Which regular Kindle? The built-in backlight was the selling feature to me. My old Kindle had the light built into the cover which worked OK but was too bright for my wife. The paperwhite is great for reading in bed.
"It is traditional in Bavaria, in Poland, and in Hungary. In Bavaria or Poland, special dishes are made exclusively to be eaten during second breakfast."
Modern processors can generate different micro-ops depending on whether the flags are observed. In old non-pipelined/non-speculative/non-rewriting processors what you said is true but all bets are off in the world of massively funded x86 processor development.
It would be super difficult to represent value types, generics and the reflection metadata in the JVM without building some kind of giant abstraction layer. MSIL is rich, maybe overly rich. If you get rid of value types and generics from C# you're basically left with ... Java.
I find this disturbing. I realize that startups are usually associated with non-linear returns but assuming the burn rate in the OP is about gross expenses, not just net burndown of the funding, I think that there's a huge problem with hiring the cheapest engineers hoping to make big bucks from the IPO rather than the best engineers who can solve the problem in a reasonable manner.
This speaks to the problem with demand for entry level (meaning cheap) folks in the tech sector as well as the disruption culture over delivering long term customer value.
Revenue per employee is certainly interesting but isn't comparable to the topic of discussion. It would be very interesting to see what the run rates for each of these enterprises is. I suspect you could compute this from the annual statements.
It would be even more interesting to see it broken down by employment category. Amazon's 132,600 employees probably includes a large number of pickers and packers diluting the comparison, whereas Oracle's, Microsoft's and Google's staff are predominantly technical.
> Revenue per employee is certainly interesting but isn't comparable to the topic of discussion.
Sure it is. A startup's burn-rate is almost all in staff. If you have 10 employees, then your yearly burn rate is going to be not that far off the FBR for those 10 employees (~$2.5m/yr), unless you're in some very capital intensive business (hardware manufacture or something).
But 10 employees working on a photo sharing app or whatever is ~$200k/mo. Your hosting fees, etc. are unlikely to be more than a few percent delta off of that.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there is this or that exception. But in your revenue model for your company you'll need to build all that in. For example, if your hosting fees cost another $100k/mo for whatever reason, and it's growing 5% a month, you better figure that in.
If you're making a physical doodad, and your upfront capital costs are $1m and the per-unit manufacturing costs are $10/item you better figure out how to cover the manufacturing costs, as well as recoup the upfront costs + marketing + sales staff + shipping + expected returns before thinking of the extra over the per-unit sales as profit.
Too many startups discount these things or write them off. They make a doodad for $10/unit, then sell it at $100/unit then congratulate themselves on the $90/unit profit they're making. Then they run out of business because they forgot that they're spending $50/unit on marketing and $50/unit on shipping, support, returns, warehouse loss, etc.
The problem is that the question "Is My Startup Burn Rate Normal?" is a bad question. You shouldn't really be comparing your burn rate to anybody else's. You should be comparing your burn rate to revenue and profit goals and adjust accordingly.
It's a trap! I want net neutrality as much as the next person but having the federal government oversee it like it oversees utilities is a cure far worse than the disease.
Some people have built string processing libraries which operate on struct which have a string object reference and an index to the first character and a length. This lets you slice etc the strings without forcing any heap allocations.
