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We Pay Our Rent By Buying Coffee
Wired is running a story on Delicious Monster, a startup Mac software company whose main office is a Seattle coffee shop. Hope they're drinking decaf.
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If you read the article, they say "When there's just two of you, you can't stay in one room all day."
-- Nic
It's called data encryption, in the form of a VPN. Look into it.
Really -- this problem has been solved for a long, long time. Create your own virtual network within the network by implementing an encryption and authentication system so that only those systems and users belonging to the company can connect and intercommunicate, and your work just looks like garbage to anyone wishing to snoop in on you.
Yaz.
Just want to throw a kudo their way.
I find Delicious Library a great product for being so new. Many customer empowering features and overall refinement. It also leverages the best of what Mac OS X has to offer developers.
Good job and keep it up!
And you know what? They're ordinary, hard-working developers, and they're quite creative. Apple should be hiring them.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
You don't like it. I do. What's your point?
One of the reasons I buy media is to lend it out to my friends. I've lost more than one book/DVD/game that way, and Delicious helps me keep things organized. It's superbly designed, really easy to use, and does exactly what it says it does.
You've got buyer's remorse. I'm a happy customer. Both of us were free to buy, or not buy, the program. What's the problem?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Tellico seems to better about spreading the integration around (Amazon for books, IMDB for movies).
Don't mean to burst your bubble, but, next time you are in IMDB, scroll to the very bottom of the page and read what it says.
- Tony
The famous Lloyd's of London insurance group started out in Lloyd's coffee house in the late 1600s. This bodes well for Delicious Monster. :)
Excerpts from the book "Against the Gods" by Peter Bernstein:
"One afternoon in 1637 * a Cretan scholar named Canopius sat down in his chambers at Balliol College, Oxford, and made himself a cup of strong coffee. Canopius's brew is believed to mark the first time coffee was drunk in England; it proved so popular when it was offered to the public that hundreds of coffee houses were soon in operation all over London.
What does Canopius's coffee have to do with * the concept of risk? Simply that a coffee house was the birthplace of Lloyd's of London, which for more than two centuries was the most famous of all insurance company's. *
The second half of the seventeenth century was also an era of burgeoning trade. The Dutch were the predominant commercial power of the time, and England was their main rival. Ships arrived daily from colonies and suppliers around the globe to unload a profusion of products that had once been scarce or unknown luxuries-sugar and spice, coffee and tea, raw cotton and fine porcelain. * Information from remote areas of the world was now of crucial importance to the domestic economy. With the volume of shipping constantly expanding, there was a lively demand for current information with which to estimate sailing times between destinations, weather patterns, and the risks lurking in unfamiliar seas.
In the absence of mass media, the coffee houses emerged as the primary source of news and rumour. In 1675, Charles II,
suspicious as many rulers are of places where the public trades information, shut the coffee houses down, but the uproar was so great that he had to reverse himself sixteen days later. Samuel Pepys frequented a coffee house to get news of the arrival of ships he was interested in; he deemed the news he received there to be more reliable than what he learned at his job at the Admiralty.
The coffee house that Edward Lloyd opened in 1687 near the Thames on Tower Street was a favourite haunt of men from the ships that moored at London's docks. The house was "spacious, well built and inhabited by able tradesmen" according to a contemporary publication. It grew so popular that in 1691 Lloyd moved it to much larger and more luxurious quarters on Lombard Street. Nat Ward, a publican whom Alexander Pope accused of trading vile rhymes for tobacco, reported that the tables in the new house were "very neat and shined with rubbing." A staff of five served tea and sherbet as well as coffee.
Lloyd had grown up under Oliver Cromwell and he had lived through plague, fire, the Dutch invasion up the Thames in 1667, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was a lot more than a skilled coffeehouse host. Recognizing the value of his customer base and responding to the insistent demand for information, he launched "Lloyd's List" in 1696 and filled it with information on the arrivals and departures of ships and intelligence on conditions abroad and at sea. That information was provided by a network of correspondents in major ports on the Continent and in England. Ship auctions took place regularly on the premises, and Lloyd obligingly furnished the paper and ink needed to record the transactions. One corner was reserved for ships' captains where they could compare notes on the hazards of all the new routes that were opening up - routes that led them farther east, farther south, and farther west than ever before. Lloyd's establishment was open almost around the clock and was always crowded.
Then as now, anyone who was seeking insurance would go to a broker, who would then hawk the risk to the individual risk-takers who gathered in the coffee houses or in the precincts of the Royal Exchange. When a deal was closed, the risk-taker would confirm his agreement to cover the loss in return for a specified premium by writing his name
Add me to the list of happy customers, the bar code scanning works very well I use a standard sony fireware dv camera. I put it on a tripod about 6 inch's away from a wall to get the scanning distance right. As I am from the UK it used to only work for my books but I note version 1.1 can talk to amazon.co.uk. When I tried a random DVD it now works. So another happy customer who paid full price. I was put on to it at work by a fell sysadmin who had just bought it.
Wow, that sounds like a question they must get asked frequently. Quoting from the FAQ:
Can I use my CueCat or other USB barcode scanner with Delicious Library?
Delicious Library should support any USB barcode scanner that sends data in the same fashion as a keyboard. The CueCat scanner does not fall into this category, but the following instructions allow you to modify the CueCat to be more compatible.
How to modify your CueCat barcode scanner (1965 USB Models): The USB models has an onboard 16 pin SMD component. This IC will have a serial number on it similar to the following sequence: K130A033 HMS91C7316 0027. Simply lift pin 5 on this device. Congratulations, your USB CueCat is now functioning as a commercial barcode scanner.
Wanna send me one of your extra USB 'Cats?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
A few people have mentioned that Mike Matas and Wil Shipley used to work for OmniGroup (event though the picture on the wired article calls him Shipman... I've met him a few times and I'm pretty sure it is Shipley). Tim Omernick also worked for OmniGroup. He went by Tim2 because there were 2 Tims ;-) Back when I met him at WWDC 2001, I think he was only 18, and he had been at Omni for 3-4 years. As for the fourth member, Drew Hamlin, he's not an Omni alum as far as I can tell... he's some RB coder / web designer turned tech support person for the company. All three of the developers are straight from OmniGroup though. I'm glad to see them working on more awesome software, but that raises an interesting question - what is to become of Omni with all of this talent leaving, and why are they leaving?
Uh, no.
CueCat was about reading stupid little faux-barcodes, which were specific to the CueCat, and would be printed in magazine ads (and ads posing as articles, as you find in Wired and similar consumer goods whore magazines).
Kinda different.
The use of the CueCat to scan generic barcodes was a hack, and not the intended purpose of the device.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Our web server and store machines are both off-site. We don't do shipping out of the coffee-house either. We do take phone calls and meetings there.
I hope they're related somehow.. otherwise one of these is a total ripoff.
This looks exactly the same without the fancy wood panelling.
We will absolutely have sharing your collection be "opt-in," on several levels. We aren't Safeway.
Amazon already has 1,000,000x the data on people's buying habits and their relations to each other than we'll ever collect, so I suspect that if marketers were going to have a field day, they'd be calling Amazon long before us.
It's true that it'd be _possible_ for us to do less-than-good things with the data we collect, but we're not going to. We're going to use the data to create new virtual communities of people with common interests, and bring our fragmented society closer together. If you don't want to join in those communities, don't check the preference box.
Mike has always been against us making the "buy similar items" aspect of our product too prominent, because he didn't want us to seem like a front-end to Amazon. And when we were looking for a way to help the world with our money, It was his idea to give all of our Amazon associates' money to charity, so it's clear to our customers we are NOT trying to encourage them to BUY BUY BUY.
Any new technology can be used for good or evil. I would expect people on this forum would recognize this truism isn't an argument against progress; it's a caution against recklessness.
I can't speak for Omni, since I don't have anything to do with their day-to-day business any more. I think it's a fair guess that development will continue on OmniWeb and OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner and OmniDiskSweeper without me, as it has for the last nine months.
Little Kimberly Anne survived her disease and took off on her own six years ago. She's happy and living in Seattle, and writes book reviews for MSNBC.
That would be 'your majesty', not 'your grace'.
'Your grace', is reserved for higher levels of religion, like witches.
Of course, if you are quite friendly with the Queen, you may call her 'your maj'.
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Whilst you are correct that 'your majesty' is appropriate and 'your grace' is inappropriate, it is not reserved for religion.
In the British nobility one addresses a duke as 'your grace'.