tx's comments | WingNews

tx | 17 years ago | on: Looking for Plan B - 'almost no one is seeking to create long-term value or build businesses'

I belive that just like WallStreet was driving/encouraging increase in housing prices and spending habits of Americans, Silicon Valley VCs of late have been encouraging build-to-flip ventures.

tx | 17 years ago | on: Firefox plugin Socialbrowse launches in-page commenting

Yeah, shadows.com tried the same thing, and they had plugins for IE/FF, are they still around?

tx | 17 years ago | on: Are You Ready to Give Up Cable TV for Internet Video?

TV programming is junk, it's anti-Internet, it's old. What's the point of watching whatever someone else pre-selected for you? Netflix is obsolete too: these funky plastic disks are so last century.

If I can't download a video, I don't care for it. iTunes HD rentals are ok, but selection is small. Amazon's offering is Windows-only... What a weird choice of a target market... I thought only unemployed still use Windows at home since it comes standard on $299 laptops.

tx | 17 years ago | on: Facebook Connect Will Be Game-Changing...and Dangerous

On the one hand, you have to admit this is revolutionary.

#1 No it isn't. Remember Microsoft Passport?

The web will be transformed from the still (somewhat) closed system it is today, to a massively social experience

No it wont. See #1.

tx | 17 years ago | on: 3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia

There is another knol out there, it's called "about.com", and all 3 points the author is making (including high pagerank) isn't working for them.

Most of content on about.com is utter junk: a bunch of bored housewives trying to make a buck are desperate to write something, anything.

tx | 17 years ago | on: You don't have to sell your company to have financial security

No, they aren't. The former suppresses competition because it relies on existence of "big gorillas" to come over and buy you, therefore no new gorillas can emerge. Meanwhile, most often than not, big gorillas simply put their new toys on the shelf, thus suppressing innovation.

In that regard, entrepreneurs who build to flip are no different from real estate speculators: they make a few people richer, but in the end you'll end up with the same lot of aging houses.

Not to mention that "build to flip" companies simply suck. Their products are jokes built overnight as parasites on shoulders of open source excellence, and in the end they don't reward financially anyone but investors and (but not always) founders: it's statistically stupid decision to work long hours as a regular programmer for a startup whose goal is to sell out for $50M after 3 rounds of funding.

I like Paul a lot, but his patronage and encouragement (!) of build-and-flip projects is the worst part of "PG culture" that I have the biggest problem with. Especially when he blames VCs for not funding the "next Google". The Google wouldn't has happened if S&L landed on YC.news some day in 99: they'd sell out to Yahoo for $10M instead.

tx | 17 years ago | on: Linux should rival Apple, urges Ubuntu founder

Dell charges $1-2 per crapware install, but sometimes those are free if Dell feels like they add value. Vista Basic, OEM edition, is probably $50 (I am guessing about this one). This requires 20-25 cases of infection with useless shit to offset Microsoft tax.

This still can't explain how come Ubuntu-based machines are more expensive.

I think that Dell simply rides the demand train: they're the only big-name brand that sells Ubuntu-powered machines (very few know that Lenovo sells SUSE) and they're enjoying higher profit margins on them.

tx | 17 years ago | on: Linux should rival Apple, urges Ubuntu founder

With laptops, there are 3 things to be worried about: video, wireless and suspend/resume.

Video: Always Intel integrated. Wifi : Anything from Intel Suspend/Resume: Thinkpads

tx | 17 years ago | on: Linux should rival Apple, urges Ubuntu founder

"Desktop" is too broad of a definition. Gnome/Nautilus already kick Finder's ass, but is it enough to recommend Ubuntu over OSX to my parents? No.

What Linux needs, is PC manufacturer's support. I am not talking about drivers here, I'm talking about quality pre-installs done at the factory. Once suppliers see this, they'll provide quality Linux drivers in order to compete. And for users stuff "will just work".

ThinkPad T61 running Ubuntu is in many ways superior to MBP/OSX (and 30% cheaper), but only because I deliberately configured it with only Linux-compatible components and spent a weekend tuning it upon arrival.

tx | 17 years ago | on: Uncomfortable answers to questions on Economy

What I don't get is why aren't housing prices falling even further? In my recent memory (I moved to US in 2000) house prices rose by 200-400% and they haven't fallen nearly as much lately.

A decent houses/condos in all interesting US metro areas are still in $400K+ range, which is absolutely insane, considering median family incomes.

Even most financial planning books/sites will tell you that it's "normal" to spend about 30% of your after-tax income on housing. WTF? Since when it's been "normal"?

tx | 17 years ago | on: Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S.

Could not agree more. I know it first hand that wedding photographers are probably the most underpaid kind: even though I love photography, but sitting in a quiet cubicle writing 5 lines of Java a day and hacking on your own stuff for fun at average "corporate IT Job" is by FAR easier money.

Even if you charge $3K per wedding, you still (most probably) won't be able to book every single weekend, pay shitload to private medical insurance (like $1.5K/mo), work your ass off post-processing 2-3 thousand photos you take per wedding, and yes - deal with hysterical bitchez who had absolutely no life for a whole year planning this "day of their life".

Wedding photographers are either: bored housewifes making little money on a side, producing mediocre results, or talented people who are unable to find any other way to make money on photography: they work really hard and get paid well, but that money is hard earned.

And this is how you do it: http://juliabailey.com/

tx | 17 years ago | on: The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company

I have to disagree: founders of the most successful and admired companies stick around for long, long time. Neither of Brin, Page, Gates, Moore or Yang think there are more interesting activities than running their companies.

Maybe that's why there aren't many new googles around: entrepreneurs have "more interesting" activities in mind they need to make a quick $5M for.

tx | 17 years ago | on: Open Flash Chart Plugin for Ruby on Rails

I guess people at FusionCharts aren't happy. It's hard to be a commercial software tools/libraries company these days.

tx | 17 years ago | on: First hints of Microsoft's $300 mill “fight back” ads appear

The problem with this is that I want my RAM to run applications on it, not just the OS alone. I want to say to Vista: "fuck off, this is my RAM, for my applications, to solve MY problem, not yours".

We don't buy RAM to run operating systems, we buy RAM to run software, and OS must be our "Santa's little helper", not "Santa's rape-me-in-the-ass hairy inmate".

tx | 17 years ago | on: First hints of Microsoft's $300 mill “fight back” ads appear

What has changed? I just bought a new laptop with Vista on it. The poor puppy was spending about 10 minutes to boot up and cool down: HDD activity upon startup was so insane that it was better to let it sit for 10 minutes before you could actually do anything. After that it could barely breathe on its own 1GB of RAM, without any applications running. I went through the list of running services but couldn't clean up much: there was nothing excessive. Even usual anti-virus junksoft was absent. The damn thing needs 1GB of RAM only to stay barely alive on its own.

How is that usable? These days we're accustomed to running 2-3 copies of virtualized OSes. An operating system in 2008 mustn't assume more than 128MB of RAM available for just sitting and doing nothing, let alone demand 4 times as much.

XP was released when 128MB of RAM was more or less the norm. If you had 512MB, XP was screaming. With Vista, these two numbers (for "barely works" and "screaming") are 1GB and 3GB, i.e. Vista effectively increased its predecessor's hardware requirements by more than 400%

That's just insane.

tx | 17 years ago | on: A Brief History of Dangerous Ideas

Raganwald, your writing kicks ass. I wish I've mastered this language well enough to disagree with some of your points [regarding obsolesce of VCs] properly.

Have fun in August!

tx | 17 years ago | on: Apple Q3 2008: Macs unstoppable, solid growth down the line

What "new and exciting" is on the web?

After I dumped Windows, moved to Linux and especially after bought a Mac I actually started enjoying installing and exploring new (to me) software. I can honestly say that these programs changed the way I work or even think about something: ssh, gvim, quicksilver and (oh yes) multi-touch on the latest MBP.

So far there is only one online application I use: gmail (dumped POP3 clients long ago) and it isn't particularly exciting.

Everything else is the same old online stuff: ever-changing flavors of news reading, talking to people, humor, etc. Just like it was last year, just like it had always been. Always, even before Internet, when I was on FIDO.

Apple makes computers fun again: there is a lot of cool stuff to play with. Do you realize that while everyone is drooling over little piece of online advertisement money, Apple is actually milking the desktop? Sometimes I wish PG didn't do Viaweb, but rather did something in consumer software space, YC'd been much more interesting.

tx | 17 years ago | on: IPhone 2.0: The glory wore off in wash

I’ve installed but not actually used ... Yelp, Movies.app, Facebook, PayPal, NYTimes...

What?! Those are apps? That's nice, I want off-browser applications for my favorite sites too, on a regular PC desktop: without annoying login screens, without endless "please waits", without ads (yes, I'll pay for it), with look and feel (especially fonts) consistent with the rest of the system.

I want my stuff to get off the browser, anyone here cares to submit a YC application?

tx | 17 years ago | on: The Techcrunch Web Tablet Project

There's a marketing play here, you see how the slash separates two types of future customers?

"Cloud computing" - for those who believe in it and "web browsing" for the rest of us.

:-)

tx | 17 years ago | on: Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry

Why would that industry be worried? These machines aren't replacing more powerful laptops nor desktops: I bet people are buying them as an addition to a regular computer.

I was shopping for EeePC and reading reviews of it, and lots of people were saying just that - a cheap travel companion, not a laptop replacement. Hey, I myself was going to get it precisely for that reason.

Price isn't as important, you can get "real" laptops for cheap. I paid $299 for Acer laptop for my parents: 1.7Gz Core Duo 2, 1GB ram, 15" LCD, 120GB HDD, big&usable keyboard. The whole thing is big, that's why it's cheap.

The point here is size: these machines are painful to type on and screens are tiny for most kinds of work (be it documents, programming, image editing, etc). They're decent "time wasters" - youtube, reddit, etc.