(sheepish) "government contractors," I meant to say. SAIC is a contractor.

What the hell does "worst" mean anyway? You've got companies that are responsible for thousands of families losing their homes illegally (I'm looking at you, Bank of America); You've got companies that are responsible for billions of dollars lost by investors (yeah, Goldman, this song really is about you). You've got gas companies fracking the Northeast and causing cancers and health defects while trying to sue documentarians to stop them from talking about it. You've got government agencies getting caught running massive scams and having to pay half a billion dollar fines (hi, SAIC!). You've got megamarts which underpay their employees, keep them at 32 hours a week so they don't get benefit, force them to use public assistance, stop them from unionizing, and refuse to even follow the law in paying them overtime. And NETFLIX is worst in America? I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

yo dudes, has anyone confirmed this? you can find a ton of people claiming that netflix is advertising with rush, but the closest i've found is http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/04/1070965/-ATTN-dKos-Netflix-users which seems like it's a recording of a netflix advertisement approximately four minutes before the beginning of the rush show. right now, what i'm seeing is one of those "some people on the internet said its true, so some more people on the internet said its true, so it must indeed be true". anyone have a recording of something that clearly shows a netflix ad in the middle of a rush show?

@Keep it reel, If a very large library of DVD's was all that was necessary to make Netflix a success, Blockbuster would still have three stores within a mile of your house. But they don't. Because it's not about how many DVDs you have.

The only downside to this is that, potentially, Netflix could be put in the awkward position of streaming the Twilight movies.

@david, They don't pay market rates -- they pay either top of market, or above market. That means that when things work as they should, any Netflix employee should be making more on a given year than they would be able to make in straight comp + bonus elsewhere. The stock option stuff is confusing, and hard to compare. So how do they incent staff? Mostly they try to hire staff that isn't particularly incented by the next bonus they may get. High performers, huge impact kinda people who expect a fair compensation in excahenge for moving mountains. Works pretty well for them, most of the time.

these days, the api is also the system used by netflix's own systems to get information about movies, etc -- they're eating their own dog food, as the saying goes. it's a critical component of the service -- if the api's down, streaming's going to be down.

Seems like there's an easy to figure out how realistic this is -- what did the previous Prophet surveys say? How accurate were they? Were they predicting five years ago that Facebook would be dead by now, for example?

Netflix's reputation for being a place where people are "unceremoniously fired for little to no reason" is massively overhyped.

Honeycomb? Great! Yeah, yeah,yeah!

the tone of the ode is about spot-on, and its probably true for not just andy but most of the qwikster people who worked their asses off for the last few months to create a real company from practically nothing, only to see their dreams dashed and employment terminated on monday. and amazon is not entirely a netflix competitor - its also one of netflixs strongest partners, given that virtually all of netflixs production systems run on amazons cloud.

I'll be surprised if they do games. Qwikster was going to do games when it was going to be driven by Rendich, but Rendich looked like he was more willing to step outside of the very narrrow focus that Netflix overall has maintained. I don't see a reason why, given that Netflix pre-Qwikster didn't do games because of Hastings' "strategy is about what you decide not to do," Netflix is going to turn around now and do games.

I got a chromebook from Google as a beta tester. Amusingly, I was sure there was no way I was going to get one, but my wife insisted I apply. It's perhaps poetic justice that she uses it far more than I do. It's neat. Hellacious (in a really, really good way) battery life, which is very nice. Useful for web stuff. She's run into problems because, obviously, there's a ton of stuff she can't do including Netflix. She also had problems working with her Android phone (connected to the laptop), and dealing with pictures (since Google hasn't really released Chromebook versions of their apps like Picasa). Overall, if I was stuck using one, I'd probably prefer to find something with a real OS on it so I could install something that let me install apps. That said, especially now that I've got an SSD in my Macbook Pro, I'd probably opt for the more expensive option of getting a Netbook and upgrading the drive to an SSD.