Re:Intro to negotiating for younger contractors
on
Helping Your Ex-Employer?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You have got to be kidding. salary/2000 * 2.8??? If base = salary/2000, I've heard recommendations from between base*1.4 to base*2.0, but 2.8 is making an awfully big assumption that someone with your skillset isn't charging less.
Some of it depends on what you're doing. If you're an internal administrator, then it is more relevant to set a static rate and stick to it, even advertise it. However, if you're a programmer bidding for projects that are about revenue, this whole rate calculation thing is pretty much irrelevant aside from a very general baseline. It's dependent on the budget available for the project, how fast/good you are.
People forget that the whole reason freelancing works is because it is a more direct correlation to how good your skills are - it's not dependent on spreadsheets showing cost of living and other people's salaries and all that malarkey. It's just negotiation, and that's all it is. The name of the game is to find win-win scenarios where they feel like they're getting their money's worth, and where you feel like you are getting your time's worth. It's about managing expectations, and it's about intangibles.
My first freelance gig was for my previous (laid off) base * 0.5. Horrible rate, but the client was cool, the technology was cooler, it meant new skills, it was for me to get my feet wet and try out business instincts with an extremely laid back client, and it meant some very good referrals. I don't regret it in the slightest - it was worth my time, no question.
I recently gave a quote for base * 2.0 for an hourly rate. He reacted, "Well, here's our budget - if you think you can deliver the objective at your rate and not go over the budget, that's fine. Or if you think the budget is insane, tell us." The rate isn't even relevant to the client in these cases.
If you're just starting out and going off of base * 2.8 just because someone told you to do so on slashdot, good luck. In the Portland market, I'd only be able to justify that if I'd be able to guarantee the objective in about 30% less time than someone else with my skillset using a market-average. And I can't do that yet, although I'm working really hard on developing my own library of pre-rolled code to make this possible. And for the freelancers that prefer fixed-cost bids and deadlines, this whole subject is irrelevant from the client's perspective, anyway.
Keep in mind the worst line from X-Men was Whedon's, too...
"Know what happens when a Toad is struck by lightning?"
"What?"
(Zap)
"SAME THING AS WHAT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE ELSE!!!!"
Or something like that...
Re:With enough storage, Chess could be solved too.
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2
Duh... if the queen could have been captured, so could have the knight. Still, a knight offers different immediate scenarios.
Re:With enough storage, Chess could be solved too.
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2
He probably meant a knight. I imagine the board position was such that the queen could have been immediately captured, leading to a stalemate, whereas a knight would have put the king in check, forcing a separate move, allowing the knight to escape from his in-danger square, giving him a major piece advantage.
Re:Game board/peices?
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2
I have one of them... actually it's the spitting image to the one you see. It's even cooler when it is closed because there are a lot of designs woodworked into the outside. Anyway, I don't know where to get them. My ex-girlfriend got it for me when she went to Ghana.
Use cdbaby.com if you haven't. I have a friend that works there. They have a lot of crossmarketing opportunities among their different artists, but you don't give up any control.
Here is a rebuttal I just send to the authors of the article:
Thanks for a good article in Electronic Musician - I found
the songwriter's section most illuminating (and actually
somewhat encouraging).
There were a couple of figures that didn't make sense to
me - in your hypothetical record deal, you mentioned a
$250,000 advance to the band - and you also mention that
the record company intercepts the bands royalties (if they
are there) to recoup the advance. So it isn't really true that
the record company only makes $5.75 per album, is it?
They're also being paid back, on top of that, from the royalty
rates of the artists until they recoup. Minus the record
producer, that's an extra $1.80 per album up through the
first $250,000. Secondly, most articles I have read say that
many record companies try and make the marketing expenses
recoupable against royalties as well - whether or not it was
structured as an "advance" to the band - which if true would
make the entire $500,000 recoupable at $1.80 extra per album.
On top of that, royalty rates for first-time artists have certainly
be consistently reported as lower than 15%, which dramatically
increases the gap of time (and units) between when the
record company breaks even and when the artist starts
seeing income.
Let's restructure it so that $500,000 is recoupable and the
royalty rate is 10% (still high compared to many first-time
artists). $1.50 royalty per cd, minus 3% producer
fees, is $1.05 per cd royalty. Until the label recoups,
they are making $7.55/cd, or $6.50 straight profit.
The label recoups their out-of-pocket costs after
66,225 units. However, they haven't finished recouping
from the band yet, and continue to make $7.55 until they
do. The band gets $1.50 per cd, which means they don't
start making bucks until 333,333 units are sold. By that
point, the record company has sold 267,108 more copies
at a pure profit of $7.55 apiece, or over two million dollars.
The producer has made $150,000. The band only has their
advance.
I think your article highlights the adversarial positions
record companies and artists have towards each other - when
I look at the numbers this way (hopefully accurate), it doesn't
seem quite as fair as it did when I read your article.
Saw an article about how his good friend Jesse Venture was theorizing the two of them probably could have beaten both Bush and Gore this last election. I think they're thinking about it for next time around.
Just curious, is the daylight in the footage consistent with what it would have been in the late afternoon/early evening (when the attacks happened)? I think that area of the world is at least 8 or 9 hours ahead of New York.
If we want to start doing what you are doing, how
and where do we start? How can we get involved?
I mean beyond just writing letters to our congresscritters.
For what it's worth, I have a thinkpad 390c and had a horrible time with mandrake 8.0 - it ended up freezing daily and I had to hard reset often, plus sound was hard to get working and it wouldn't recognize my different pcmcia network cards when I swapped them.
In contrast, Mandrake 7.2 works out of the box. At this point I'd recommend trying Mandrake 7.2 or waiting for 8.1 . Skip 8.0. Especially for a Pentium 266.
I have strong doubts about studies that say constant menstruation is a big "unnatural" health problem when I know there are plenty of other medical experts and gynecologists that profess otherwise (Christine Northrup for one), and would probably take offense at it being called utter bullshit. There's also plenty of literature about how hormonal treatments such as the pill lead to an increased cancer risk. My girlfriend won't go anywhere near the stuff.
And, inconvenient and messy? First, when something that naturally occurs in the body (when things are working NORMALLY) is seen as inconvenient, it really should make one question the adopted framework/society that would MAKE it inconvenient. There's a bigger disconnect here than the matter of women's bodies not "behaving appropriately", so to speak. I don't even know what to say about "messy" - sounds like a hangup.
Now, I'm only referring to things such as timing, flow, and to a degree, emotional sensitivity. I agree that there can be other symptoms that really are debilitating (including the degree of emotional sensitivity), but more often than not those are the product of other health imbalances.
Hasn't anyone stopped to think that menstruation is a normal, cleansing part of a woman's cycle? So lame that it's seen as nothing more than an inconvenience. In older spiritualities, pagan, native american, etc, menstruation was seen as sacred and a way for women to connect with their inner selves. It's sad that it as seen as nothing more than an inconvenience now.
I can understand "exceptions" where some women's systems make menstruation some sort of risk, but this is obviously going to be marketed to all women in some sort of floaty commercial with muted pastel colors exhorting women to exercise their newfound FREEDOM...
tune
Re:Developers Have a Louder Voice than Speech
on
Still in DMCA Prison
·
· Score: 3
Well, what are services that developers give to corporations that if we withheld them, it wouldn't be illegal?
Maybe some open-source software that corporations rely on could change their licenses so they only work for open-source purposes. Like apache could include a mod by default that would make it so that commercial browsers wouldn't server the correct pages. Or the various server programs.... make the stuff that is already free "crippleware" if used for certain purposes. That's not illegal, right? They're freely available. Corporations rely on services we give them for free. No reason we can't hold them for ransom, payable in guaranteed rights.
I appreciate your opposition to the DMCA as well, but I don't think this is the way to go about critizing it. Your slant is so extreme that not everything you wrote is true. For example "Now, however, it gets you arrested" or "as Adobe just has in arresting a foreign programmer".
Okay, okay, you win. I will revise:
"Now, however, it can get you arrested" and "as Adobe just has in having a foreign programmer arrested".
Your analogy doesn't hold up... first, a lot of "bomb"-type things are perfectly legal to buy and sell. But anyway, I'll assume you came up with an example of something highly illegal here but legal in another country. What still doesn't hold up is that it isn't illegal to OWN or to USE a circumvention technology.
In other words, Chewbacca does NOT MAKE SENSE. If Chewbacca does NOT MAKE SENSE, you MUST ACQUIT.
See, I've heard exactly the opposite. Adobe pressured ElcomSoft to take it off the market, and they did. He gave the talk afterward, and the charges were exactly consistent what RIAA was thinking of giving Edward Felton for giving HIS talk on how to circumvent copyright protections in music.
that cd rippers that can get around the copy protection through error correction while ripping are now illegal to distribute or talk about at conventions under the DMCA?
US Government wouldn't have arrested Dmitry in this case if Adobe hadn't complained. You act as if it's Adobe's legal responsibility to handle it in the way they did. That was their choice. We can protest both the flawed law as well as Adobe's choice to take advantage of it.
No, because there aren't copy controls on cds and tapes. But, given the new copy controls on certain un-named cds, it is now "ok" to arrest, say, Monty of Xiph for distributing a program (cdparanoia) that gets around these new copy controls by default by incorporating error-control "interpolation" in its digital ripping capability.
1. He didn't hold the copyright, his employer did.
2. Even if his employer broke a law, this should have been a civil suit, not a criminal suit against an employee that was convenient to catch.
3. The employer was not breaking a law in Russia, where they are located.
4. The product was designed for fair-use purposes, not for piracy.
5. It is not illegal anywhere to own or use the product.
6. Just because Dmitry/Elcomsoft finds a security flaw does not require them to tell Adobe and no one else. They did not find it to audit a company's security. They found it to protect Russian consumer rights that are comparable to what was formerly "fair use" here. (What's more, I believe the ability to make back-up copies is *required* there, so it is beyond just protecting rights. You could argue it is a responsibility if they were to own encrypted pdf documents.)
7. The product was briefly for sale, sold less than 20 copies, was then open-sourced. It also has protections to help keep it from being used for piracy purposes (I am unfamiliar with what these controls are, however.) It was not written/designed/sold for the purposes of piracy.
I appreciate your opposition to the DMCA, but I just think the problem is worse than you actually yet realize. Everything I wrote is true.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of it depends on what you're doing. If you're an internal administrator, then it is more relevant to set a static rate and stick to it, even advertise it. However, if you're a programmer bidding for projects that are about revenue, this whole rate calculation thing is pretty much irrelevant aside from a very general baseline. It's dependent on the budget available for the project, how fast/good you are.
People forget that the whole reason freelancing works is because it is a more direct correlation to how good your skills are - it's not dependent on spreadsheets showing cost of living and other people's salaries and all that malarkey. It's just negotiation, and that's all it is. The name of the game is to find win-win scenarios where they feel like they're getting their money's worth, and where you feel like you are getting your time's worth. It's about managing expectations, and it's about intangibles.
My first freelance gig was for my previous (laid off) base * 0.5. Horrible rate, but the client was cool, the technology was cooler, it meant new skills, it was for me to get my feet wet and try out business instincts with an extremely laid back client, and it meant some very good referrals. I don't regret it in the slightest - it was worth my time, no question.
I recently gave a quote for base * 2.0 for an hourly rate. He reacted, "Well, here's our budget - if you think you can deliver the objective at your rate and not go over the budget, that's fine. Or if you think the budget is insane, tell us." The rate isn't even relevant to the client in these cases.
If you're just starting out and going off of base * 2.8 just because someone told you to do so on slashdot, good luck. In the Portland market, I'd only be able to justify that if I'd be able to guarantee the objective in about 30% less time than someone else with my skillset using a market-average. And I can't do that yet, although I'm working really hard on developing my own library of pre-rolled code to make this possible. And for the freelancers that prefer fixed-cost bids and deadlines, this whole subject is irrelevant from the client's perspective, anyway.
Curt
"Know what happens when a Toad is struck by lightning?"
"What?"
(Zap)
"SAME THING AS WHAT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE ELSE!!!!"
Or something like that...
Duh... if the queen could have been captured, so could have the knight. Still, a knight offers different immediate scenarios.
He probably meant a knight. I imagine the board position was such that the queen could have been immediately captured, leading to a stalemate, whereas a knight would have put the king in check, forcing a separate move, allowing the knight to escape from his in-danger square, giving him a major piece advantage.
I have one of them... actually it's the spitting image to the one you see. It's even cooler when it is closed because there are a lot of designs woodworked into the outside. Anyway, I don't know where to get them. My ex-girlfriend got it for me when she went to Ghana.
Use cdbaby.com if you haven't. I have a friend that works there. They have a lot of crossmarketing opportunities among their different artists, but you don't give up any control.
An invisible hologram? How pointless is that?
tune
Thanks for a good article in Electronic Musician - I found
the songwriter's section most illuminating (and actually
somewhat encouraging).
There were a couple of figures that didn't make sense to
me - in your hypothetical record deal, you mentioned a
$250,000 advance to the band - and you also mention that
the record company intercepts the bands royalties (if they
are there) to recoup the advance. So it isn't really true that
the record company only makes $5.75 per album, is it?
They're also being paid back, on top of that, from the royalty
rates of the artists until they recoup. Minus the record
producer, that's an extra $1.80 per album up through the
first $250,000. Secondly, most articles I have read say that
many record companies try and make the marketing expenses
recoupable against royalties as well - whether or not it was
structured as an "advance" to the band - which if true would
make the entire $500,000 recoupable at $1.80 extra per album.
On top of that, royalty rates for first-time artists have certainly
be consistently reported as lower than 15%, which dramatically
increases the gap of time (and units) between when the
record company breaks even and when the artist starts
seeing income.
Let's restructure it so that $500,000 is recoupable and the
royalty rate is 10% (still high compared to many first-time
artists). $1.50 royalty per cd, minus 3% producer
fees, is $1.05 per cd royalty. Until the label recoups,
they are making $7.55/cd, or $6.50 straight profit.
The label recoups their out-of-pocket costs after
66,225 units. However, they haven't finished recouping
from the band yet, and continue to make $7.55 until they
do. The band gets $1.50 per cd, which means they don't
start making bucks until 333,333 units are sold. By that
point, the record company has sold 267,108 more copies
at a pure profit of $7.55 apiece, or over two million dollars.
The producer has made $150,000. The band only has their
advance.
I think your article highlights the adversarial positions
record companies and artists have towards each other - when
I look at the numbers this way (hopefully accurate), it doesn't
seem quite as fair as it did when I read your article.
Thanks for the exercise though,
Curt Siffert
tune
and where do we start? How can we get involved?
I mean beyond just writing letters to our congresscritters.
tune
In contrast, Mandrake 7.2 works out of the box. At this point I'd recommend trying Mandrake 7.2 or waiting for 8.1 . Skip 8.0. Especially for a Pentium 266.
tune
tune
And, inconvenient and messy? First, when something that naturally occurs in the body (when things are working NORMALLY) is seen as inconvenient, it really should make one question the adopted framework/society that would MAKE it inconvenient. There's a bigger disconnect here than the matter of women's bodies not "behaving appropriately", so to speak. I don't even know what to say about "messy" - sounds like a hangup. Now, I'm only referring to things such as timing, flow, and to a degree, emotional sensitivity. I agree that there can be other symptoms that really are debilitating (including the degree of emotional sensitivity), but more often than not those are the product of other health imbalances.
tune
I can understand "exceptions" where some women's systems make menstruation some sort of risk, but this is obviously going to be marketed to all women in some sort of floaty commercial with muted pastel colors exhorting women to exercise their newfound FREEDOM...
tune
Maybe some open-source software that corporations rely on could change their licenses so they only work for open-source purposes. Like apache could include a mod by default that would make it so that commercial browsers wouldn't server the correct pages. Or the various server programs.... make the stuff that is already free "crippleware" if used for certain purposes. That's not illegal, right? They're freely available. Corporations rely on services we give them for free. No reason we can't hold them for ransom, payable in guaranteed rights.
tune
Okay, okay, you win. I will revise:
"Now, however, it can get you arrested" and "as Adobe just has in having a foreign programmer arrested".
tune
In other words, Chewbacca does NOT MAKE SENSE. If Chewbacca does NOT MAKE SENSE, you MUST ACQUIT.
tune
tune
tune
tune
tune
2. Even if his employer broke a law, this should have been a civil suit, not a criminal suit against an employee that was convenient to catch.
3. The employer was not breaking a law in Russia, where they are located.
4. The product was designed for fair-use purposes, not for piracy.
5. It is not illegal anywhere to own or use the product.
6. Just because Dmitry/Elcomsoft finds a security flaw does not require them to tell Adobe and no one else. They did not find it to audit a company's security. They found it to protect Russian consumer rights that are comparable to what was formerly "fair use" here. (What's more, I believe the ability to make back-up copies is *required* there, so it is beyond just protecting rights. You could argue it is a responsibility if they were to own encrypted pdf documents.)
7. The product was briefly for sale, sold less than 20 copies, was then open-sourced. It also has protections to help keep it from being used for piracy purposes (I am unfamiliar with what these controls are, however.) It was not written/designed/sold for the purposes of piracy.
I appreciate your opposition to the DMCA, but I just think the problem is worse than you actually yet realize. Everything I wrote is true.
tune