Default State

The default state of a startup is failure - Chris Dixon:

The default state of the world is to stay the way it is, which means the default state of a startup is failure.

Facebook's business model

Facebook's business model - Chris Dixon:

A more likely outcome is that Facebook uses their assets - a vast number of extremely engaged users, it's social graph, Facebook Connect - to monetize through another business model. If they do that, the company is probably worth a lot more than the expected $100B IPO valuation. If they don't, it's probably worth a lot less.

Methinks Dixon gives Facebook too much credit. They've been hiring really smart people for a long long time and yet their newst cab off the proftiability rank is ripped straight from Twitter/Tumblr in the same way that most of their feature-adds of the last few years are acquisitons and regurgitations of successful implimentations elsewhere. 

AppleSquared

Apple squared, (four)squared - Tech News and Analysis:

Apple will immediately become a giant payments company, with an installation base that is expected to encompass half of all mobile devices sold. The company will have the best local search abilities, far exceeding any existing recommendation engine. And due to its enormous reach, it will possess a payment system that merchants will line up to support.

Time and Taste

Time and taste - Marco.org:

But all of the money, web traffic, and cheap cardboard boxes in the world can't buy two huge factors that contribute to Apple's modern success: time and taste.

Simple, valid arguement... in the consumer space. Some could argue the "consumerisation" of the enterprise means this is ubiqutiously relevant, but backend infrastructure is 

a) Not penetrated by Apple in any real way shape or form (I don't care if you work in a small business/freelance where your whole backend is run on SaaS, you don't matter). Case in point... OSX Lion Server. 

b) Not dictated by design or first to market. Marco argues that a well constructed first to market product producer will reign supreme indefinately, but VMware were first to market with an enterprise ready hypervisor and held the reigns for only five years. This is a technology that all enterprises want to eventually use to run 100% of their workloads, be it on premise or "in the cloud". The CLOUD is powered by hypervisors. 2012+ is a real three horse race between ESX, Hyper-V and XenServer. In this scenario and so many others, Microsofts late start + "unlimited cash" combination didn't proclude them from making a huge comeback (Hyper-V 3).

I see no reason why WP8(.5) / Windows 8 can't come in strong against Apple's iOS 6 / OSX ML given that Metro is well designed and backed by an equally large ecosystem of users and developers.

This post was written on an iPhone, published on an iPad and viewed on a MBP (running Windows 8 Server Beta), so biased I am not.

Thinking about Death

How thinking about death can lead to a good life:

Thinking about death can actually be a good thing. An awareness of mortality can improve physical health and help us re-prioritize our goals and values, according to a new analysis of recent scientific studies. 

Jobs hit this on the head in his now oh so famous 2005 Stanford speech, and science now backs him up. Constantly reaffirming your mortality ensures you make the most of today.

Happiness

Free

Ruffled Feathers - The Brooks Review:

Regular people don't care about their attention as long as Facebook is free.

This is the post-consumer-centric-web world we live in. People will willingly put up with ads (which at best distract them from the task at hand, at worse incite them to buy things they didnt want or need) and companies collecting & distributing vast amounts of data about their personal preferences as long as it means that Facebook, GMail and Words with Friends remain free.

Every tech literate (i use that term loosely) person I know harps on about the life changing benefits of Dropbox. Not one of them pays the yearly fee. I'd be very interested to see how evangelical they were if the free option was removed.

Full disclosure: I pay for Dropbox, Exchange, don't have a Facebook and the $1 version of Words with Friends. I also pay for Evernote, will pay for Asana when they let me, fly Business even when its not on points and religiously stay at Hiltons. Value trumps cost.

Real Men

Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies - Linus Torvalds

US wants AU cloud business

US slams Australia's on-shore cloud fixation | Delimiter:

The United States' global trade representative has strongly criticised a perceived preference on the part of large Australian organisations for hosting their data on-shore in Australia, claiming it created a significant trade barrier for US technology firms and was based on a misinterpretation of the US Patriot Act.

So... even though we would have to suffer higher latency (150ms vs 30ms) and deal with data sovereignty issues, we should still prefer Uncle Sams' cloud offerings over that of our own. No thanks.

Windows 8 vs Mountain Lion [Betas]

Having used Windows 8 Server in a Fusion Tech Preview 2012 VM for the last fortnight with no issue whatsoever I decided to take the plunge and format my main desktop (productivity/gaming) Windows 7 machine to Windows 8 Server, too.

Can happily report this has also been relatively painless (only exception has been the need to manually specify INF for some drivers - autodetect based on folder & driver setup programs sometimes unreliable which speaks only to the fact I am installing Windows 7 drivers on Windows 8 and nothing about the quality of the OS).

Can't say the same for Mountain Lion in "production". Finder crashes all the time (for those of you only Windows literate, Finder is the equivilent to explorer.exe). Nuff said.

Pirate Bay [literally] moving to the cloud

Pirate Bay Putting Its Servers In The Air | Gizmodo Australia:

But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away.

I like this. Web companies moving their domains to neutral countries in response to SOPA, now literally moving infrastructure into the sky to avoid being shutdown. Regulation sucks.

RDP exposure

RDP and the Critical Server Attack Surface - Dan Kaminsky's Blog:

Extrapolating from this sample, we can see that there's approximately five million RDP endpoints on the Internet today.

Patch MS12-020 today and or turn on NLA for RDP enabled machines. This isn't a big deal unless you're unable or too lazy to perform the above steps. Let's not make it one.

Fusion vs Parallels

This is subjective, perhaps. I've always used Fusion. It's worked great. I've heard a lot of hype about Parallels (7) so decided to try building my Windows 8 Server VM on it (supported in latest builds). This was a disaster. Hung repeatedly, the start bar kept "flicking" as if explorer was crashing and reloading really fast. Explorer did crash a bunch of times. Mouse capture was unreliable. I tried a few solutions listed in the Parallels KB to no avail.

I've just rebuilt the same VM on Fusion Technical Preview 2012, also offering Windows 8 support and the experience has been the same as that of my previous 2008 R2 VM, ie flawless. 

Now you know.

vSphere 5 U1

Release: VMware vSphere 5.0 Update 1 | The VMguy:

The VMware vCenter Server for Windows 5.0 Update 1 offers the following improvements: Guest Operating System Customization Improvements: vCenter Server adds support for customization of the following guest operating systems: Windows 8

 That was quick. Also supports Lion 10.7.3

Guild Leadership = MBA

You're hired, now let's kill Onyxia - Bing Gordon on structuring your business like a WoW guild | The Verge:

I think that every Fortune 500 company should have a gamer in the executive suite," Gordon said. "I think that game design is the new MBA. If you don't have an MBA yet, play World of Warcraft instead.

Incentivising fifty people to show up on time, prepared and motivated to perform to the best of their ability without paying them, and even without guarantee of virtual payback (loot/progression) is a skill. To create and cultivate a cooperative environment in which money is not the primary driver for your 'employees' performance/attendance is a skill. To acheive a degree of success with said unpaid, talented 'employees is an even bigger accomplishment.

Mountain Lion to Lion Rollback

This is an update of sorts to a previous post indicating frustration at the lack of community support for those awesome enough update their production MacBook to ML developer preview and wish they'd done anything but.

The internet says you're an idiot for performing the unsanctioned upgrade, and an idiot for not having a 10.7 backup. As you are I'm sure aware, you are awesome, not an idiot, so here's how to continue being awesome.

1. Take a full 10.8 Time Machine backup.
2. Build a Lion USB key.
3. Reboot and hold the option key to bring up the USB as a bootable option.
4. Install Lion (clean - I wiped my whole disk knowing full well the only backup I had was a 10.8 Time Machine snapshot - again, i'm awesome, you are too, just go with it).
5. Make sure you pick a username when prompted that doesn't match your previous username (i used migrate/migrate - this account will be deleted). Skip through any user data/migration prompts.
6. Update to 10.7.3 using Software Update.
7. Restore your apps and data from the Time Machine backup using the Migration Assistant. I left all the boxes checked.
8. Whilst still logged into your transient account, reset your main user account password to whatever it was (consider this "corrupted restore fragment #1").
9. Find someone else who has 10.7.3 and get them to send you the following folder from their Mac.

   /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/iLifeMediaBrowser.framework

10. Delete said folder on your Mac (or rename to iLifeMediaBrowser.framework.old) and replace with their copy. This fixes restore fragment #2, which would otherwise see you unable to open Mail or Messages Beta apps.
11. Reboot, log in using your normal account with the password you reset previously, delete your temporary account (or don't, whatever).
12. Voila. Awesome.

IaaS doesn't make sense

Why Infrastructure As A Service Is A Bad Deal - Cloud-computing - Infrastructure as a Service - Informationweek:

Here's my bottom line: The fundamental value of IaaS is flawed, unless you need it for cloud bursting or a similar seldom-used application.

 TL;DR utilizing 50TB of storage on Amazon in 2006 (for four years) cost ~$1mil all inclusive of fees, and equivilent on premise storage cost approximately the same. In 2012, Amazon still charge north of $500k but on premise is $100k.

Free to Play

Gamasutra - News - GDC 2012: How Valve made Team Fortress 2 free-to-play:

Fortunately for Valve, its four-year efforts ended up paying off. Once the item store was introduced, revenues from item sales alone were four times larger than revenues from sales of TF2 itself, and after the free-to-play transition was finished, overall revenue was up 12 times higher than monthly TF2 sales were.

The success of both Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends as immensely popular (and profitable) free to play (funded by in game item purchases) is fascinating; it's as if they've turned the double decade "release a game for $80" meta on its head, observed and learnt from the startup freemium model and cashed in bigtime. The developers, as above, are obviously winning, and the playerbase arguably is too as any multiplayer game thrives in having a larger community & a business model where frequent developer updates are incentivised.

That said, i'm very glad you can't "buy" the TV missile in BF3 :)

Move

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

If that doesn't make you want to travel... re-assess.

Why are lawyers so expensive?

Why Are Lawyers So Expensive Even With The Excess Supply Of Lawyers? - Forbes:

Firms in SF/SV, as well as LA and other markets outside NY, decided they needed to increase associate pay. It started incrementally, with regional offices matching NY starting salaries ($90-95K), until the 'shot heard round the legal world' was fired in early 2000. The name 'Bob Gunderson' became legendary among grateful associates as his Silicon Valley firm, Gunderson Dettmer, pushed through dramatic increases in the entire associate pay scale, beginning with $125K starting salaries (up from $95K the year before), plus bonuses. The herd followed, with all of the major SF/SV/LA firms quickly matching the new pay scale, and of course New York couldn't allow the West Coast upstarts to pay the highest salaries, so the Gunderson scale became the nationwide pay scale for top-tier law firms. Who do you supposed paid for those huge salary increases?