Oooh, look out! A bunch of companies with no established user bases are going to boycott you!

This will get the grannies to upgrade their computer machines for sure.

It's not a boycott, just a dismissible nag message. Did you read the article?

Also, the number of people from these startups is approximately (data from quantcast):

4.1 million (jtv us) + 1.3 million (weebly us) + 1.7 million (reddit us) + 1.3 million (posterous) + 0.5 million (disqus us) = 8.9 million US people. Global reach is probably 2-3x that much, but quantcast doesn't offer global numbers for all of them (JTV has 26 million globally).

I'd say that counts as an established user base.

Perhaps I'm misreading your analysis but it seems to me you're suggesting that the US visitor count for each of those sites is 8.9 million people total? I would suggest it's actually much lower - the chances are that the people who use reddit are the same sorts of people that use posterous and disqus (and so on). You're potentially counting 1 person who uses all 5 sites as 5 separate people.

The problem I see is that - particularly for reddit, posterous and disqus - the audience is mostly technical (or at least fairly Internet literate). These are not the types of people who need to warned about IE6.

I want a solution to a^3 + b^3 = c^3 where a,b,c are positive integers.

Leonhard Euler proved it isn't possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_Fermat%27s_Last_Theore...

Oh man, your wife is going to be pissed when she finds out you disintegrated her engagement ring for your little computer machine.

Thank you for trivializing a war my grandfather fought in and died. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Just kidding. I'm still trying to figure out who Japan would be..

You scared me for a second. The Japan-equivalent is tough to figure out. Maybe HTC, Sony, Nokia...not sure yet.

Pirated games come largely from China.

Not really. Pirated games are largely downloaded from the Internet.

Right. The real issue is that some consoles cannot play these downloaded games without mod chips, which the guy imported and resold. The DMCA makes it illegal to "disseminate" devices that circumvent copy-protection, which gets Customs involved.

Most companies do endorse fluid working hours.

It's just a balancing act between wanting everyone to be accessible when you need then and wanting employees to have flexibility in their schedules.

The end of the article was amazing. Nothing better than bitching about your work being stolen and then finding out that your communications director endorses the process by tipping off Gawker. Oh the irony..

I mean, technically it has meaning even without a restricted time frame. Some nonzero percentage of all businesses ever started have never failed.

That being said, it's nothing like 20% so clearly there is an implicit time frame.

No known business has lasted longer than 1,428 years:

http://www.dailynugget.com/2007/04/worlds-oldest-business-cl...

Some nonzero percentage of all businesses ever started have not failed yet.

Although if I guess what the parent comment is thinking of correctly, there was a piece on HN fairly recently about how businesses that were doing well but closed were counted as 'failures'. E.g. the owner retired and closed, the owner got ill and closed, the owner sold up and the business was merged into another before it was running for 5 years, etc.

Did Slashdot actually beat HN to a story for once?

My head just exploded.

I'm sorry, how is that the story of Mac vs. PC?

IBM as a market leader, that missed the moment, Apple as, well, Apple—company that released cool Macintosh computer—and Microsoft, as a company who started by writing software for Macs (i.e. BASIC version for Mac) but eventually released their own OS.

And Microsoft was the winner at the time.