If marketing isn't one of your firm's core competencies, outsource. Either hire an outside agency or get a hired gun in as a contractor.
If someone is really motivated to become a partner, let him/her go through a trial period where they're essentially in that contractor role and you can evaluate results. But you're right--if you're worried about possibly underperforming partners (and don't have enough mojo to figure it out without hard numbers), then get some hard numbers first.
As you correctly surmised, you can't completely ignore marketing if you're a business owner. Get some training on the subject (even if just an online class or something, though no need to go completely nuts). This is, unfortunately, one blind spot you can't have forever--marketing can be expensive and you must know and maintain what works.
Fixed (I think:-). Thanks for pointing those typos out--I think I inherited them from wherever I copied/pasted the quote and just didn't look closely enough.
I did a bit of IT consulting a while back for a small company owned by a friend of mine that upgraded one of their (dead) machines to Win7 from XP. One of their pieces of software (that isn't supported by the vendor anymore, natch) had some copy protection on it that ABSOLUTELY REFUSED to run on Win7. As in "every single post I could find about it on Google said 'don't bother'" and no amount of backwards-compatibility junk would get Win7 to make it work, period (though admittedly this was Win7 Home Prem, so no built-in VM stuff).
The solution: VirtualBox, running a spare XP license, and just this one application. With the VBox tools installed, I set it to resize the desktop automatically when the window's resized, put the taskbar on autohide, and it works great (nice and snappy for an office-type app). When you click the close box on the window, VBox suspends the VM. When you open it back up again, it un-suspends. Plus you get snapshotting and portability of the environment.
They were not sophisticated enough to pull this off, but their local IT guy (me) was, and this is a little 5-person extermination company...
Second. I have VM service on my LG Optimus V that I occasionally use as a hotspot with my Linux laptop no problems. It's not teh awesum bandwidth, but it's usable.
Sprint's network (which VM piggybacks on in the US) is pretty good in the bay area and they're not nearly as price-gougy as VZW or AT&T.
$130 for the mifi, $50 for "unlimited" data (throttled after 2.5G) for a month. Resell the device on eBay if you want when you're done. VZW is at least 2x for the device...
Disk space is cheap (modulo the current supply problems); disk management is expensive. RAID, index time, backups all conspire to make that $100 Fry's special cost 10x as much in reality.
1. Get on coaster. 2. Break a hip/rib; dislocate a shoulder on turn 1. 3. Be in horrible, horrible pain until passing out from pain and/or dying from acceleration.
Awesome. I wouldn't even call this a nice thought experiment--it's just stupid.
Actually, getting a relative newbie to get BIOS to boot from something other than a hard disk is way worse than learning a VM environment IMO. I'm all for the VM idea, whether VMware Player or VirtualBox. VirtualBox can import OVFs, too, so it's fairly easy to get just about anything that has been made as a virtual appliance to work.
I worked at SJSU up until 2008 and the policy was that access wasn't particularly restricted in any way but support for non Windows/MacOS was fairly limited.
Except in the College of Engineering--we tried our best to support basically anything the students would come up with, no matter how weird. Getting something bizarre working on our network was a point of pride:-). The school flirted with implementing Clean Access, but I don't know if that ever actually happened (and from the sound of it, the plan was that only Windoze users would have been affected).
Folks toss about the phrase "Epic Fail" far too loosely. Here's what a real Epic Fail looks like:
The DRM code has a bug that, when a certain condition happens (time passes, specially-formulated packet received, etc.), it overclocks the CPU to the point that it catches on fire. Within minutes of the event, most of the millions of PS3s in the wild have set peoples' homes ablaze.
As a result, thousands die and the insurance industry collapses. Anarchy reigns, so there's nobody to enforce copyright anymore and the original DRM is rendered irrelevant.
The explanation is simple. The plucky young upstart warrior (and perhaps the rest of his party) just defeated the final boss using his strongest-ever attack. One involving, say, exploding materia*.
What everyone saw was just the endgame cutscene for that (at a safe distance, of course).
* Materia is a Final Fantasy VII term. Substitute your favorite mystical RPG energy thingy here if you like.
Gotta second this. You get awesome control (since IMO fingers are better at fine motor control than thumbs are), little arm motion, and great stability in a relatively small package.
Plus you confound normal mouse-users, so they're tempted to just leave your machine alone. The cable is USB and PS/2 (cheapie adapter included). I don't think a wireless version is available, but that's generally the case with trackballs AFAIK.
I set up some labs with bench space a while back and used exclusively 19" monitors with VESA arms. The space under the monitor becomes usable (since there's no stand in the way) and the adjustability (and ability to just shove the monitor to the side when not in use) is invaluable. This gets even better with 2x stands.
Oh, and with many brackets, you can mount them from above instead of below, too.
1. I'd rather avoid a collision than survive it. Smaller cars tend to be easier to manuever, so...
2. Larger cars tend to cost more and have more safety features as a result. I genuinely suspect it's dollars more than intrinsic size that determine any safety advantage that larger cars have here.
So, here's a case where the kid does well on tests, usually getting As and Bs, but consistently gets Fs overall. He knows the material better than most of his peers, but is failing.
I wasn't quite that bad, but I was pretty lazy growing up. I don't know that I have a great deal of advice to hand out, but I can tell the (extremely abridged) version of my life story:
Graduated in the top 10% of my high school class. Barely.
Went on to a state school.
Started failing classes because, while smart, I had no work ethic.
Went out into the real world for a while (sold computers, tech support, etc.).
After building up a work ethic, went back to school part time, moved to Silicon Valley.
After years as a full-time worker/part-time student, I graduated as the CS department's graduating senior of the year in 2008--after first starting college in 1992(!).
I now work as a reasonably well-paid software engineer and (even in this economy) have 2-4 recruiters per week bugging me.
Until I figured out how to put my head down, concentrate and get sh*t done, I was in many ways only half a person. No matter how smart you are, you're likely to get no traction without the ability and patience to do the work. Sorry, but that's the way it is. I wish you the best of luck with your son--it was only by the grace of being independent and responsible for my own life that I learned the value of hard work.
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If marketing isn't one of your firm's core competencies, outsource. Either hire an outside agency or get a hired gun in as a contractor.
If someone is really motivated to become a partner, let him/her go through a trial period where they're essentially in that contractor role and you can evaluate results. But you're right--if you're worried about possibly underperforming partners (and don't have enough mojo to figure it out without hard numbers), then get some hard numbers first.
As you correctly surmised, you can't completely ignore marketing if you're a business owner. Get some training on the subject (even if just an online class or something, though no need to go completely nuts). This is, unfortunately, one blind spot you can't have forever--marketing can be expensive and you must know and maintain what works.
Fixed (I think :-). Thanks for pointing those typos out--I think I inherited them from wherever I copied/pasted the quote and just didn't look closely enough.
Yes and no.
I did a bit of IT consulting a while back for a small company owned by a friend of mine that upgraded one of their (dead) machines to Win7 from XP. One of their pieces of software (that isn't supported by the vendor anymore, natch) had some copy protection on it that ABSOLUTELY REFUSED to run on Win7. As in "every single post I could find about it on Google said 'don't bother'" and no amount of backwards-compatibility junk would get Win7 to make it work, period (though admittedly this was Win7 Home Prem, so no built-in VM stuff).
The solution: VirtualBox, running a spare XP license, and just this one application. With the VBox tools installed, I set it to resize the desktop automatically when the window's resized, put the taskbar on autohide, and it works great (nice and snappy for an office-type app). When you click the close box on the window, VBox suspends the VM. When you open it back up again, it un-suspends. Plus you get snapshotting and portability of the environment.
They were not sophisticated enough to pull this off, but their local IT guy (me) was, and this is a little 5-person extermination company...
...in other words, all of them. Wow.
Lasers! Lasers! Lasers!
A nuclear drone really should have laser cannons.
Pew! Pew! Pew!
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
Chicken Pot Pie or Shepherd's Pie
Salad
Slice of Pie (Your Choice)
$11 in the bay area.
Went there for lunch today :-)
Second. I have VM service on my LG Optimus V that I occasionally use as a hotspot with my Linux laptop no problems. It's not teh awesum bandwidth, but it's usable.
Sprint's network (which VM piggybacks on in the US) is pretty good in the bay area and they're not nearly as price-gougy as VZW or AT&T.
$130 for the mifi, $50 for "unlimited" data (throttled after 2.5G) for a month. Resell the device on eBay if you want when you're done. VZW is at least 2x for the device...
...and the one that gets you busted is the Mickey Mouse ears.
5 years for pirating a Michael Jackson CD :-(
4 years for killing Michael Jackson
Seriously
The guy who staged out the Bible in Legos would have had an easier time of it for sure:
http://thebricktestament.com
He clearly needed to hax0r a bunch of Legos to tell many of the stories...
If you're in Silicon Valley (or planning to move here), I'd love to chat with you. bj #at# wjblack.com
+1 +1 +1, for the love of God, +1
Disk space is cheap (modulo the current supply problems); disk management is expensive. RAID, index time, backups all conspire to make that $100 Fry's special cost 10x as much in reality.
...though "ability to see into the UV part of the spectrum" is not quite as useful as "ability to smell into the future" (my personal fave).
For everyone else, it's:
1. Get on coaster.
2. Break a hip/rib; dislocate a shoulder on turn 1.
3. Be in horrible, horrible pain until passing out from pain and/or dying from acceleration.
Awesome. I wouldn't even call this a nice thought experiment--it's just stupid.
Actually, getting a relative newbie to get BIOS to boot from something other than a hard disk is way worse than learning a VM environment IMO. I'm all for the VM idea, whether VMware Player or VirtualBox. VirtualBox can import OVFs, too, so it's fairly easy to get just about anything that has been made as a virtual appliance to work.
I worked at SJSU up until 2008 and the policy was that access wasn't particularly restricted in any way but support for non Windows/MacOS was fairly limited.
Except in the College of Engineering--we tried our best to support basically anything the students would come up with, no matter how weird. Getting something bizarre working on our network was a point of pride :-). The school flirted with implementing Clean Access, but I don't know if that ever actually happened (and from the sound of it, the plan was that only Windoze users would have been affected).
Now you just wait a centon. What do you mean we aren't using a base 10 timing metric? ;-)
Folks toss about the phrase "Epic Fail" far too loosely. Here's what a real Epic Fail looks like:
The DRM code has a bug that, when a certain condition happens (time passes, specially-formulated packet received, etc.), it overclocks the CPU to the point that it catches on fire. Within minutes of the event, most of the millions of PS3s in the wild have set peoples' homes ablaze.
As a result, thousands die and the insurance industry collapses. Anarchy reigns, so there's nobody to enforce copyright anymore and the original DRM is rendered irrelevant.
THAT is an epic fail.
B-52s FTW!
I'm personally more of a fan of "Love in the Year 3000" than "Funplex," but it's a good album nonetheless.
The explanation is simple. The plucky young upstart warrior (and perhaps the rest of his party) just defeated the final boss using his strongest-ever attack. One involving, say, exploding materia*.
What everyone saw was just the endgame cutscene for that (at a safe distance, of course).
* Materia is a Final Fantasy VII term. Substitute your favorite mystical RPG energy thingy here if you like.
Does anyone but me have a problem with the title "Malaysia Seeking to Copyright Food?" right above a picture of a human foot?
IANAL (yada, yada), but...
In general, you can't be prevented from saying almost anything. You can, however, suffer consequences from what you do say.
That's the big difference.
Gotta second this. You get awesome control (since IMO fingers are better at fine motor control than thumbs are), little arm motion, and great stability in a relatively small package.
Plus you confound normal mouse-users, so they're tempted to just leave your machine alone. The cable is USB and PS/2 (cheapie adapter included). I don't think a wireless version is available, but that's generally the case with trackballs AFAIK.
Aah, if I only had mod points.
I set up some labs with bench space a while back and used exclusively 19" monitors with VESA arms. The space under the monitor becomes usable (since there's no stand in the way) and the adjustability (and ability to just shove the monitor to the side when not in use) is invaluable. This gets even better with 2x stands.
Oh, and with many brackets, you can mount them from above instead of below, too.
1. I'd rather avoid a collision than survive it. Smaller cars tend to be easier to manuever, so...
2. Larger cars tend to cost more and have more safety features as a result. I genuinely suspect it's dollars more than intrinsic size that determine any safety advantage that larger cars have here.
So, here's a case where the kid does well on tests, usually getting As and Bs, but consistently gets Fs overall. He knows the material better than most of his peers, but is failing.
I wasn't quite that bad, but I was pretty lazy growing up. I don't know that I have a great deal of advice to hand out, but I can tell the (extremely abridged) version of my life story:
Until I figured out how to put my head down, concentrate and get sh*t done, I was in many ways only half a person. No matter how smart you are, you're likely to get no traction without the ability and patience to do the work. Sorry, but that's the way it is. I wish you the best of luck with your son--it was only by the grace of being independent and responsible for my own life that I learned the value of hard work.