I designed and implemented an entire office for 70+ people during the dot-com days. I did it on a reasonable budget and it made employees and management happy. Quick bullet points:
No flourescent lights. Halogens are great. Hang them from the ceiling and put a dimmer on each one. Different employees like different amounts of light -- give them a choice or expect to see developers climbing on furniture to remove unwanted flourescent tubes
4 network drops per employee. Use them for phones too, reconfigure as necessary in the wiring closet. Cheaping out here will make your life a pain in the ass later. Plus the ugliness of seeing hubs and switches on everyone's desk. It costs marginally more up front -- pay for it!
Furniture. Pick 2 or 3 good task chairs, have furniture people bring in samples, and let each employee choose which he/she prefers. They'll feel involoved in the process and also won't try to steal each other's chairs. Don't buy cheap $100 chairs either -- your valued employees cost you a ton of money, spend $300-$400 on something they sit in all day, every day. If you're buying cubicle systems, make sure they're modular and reconfigurable. Many aren't. This will allow you to totally reconfigure your space by buying extra pieces instead of all new cubicle systems.
No draconian network spying policies. Tell employees they are expected to work and not play. Let them be in charge of themselves. Also tell them that although they won't be spied upon in general, any suspected or unusual activity may get them canned. This is usually enough to stop most of that activity. Sure you have to block certain things (P2P) but genrerally leave employees to themselves.
Free sodas / water / coffee / snacks. Keeps employees from spending time running around buying food and drinks. We spend upwards of $1000/month buying these things for 70 employees, but it kept them productive and happy. It also keeps them from taking 30 minute breaks to walk to Starbucks. Money well spent.
Let employees expense a reasonable amount of money on books and training. We had a $500 up-front expense level for new technical employees + $100/month for books, etc. Let them keep these things if they leave. Think of it as just a (small) cost of doing business.
Provide good common areas and conference rooms. Cover every available wall with whiteboard material. Don't spend tons of money on videoconferencing and plasmas TVs unless you absolutely need to. DO spend good money on real conference speakerphone systems.
That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. My current place of work provides none of those things and I really hate them for that.
I just bought this CD, the first CD I've bought in over 2 years. A friend told me I could copy hers, but I said no, I want to pay for it. $10 at Worst Buy.
It did rip fine though, no problems there. DRM-free mp3s work fine.
I'll agree on this one and recommend SecureCRT as well. Sure it costs $$$ but it's HUGELY powerful and configurable.
I use it because i have very specific needs for port forwarding to access various things on remote systems (mainly Oracle databases). The ability to remap ports on both ends of an SSH connection and tunnel all that traffic through the SSH connetion saves me HOURS of paperwork dealing with having firewall ports opened on my servers at work (major telecom). Sure I could do this on Windows with cygwin or possibly Putty (not sure), but in 5 years of using this program I've never had a single issue with it. Support has been great as well.
Totally worth the money if you need that kind of thing.
If you have followed Microsoft developments around Longhorn you might have noticed that search is one of the top priority features...
Excellent! So I can have proper searching in 2008.
Re:Yes, it's Slashdotted.
on
Freecache
·
· Score: 1
the only thing I can think of that I would want to make sure of if I were an ISP is that my cache is only available to users on my network (the whole saving on bandwidth usage argument falls apart if you suddenly become a cache for users on other ISPs) but I would think that would be pretty easy to do
It would be very easy to do. Just don't serve content from this server to any IP address that's not owned by the ISP serving the freecache.
Give me something to listen to that doesn't suck and maybe I'll start buying CDs again. A quick look through the Billboard top 10 curbs my appetite for new music very quickly.
Well, not the Oracle database directly... But Oracle sent out a memo that certain Oracle products (Oracle Wallet Manager, in particular) would simply cease to function properly until the user upgraded their Verisign certificate(s).
I can't find ANY info on Oracle's website about this, though. The memo was sent to Oracle Premium Support customers but I don't know if the info has been generally distributed.
I don't want your MiniDisc technology anymore. I'm not interested in your proprietary removeable media formats. Miniature hard drives are here to stay.
I've owned 3 MiniDisc recorders in the last 4 years. I thought you were helping me out by putting a USB port on your more recent NetMD devices, but you decided that you can't trust me to upload MY OWN RECORDINGS back to my computer via the USB port. Which has left me in the analog realm, forcing me to plug my recorder into the analog inputs of my sound card to digitize my music. MY MUSIC THAT I RECORDED MYSELF. This is unacceptable in today's all-digital environment.
I will not be purchasing any more of your products in the future. It's not for my lack of trying -- I loved the idea of a small, compact, recording device that I could carry with me anywhere. I bought 3 of them! But now I want more. Now I expect more. I want direct digital USB or Firewire transfers to my computer. And instead of meeting my needs, you've proffered another DRM-crippled, expensive, proprietary format that doesn't do what I want it to.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll be looking elsewhere for my next recording and playback device.
I support very large Oracle databases for a living (very large meaning > 1TB), databases that must be up 24/7. Backups are done in a number of different ways:
1) Disk syncs, block by block, between disk subsystems at disparate locations, to retain multiple copies of a database in different locations. They can be synced to more than one location too, so you can have as many copies of the database as you want. Your main database is the only "hot" database, the others can be brought up and recovered if needed. We mainly use EMC disk subsystems to do this, the process is called BCV (can't remember what that stands for right now)
2) Real-time replication. One-to-one or one-to-many. All databases are "hot" at all times. This can be great for load balancing too since you can have multiple system onine at the same time. Very difficult to maintain and monitor.
Large databases just can't be put to tape anymore. Even if you did, it would take days or weeks to recover them if they failed. Disk to disk is about the only way to provide backups for really large databases.
but I think I remember that there is a time limitation that says: as the holder of a patent you must defend it against any alleged infringement within a certain time period or forfeit your right to defend it for that infringement.
You must defend your trademarks against infringement, not patents. Totally different.
...never promised that the prices of their diamonds would come down when market forces and economies of scale entered...
About CD manufacturers / record companies talking about lowering the prices of CDs over time... I know we all keep saying this around the/. water cooler and all, but is it even true? Can anyone point to any old document that shows the record companies ever made such a promise?
Not like it matters anyway; politicians never seem to keep there promises and no one cares. There's no law that says you have to do everything that you say. That's the American way, right?
You'll have to filter every outlet. You don't want your microwave oven messing up your clean power supply now, do you?
I just wish that i didn't have to do this. Maybe the solution in the long-term would be to re-think how we wire structures in the first place? Maybe each outlet has its own run back to the mains, with its own breaker? This would allow for some very customizable electical applications... Say I want a 20-amp circuit for my home theater power amps, I can change out the breakers for those 2 lines only. Of course since you wouldn't be running power loops for whole rooms at a time, you'd have a whole lot more breakers to keep track of.
I've done lots of research into the issue of clean power, thanks Google, but I still don't even have a full-blown solution at the outlet level. I finally bought a voltage regulator from APC for my home theater, but I have no empirical evidence to say that it's helping. I loathe the idea of buying one of these for every piece of equipment I own, though.
I have always suspected that many electrical issues, including frequently blown light bulbs, are caused by dirty power. What I really want isn't better light bulbs, it's better power. Everything would operate better and/or longer if the power coming out of the sockets wasn't so random and dirty. Ever look at a standard 120V AC on an oscilliscope? Nasty.
Does anyone know of a whole-house solution for providing clean, voltage-regulated power to an entire house? I probably have $50K+ of computers, music equipment, home theatre, etc, and all of it would be better off with clean power.
We have whole-house solutions for water filtering, air filtering, so where's my whole-house solution for clean power (and maybe even whole-house UPS?)
It's only because this industry (much like the music industry) is used to making FAR more return on investment than this. And now they won't be able to do that.
Why these industries feel they have the "right" to continue making as much or more money than they have in the past just baffles me. Move with the times and with the market. If you don't, you die. That's the law of the jungle.
Of course if you have the RIAA/MPAA on your side lobbying to have laws changed to protect your income stream, all bets are off.
I like this one better because it has 4 completely independent charge circuits instead of 2. So you don't have to charge in pairs, each cell gets its own individual charge. This is great for me since I use some devices (pager, minidisc recorder) than only use 1 cell at a time. It also has a slow/fast charge switch so you can charge them really fast (100 min) if you absolutely have to; otherwise, just use the slow charge (takes about 5 hours). My NiMH batteries (about 20 of them) work better than they ever have.
If ATI supported Linux as much as nvidia does mayby I'd buy one.
No offense, no troll here, but WHO CARES? How many Linux users need a top-of-the-line 3D gaming card to run under Linux? How many of the millions of 3D accelerated video cards are used for anything but running Windows and Windows games?
Platform zealotry aside: If I was the CEO of ATI or NVIDA I wouldn't give a rat's ass about supporting Linux users. Why? Don't need 'em, don't want 'em. Why not? There's no money in it. Bottom line.
a compressor-less mini-refrigerator that is completely silent
I want more and more quiet appliances, including computers. Everything is so freakin' noisy now! I wish more industrial design took this into account. Yay future!
I'm in Atlanta, GA, and it shows no people there. That seems a little odd... I don't know how it determines how to rank your new potential 'buddies'... I can't empirically rate it, but qualitatively, I can say the matching pretty much sucks.
No one on my list is anywhere near me, or has any similar interests. Brilliant.
So they're going to sell this information to other people, but I'd like to see it for myself, too.
I'm sure lots of us would like to see that data, but if they made it available to us for free, that would kinda negate the possibility of them SELLING the data for $$$, you know? Contact Tivo and I'm sure they'll get together a quote for you and you could purchase the data too.
Is there an opt-out feature?
Yes, you can call Tivo and opt-out, should you choose. It's quick and hassle free, I know lots of other Tivo owners who have done that.
Personally, I haven't opted out. I've seen the data that is sent to Tivo, it can't be tracked to me individually, and I'd like Tivo to be able to make a buck so they don't go out of business.
Really folks, this isn't a paranoid, tinfoil hat issue. It's just business, and Tivo's model seems far more ethical than most. I'm more than happy to help them out. It doesn't cost me anything.
...even if the series doesn't cover costs while being broadcast, the money from DVD sales could potentially more than make up for that.
For the most part, TV shows don't cover their costs from broadcast revenues anymore. Pretty much all "traditional" TV shows (i.e. sitcoms like Friends, etc) cost more to produce than they make in revenue. The producers of these shows are banking on putting the shows into syndication, where they sell the rights to re-broadcast them to the local network affiliates in each TV market. That's where most of their revenue is made. I'm not sure about these reality shows, they are obviously very cheap to make, and the producers love that. Less $$$ outlay up front.
A show like a sitcom generally needs about 100 episodes in the can to be commercially viable as a syndication property. At approx. 26 episodes per year, you hit that mark after your 4th season. That's also why you hear about all the actors and crew having a big party as they cross the threshhold of 100 episodes. It's not just an anniversary, it's a pretty solid guarantee that you're going to make some serious money in the future off of programming that you're already paid for. Must be a nice feeling!
Maybe DVD sales will help offset those production costs as well, and I'm happy to help out those shows. Futurama on DVD anyone? Thanks Fox!
Slashdot Mirror
That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. My current place of work provides none of those things and I really hate them for that.
Grrrr!!!
I just bought this CD, the first CD I've bought in over 2 years. A friend told me I could copy hers, but I said no, I want to pay for it. $10 at Worst Buy.
It did rip fine though, no problems there. DRM-free mp3s work fine.
I'll agree on this one and recommend SecureCRT as well. Sure it costs $$$ but it's HUGELY powerful and configurable.
I use it because i have very specific needs for port forwarding to access various things on remote systems (mainly Oracle databases). The ability to remap ports on both ends of an SSH connection and tunnel all that traffic through the SSH connetion saves me HOURS of paperwork dealing with having firewall ports opened on my servers at work (major telecom). Sure I could do this on Windows with cygwin or possibly Putty (not sure), but in 5 years of using this program I've never had a single issue with it. Support has been great as well.
Totally worth the money if you need that kind of thing.
District of Columbia?
... you need to install the Tabbrowser Extensions extension. Which is, coincidentally, the first extension I always install.
Which does not, coincidentally, work with the 0.9 release. Just FYI.
Shit, now they're never going to release Doom 3.
If you have followed Microsoft developments around Longhorn you might have noticed that search is one of the top priority features...
Excellent! So I can have proper searching in 2008.
the only thing I can think of that I would want to make sure of if I were an ISP is that my cache is only available to users on my network (the whole saving on bandwidth usage argument falls apart if you suddenly become a cache for users on other ISPs) but I would think that would be pretty easy to do
It would be very easy to do. Just don't serve content from this server to any IP address that's not owned by the ISP serving the freecache.
Give me something to listen to that doesn't suck and maybe I'll start buying CDs again. A quick look through the Billboard top 10 curbs my appetite for new music very quickly.
Am I just getting old?
Well, not the Oracle database directly... But Oracle sent out a memo that certain Oracle products (Oracle Wallet Manager, in particular) would simply cease to function properly until the user upgraded their Verisign certificate(s).
I can't find ANY info on Oracle's website about this, though. The memo was sent to Oracle Premium Support customers but I don't know if the info has been generally distributed.
Woops!
Dear Sony,
I don't want your MiniDisc technology anymore. I'm not interested in your proprietary removeable media formats. Miniature hard drives are here to stay.
I've owned 3 MiniDisc recorders in the last 4 years. I thought you were helping me out by putting a USB port on your more recent NetMD devices, but you decided that you can't trust me to upload MY OWN RECORDINGS back to my computer via the USB port. Which has left me in the analog realm, forcing me to plug my recorder into the analog inputs of my sound card to digitize my music. MY MUSIC THAT I RECORDED MYSELF. This is unacceptable in today's all-digital environment.
I will not be purchasing any more of your products in the future. It's not for my lack of trying -- I loved the idea of a small, compact, recording device that I could carry with me anywhere. I bought 3 of them! But now I want more. Now I expect more. I want direct digital USB or Firewire transfers to my computer. And instead of meeting my needs, you've proffered another DRM-crippled, expensive, proprietary format that doesn't do what I want it to.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll be looking elsewhere for my next recording and playback device.
Sincerely,
A disappointed (former) customer
How do they backup a database that is 94.3 TB?
I support very large Oracle databases for a living (very large meaning > 1TB), databases that must be up 24/7. Backups are done in a number of different ways:
1) Disk syncs, block by block, between disk subsystems at disparate locations, to retain multiple copies of a database in different locations. They can be synced to more than one location too, so you can have as many copies of the database as you want. Your main database is the only "hot" database, the others can be brought up and recovered if needed. We mainly use EMC disk subsystems to do this, the process is called BCV (can't remember what that stands for right now)
2) Real-time replication. One-to-one or one-to-many. All databases are "hot" at all times. This can be great for load balancing too since you can have multiple system onine at the same time. Very difficult to maintain and monitor.
Large databases just can't be put to tape anymore. Even if you did, it would take days or weeks to recover them if they failed. Disk to disk is about the only way to provide backups for really large databases.
if I'm not careful, I can get on one of three different networks and not know it!
Maybe you should change the default SSID of your WAP.
iTunes still defaults to ripping CD's to MP3
Not true, at least on the Windows version. Just installed it last night and the default is to rip CDs at 128K AAC.
but I think I remember that there is a time limitation that says: as the holder of a patent you must defend it against any alleged infringement within a certain time period or forfeit your right to defend it for that infringement.
You must defend your trademarks against infringement, not patents. Totally different.
About CD manufacturers / record companies talking about lowering the prices of CDs over time... I know we all keep saying this around the
Not like it matters anyway; politicians never seem to keep there promises and no one cares. There's no law that says you have to do everything that you say. That's the American way, right?
You'll have to filter every outlet. You don't want your microwave oven messing up your clean power supply now, do you?
I just wish that i didn't have to do this. Maybe the solution in the long-term would be to re-think how we wire structures in the first place? Maybe each outlet has its own run back to the mains, with its own breaker? This would allow for some very customizable electical applications... Say I want a 20-amp circuit for my home theater power amps, I can change out the breakers for those 2 lines only. Of course since you wouldn't be running power loops for whole rooms at a time, you'd have a whole lot more breakers to keep track of.
I've done lots of research into the issue of clean power, thanks Google, but I still don't even have a full-blown solution at the outlet level. I finally bought a voltage regulator from APC for my home theater, but I have no empirical evidence to say that it's helping. I loathe the idea of buying one of these for every piece of equipment I own, though.
I have always suspected that many electrical issues, including frequently blown light bulbs, are caused by dirty power. What I really want isn't better light bulbs, it's better power. Everything would operate better and/or longer if the power coming out of the sockets wasn't so random and dirty. Ever look at a standard 120V AC on an oscilliscope? Nasty.
Does anyone know of a whole-house solution for providing clean, voltage-regulated power to an entire house? I probably have $50K+ of computers, music equipment, home theatre, etc, and all of it would be better off with clean power.
We have whole-house solutions for water filtering, air filtering, so where's my whole-house solution for clean power (and maybe even whole-house UPS?)
It's only because this industry (much like the music industry) is used to making FAR more return on investment than this. And now they won't be able to do that.
Why these industries feel they have the "right" to continue making as much or more money than they have in the past just baffles me. Move with the times and with the market. If you don't, you die. That's the law of the jungle.
Of course if you have the RIAA/MPAA on your side lobbying to have laws changed to protect your income stream, all bets are off.
Don't buy a cheap charger. The MAHA charger listed above is good. Even better MAHA charger...
http://www.thomas-distributing.com/mhc401fs.htm
I like this one better because it has 4 completely independent charge circuits instead of 2. So you don't have to charge in pairs, each cell gets its own individual charge. This is great for me since I use some devices (pager, minidisc recorder) than only use 1 cell at a time. It also has a slow/fast charge switch so you can charge them really fast (100 min) if you absolutely have to; otherwise, just use the slow charge (takes about 5 hours). My NiMH batteries (about 20 of them) work better than they ever have.
If ATI supported Linux as much as nvidia does mayby I'd buy one.
No offense, no troll here, but WHO CARES? How many Linux users need a top-of-the-line 3D gaming card to run under Linux? How many of the millions of 3D accelerated video cards are used for anything but running Windows and Windows games?
Platform zealotry aside: If I was the CEO of ATI or NVIDA I wouldn't give a rat's ass about supporting Linux users. Why? Don't need 'em, don't want 'em. Why not? There's no money in it. Bottom line.
I found this to be most interesting:
a compressor-less mini-refrigerator that is completely silent
I want more and more quiet appliances, including computers. Everything is so freakin' noisy now! I wish more industrial design took this into account. Yay future!
I'm in Atlanta, GA, and it shows no people there. That seems a little odd... I don't know how it determines how to rank your new potential 'buddies'... I can't empirically rate it, but qualitatively, I can say the matching pretty much sucks.
No one on my list is anywhere near me, or has any similar interests. Brilliant.
So they're going to sell this information to other people, but I'd like to see it for myself, too.
I'm sure lots of us would like to see that data, but if they made it available to us for free, that would kinda negate the possibility of them SELLING the data for $$$, you know? Contact Tivo and I'm sure they'll get together a quote for you and you could purchase the data too.
Is there an opt-out feature?
Yes, you can call Tivo and opt-out, should you choose. It's quick and hassle free, I know lots of other Tivo owners who have done that.
Personally, I haven't opted out. I've seen the data that is sent to Tivo, it can't be tracked to me individually, and I'd like Tivo to be able to make a buck so they don't go out of business.
Really folks, this isn't a paranoid, tinfoil hat issue. It's just business, and Tivo's model seems far more ethical than most. I'm more than happy to help them out. It doesn't cost me anything.
...even if the series doesn't cover costs while being broadcast, the money from DVD sales could potentially more than make up for that.
For the most part, TV shows don't cover their costs from broadcast revenues anymore. Pretty much all "traditional" TV shows (i.e. sitcoms like Friends, etc) cost more to produce than they make in revenue. The producers of these shows are banking on putting the shows into syndication, where they sell the rights to re-broadcast them to the local network affiliates in each TV market. That's where most of their revenue is made. I'm not sure about these reality shows, they are obviously very cheap to make, and the producers love that. Less $$$ outlay up front.
A show like a sitcom generally needs about 100 episodes in the can to be commercially viable as a syndication property. At approx. 26 episodes per year, you hit that mark after your 4th season. That's also why you hear about all the actors and crew having a big party as they cross the threshhold of 100 episodes. It's not just an anniversary, it's a pretty solid guarantee that you're going to make some serious money in the future off of programming that you're already paid for. Must be a nice feeling!
Maybe DVD sales will help offset those production costs as well, and I'm happy to help out those shows. Futurama on DVD anyone? Thanks Fox!