At the first internship I had in the late 90's, part of my job was taking these text files full of data and creating these huge excel reports with them.
It was something that would take a few hours to do because of how much data there was. I taught myself VBA and wrote up this little program where you just upload the file and it spit out the report in about a minute.
I luckily had a boss who saw the potential in that and while I wasn't promoted, I was just an intern after all, at the end of the summer, I was the only intern the company kept.
And they moved me all around the company to different departments and I learned a ton and it was a great experience.
I did automate a few departments to the point where people who were doing full time work had their work cut down to couple of hours a day at most.
I finally left when my friends who started doing internships at these "internet" companies were getting paid more than I was and I had asked for a raise and didn't get it.
I went through quite a few recruiters before finding someone I really liked and trusted and sent me good candidates.
What I've learned is that it really comes down to the recruiting firm. The person I ended up using, their firm has incentivized them to stay and build relationships, not just go for the quick sell. They are the only person I know who has stayed at the same firm for years.
All the other recruiters I've tried have basically jumped to a new firm every 6 months to a year, they are just chasing the money.
So I would say ask talk to the recruiters/firm. Ask them how long they've been in that company, what's the average tenure.
We found a "build relationships" type recruiter, but he keeps trying to take us out to basketball games, etc. That's fine but uncomfortable because we can't guarantee him any new business. We haven't hired anyone since the last placement and aren't likely to soon.
Hey, maybe Joyent can finally afford to refund the people who supported it when it was textdrive and then went back on their word!
Snarky I know but I'm still bitter about how it was all handled..
"How long is it good for? As long as we exist." As a lifetime plan purchaser, I wouldn't say no to a new Samsung fridge... Although, I think we're just beating the dead horse for old time sake—which in this case is fun in itself. Though, it would be kinda awesome to hear a Samsung exec weigh in on the matter.
As a fellow early textdrive supporter, I'm pretty happy with the value I got out of the deal. I'm still using my free strongspace account 10ish years later. I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it. Honestly, textdrive's hosting was never really of a quality I could use in a professional context anyway. I understand some bitterness, but any "lifetime" deal has to be taken with a pretty big grain of salt, and I'm pretty happy about what I got for the money.
> I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it.
We were offered either one or three free years of hosting on a Joyent SmartMachine, depending on what your initial investment was. After this free trial, you would be converted to a regular customer.
Adding my voice to the bitter-parade. Joyent wouldn't be where they are today without us early bootstrap investors. It was basically a Kickstarter campaign before Kickstarter existed. Not only do I feel like I failed to receive my early investor benefits, but WORSE off was how the whole situation was handled. We had to beg and plead to get our data back. The company essentially went dark to all of their oldest, most loyal customers.
It wasn't about the money or the value I got out of it.
For me, it was the way I felt like I was treated.
It felt like, hey, we've pivoted the company but we still have to support these old users and they are becoming a pain, let's give them a credit on something that's kinda like what they paid for and be done with them.
Then when enough people complained, then they tried to find some solution at the last minute and even that felt dubious.
Let's try to cobble something together that's barely working for these people and make it someone else's problem.
I totally take the "lifetime" deal with a grain of salt but it wasn't like the company folded because it ran out of money or wasn't successful. It was more like we got successful so we forgot about the little people.
Although perhaps Samsung's acquisition might continue with the trend, improving Joyent's bottom line by ignoring all previous financial obligations that may have existed before the purchase...
We have a 2016 Legacy with the eyesight system and I actually use it a lot in traffic.
It's really useful in "stop" and go traffic where you're barely moving. I just set the adaptive cruise control and it makes driving feel a lot more relaxed. I'm not sitting there alternating between the gas and brake every 15 seconds.
It's a great system, I can't imagine having another car without this kind of system in place.
Great article, I've had a similar setup for years now.
An 8 year old readynas that's still running, it's really slow but it works.
I do a sync with that and a local desktop with a big external drive.
And then I back up that local desktop to crashplan.
I have a comment about the drives, I generally like purchasing different manufacturer drives for my NAS when I'm buying them in bulk. I always worry about multiple drives from the same batch failing around the same time. It's happened to me before so now I'll buy similar capacity drives but from different models or mfrs.
I had a ReadyNAS NV before they were bought by Netgear and though it was good. Unfortunately, I had more drives fail in the ReadyNAS than the computers I was making backups from. As time went on it became hard to find drives that were on the compatibility list.
I had the original doorbot. It never really worked. They made all these promises about features coming up and never delivered. The mobile apps were a disaster and never updated.
I finally returned it after trying it for a year which was the only really good experience with the company. Letting me return the product after a year.
I felt like it was a bait and switch. They got all these people to crowdfund the 1st product, delivered something that was mediocre at best and never iterated on it.
Then they changed the name and are selling a similar product.
Feels a little shady to me.
I would be really weary of backing them at this point.
I've been getting something similar from what I assume is a married couple for the past 4-5 years now.
From what I've been able to deduce from the emails, the wife has been putting down her husband's email address but constantly getting it wrong.
I've gotten American express travel itineraries, invoices for home furnishings, etc.
