disdev
Great design!
Memphis has Prince Mongo [http://www.1045theriver.com/pages/7337724.php?]
I grew up in Memphis. Prince Mongo had a nightclub that was the place to go for high school kids. They apparently never checked for ID's... it was known for serving to high schoolers.
And, Apple and Microsoft have previously funded patent trolls (IV). And IBM has more than 50,000 patents and brings in over $1 billion annually in licensing revenue.
But, I do the same with running. I drive to nearby trails most every day. And for the family, we do short backpacking trips with no real goal. Just hike a few miles out to a campsite, hang out, read, cook, play around, and then head home the next evening. My kids are young (7 and 12), and I think it does them a lot of good to be able to cover some distance and pack things in and out on their own.
Let's say I patent a design for a table, something unique and interesting that's never been done before. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to building it yet, or haven't marketed it publicly. You come around after my patent and build and sell a table that is very similar to my table design... even exactly the same in some respects. Even though you may not have known about my patent, and didn't maliciously copy anything, you would still be infringing upon my patent. Even if you just built the table from someone else's parts.
The resolution would be that you either pay me a reasonable license fee, buy the patent, or argue over the validity. For the validity aspect, you either say you had prior art that predates my table design, that some other prior design existed, or that my patent shouldn't have been granted for some other reason.
I worked for a company that invented a novel product but didn't patent it. Some other company came around and made the same thing a few years later and patented it. Personally, I think they knew about our product, but that's not important. They were granted the patent and then proceeded to send warning letters to our customers, saying they were the patent holders and might be calling later to collect license fees. Then, they sent something to us saying, hey, we can proceed with collecting from your customers, or you can license it from us directly and it'll cover all your customers.
We could have gone to court to have the patent invalidated. We had prior art. But, not knowing what prior art they had, and the generally slow nature of that process, and the risk to our customers, we just paid them. It was an annual fee that wasn't too onerous and made it worth it just to pay it.
That is about the trolliest of patent trolling. But, they played their hand perfectly and make a lot of money on that license annually with no real work to get it.
Personally, I think software and process patents shouldn't exist.
The point of Node is that it is asynchronous.
Quick question, though... Do you use Stripe's Connect API for the 50 cent transaction fee you're taking (application_fee)?
To me, that's the key. Value. A $10,000 website is a bargain if it allows them to bring in much more than that in new business or save more than that in costs. But to get that message across, you have to quantify and drive home the potential payoff.
In terms of performance and cost, both are great. I haven't ever had any issues with Digital Ocean. With RamNode, they've had a couple of issues where there's been minimal downtime. And they had a breach back in June, but responded well.
I think I trust Digital Ocean more. The setup is easier and performance maybe slightly better.
I had to re-do our TeamCity integration when they stripped out the IIS Path property out of the project file in favor of publishing profiles. For a shop like ours, where we have lots of small projects, automating the deployment is pretty critical. I don't want to have to add 120 publish profiles when previously I could rely on the project settings.
Ultimately, we hacked together a fix, but I'm still wary of their changes.
Am I the only one who works better and more efficiently when I have a little bit of a break in between?
Groupon turned them down, thinking they were worth more and then went the IPO route.
Now, in late 2013, Groupon has a market cap of $6.8 billion.
Moral of the story? Take the money and run.
How about "A decent phone at a decent price."
I like that it's SSH based... I can secure it reasonably well and run any terminal command I need. It has decent code completion (at least for Node), a nice file tree view, can format code with indentations, etc... overall, a pretty nice experience.
The way I have it set up, is I work on a dev VPS (using their SSH). For any deploys, I check in my code, then can terminal into the production machine and git it. So, I can debug through the dev setup, then deploy to production when ready.
But my guess is it comes down to poor security.
But I think you hit on the right value for someone who's not in the business of blogging: writing out the idea. We can keep ideas in our head, even code things out, but the process of putting your ideas into a blog post is a great way to flesh it out.
That way, when I looked at their check-ins and their project updates, I had context for that.
At some point, you'd expect these arbitrary this vs. that comparisons to die off. They haven't, and I'm guessing they won't.
Basically, it comes down to picking the tool that best supports your use case, or being okay with a compromise. Like the SQL/NoSQL discussions recently... Use it poorly and you get poor results.