Re:Nice office... but who is going to pay for this
on
The Bionic Office
·
· Score: 1
This is certainly correct (although, as you note, this can vary considerably by the company).
That's why the receptionist ( who you could probably live without for a while ) gets the best desk first. Not the Owner/CEO.
In the case of Salon, to take an example, their offices needn't look any better than average small town newspaper's, because it's their webpage that determines the public's perception of "what they look like."
They could be serving those pages from somebody's garage for all anyone cares, including their customers.
Well, in this case, self-serving hypocrisy, perhaps?
I guess the RIAA's sense of irony only goes in one direction. Live by the DMCA, die by the DMCA.
And just what is the real irony? The fact that by the RIAA's own actions KaZaA has been judicially reviewed and found to be a legal service.
The RIAA has no more right to illegally access KaZaA's network to snoop for violations of "their" IP than I would to illegally access the RIAA's network for violations of my IP ( and this could actually be happening, in a Judy Tenuta sort of way).
Didn't a jury have something to say about ABC snooping around Food Lion's pantry?
And you'll have to click on the "Paranoia" tab to find the checkbox for this.
Calling disabling Autorun "paranoia" is like calling making sure all of the chambers in a revolver are empty before pointing it at your head and pulling the trigger "paranoia."
Oh yeah, be "paranoid" and check the chamber too, just in case, you paranoid bastard you.
Barring that just about anywhere a renovation is going on you'll find old doors. Modern interior doors are so cheap these days they're treated as throw away items. Cheaper to replace than fix up.
Don't worry about them being flat. An old paneled door becomes flat the second you put the quarter inch of masonite on top of it.
Barring that MDF is dirt cheap and comes precut to 2x4 feet, for only a few bucks. Or watch for a kitchen countertop sale at the local home store. I've seen some really neat shit go for only a buck a foot.
With some file cabinets, a kitchen countertop, a bit of masonite and a can or two of paint you can make a desk that looks like $400 for $40, and save your capital for things that actually matter to your business.
You buy the fancy desk when A) You've actually made real money and B) need to invest some of it in "capital" to keep from just giving it to the government.
At that point spend away. Those bastards have already bought fancy desks on your dime.
KFG
Re:Nice office... but who is going to pay for this
on
The Bionic Office
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When you start your own company your first desk should be an old door propped up with a couple of old milk crates. You have more important things to spend your money on when you start up.
If more "dot coms" had understood that instead of burning their money on fancy digs, pool tables and Porsches a few more of them might still be around.
Oh yeah, and clear idea of how you're going to make a profit to earn fancy desks, chairs and cars wouldn't be a bad idea either.
There are free tools to do the job as well, but if you aren't already au fait with the command line and partitioning drives I can't say I'd recommend them.
So the down side is it will cost you some money. The upside is that Partition Magic is a really kick ass piece of software and worth every penny.
The main advantage of BeOS over everything else available right now is that it has a complete lack of history and cruft. It was designed from scratch for modern graphical enviroments, yet also has an easily accessable Unix like command line, that works.
It's chief disadvantage?
It has a complete lack of history and cruft.
People want evolution, not revolution, no matter what they say.
"You'd think that predicting human behavior would be easy.
Anyone who has ever been married and/or had the care of children ( of any age ) knows how laughably naive it is.
Ok, so people do things for their own benefit. A simple enough concept. The problem arises in the definition of "own benefit."
Clearly some people, for some peculiar reason, think it's in their own benefit to climb a clock tower with a 30-06.
All attempts to accurately predict just which individuals are likely to do so have proven futile and are likely to remain so. Any cursory examination of the record will quickly show that the clock tower people are roughly divided between those that "we always knew would be trouble" and "I never would have expected it of her. She was always so sweet and caring."
You might just as well needlessly sacrifice a chicken for scrying, or toss sticks about, to determine the likely behaviour of individuals.
Masses of people are a different issue, within limits. Do you know what tool they use to determine traffic patterns in shopping malls?
The kinetic theory of gasses, which assumes purely random motion of ideally spherical and inelastic particles.
Statistically large numbers of people confined to a corridor behave almost exactly like the molocules of a gas in a cylinder.
This has nothing to do with the herd like instinct that results in cultural fads though. Predicting fads falls much into the same catagory as predicting the behaviours of individuals and is much easier post facto than a priori. ( Go ahead, tell me you actually predicted the craze for Hula-Hoops or Davey Crockett hats)
Not that there aren't people ( can you say Jeanne Dixon) who aren't beyond making post facto "predictions" and claiming them as a priori.
Most marketing people fall into this catagory. No one makes a multi-million dollar salary for saying, "Gee, damned if I know."
Market predictors are people no better than ( and fall into the same catagory as ) the average, run of the mill, "psychic," astrologer or Tarot Reader. They give things their best guess, couched in weasel words in case things go wrong, disregard their misses and offer their odd hit as "proof" that their predictive theory actually works.
It's all hogwash, smoke, mirrors and a waving of hands so that you don't notice Dearly departed Aunt Millie is really just a ballon with a tissue over it being dangled about by a sting.
I'm not saying that all of these people are being deliberately fraudulent ( although many of them are, thus the cynicism among some of the populace who realize they are being treated like morons ), most astrologers actually deeply believe their particular line of bullshit. This doesn't mean they aren't deeply self-deluded though. Sincerity is evidence of nothing but sincerity.
But I'm being redundant. All of this is common wisdom.
"Even in civil cases (IMO) higher standards of proof ought to be necessary before the courts get the ball rolling."
This is the function of the priliminary hearing, for the judge to make a determination of whether the suit bears enough merit to be heard formally. (Two suits against McDonald's for making people fat have been thrown out for being without grounds at this point in the procedings)
All grievences have a right to procede at least this far. Grievences, by their very nature, require some sort of third party arbitration. In most cases this really should be done by private arrangement, since such grievences are inherently private matters, and many courts make trying to arrange such private arbitration part of the priliminary procedure.
Judges hate civil cases. They are always messy and squalid affairs that always boil down to someone's dog having pissed on someone's rose bush. (See SCO vs. IBM).
If they weren't messy and squalid they wouldn't exist in the first place.
But I'll expand my anaolgy using your own example.
What if your window got broken during a Little League baseball game and you weren't really sure who broke it or who is really legally responsible, so you filed suits against all the players and coaches individually?
Only you didn't know all of their names and culled them from newspaper articles.
One of these names turns out to be a 66 year old who was just mentioned in an article incidentally, wasn't there, doesn't have any grandkids and doesn't even like baseball.
It wouldn't be unreasonable, even for a lawyer, to do a quick check of her story through publicly accessable means, then send her a letter saying, "Ooops, sorry," and then procede with the other 260 cases you have pending.
Especially since actually hauling a 66 year old in front of a judge claiming she's a Little League player who broke your window, with all the pissed of townspeople there watching, could be highly embaressing and prejudice your other cases.
Please note that the judge did not dismiss this case, the RIAA withdrew it.
Unlike criminal cases where a judge is involved from the very first, civil cases, i.e. mere private squabbles over money, aren't State issues. It is often months after a filing before the parties have so much as a priliminary hearing and are strongly encouraged by the system to settle things amongst themselves long before that date.
If someone breaks your window and you sue them to recover damages, then they come to you and say "Hey, what gives? Why don't I just fix your damned window?," and you say ok, then there is no longer any issue of law to be settled.
You go down to the courthouse and say, "Ummmmmm, nevermind," and it's over.
No judge.
The RIAA withdrew its complaint (while reserving the right to refile. Nice guys).
I'm not sure how you can say your new technology is better than the old one when you haven't even bothered to check out a fully implemented version of the old one.
His choice was emacs, but the motivation was the same.
I'm a formally trained touch typist who hates meta keys, so I go with vi.
In any case the choice of text editor isn't a religious war item to me. Use Notepad for all I care. It works. The true religous war is Word Processor vs. Text editor.
If you are truly a professional writer your job is simply to get words down on paper. Someone else, who is a specialist in the field, does the final formating. If you load up your document with formating codes the first thing they have to do is strip it all out anyway, so your work formating is wasted and it annoys the hell out of them.
Who would have thunk that the command line, a text interface, in text mode, would be the ideal method for generating text?
Every tool you could possibly want is inherent in the system. Any one time use tool you can imagine can be whipped up by a script. No bitching that your WP doesn't have a particular "function."
What's more, it's fast as lightning. If you're getting paid by the word/page this is important.
Just for giggles I just ran Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman Empire through wc. Over a quarter million words and a million and half charaters, as it turns out, and the response was nearly instantanious.
Things like word count and spell checkers have now been included in Linux word processors, in part because these are now running under windows as well, where such functions are actually necessary if you wish to get any work done, but initially because there was a demand for them from people switching to Linux from Windows who simply didn't understand that such "functions" were already inherent in the system.
Forgive me if I keep repeating that last phrase over and over again. Some mules take more than one whack with the 2x4 before you can get their attention.
For the professional wordsmith there is nothing more powerful, and just plain joyous to use, than a plain text editor, at the command line, in text mode, under a Unix enviroment.
Unfortunately, if you're really, really good at finding things you immdiately become a target for those with a vested interest in certain things not being found.
Go watch Chinatown.
It isn't really Google's fault. Find a way to guaruntee the lawyers won't give them a "nose job" and I'm sure all those sites would reappear.
Note that even though they took down the Kazaa Lite search listing they still found a subversive way to pass the url along.
I would suppose it would handle the same thing that has happened thousands of times the same way it has the other thousands of time regardless of who or what causes it (and it has happened faster than what we are seeing now well before humans existed). Note: that is not all life dies, all currents halt, all geologic processes halt, though they will most likely work somewhat differently.
The issue isn't all life dieing. No one expects or predicts that at all, although it would have a disasterous effect on some life ( like, say, the Atlantic Salmon which while in the ocean stays within a very small area off the Grand Banks).
No, our real concern, in our typical fashion, is how badly it would mess us up. More specifically, how much would it cost.
If the Atlanitc Conveyer, the Gulf Stream, stopped then France would, ironically, be turned into a frozen wasteland by global "warming". They would be fscked.
Oh, wait. How do we turn that conveyer thingy off?
Nevermind, it probably wouldn't work. Tahiti is French these days and they'd probably just all go there, messing paradise up even more than they already have.
The problem with Einstein is that he was just an armchair physicist.
Why didn't he just shut up and do something?
Can someone tell me when expertise, perception and wisdom became "worthless"?
"Excuse me sir, but did you know that your door lock is faulty?"
"Hey, don't give me none of that talk mister. Just shut the hell up and fix my lock. OK?"
"Listen. . . asshole. I didn't design the lock, I didn't make it and, more to the point, I'm not the jerk who put it in your door. It's your design, your lock and your door. You fix. Now FOAD."
Open source is about sharing, not about making the other guy responsible for your cockups.
Slashdot Mirror
This is certainly correct (although, as you note, this can vary considerably by the company).
That's why the receptionist ( who you could probably live without for a while ) gets the best desk first. Not the Owner/CEO.
In the case of Salon, to take an example, their offices needn't look any better than average small town newspaper's, because it's their webpage that determines the public's perception of "what they look like."
They could be serving those pages from somebody's garage for all anyone cares, including their customers.
KFG
"if it isn't self-serving, what is it for?"
Well, in this case, self-serving hypocrisy, perhaps?
I guess the RIAA's sense of irony only goes in one direction. Live by the DMCA, die by the DMCA.
And just what is the real irony? The fact that by the RIAA's own actions KaZaA has been judicially reviewed and found to be a legal service.
The RIAA has no more right to illegally access KaZaA's network to snoop for violations of "their" IP than I would to illegally access the RIAA's network for violations of my IP ( and this could actually be happening, in a Judy Tenuta sort of way).
Didn't a jury have something to say about ABC snooping around Food Lion's pantry?
KFG
And you'll have to click on the "Paranoia" tab to find the checkbox for this.
Calling disabling Autorun "paranoia" is like calling making sure all of the chambers in a revolver are empty before pointing it at your head and pulling the trigger "paranoia."
Oh yeah, be "paranoid" and check the chamber too, just in case, you paranoid bastard you.
KFG
In my basement.
Barring that just about anywhere a renovation is going on you'll find old doors. Modern interior doors are so cheap these days they're treated as throw away items. Cheaper to replace than fix up.
Don't worry about them being flat. An old paneled door becomes flat the second you put the quarter inch of masonite on top of it.
Barring that MDF is dirt cheap and comes precut to 2x4 feet, for only a few bucks. Or watch for a kitchen countertop sale at the local home store. I've seen some really neat shit go for only a buck a foot.
With some file cabinets, a kitchen countertop, a bit of masonite and a can or two of paint you can make a desk that looks like $400 for $40, and save your capital for things that actually matter to your business.
You buy the fancy desk when A) You've actually made real money and B) need to invest some of it in "capital" to keep from just giving it to the government.
At that point spend away. Those bastards have already bought fancy desks on your dime.
KFG
When you start your own company your first desk should be an old door propped up with a couple of old milk crates. You have more important things to spend your money on when you start up.
If more "dot coms" had understood that instead of burning their money on fancy digs, pool tables and Porsches a few more of them might still be around.
Oh yeah, and clear idea of how you're going to make a profit to earn fancy desks, chairs and cars wouldn't be a bad idea either.
KFG
Partition Magic. Don't leave home without it.
There are free tools to do the job as well, but if you aren't already au fait with the command line and partitioning drives I can't say I'd recommend them.
So the down side is it will cost you some money. The upside is that Partition Magic is a really kick ass piece of software and worth every penny.
KFG
The main advantage of BeOS over everything else available right now is that it has a complete lack of history and cruft. It was designed from scratch for modern graphical enviroments, yet also has an easily accessable Unix like command line, that works.
It's chief disadvantage?
It has a complete lack of history and cruft.
People want evolution, not revolution, no matter what they say.
KFG
Please be aware that making a mint may be illegal in your jurisdiction. At the very least it's highly regulated.
KFG
". . .just a ballon with a tissue over it being dangled about by a sting.,"
a Freudian, Pepsi Syndrome induced, typo, or what?
I have got to get around to cleaning my keyboard.
KFG
"You'd think that predicting human behavior would be easy.
Anyone who has ever been married and/or had the care of children ( of any age ) knows how laughably naive it is.
Ok, so people do things for their own benefit. A simple enough concept. The problem arises in the definition of "own benefit."
Clearly some people, for some peculiar reason, think it's in their own benefit to climb a clock tower with a 30-06.
All attempts to accurately predict just which individuals are likely to do so have proven futile and are likely to remain so. Any cursory examination of the record will quickly show that the clock tower people are roughly divided between those that "we always knew would be trouble" and "I never would have expected it of her. She was always so sweet and caring."
You might just as well needlessly sacrifice a chicken for scrying, or toss sticks about, to determine the likely behaviour of individuals.
Masses of people are a different issue, within limits. Do you know what tool they use to determine traffic patterns in shopping malls?
The kinetic theory of gasses, which assumes purely random motion of ideally spherical and inelastic particles.
Statistically large numbers of people confined to a corridor behave almost exactly like the molocules of a gas in a cylinder.
This has nothing to do with the herd like instinct that results in cultural fads though. Predicting fads falls much into the same catagory as predicting the behaviours of individuals and is much easier post facto than a priori. ( Go ahead, tell me you actually predicted the craze for Hula-Hoops or Davey Crockett hats)
Not that there aren't people ( can you say Jeanne Dixon) who aren't beyond making post facto "predictions" and claiming them as a priori.
Most marketing people fall into this catagory. No one makes a multi-million dollar salary for saying, "Gee, damned if I know."
Market predictors are people no better than ( and fall into the same catagory as ) the average, run of the mill, "psychic," astrologer or Tarot Reader. They give things their best guess, couched in weasel words in case things go wrong, disregard their misses and offer their odd hit as "proof" that their predictive theory actually works.
It's all hogwash, smoke, mirrors and a waving of hands so that you don't notice Dearly departed Aunt Millie is really just a ballon with a tissue over it being dangled about by a sting.
I'm not saying that all of these people are being deliberately fraudulent ( although many of them are, thus the cynicism among some of the populace who realize they are being treated like morons ), most astrologers actually deeply believe their particular line of bullshit. This doesn't mean they aren't deeply self-deluded though. Sincerity is evidence of nothing but sincerity.
But I'm being redundant. All of this is common wisdom.
Isn't it?
KFG
"Even in civil cases (IMO) higher standards of proof ought to be necessary before the courts get the ball rolling."
This is the function of the priliminary hearing, for the judge to make a determination of whether the suit bears enough merit to be heard formally. (Two suits against McDonald's for making people fat have been thrown out for being without grounds at this point in the procedings)
All grievences have a right to procede at least this far. Grievences, by their very nature, require some sort of third party arbitration. In most cases this really should be done by private arrangement, since such grievences are inherently private matters, and many courts make trying to arrange such private arbitration part of the priliminary procedure.
Judges hate civil cases. They are always messy and squalid affairs that always boil down to someone's dog having pissed on someone's rose bush. (See SCO vs. IBM).
If they weren't messy and squalid they wouldn't exist in the first place.
KFG
I specifically didn't include all the other possible suits because they are irrelevant to this paritcular action.
The suit against the owner of the field is analogous to the RIAAs suit against Kazaa ( which they lost, by the way).
Analogies don't suck, otherwise people wouldn't use them. Lawyers specifically rely on them all the time.
They serve as an instument of understanding by couching the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar.
Analogies aren't identity, however, thus taking them literally is what sucks.
KFG
Sure.
But I'll expand my anaolgy using your own example.
What if your window got broken during a Little League baseball game and you weren't really sure who broke it or who is really legally responsible, so you filed suits against all the players and coaches individually?
Only you didn't know all of their names and culled them from newspaper articles.
One of these names turns out to be a 66 year old who was just mentioned in an article incidentally, wasn't there, doesn't have any grandkids and doesn't even like baseball.
It wouldn't be unreasonable, even for a lawyer, to do a quick check of her story through publicly accessable means, then send her a letter saying, "Ooops, sorry," and then procede with the other 260 cases you have pending.
Especially since actually hauling a 66 year old in front of a judge claiming she's a Little League player who broke your window, with all the pissed of townspeople there watching, could be highly embaressing and prejudice your other cases.
KFG
Please note that the judge did not dismiss this case, the RIAA withdrew it.
Unlike criminal cases where a judge is involved from the very first, civil cases, i.e. mere private squabbles over money, aren't State issues. It is often months after a filing before the parties have so much as a priliminary hearing and are strongly encouraged by the system to settle things amongst themselves long before that date.
If someone breaks your window and you sue them to recover damages, then they come to you and say "Hey, what gives? Why don't I just fix your damned window?," and you say ok, then there is no longer any issue of law to be settled.
You go down to the courthouse and say, "Ummmmmm, nevermind," and it's over.
No judge.
The RIAA withdrew its complaint (while reserving the right to refile. Nice guys).
KFG
pretty much identify it as a mass fatality? I'd think that would at least be a major clue.
."
Or are we going to start giving them names, like hurricanes?
"In mass fatality "Jane" today. .
What am I missing?
KFG
When we haven't said hello to one yet?
I'm not sure how you can say your new technology is better than the old one when you haven't even bothered to check out a fully implemented version of the old one.
KFG
"if you're really serious about keeping your pants up, use both!"
But if you're really, really serious you'll take care that your hips don't disappear.
Hard for some hackers, I know, but worth it in the pants security field.
If you're a kilt sort of guy all bets are off though, seeing as they lack any sort of basic security to begin with.
KFG
In his wonderful little essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line."
M _I _C_O_N.shtml
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_
His choice was emacs, but the motivation was the same.
I'm a formally trained touch typist who hates meta keys, so I go with vi.
In any case the choice of text editor isn't a religious war item to me. Use Notepad for all I care. It works. The true religous war is Word Processor vs. Text editor.
If you are truly a professional writer your job is simply to get words down on paper. Someone else, who is a specialist in the field, does the final formating. If you load up your document with formating codes the first thing they have to do is strip it all out anyway, so your work formating is wasted and it annoys the hell out of them.
Who would have thunk that the command line, a text interface, in text mode, would be the ideal method for generating text?
Every tool you could possibly want is inherent in the system. Any one time use tool you can imagine can be whipped up by a script. No bitching that your WP doesn't have a particular "function."
What's more, it's fast as lightning. If you're getting paid by the word/page this is important.
Just for giggles I just ran Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman Empire through wc. Over a quarter million words and a million and half charaters, as it turns out, and the response was nearly instantanious.
Things like word count and spell checkers have now been included in Linux word processors, in part because these are now running under windows as well, where such functions are actually necessary if you wish to get any work done, but initially because there was a demand for them from people switching to Linux from Windows who simply didn't understand that such "functions" were already inherent in the system.
Forgive me if I keep repeating that last phrase over and over again. Some mules take more than one whack with the 2x4 before you can get their attention.
For the professional wordsmith there is nothing more powerful, and just plain joyous to use, than a plain text editor, at the command line, in text mode, under a Unix enviroment.
You'd almost think it was written that way, huh?
KFG
And the ninth hit is still the link to the C&D letter listing all the urls they were "ordered" to remove.
KFG
Unfortunately, if you're really, really good at finding things you immdiately become a target for those with a vested interest in certain things not being found.
Go watch Chinatown.
It isn't really Google's fault. Find a way to guaruntee the lawyers won't give them a "nose job" and I'm sure all those sites would reappear.
Note that even though they took down the Kazaa Lite search listing they still found a subversive way to pass the url along.
KFG
I would suppose it would handle the same thing that has happened thousands of times the same way it has the other thousands of time regardless of who or what causes it (and it has happened faster than what we are seeing now well before humans existed). Note: that is not all life dies, all currents halt, all geologic processes halt, though they will most likely work somewhat differently.
The issue isn't all life dieing. No one expects or predicts that at all, although it would have a disasterous effect on some life ( like, say, the Atlantic Salmon which while in the ocean stays within a very small area off the Grand Banks).
No, our real concern, in our typical fashion, is how badly it would mess us up. More specifically, how much would it cost.
If the Atlanitc Conveyer, the Gulf Stream, stopped then France would, ironically, be turned into a frozen wasteland by global "warming". They would be fscked.
Oh, wait. How do we turn that conveyer thingy off?
Nevermind, it probably wouldn't work. Tahiti is French these days and they'd probably just all go there, messing paradise up even more than they already have.
KFG
Is anyone an oceanologist?
I assume someone, somewhere, must be. Otherwise why would they bother to have the name?
KFG
Oh, I thought it was all the hot gasses wafting out from SCO.
I told them they should avoid the brown acid and cut back on the burritos, but would they listen?
Nooooooooooooooooo!
KFG
The great man himself gave you a clue to great wisdom. Not everyone has that chance.
And you blew it, Grasshopper.
The lesson was, "The right tool for the job."
Sometimes the right tool, despite all the modern technolgical advances, is still a rock.
KFG
The problem with Einstein is that he was just an armchair physicist.
Why didn't he just shut up and do something?
Can someone tell me when expertise, perception and wisdom became "worthless"?
"Excuse me sir, but did you know that your door lock is faulty?"
"Hey, don't give me none of that talk mister. Just shut the hell up and fix my lock. OK?"
"Listen. . . asshole. I didn't design the lock, I didn't make it and, more to the point, I'm not the jerk who put it in your door. It's your design, your lock and your door. You fix. Now FOAD."
Open source is about sharing, not about making the other guy responsible for your cockups.
KFG