog post would have me avoiding looking for jobs there full stop. Sometimes you find good people who aren't perfect for you but you know will work out. I worked with an engineer who was an exceptional perl/systems developer. I bumped into a former colleague who asked how the other guy was doing and said that he would love to hire him despite the fact he had no experience with his new job's technology as he knew that he would be an asset. This is why saying "You need to have worked on product" or "You need experience in industry X" is very short sighted. In some roles, it's required, in other roles it's an added bonus. Founders, recruiters and hiring managers need to understand the difference.

I think the business model is definitely to sell to someone else consolidating in the sector. I use this and have used Xobni but don't need the services enough to pay for them like most people I suspect. It's genuinely useful for people who don't know how their email search works and for those who want to track people down though.