The largest crop in the US is not Corn or Soybeans, it's lawn grass. Many of the lawn and garden chemicals homeowners like to use, or are used on plants homeowners pick up at the local big box retailer, contain these chemicals harmful to pollinators.
The statistic is somewhere around 70% of the foods in the typical American Diet need pollinators. No pollinators then pretty limited menus.
.
I've used CAELinux for quite a bit, but focused on Finite Element Modeling using Salome->Code_Aster. There are several packages on the disk and easy to burn the LiveDVD, insert it into your computer, reboot, use the software, reboot back to your base system. http://www.caelinux.com/CMS/
.
The perceived problem is really a symptom of the greater issue within these organizations. Moving them back to the office to "keep an eye on them" will be counter productive. Of course any change will have an effect (but short lived) because someone will be "measuring" (Westinghouse Hawthorne effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect). .
The strongest performers, if any remain in the organization, will bail and find flexible jobs at major competitors. .
The real solution? Hire professionals and give them the ability to get things done - aka thin the middle management ranks and flatten the organization. .
.
.
As an artist myself, but in a different media, I give away product all the time (I have a free download running today in fact). It's what I do to expose new consumers to my work. Food companies hire people to do free samples in a supermarket "try Pete's Wacky Pizza and here is a coupon for today too." .
The point of the streaming (as was radio) is the artist is running a three to five minute commercial, they have that whole audience captured for the length of that song. Hopefully the streaming service provides links or a radio announcer that says "This is Jane Cellist and buy her stuff at Jane's web site". The streaming services can give accurate data that the artist can compare against their actual sales at the time or shortly after and see what the sales-through rate is. Example, the cellist run her classical cello music on Pandora for a week and her CD sales are flat but a few weeks later she runs her product on Spotify and she makes a thousand sales. Every time she runs Spotify she has big sell through. So she doesn't use Pandora but works Spotify hard. Then she does the same with other streaming services, or finds her Rock-style cello music pulls in a big Pandora fan base of physical sales. . .It's advertising that the 'network' pays the artist to "come over here and advertise with us." Since this is Superbowl Sunday.. what is the number of earlobes the cellist might reach on Pandora vs how many viewers see the thirty-second commercial spot? .
.
I've worked at a couple of Fortune 10 corporations (basement to lofty offices), private manufacturing businesses (many capacities), and consulting (domestic and international small to large corporations). My plan has been to seek freedom and adventure. Yours might be something else. But these were my reasons: .
Early on while at one of the big-co's a co-worker went around and asked many in the department what they made when they first started at the company and what year they hired in. All these people approaching 30 years started with their "walk both ways to school uphill in driving snow" stories and of course were happy to share, Then he showed them a number "how far away is this number from what you make now?" Their jaws dropped at the accuracy. All he did was add in a formula of typical raises over the intervening years. Workers fresh out of school that these old timers were training made more than them because the company was forced to hire the new people at the going street price - not the carry price of the experienced talent. .
If a company is approaching a recession (count back and you'll see one every 7-10 years) then many of those experienced workers approaching the magical mid-50s "get packages". Or if things are bad enough a company starts with a bunch of 5% on up to 20% staff reductions that clear out whole sections of new and old workers. Plus HR comes around to those experienced people "are you sure you don't want to take this package? you might be safe now but next week could be a deeper cut". .
Pensions get underfunded all the time because the team in charge of it has assumed and calculated returns based on the stock/bond market goes up at "6%" or "10%" or "15%" and each percent figure higher reduces the initial pension pot money to start with (which frees up capital to produce those funny Superbowl advertisements). Then when the withdraws come faster than anticipated and the market never cleanly produced "12%" returns to start with, well.. someone gets fired but a whole lot get reduced benefits. This will impact States/Teachers/Government types too in the coming years... .
Structure your budget so you spend less than you make. Start with housing and transportation and other big cash consuming devices. Saving cash is something you have control of and that saving can mean freedom. As can learning transferable skills. Jobs, careers, companies, customers - all transient and in the end risky.. .
.
"You're screwed dude" .
Whatever your project is.. it is change and challenges the existing power structures. Large corporate organizations develop clear methods and core skills at suppressing anything that creates change. The whole organization fears any mistake is far far far worse than the potential upside for brilliance. That is why committees and groups will revert to the mean, it's why bland products exist. It's why companies like Apple are ultimately doomed (centralized change agent Jobs is no longer running the show, the middle managers are taking over). Consensus management. Team buy-in. Death from a thousand cuts. You're in the deep weeds already. .
I'm a (non-software) Engineer with an MBA who has worked in top 5 to 25 global corporations from the bottom all the way up to working with VPs and CEOs internationally. Unless that management blockade can be made to think your software project is their idea (such that they get the credit for its success, not you, you will be soon running errands for their idea) then to see any success from that project you have to spin it outside work using non-work resources (like not the company laptop) and once that company is a success then you sell it back into your previous employer for big bucks and a corner office and they put you in charge of that prior management (did you sign any patent auto-hand-over paperwork when you hired in? Check that too). But inside? Only heartache and stress is ahead and lower long term promotability - because you are now or will be a 'loose cannon' and a 'maverick' - enviable skills on the outside but career death inside. .
When you are on the outside you need to focus on Sales. Only by Sales to real paying customers can you see the dream through and get that success. Real customers are looking for solutions to their problem and don't care about who thought the thing up -- they just want their problem to go away. Getting Sales and figuring out your Burn Rate minimization plan and you'll be fine for the MBA skillz you'll need. Sales...those are still hard and take longer than you think so be prepared..
Check the Power Source. I used one power cube that was around the 700mA minimum recommended and I had flaky problems with devices and crashed boots that didn't work, especially on the Pi-XBMC distro as it overclocks the cpu. Switching to a power cube giving 2000mA capacity fixed all that (~$10).
Still have a $4 keyboard that doesn't work but it's on the 'known problem' page. My other portable keyboard works fine.
OpenERP for the POS option:
http://www.openerp.com/products/pos
OpenERP has built in inventory and all the financial accounting plus management drill-down 'dashboard' (so you as the owner can monitor the business "what are sales today?" "Ok" "what are sales of chicken platters today?" "hey, that's nice"). An average technical person can install this on an older pc you might already have and be up and running pretty quick.
gnu cash as noted - real accounting package. Think 'peachtree' not 'quickbooks'.
http://gnucash.org/
LibreOffice.org (instead of openoffice)
Others that might help:
http://www.openbravo.com/retail has a POS http://www.myfreepos.net/featured.htm
also google 'windows linux equivalents' to get other software you might want from time to time, like Brainstorming/mindmapping (xmind is good), ganttproject for project management tasks.
Quickbooks isn't the answer. Actual CPA's have told me there are some odd ways it handles some accounts and does some 'magic number balancing'. Hard-core middle market cpa's use peachtree and similar programs.
THAT'S the reason it was great. "I'll show you striking writers" and they did a free internet distributed independent show. The second part of distributing it without a network and just over the internet - you had to get one of those new fangled internet-cable-things and a 'puter to see it.
The guy shouldn't have been recording people. however a few worrisome things about this is that
Count the number of video cameras that Apple is already recording people with in their stores. It's not just used for security/theft, they also use it to mine shopper behaviors - spying on you to figure out how to better sell to you. So there is some dude in a back room looking at you - yes you - as you go about your random shopper tactics. Maybe even using those very same computers they sell. This happens all over.
The other worrisome item is how Apple got the SS involved. Of course, since Apple is just a corporation, it's subject to a few bad years of mismanagement that will have taken care of themselves and righted the world in the process.
This is because the movie companies have run out of the basic ways to tell STORIES THAT WE CARE ABOUT. Gimmicks and flash must be the only way to get people into the theater? Oh, I forgot about explosions and car chases.
I go to the theater to see a huge screen and amazing detail and a meaningful story. All that fancy 3D did was make everything blurry and appear out of focus. My home TV can do that on its own thank you very much.
The other problem is if you happen to find a farmer growing non-patented seed, if there is another farmer in the next field using patented seed there will be cross-pollination by the wind so the next season crop has the patent markings in it. Even grain falling off a truck on its way to the mill sprouts by the road and contaminates farmers fields. Monsanto has been suing farmers for using/selling patented seed that the farmers didn't even know their heirloom seed had been contaminated this way (how many farmers have the genetic equipment to look for what's in there?).
I have a bunch of Linux distros that I torrent continuously (debian, lubuntu, and ubuntu-studio at the moment). I don't code so I help out the Linux community as I can.
Will the ISP systems be smart enough to figure out what's being torrented or just dumb and track if your line shows any torrent participation at all 'you must be a pirate'?
I suspect they only look for the torrent header codes and cannot see inside so cue up all kinds of additional backlash for the ISPs/etc.
. What is in the torrent transfer codes to show reliably what's in the included file?
Openmediavault is a great choice.
I ran with freenas (bsd) for several years but if you have a problem, there are not many ways to recover your data with a liveCD for *bsd. Drives might be fine but what happens when the cat knocks over your server and magic smoke comes out of it?
For Debian-based Openmediavault I have all kinds of livecd's and workstations to access and recover from issues. OMV has been solid and plays nice on the LAN.
Yes. This. LTSP is great. However, you need ethernet (hard wire) for it to work. You won't be able to wifi it across.
For a no brainer starter system, go to Edubuntu.org and download their DVD. Install that on the master node. And launch LTSP from it. Change the desktop background default if you've got some serious folks and not kids using it. It has the latest LibreOffice installed plus a lot of other good stuff.
The other option is to just load Ubuntu OS's on a fist full of USB drives (4GB are fine) and pull the HDDs from all the laptops (make sure you ID the HDDs as Windows has the annoying feature that it will not run if the HDD is put in a different computer chassis, it records things like mac address and mobo serial #). Put two partitions on the USB drives, first is normal FAT that windows can even load, the second (bootable) is where you use Ubuntu's System/Administration/StartupDiskCreator. That way there is some user storage space along with the full OS.
Many of us are already running around Big Publishing, which like Hollywood, has seen disruptive technology twist the industry. Search for Konrath to learn more. Or look up my books (http://jgordonsmith.com: swords & sorcery published, urban thrillers and SF in the works).
It comes down to Story. Take a look at some of the blogs by the independent novel authors (konrath, wesleysmith, passive guy) to see how the writing and writers are getting closer to the consumers via Amazon's Kindle distribution system. The software to run servers and video host content is already out there, much of it is open source and free. There is a huge pile of very good script writers that are sitting in some studio's slush-pile being ignored. So figure out how to get them and you've got the stories. The rest is just having a production pipeline to make the rest of the magic happen.
Billed as the No-Budget movie.. and a lot of amazing special effects. They have been getting help to fund late stage color correction and touch-ups. but I still think they will be close to a practical no budget.
Do you have a link to your content site to share? This looks really promising.
I've been following Project London (http://projectlondonmovie.com/) for a while as a fan. All their special effects have been done with Blender. There is also the fantastic Sintel project. Open Source tools and technology cost reductions along with the low cost of Internet distribution are keys to success. You are "write" about the stories and writing being important. But you can find reasonableness even in the US.
I write novels (http://jgordonsmith.com : swords&sorcery published, urban thrillers and SF in the works) and have been collecting a group of writers - including script writers. Everyone is independent of the old systems. We like it that way.
The Nobel Prize, like literary awards, usually avoid popular cultural products of 'the masses'. Like your tag line about hipsters, it's the same type of group, but on a more sophisticated level.
As an author, I can appreciate the scale and scope of the Ring trilogy and there are some great scenes, but the Hobbit was the better story.
Slashdot Mirror
The largest crop in the US is not Corn or Soybeans, it's lawn grass. Many of the lawn and garden chemicals homeowners like to use, or are used on plants homeowners pick up at the local big box retailer, contain these chemicals harmful to pollinators.
The statistic is somewhere around 70% of the foods in the typical American Diet need pollinators. No pollinators then pretty limited menus.
Bees consume pollen. Some even call it 'bee bread'...
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/in868
http://www.hhmi.org/biointerac...
.
I've used CAELinux for quite a bit, but focused on Finite Element Modeling using Salome->Code_Aster. There are several packages on the disk and easy to burn the LiveDVD, insert it into your computer, reboot, use the software, reboot back to your base system.
http://www.caelinux.com/CMS/
.
. The perceived problem is really a symptom of the greater issue within these organizations. Moving them back to the office to "keep an eye on them" will be counter productive. Of course any change will have an effect (but short lived) because someone will be "measuring" (Westinghouse Hawthorne effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect).
.
.
.
The strongest performers, if any remain in the organization, will bail and find flexible jobs at major competitors.
The real solution? Hire professionals and give them the ability to get things done - aka thin the middle management ranks and flatten the organization.
.
.
.
.
.It's advertising that the 'network' pays the artist to "come over here and advertise with us." Since this is Superbowl Sunday .. what is the number of earlobes the cellist might reach on Pandora vs how many viewers see the thirty-second commercial spot?
.
As an artist myself, but in a different media, I give away product all the time (I have a free download running today in fact). It's what I do to expose new consumers to my work. Food companies hire people to do free samples in a supermarket "try Pete's Wacky Pizza and here is a coupon for today too."
The point of the streaming (as was radio) is the artist is running a three to five minute commercial, they have that whole audience captured for the length of that song. Hopefully the streaming service provides links or a radio announcer that says "This is Jane Cellist and buy her stuff at Jane's web site". The streaming services can give accurate data that the artist can compare against their actual sales at the time or shortly after and see what the sales-through rate is. Example, the cellist run her classical cello music on Pandora for a week and her CD sales are flat but a few weeks later she runs her product on Spotify and she makes a thousand sales. Every time she runs Spotify she has big sell through. So she doesn't use Pandora but works Spotify hard. Then she does the same with other streaming services, or finds her Rock-style cello music pulls in a big Pandora fan base of physical sales.
.
.
.
. .. someone gets fired but a whole lot get reduced benefits. This will impact States/Teachers/Government types too in the coming years...
. .
.
I've worked at a couple of Fortune 10 corporations (basement to lofty offices), private manufacturing businesses (many capacities), and consulting (domestic and international small to large corporations). My plan has been to seek freedom and adventure. Yours might be something else. But these were my reasons:
Early on while at one of the big-co's a co-worker went around and asked many in the department what they made when they first started at the company and what year they hired in. All these people approaching 30 years started with their "walk both ways to school uphill in driving snow" stories and of course were happy to share, Then he showed them a number "how far away is this number from what you make now?" Their jaws dropped at the accuracy. All he did was add in a formula of typical raises over the intervening years. Workers fresh out of school that these old timers were training made more than them because the company was forced to hire the new people at the going street price - not the carry price of the experienced talent.
If a company is approaching a recession (count back and you'll see one every 7-10 years) then many of those experienced workers approaching the magical mid-50s "get packages". Or if things are bad enough a company starts with a bunch of 5% on up to 20% staff reductions that clear out whole sections of new and old workers. Plus HR comes around to those experienced people "are you sure you don't want to take this package? you might be safe now but next week could be a deeper cut".
Pensions get underfunded all the time because the team in charge of it has assumed and calculated returns based on the stock/bond market goes up at "6%" or "10%" or "15%" and each percent figure higher reduces the initial pension pot money to start with (which frees up capital to produce those funny Superbowl advertisements). Then when the withdraws come faster than anticipated and the market never cleanly produced "12%" returns to start with, well
Structure your budget so you spend less than you make. Start with housing and transportation and other big cash consuming devices. Saving cash is something you have control of and that saving can mean freedom. As can learning transferable skills. Jobs, careers, companies, customers - all transient and in the end risky.
.
. .. it is change and challenges the existing power structures. Large corporate organizations develop clear methods and core skills at suppressing anything that creates change. The whole organization fears any mistake is far far far worse than the potential upside for brilliance. That is why committees and groups will revert to the mean, it's why bland products exist. It's why companies like Apple are ultimately doomed (centralized change agent Jobs is no longer running the show, the middle managers are taking over). Consensus management. Team buy-in. Death from a thousand cuts. You're in the deep weeds already.
.
. .
"You're screwed dude"
Whatever your project is
I'm a (non-software) Engineer with an MBA who has worked in top 5 to 25 global corporations from the bottom all the way up to working with VPs and CEOs internationally. Unless that management blockade can be made to think your software project is their idea (such that they get the credit for its success, not you, you will be soon running errands for their idea) then to see any success from that project you have to spin it outside work using non-work resources (like not the company laptop) and once that company is a success then you sell it back into your previous employer for big bucks and a corner office and they put you in charge of that prior management (did you sign any patent auto-hand-over paperwork when you hired in? Check that too). But inside? Only heartache and stress is ahead and lower long term promotability - because you are now or will be a 'loose cannon' and a 'maverick' - enviable skills on the outside but career death inside.
When you are on the outside you need to focus on Sales. Only by Sales to real paying customers can you see the dream through and get that success. Real customers are looking for solutions to their problem and don't care about who thought the thing up -- they just want their problem to go away. Getting Sales and figuring out your Burn Rate minimization plan and you'll be fine for the MBA skillz you'll need. Sales...those are still hard and take longer than you think so be prepared.
Check the Power Source. I used one power cube that was around the 700mA minimum recommended and I had flaky problems with devices and crashed boots that didn't work, especially on the Pi-XBMC distro as it overclocks the cpu. Switching to a power cube giving 2000mA capacity fixed all that (~$10).
Still have a $4 keyboard that doesn't work but it's on the 'known problem' page. My other portable keyboard works fine.
OpenERP for the POS option: http://www.openerp.com/products/pos OpenERP has built in inventory and all the financial accounting plus management drill-down 'dashboard' (so you as the owner can monitor the business "what are sales today?" "Ok" "what are sales of chicken platters today?" "hey, that's nice"). An average technical person can install this on an older pc you might already have and be up and running pretty quick.
gnu cash as noted - real accounting package. Think 'peachtree' not 'quickbooks'. http://gnucash.org/
LibreOffice.org (instead of openoffice)
Others that might help: http://www.openbravo.com/retail has a POS
http://www.myfreepos.net/featured.htm
also google 'windows linux equivalents' to get other software you might want from time to time, like Brainstorming/mindmapping (xmind is good), ganttproject for project management tasks.
Quickbooks isn't the answer. Actual CPA's have told me there are some odd ways it handles some accounts and does some 'magic number balancing'. Hard-core middle market cpa's use peachtree and similar programs.
THAT'S the reason it was great. "I'll show you striking writers" and they did a free internet distributed independent show. The second part of distributing it without a network and just over the internet - you had to get one of those new fangled internet-cable-things and a 'puter to see it.
The guy shouldn't have been recording people. however a few worrisome things about this is that
Count the number of video cameras that Apple is already recording people with in their stores. It's not just used for security/theft, they also use it to mine shopper behaviors - spying on you to figure out how to better sell to you. So there is some dude in a back room looking at you - yes you - as you go about your random shopper tactics. Maybe even using those very same computers they sell. This happens all over.
The other worrisome item is how Apple got the SS involved. Of course, since Apple is just a corporation, it's subject to a few bad years of mismanagement that will have taken care of themselves and righted the world in the process.
This is because the movie companies have run out of the basic ways to tell STORIES THAT WE CARE ABOUT. Gimmicks and flash must be the only way to get people into the theater? Oh, I forgot about explosions and car chases.
I go to the theater to see a huge screen and amazing detail and a meaningful story. All that fancy 3D did was make everything blurry and appear out of focus. My home TV can do that on its own thank you very much.
http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
The other problem is if you happen to find a farmer growing non-patented seed, if there is another farmer in the next field using patented seed there will be cross-pollination by the wind so the next season crop has the patent markings in it. Even grain falling off a truck on its way to the mill sprouts by the road and contaminates farmers fields. Monsanto has been suing farmers for using/selling patented seed that the farmers didn't even know their heirloom seed had been contaminated this way (how many farmers have the genetic equipment to look for what's in there?).
I have a bunch of Linux distros that I torrent continuously (debian, lubuntu, and ubuntu-studio at the moment). I don't code so I help out the Linux community as I can.
Will the ISP systems be smart enough to figure out what's being torrented or just dumb and track if your line shows any torrent participation at all 'you must be a pirate'?
I suspect they only look for the torrent header codes and cannot see inside so cue up all kinds of additional backlash for the ISPs/etc.
. What is in the torrent transfer codes to show reliably what's in the included file?
Openmediavault is a great choice. I ran with freenas (bsd) for several years but if you have a problem, there are not many ways to recover your data with a liveCD for *bsd. Drives might be fine but what happens when the cat knocks over your server and magic smoke comes out of it? For Debian-based Openmediavault I have all kinds of livecd's and workstations to access and recover from issues. OMV has been solid and plays nice on the LAN.
Yes. This. LTSP is great. However, you need ethernet (hard wire) for it to work. You won't be able to wifi it across. For a no brainer starter system, go to Edubuntu.org and download their DVD. Install that on the master node. And launch LTSP from it. Change the desktop background default if you've got some serious folks and not kids using it. It has the latest LibreOffice installed plus a lot of other good stuff.
The other option is to just load Ubuntu OS's on a fist full of USB drives (4GB are fine) and pull the HDDs from all the laptops (make sure you ID the HDDs as Windows has the annoying feature that it will not run if the HDD is put in a different computer chassis, it records things like mac address and mobo serial #). Put two partitions on the USB drives, first is normal FAT that windows can even load, the second (bootable) is where you use Ubuntu's System/Administration/StartupDiskCreator. That way there is some user storage space along with the full OS.
.
Many of us are already running around Big Publishing, which like Hollywood, has seen disruptive technology twist the industry. Search for Konrath to learn more. Or look up my books (http://jgordonsmith.com: swords & sorcery published, urban thrillers and SF in the works).
It comes down to Story. Take a look at some of the blogs by the independent novel authors (konrath, wesleysmith, passive guy) to see how the writing and writers are getting closer to the consumers via Amazon's Kindle distribution system. The software to run servers and video host content is already out there, much of it is open source and free. There is a huge pile of very good script writers that are sitting in some studio's slush-pile being ignored. So figure out how to get them and you've got the stories. The rest is just having a production pipeline to make the rest of the magic happen.
take a look at Project London http://projectlondonmovie.com/
.. and a lot of amazing special effects. They have been getting help to fund late stage color correction and touch-ups. but I still think they will be close to a practical no budget.
Billed as the No-Budget movie
Do you have a link to your content site to share? This looks really promising.
I've been following Project London (http://projectlondonmovie.com/) for a while as a fan. All their special effects have been done with Blender. There is also the fantastic Sintel project. Open Source tools and technology cost reductions along with the low cost of Internet distribution are keys to success. You are "write" about the stories and writing being important. But you can find reasonableness even in the US.
I write novels (http://jgordonsmith.com : swords&sorcery published, urban thrillers and SF in the works) and have been collecting a group of writers - including script writers. Everyone is independent of the old systems. We like it that way.
The Nobel Prize, like literary awards, usually avoid popular cultural products of 'the masses'. Like your tag line about hipsters, it's the same type of group, but on a more sophisticated level. As an author, I can appreciate the scale and scope of the Ring trilogy and there are some great scenes, but the Hobbit was the better story.
I was wondering if someone would get around to posting Project Gutenberg.
Also check out LibreVox http://librivox.org/. Free site of audio books.
.
.... great signature line :D