I totally agree. I try to make sure I sepperate my page template, css, images, and javascript all very clearly and break my code into one file for code that generates data (database, calculations, etc), and another file for code that converts the data into output. Where possible I break down code into services so that the lines between different functionality are clearly defined and all components are reusable.
Javascript behaviors is a current favorite of mine if you have to deal with Javascript on your pages. It keeps your code and HTML so much cleaner. It really makes it easier to work with.
I have dozens of active domains with hundreds of email addresses each pointed back to me and other users and spam hasn't been a very big issue. The majority is filtered of spam and viruses first by the mail server and second by the mail client. Maybe one or two spam messages a week per user slide through and I never have problems with clean mail being filtered. My GMail isn't quite so good at filtering but still limits me to maybe half a dozen spam messages that get through a week. It's really not much of an issue anymore thanks to improvements in filtering technology.
The most problematic recently have been messages with no text at all - just an inline image. Filtering really needs to have better ways of identifying binaries and images and filtering by them. I've been working on a way that both simply includes the md5 code of the image and processes images with a tiny neural net that looks at them and outputs a sort of text based dna chain as output so that the bayesian filters have something they can work with without needing a rewrite at every level of filtering.
Rumble packs were always a retarded feature that didn't really contribute much to the experience. They always reminded me of a NES type of cheesy lame VR feature. Remember those vests you could wear that would rumble during play? Ooooh yeah those were fun for about five minutes.
I would pay an extra couple hundred dollars if they'd upgrade the hdd to 500GB. It seems silly to be stuck with a tiny sub-100GB drive just to toss it out or throw it in my closet with my other tiny drives. Buying a PS3 is supposed to be like buying a computer and not some kiddy console so they should offer a really maxed out version.
The games I bought for PS2 aren't that impressive. I picked them more for their game play rather than for their graphics. I do avoid games that have really sucky graphics though. I don't expect the best but I don't want it to look like a past gen console either.
The Tidy Firefox extension helps quite a bit because the W3 compliance tools aren't always easy to test on dynamic content especially in pages that require a complex process to get to.
I am a professional designer and while I won't say my sites are 100% compliant I do make a lot of effort to be standards compliant. The things that bite me most are minor things you have to do to make things work in given browsers. IE is the cause of most of these. Other than that the biggest issue is remembering to use the proper html entities. It's easy to forget especially with dynamic content.
Overall it's not that much work to be standards compliant. What is a lot of work is trying to work with non-compliant browsers and minor issues with compliant browsers.
For content that can be encoded from a pure source I'm all for new codecs that compress better and are more open. I'd love to see a DVD-like open standard take hold complete with menus, choices for language, etc. I'd like to see such a standard that was structured such that you could use either the custom interface or a structured interface which would be better for disabled users and other people that might have trouble using the themed menus that come with a movie.
Maybe if you are encoding from the same original source. If you transcode a previously encoded file using any means you are going to get a lower quality output. It's impossible to shrink the size of a ripped DVD, using transcoding, and keep the same quality. The only options that would work would be compression and removal of unwanted or duplicate bits.
Real life isn't like CSI where you can take a grainy movie and run some program over it to restore it to it's original quality.
Myself, I'd rather they'd make movies available such that each frame was stored in a loseless format. It'd be a huge file but it'd be the next best thing to the original.
I can't stand divx and other 'crappy' formats. You definately can see a loss in video quality and you lose a lot of features such as easy selection of different languages and subtitles and all that. Probably one reason I have terabytes of ripped movie files. I own most of the DVDs I rip but I like to play them off a PC better than disc as it's so much easier to flip through them. I can plug in a removable hdd with 40+ movies on it as easily as I could put a single dvd in and with the system able to play movies and music available on my network I don't even have to do that much,
DivX is great for copies I hand out to other people but for myself I want the real thing.
I don't blame Google and other search engines for the problems in China. I think they are right that by making more information available they are more likely to cause changes than by not making that information available - even at the cost of having to play the role of censors. Those to blame are the companies providing hardware and software specially designed to filter the Internet traffic. Point the finger at companies like Cisco.
History is always rewriten so that's nothing new. I've seen some horrible text books for example that make things out in very rose colored ways. One claimed that the pyramids were built by happy workers and not slaves and low men as commonly taught. The same book claimed that the Nazi's didn't really have concentration camps full of Jews and others during WW2. This was a text book in a public high school. Horrible stuff. Censorship in general goes on a lot. I think it can only get better by putting more works online where it's harder to control the flow of information.
Stopping censorship is less a technical problem than a social one. We need to really stand up against censorship if we want it to stop.
It's not that you can't get around logins - it's that they hinder your effort and are often enough to keep a user from bothering at all. I dunno the last time I actually looked at an article on the NY whatever it is because they want me to login and I don't want to bother. My comment was largely a barb at them.;)
I dunno about your claim that you can store 100 movies on a drive. Maybe if you have a really big drive or you compress your movies down to some shitty quality. My experience is that a 300GB drive can hold about 43 DVD-quality movies ripped in their full glory. At an average size of around 7GB each they aren't especially small files for transmission over the shitty slow Internet most of us Americans have even if we have broadband. Maybe you could get the average size down to around 5GB if you stripped out all the non-movie parts of the DVD rips.
I don't bother downloading movies over P2P because it's cheaper, counting time spent trying to download via P2P as having a value, to just buy them and I'm unsatisfied with the poor quality of most rips.
I don't think a DNS system makes much sense for complex queries. Really the current search server model makes the most sense except they'd be more logical if the servers they index would update their own data rather than having to be spidered. The really tricky part is classification of the stored data which I think will end up being a combined system of human contributions and computer processing. Let people vote on quality of content and tag the content and let smart systems such as neural nets learn from the human input to identify the content and give it's own best guess as to file types, content, quality, etc. I've done a lot of work with different AI techniques for identifying objects in photos and videos and I think a good enough result could be produced to give human contributors a solid place to begin their own identification.
Copyright in general is a seriously broken concept that needs an overhaul. In general globalization is making things interesting because laws to vary and with technology enabling people to easily access files anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world it's quite easy for things to be available even if they shouldn't be by a user's country's laws. For the most part I'm for getting rid of copyright and for the remainder they need to stabalize the laws worldwide to be the same. This is only one issue that makes me wonder if it's time to begin looking at a single worldwide government.
I think there needs to be a working model by which authors can get paid for their work. I don't think this requires 200 years of copyright protection on a work or DRM or any other of that crap which is incompatible with technology and freedom of speech. Poeple need to make a living and pay for costs such as storage and bandwidth but they don't need their own little monopoly that lasts centuries after they're dead. My general plan for copyrights and patents is that they should be $1 the first year and double every year until the own decides to let the copyright or patent lapse. I don't think DRM is needed to get people paid. Some people will always find ways to steal but the vast majority of people are willing to pay a fair price if it's easy to do. Setting up some sort of control structure by which when authors submit their work to search engines for indexing that those search engines will know the price and handle charging the users and getting the authors paid would be ideal I think. Google Base and some of their other work seems to be heading this direction so we shall see how it works out. I think iTunes is a prime example that people are willing to pay a fair price for something freely available if it's easy enough to do so.
I know servers and bandwidth are expensive as I maintain several servers that host websites, email, file sharing, etc. It can add up quick if your not paying attention - especially file sharing. Even finding hosted servers of fat pipes with 1TB of filespace each took me a lot of work and was fairly expensive (around $250/mo each box).
Raw scans suck. Did you process you book scans into some useful form? OCR with any artwork taken into account and included properly is the way to go if you can't get original data files.
Will all these books and articles require we login to view them first? I think having every book, article, movie, song, etc available for use anytime is a great idea and important for society but I don't want to have to login and leave a paper trail of everything I'm looking at. Searching should be powerful, access private, and making payments for work still under copyright easy and affordable.
I think these ISPs are so full of shit for their whines about bandwidth usage. They could easily cache most content going through their networks but they choose not to bother.
Advances in bit torrent are helping too I think as they improve it to try to pick closer nodes to download from first. That alone could potentially speed downloads up and reduce network stress a lot especially as more and more audio and video content changes to using the torrent protocols.
Streaming content can be cached too and can be distributed to load from closer location when possible and there is no reason for most audio and video content to be streamed. If it isn't live then streaming doesn't make sense.
Stop trying to pass laws and rip off your customers - so long as there is a technical fix for the problems the network is experiencing those should be the methods used to fix the problems. I think local-centric Internet is one of the biggest places where there is room for profit today. A good start-up that focuses on local access points with local-centric chat, file sharing, news, shopping, etc could do really well and it's a great market because it's perfect for many small companies in different communities to be involved in.
I agree. When a customer asks us a question we go out of our way to help them through whatever their problem is. If they want some special item we don't usually carry but know how to get we'll order it for them. A lot of times we'll give customers free or steeply discounted products or service especially if they are a repeat customer. We know their names and they know ours. We may not always be as cheap as Walmart or Home Depot but our service is a lot better and we offer things that you just can't get at places like that. How often has Walmart special ordered items for you? Small businesses that succeed know how to treat customers and for the customer that is a much better experience.
Sure small businesses have problems but they also have many benefits. First off you're seeing a small business as needing to behave like a big business - that just isn't really a good idea.
An ideal small business is half a dozen or less tightly knit people in a little group that works together extremely well. Family and friends mostly. All work they aren't skilled at doing, or just don't have the time to do, should be farmed out to other small businesses of similar size. Instead of trying to get a job people should be trying to start their own little business and network with other small businesses to get some revenue. Keeping the units small and specialized makes them much more flexible and effecient. Yes, it means that you'll need to figure out things like insurance for yourself (and trust me it's not that easy) but you get to control your own life and you don't have to support a bunch of mgmt above you or a bunch of lossers that do their job poorly. There is a larger slice of the pie for the few people in your little company.
Large businesses have proven to be unable to stay flexible and effecient and have proven to make up for these shortcomings by crushing their competition using money and power rather than by real innovation, quality, and low prices. None of this is good for the economy or for society. Big business is the bane of modern society and at the heart of most of our social issues.
Getting hired should not be the goal of any upwardly mobile person in todays world. Jobs are fleeting and the concept of a career unrealistic in most cases. Start your own company and make it succeed. If it fails then learn from it and try again. There is a lot of room for small businesses to work with each other even when they are in competition with one another. If we get more work then we can handle in a time period we farm some of it out to our competition and they do likewise. It works pretty well really.
The biggest issues I see are in training, social security, and legal red tape. People aren't being properly trained for todays work enviroment. You need a basic understanding of business including accounting, law, marketing, purchasing, etc along with whatever trade skills you may have. Knowing how to go out and get insurance for your employees, at a reasonable price, is something many small business owners don't really know how to do - so it doesn't get done. Also laws are formed such that small businesses don't have to get their employees insurance which I think is as bad a concept as drivers not having to have insurance. Laws should exist to require everyone be given insurance and to make it easy and affordable for small employers to do so. Unemployment laws need to be changed to provide safety nets so that when a small business goes bust the owner won't become homeless or starve any more than his (or her) employees. It needs to be recognized that many of these ventures are short lived and don't provide enough capital to act as a safety net for their owners. Giving them a safety net, like unemployment security is supposed to do, will make it easier for them to recover and try again. Boundries to creating a small business need to be lowered too. There are to many permits and such required for a small business. It's both an expense and a confussing bit of red tape that keeps people from trying their own business. Just to get to the point where you can order product for resale is often an involved affair. You need to find a wholesaler who will usually require a tax permit, a business phone, and a business mailing address. You can't get any of these without filing for your business permit and getting a fictious name and publishing whatever announcements are required in your area for these. Have you tried to open a PO Box recently? In the past couple years it's became something of a nightmare to do. You have to prove your business identity, your own identity, and the identity of anyone who could possibly receive mail to the box. If someone slightly misspells your name when mailing to you then the
I think apps should have to make it clear if back is functioning as an undo. Maybe if they had to overload the back button the back button could change colors and offer an option to prompt for permission to undo? "Doing this will undo your last change. Are you sure you want to continue? [Yes], [No], [Go Back]" I think in applications that back as undo and forward as redo makes sense but you have to make clear to the user when they are in an application and when they are in a document. Back as undo is a common concept in many apps, such as wizards, already so if implemented well I don't think it'd be near as confussing to users as the current way things happen. An application transaction that can't be undone, such as sending an email, should be listed but make it clear that it's permanent. I'm seeing a handy little dropdown under the back button, if you click on the widget for it, that shows previous pages as it does now but in the case of an application shows a collapsable sub-list that shows the different actions you've taken with each of them with their own collapsable sub-list of steps. They could be greyed out for actions that can't be undone.
I think an easy back-forward model is one of the things that made the web as popular as it is and it can make applications easier to use too if handled correctly. It's an important enough issue to be worth some study and work to make it right.
IMO there is no reason the government should be able to take any of my blood, dna, fingerprints, etc unless they have specific evidence that I've comitted a crime - and if I'm not convicted they should have to delete that data. Once your time is served there should be a time limit, for non-violent crime, after which time your data will be deleted.
The government should not be able to collect large amounts of data on it's citizens. Privacy is an important component of freedom.
True, but hitting back SHOULD undo anything that is possible. It'd be nice if it'd send some sort of special signal on back so that site's could undo. A built-in transaction model would be good too so that transactions could be started, rolled back, or committed in such a way that the whole task would group back and forward actions in a way that makes sense.
Is the web to the point where it needs to improve the back and forward model without completely tossing it? What about refresh and stop? It all seems it could be improved a lot while still keeping things easy.
Why not just get a new bit of analytic software? In years of using different packages I've yet to see one I liked anyway. I use my own and it analyzes a lot more than any of the off-the-shelf options I've seen. I want to know everything about the people at my sites.
One of my favorite uses of AI in MUDs I made in the good old text days was using it for non-character intelligence such as making tools for generating quests in a way that responded to how the players behaved, weather patterns, etc. Current RPGs and online games are fricken boring. Quests and tasks are very canned and they don't really behave like a real living world in which magic is alive and good and evil clash.
One of my favorite toys was an oracle ball that when users used it would predict future events in the game. Nothing really fancier than predicting the stock market or anything else. Just analyze events as they happen and use statistics and AI to predict what is going to happen later. Put into a game this kind of thing can be a fun sort of psuedo-quest. Gamers can go to find the oracle in order to get tips as the best thing to do later in the game and those tips will vary in reliability.
Good point. I'm the only one sick enough to admit in public to finding cashiers a turn-on. When I get bored late at night, instead of watching porn like a healthy male, I go down to the local Super WalMart and chat up the cuties stuck working the graveyard shift. It's amazing how much more willing women are to talk to you when they're bored out of their mind. I've met many a cute girl working the counter in electronics late at night.;)
I bet you still want to see all those slightly trailer park looking cashier girls naked in a private changing booth. Girls who have to work crappy jobs party better - especially when you're buying. That's how you find your smiley face!
Okay.. maybe I'm the only person with this fantasy for cashier girls. What a sick bastard.
If my neighbor is raping their own children I shouldn't step in to stop them because they're not threatening me or otherwise harming me? A self-centric view of the world is very short sighted and only leads to a world which is bad for just about everyone. I don't really care if Saddam had WMDs or not. He was an asshole, a dictator, and a destabalizing factor. He's like the drug dealer that lives down the block - even if he isn't an active threat he is influencing the world around him to become a threat to you. Something needed to be done and we stepped up to do it. Maybe it hasn't been handled as best as could have been done but it's been done pretty well.
I think Bush, and all our politicians mostly, has proven horrible in protecting the civil rights of Americans. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and everyone in places of power have user the war on terror, much like the war on drugs, as a chance to make their own plays for increased power. I've yet to see anybody in a position of power in our country make a significant stand to protect the liberty of Americans. Protecting the rights of people in other countries is important but protecting the rights of people in our own country is much more important. Who will defend others when there is nobody here left with the freedom to defend even themselves? Saddam was a threat to America but not nearly the threat that our own leadership is.
Honor and responsiblity should start with the person and work their way up to all humanity. Self, Family, Neighborhood, City, State, Country, World, etc. Across America there is a break down somewere in the area between self and family so there is no chance that we can take the responsibility for the world and do it well because we lack the ability to be responsibile for ourselves and our own government. If we're going to lead we need to lead by example and look after our own affairs first.
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I totally agree. I try to make sure I sepperate my page template, css, images, and javascript all very clearly and break my code into one file for code that generates data (database, calculations, etc), and another file for code that converts the data into output. Where possible I break down code into services so that the lines between different functionality are clearly defined and all components are reusable.
Javascript behaviors is a current favorite of mine if you have to deal with Javascript on your pages. It keeps your code and HTML so much cleaner. It really makes it easier to work with.
I have dozens of active domains with hundreds of email addresses each pointed back to me and other users and spam hasn't been a very big issue. The majority is filtered of spam and viruses first by the mail server and second by the mail client. Maybe one or two spam messages a week per user slide through and I never have problems with clean mail being filtered. My GMail isn't quite so good at filtering but still limits me to maybe half a dozen spam messages that get through a week. It's really not much of an issue anymore thanks to improvements in filtering technology.
The most problematic recently have been messages with no text at all - just an inline image. Filtering really needs to have better ways of identifying binaries and images and filtering by them. I've been working on a way that both simply includes the md5 code of the image and processes images with a tiny neural net that looks at them and outputs a sort of text based dna chain as output so that the bayesian filters have something they can work with without needing a rewrite at every level of filtering.
Rumble packs were always a retarded feature that didn't really contribute much to the experience. They always reminded me of a NES type of cheesy lame VR feature. Remember those vests you could wear that would rumble during play? Ooooh yeah those were fun for about five minutes.
I would pay an extra couple hundred dollars if they'd upgrade the hdd to 500GB. It seems silly to be stuck with a tiny sub-100GB drive just to toss it out or throw it in my closet with my other tiny drives. Buying a PS3 is supposed to be like buying a computer and not some kiddy console so they should offer a really maxed out version.
The games I bought for PS2 aren't that impressive. I picked them more for their game play rather than for their graphics. I do avoid games that have really sucky graphics though. I don't expect the best but I don't want it to look like a past gen console either.
The Tidy Firefox extension helps quite a bit because the W3 compliance tools aren't always easy to test on dynamic content especially in pages that require a complex process to get to.
I am a professional designer and while I won't say my sites are 100% compliant I do make a lot of effort to be standards compliant. The things that bite me most are minor things you have to do to make things work in given browsers. IE is the cause of most of these. Other than that the biggest issue is remembering to use the proper html entities. It's easy to forget especially with dynamic content.
Overall it's not that much work to be standards compliant. What is a lot of work is trying to work with non-compliant browsers and minor issues with compliant browsers.
For content that can be encoded from a pure source I'm all for new codecs that compress better and are more open. I'd love to see a DVD-like open standard take hold complete with menus, choices for language, etc. I'd like to see such a standard that was structured such that you could use either the custom interface or a structured interface which would be better for disabled users and other people that might have trouble using the themed menus that come with a movie.
Maybe if you are encoding from the same original source. If you transcode a previously encoded file using any means you are going to get a lower quality output. It's impossible to shrink the size of a ripped DVD, using transcoding, and keep the same quality. The only options that would work would be compression and removal of unwanted or duplicate bits.
Real life isn't like CSI where you can take a grainy movie and run some program over it to restore it to it's original quality.
Myself, I'd rather they'd make movies available such that each frame was stored in a loseless format. It'd be a huge file but it'd be the next best thing to the original.
I can't stand divx and other 'crappy' formats. You definately can see a loss in video quality and you lose a lot of features such as easy selection of different languages and subtitles and all that. Probably one reason I have terabytes of ripped movie files. I own most of the DVDs I rip but I like to play them off a PC better than disc as it's so much easier to flip through them. I can plug in a removable hdd with 40+ movies on it as easily as I could put a single dvd in and with the system able to play movies and music available on my network I don't even have to do that much,
DivX is great for copies I hand out to other people but for myself I want the real thing.
I don't blame Google and other search engines for the problems in China. I think they are right that by making more information available they are more likely to cause changes than by not making that information available - even at the cost of having to play the role of censors. Those to blame are the companies providing hardware and software specially designed to filter the Internet traffic. Point the finger at companies like Cisco.
History is always rewriten so that's nothing new. I've seen some horrible text books for example that make things out in very rose colored ways. One claimed that the pyramids were built by happy workers and not slaves and low men as commonly taught. The same book claimed that the Nazi's didn't really have concentration camps full of Jews and others during WW2. This was a text book in a public high school. Horrible stuff. Censorship in general goes on a lot. I think it can only get better by putting more works online where it's harder to control the flow of information.
Stopping censorship is less a technical problem than a social one. We need to really stand up against censorship if we want it to stop.
It's not that you can't get around logins - it's that they hinder your effort and are often enough to keep a user from bothering at all. I dunno the last time I actually looked at an article on the NY whatever it is because they want me to login and I don't want to bother. My comment was largely a barb at them. ;)
I dunno about your claim that you can store 100 movies on a drive. Maybe if you have a really big drive or you compress your movies down to some shitty quality. My experience is that a 300GB drive can hold about 43 DVD-quality movies ripped in their full glory. At an average size of around 7GB each they aren't especially small files for transmission over the shitty slow Internet most of us Americans have even if we have broadband. Maybe you could get the average size down to around 5GB if you stripped out all the non-movie parts of the DVD rips.
I don't bother downloading movies over P2P because it's cheaper, counting time spent trying to download via P2P as having a value, to just buy them and I'm unsatisfied with the poor quality of most rips.
I don't think a DNS system makes much sense for complex queries. Really the current search server model makes the most sense except they'd be more logical if the servers they index would update their own data rather than having to be spidered. The really tricky part is classification of the stored data which I think will end up being a combined system of human contributions and computer processing. Let people vote on quality of content and tag the content and let smart systems such as neural nets learn from the human input to identify the content and give it's own best guess as to file types, content, quality, etc. I've done a lot of work with different AI techniques for identifying objects in photos and videos and I think a good enough result could be produced to give human contributors a solid place to begin their own identification.
Copyright in general is a seriously broken concept that needs an overhaul. In general globalization is making things interesting because laws to vary and with technology enabling people to easily access files anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world it's quite easy for things to be available even if they shouldn't be by a user's country's laws. For the most part I'm for getting rid of copyright and for the remainder they need to stabalize the laws worldwide to be the same. This is only one issue that makes me wonder if it's time to begin looking at a single worldwide government.
I think there needs to be a working model by which authors can get paid for their work. I don't think this requires 200 years of copyright protection on a work or DRM or any other of that crap which is incompatible with technology and freedom of speech. Poeple need to make a living and pay for costs such as storage and bandwidth but they don't need their own little monopoly that lasts centuries after they're dead. My general plan for copyrights and patents is that they should be $1 the first year and double every year until the own decides to let the copyright or patent lapse. I don't think DRM is needed to get people paid. Some people will always find ways to steal but the vast majority of people are willing to pay a fair price if it's easy to do. Setting up some sort of control structure by which when authors submit their work to search engines for indexing that those search engines will know the price and handle charging the users and getting the authors paid would be ideal I think. Google Base and some of their other work seems to be heading this direction so we shall see how it works out. I think iTunes is a prime example that people are willing to pay a fair price for something freely available if it's easy enough to do so.
I know servers and bandwidth are expensive as I maintain several servers that host websites, email, file sharing, etc. It can add up quick if your not paying attention - especially file sharing. Even finding hosted servers of fat pipes with 1TB of filespace each took me a lot of work and was fairly expensive (around $250/mo each box).
Raw scans suck. Did you process you book scans into some useful form? OCR with any artwork taken into account and included properly is the way to go if you can't get original data files.
Will all these books and articles require we login to view them first? I think having every book, article, movie, song, etc available for use anytime is a great idea and important for society but I don't want to have to login and leave a paper trail of everything I'm looking at. Searching should be powerful, access private, and making payments for work still under copyright easy and affordable.
I think these ISPs are so full of shit for their whines about bandwidth usage. They could easily cache most content going through their networks but they choose not to bother.
Advances in bit torrent are helping too I think as they improve it to try to pick closer nodes to download from first. That alone could potentially speed downloads up and reduce network stress a lot especially as more and more audio and video content changes to using the torrent protocols.
Streaming content can be cached too and can be distributed to load from closer location when possible and there is no reason for most audio and video content to be streamed. If it isn't live then streaming doesn't make sense.
Stop trying to pass laws and rip off your customers - so long as there is a technical fix for the problems the network is experiencing those should be the methods used to fix the problems. I think local-centric Internet is one of the biggest places where there is room for profit today. A good start-up that focuses on local access points with local-centric chat, file sharing, news, shopping, etc could do really well and it's a great market because it's perfect for many small companies in different communities to be involved in.
I agree. When a customer asks us a question we go out of our way to help them through whatever their problem is. If they want some special item we don't usually carry but know how to get we'll order it for them. A lot of times we'll give customers free or steeply discounted products or service especially if they are a repeat customer. We know their names and they know ours. We may not always be as cheap as Walmart or Home Depot but our service is a lot better and we offer things that you just can't get at places like that. How often has Walmart special ordered items for you? Small businesses that succeed know how to treat customers and for the customer that is a much better experience.
Sure small businesses have problems but they also have many benefits. First off you're seeing a small business as needing to behave like a big business - that just isn't really a good idea.
An ideal small business is half a dozen or less tightly knit people in a little group that works together extremely well. Family and friends mostly. All work they aren't skilled at doing, or just don't have the time to do, should be farmed out to other small businesses of similar size. Instead of trying to get a job people should be trying to start their own little business and network with other small businesses to get some revenue. Keeping the units small and specialized makes them much more flexible and effecient. Yes, it means that you'll need to figure out things like insurance for yourself (and trust me it's not that easy) but you get to control your own life and you don't have to support a bunch of mgmt above you or a bunch of lossers that do their job poorly. There is a larger slice of the pie for the few people in your little company.
Large businesses have proven to be unable to stay flexible and effecient and have proven to make up for these shortcomings by crushing their competition using money and power rather than by real innovation, quality, and low prices. None of this is good for the economy or for society. Big business is the bane of modern society and at the heart of most of our social issues.
Getting hired should not be the goal of any upwardly mobile person in todays world. Jobs are fleeting and the concept of a career unrealistic in most cases. Start your own company and make it succeed. If it fails then learn from it and try again. There is a lot of room for small businesses to work with each other even when they are in competition with one another. If we get more work then we can handle in a time period we farm some of it out to our competition and they do likewise. It works pretty well really.
The biggest issues I see are in training, social security, and legal red tape. People aren't being properly trained for todays work enviroment. You need a basic understanding of business including accounting, law, marketing, purchasing, etc along with whatever trade skills you may have. Knowing how to go out and get insurance for your employees, at a reasonable price, is something many small business owners don't really know how to do - so it doesn't get done. Also laws are formed such that small businesses don't have to get their employees insurance which I think is as bad a concept as drivers not having to have insurance. Laws should exist to require everyone be given insurance and to make it easy and affordable for small employers to do so. Unemployment laws need to be changed to provide safety nets so that when a small business goes bust the owner won't become homeless or starve any more than his (or her) employees. It needs to be recognized that many of these ventures are short lived and don't provide enough capital to act as a safety net for their owners. Giving them a safety net, like unemployment security is supposed to do, will make it easier for them to recover and try again. Boundries to creating a small business need to be lowered too. There are to many permits and such required for a small business. It's both an expense and a confussing bit of red tape that keeps people from trying their own business. Just to get to the point where you can order product for resale is often an involved affair. You need to find a wholesaler who will usually require a tax permit, a business phone, and a business mailing address. You can't get any of these without filing for your business permit and getting a fictious name and publishing whatever announcements are required in your area for these. Have you tried to open a PO Box recently? In the past couple years it's became something of a nightmare to do. You have to prove your business identity, your own identity, and the identity of anyone who could possibly receive mail to the box. If someone slightly misspells your name when mailing to you then the
I think apps should have to make it clear if back is functioning as an undo. Maybe if they had to overload the back button the back button could change colors and offer an option to prompt for permission to undo? "Doing this will undo your last change. Are you sure you want to continue? [Yes], [No], [Go Back]" I think in applications that back as undo and forward as redo makes sense but you have to make clear to the user when they are in an application and when they are in a document. Back as undo is a common concept in many apps, such as wizards, already so if implemented well I don't think it'd be near as confussing to users as the current way things happen. An application transaction that can't be undone, such as sending an email, should be listed but make it clear that it's permanent. I'm seeing a handy little dropdown under the back button, if you click on the widget for it, that shows previous pages as it does now but in the case of an application shows a collapsable sub-list that shows the different actions you've taken with each of them with their own collapsable sub-list of steps. They could be greyed out for actions that can't be undone.
I think an easy back-forward model is one of the things that made the web as popular as it is and it can make applications easier to use too if handled correctly. It's an important enough issue to be worth some study and work to make it right.
IMO there is no reason the government should be able to take any of my blood, dna, fingerprints, etc unless they have specific evidence that I've comitted a crime - and if I'm not convicted they should have to delete that data. Once your time is served there should be a time limit, for non-violent crime, after which time your data will be deleted.
The government should not be able to collect large amounts of data on it's citizens. Privacy is an important component of freedom.
True, but hitting back SHOULD undo anything that is possible. It'd be nice if it'd send some sort of special signal on back so that site's could undo. A built-in transaction model would be good too so that transactions could be started, rolled back, or committed in such a way that the whole task would group back and forward actions in a way that makes sense.
Is the web to the point where it needs to improve the back and forward model without completely tossing it? What about refresh and stop? It all seems it could be improved a lot while still keeping things easy.
Why not just get a new bit of analytic software? In years of using different packages I've yet to see one I liked anyway. I use my own and it analyzes a lot more than any of the off-the-shelf options I've seen. I want to know everything about the people at my sites.
I think applications should have back buttons. Being able to undo everything is a brilliant concept.
One of my favorite uses of AI in MUDs I made in the good old text days was using it for non-character intelligence such as making tools for generating quests in a way that responded to how the players behaved, weather patterns, etc. Current RPGs and online games are fricken boring. Quests and tasks are very canned and they don't really behave like a real living world in which magic is alive and good and evil clash.
One of my favorite toys was an oracle ball that when users used it would predict future events in the game. Nothing really fancier than predicting the stock market or anything else. Just analyze events as they happen and use statistics and AI to predict what is going to happen later. Put into a game this kind of thing can be a fun sort of psuedo-quest. Gamers can go to find the oracle in order to get tips as the best thing to do later in the game and those tips will vary in reliability.
Good point. I'm the only one sick enough to admit in public to finding cashiers a turn-on. When I get bored late at night, instead of watching porn like a healthy male, I go down to the local Super WalMart and chat up the cuties stuck working the graveyard shift. It's amazing how much more willing women are to talk to you when they're bored out of their mind. I've met many a cute girl working the counter in electronics late at night. ;)
I bet you still want to see all those slightly trailer park looking cashier girls naked in a private changing booth. Girls who have to work crappy jobs party better - especially when you're buying. That's how you find your smiley face!
Okay.. maybe I'm the only person with this fantasy for cashier girls. What a sick bastard.
If my neighbor is raping their own children I shouldn't step in to stop them because they're not threatening me or otherwise harming me? A self-centric view of the world is very short sighted and only leads to a world which is bad for just about everyone. I don't really care if Saddam had WMDs or not. He was an asshole, a dictator, and a destabalizing factor. He's like the drug dealer that lives down the block - even if he isn't an active threat he is influencing the world around him to become a threat to you. Something needed to be done and we stepped up to do it. Maybe it hasn't been handled as best as could have been done but it's been done pretty well.
I think Bush, and all our politicians mostly, has proven horrible in protecting the civil rights of Americans. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and everyone in places of power have user the war on terror, much like the war on drugs, as a chance to make their own plays for increased power. I've yet to see anybody in a position of power in our country make a significant stand to protect the liberty of Americans. Protecting the rights of people in other countries is important but protecting the rights of people in our own country is much more important. Who will defend others when there is nobody here left with the freedom to defend even themselves? Saddam was a threat to America but not nearly the threat that our own leadership is.
Honor and responsiblity should start with the person and work their way up to all humanity. Self, Family, Neighborhood, City, State, Country, World, etc. Across America there is a break down somewere in the area between self and family so there is no chance that we can take the responsibility for the world and do it well because we lack the ability to be responsibile for ourselves and our own government. If we're going to lead we need to lead by example and look after our own affairs first.