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rp's comments

rp | 17 years ago | on: Imagining College Without Grades

Yale Law School, which is consistently rated as #2 after Harvard, has pass or fail w/no grades. The implication is that getting in is enough to "signal" your "quality" on the market. Compare this all other law schools where students are mercilessly ranked based on a bell curve.

rp | 17 years ago | on: Steve Jobs speaks out about his health

"a great deal of apple's strength is that they don't follow trends. if they listened to what the industry thinks, they would license osx for plain-vanilla pcs, compete against ugly low-cost hardware from their competitors, etc etc etc, until they were indistinguishable from dell or hp, and therefore completely uninteresting."

They did exactly this a year before Jobs came back. In spite of Jobs's claims to the otherwise, the experiment did not last long enough to indicate whether it would have been viable in the long term. What is clear is that the clone makers where releasing computers more expandable and powerful than what Apple actually had on the market.

rp | 17 years ago | on: Incorporate for free (Until Friday)

Please remember that the only thing that is "free" is the fee that you would pay this company to do your paperwork. You will have to pay business organization fees to the state of formation no matter what you do (check your state). As noted by others, most states also charge yearly franchise taxes, which is in addition to any federal taxes you are liable for if you see revenue.

rp | 18 years ago | on: What the F***? - Why We Curse

Linking free speech to property rights carries a bunch of political and philosophical assumptions that are divorced from the legal history and realities of 1st amendment law in the U.S. Thats not just not how it works from either a legal or policy standpoint.

rp | 18 years ago | on: Is Flickr Worth $4 Billion?

The one thing that stands out in this analysis is the author's almost casual statement that Flicker users regard "Flickr as their property and are resistant to change of any kind." Given the recent flap over adding video to the site, which is an individual user's choice, what would kind of noise would people make if ads started popping up on Flickr even if people could opt-out? The issue of how user's seemingly arbitrary whims may obstruct monetization of community sites seems to begging for further analysis.

rp | 18 years ago | on: How To Get Your Own Fanboys

Apple fans have always been fervent even during the very long period where the computers very obviously underpowered and overpriced. Apple was putting out 040-based computers at high prices when the PC industry was knee-deep in comparatively cheap Pentium systems. It was only until the Power PC came along that Apple started to release systems where the hardware was hefty enough to match the quality of the interface. I also challenge anybody to argue that the OS, as opposed to interface, was anything but creaky for many years. OS 10 (not OS X) was garbage.

rp | 18 years ago | on: Would you have answered this job ad?

Its important to remember that market for Internet skills was completely different back in 1994. Working sweatshop hours, and jumping to unknown VC-backed companies for a shot at an IPO was just part of the game.

I will also note that the ad is promoting explicit high-level programming skills and states that "[F]amiliarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary." This would have cut-off a lot of people who were riding the "web development" bandwagon (rudimentary HTML, perhaps some CGI scripting) and gotten the attention of lot of skilled people looking to catch a quick IPO.

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