I have several friends who have tried this over the years, and know other people who have tried this. The bottom line is: friendships can fail under the strain of a business relationship, and when the friendship fails, the business is not far behind. My wife has worked for three of these ventures over the last 15 years, where two friends created a business, had a falling out, and the business collapsed as a result. All three times. In none of those cases were the owners able to remain friends. She is now with a family owned business who are having their own difficulties right now, but there's no risk of a partnership collapsing here to accelerate it.
Being in it with a friend at a stressful time, when you have one idea about how to save the company, and your friend has a different-and-incompatible idea, and there's just enough money left to try one of your ideas, that's a pressure cooker not many relationships can survive.
Now, you may have a "less permanent" idea about business. Maybe you just want to start a company for the purpose of working, but don't care if it stays together longer than three years or so. As long as you and your partners agree up front, that may work for you.
One other piece of advice -- hire an independent person to do the books, someone you both can trust. Not just an external accountant, but a bookkeeper who sees the day-to-day spending, and lets you both know that the other isn't spending money foolishly.
I will say that family owned businesses seem to be the exception to the rule, as long as Dad or Mom or Grandpa is the "boss" and everyone else understands that.
What bothers me is the exaggerated claims of herbal medicine industry in general.
That's why I have a hard time walking into a GNC store even when looking for something specific, like whey protein. The cashier doesn't care what he or she sells you, as long as you're buying, but they sure act like whatever it is it's the greatest thing ever for Condition "X". Not only do I not know when they're being truthful, but I don't think they know either.
Re:Herbal medicine has limited value
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Overall I have a lot of faith in science but when there are multi billion-dollar markets involved like the one pharmaceutical companies are in, there tend to be some less than scrupulous people around and as a result it wouldn't surprise me if results are skewed for the sole purpose of maintaining their hold on the market.
This was exactly the case with Synthroid. In the 1990s the patent had run out on levothyroxine (the generic name for Synthroid.) Knoll Pharmaceuticals, the maker of Synthroid, suppressed a study that proved the generic forms were equally as effective as the brand name, and convinced many doctors to tell their patients to only purchase Synthroid-brand drugs. Knoll finally settled in 2000 for about $100 million dollars, which was a bargain considering the business they get from people who are still afraid of the generics, driven by doctors who still don't know the difference.
The difference between this case and the alternative medicine believers is that the case revolved around legitimate science on both sides of the issue, and it was humans tampering with the data that made the difference (just as you speculated above.) The alternative medicine purveyors, on the other hand, have no such data but tries to claim the same types of protections. Without actual studies, though, they deserve nothing. It's just a shame that some people believe that because they're mocked it gives them some kind of moral high ground, when they truly deserve nothing but mockery.
Thank goodness we're prepared for when the sinister Kythera device is unearthed.
EdZ, you win at the internets today! Congratulations! Taco, tell him what he's won!
And to the rest of you, thanks for playing. Vanna has some nice take-home gifts for you, including the play-at-home edition of Slashdot complete with working mini-flame throwers and tiny troll-bridges. Collect karma while you play your mod cards, but watch out for the copypastas! Slashdot, by Milton Bradley.
Probably because those victims were offered a year of "credit monitoring" and those victims took them up on it. It made them more paranoid than they had been before, so they watched their financial data more carefully, and were perhaps more cautious when using their credit cards. (Of course that doesn't reduce the number of attacks, just the number that are successful, but the data posted is a "fraud rate", and doesn't denote "successful vs. unsuccessful.")
Or maybe many of them closed out a bunch of unused credit accounts to minimize their footprints, which actually did spare them from further breaches.
I don't think it's a scalability problem. What are you supposed to do about any particular breach you read about in the news? Worry harder? "Serious" is not a matter of public opinion -- it's a boolean issue to the victims.
How does that differ if it happens one time or one million times? It doesn't affect us as a society any differently.
Where scalability makes a difference is in the organization who had the breach. If they have to answer to a single angry customer, they can probably deal with it. If they have to answer to a horde of a million angry customers, they may go out of business. Even that doesn't have a "scalability" problem to society. Either the TV news says "XYZ corp filed for chapter 11 today because an angry horde of customers whose data was leaked sued them into oblivion" or they don't.
There is another place where scalability does matter, and that is in defending against breaches. If I own a restaurant and hear that there's a ring of card skimmers in town, and they've hit 9 restaurants so far, I'd want to take extra measures to avoid becoming the 10th. But that's a matter of geography and modus operandi, not "did they steal 10 or 1000 cards from each?"
The cyber-term "cyber" will become an ubiquitous cyber-prefix to all cyber-nouns. And half of all cyber-verbs.
It'll just get creepier. Just as we are now all cyber-complacent, the digerati will start shortening it to cy-. Cyverbs will creep into the cylanguage. We already have cyborgs, why not cyarms and cylegs? They'll "log on" to the cyweb with their cyphones.
Ish. Someone get me a cygun before this goes any further. Or a cylon. That'll stop 'em.
My status reports are never more than half a page, they're usually a dozen simple sentences hastily emailed moments before I have my weekly chat with my manager. We both agreed that this format works -- she can keep tabs on my projects, and it makes for a good agenda for the chat.
The lesson for you would be to discuss it with your new employees: "how can you get me a status report in the least painful way possible?"
I'm in an online graduate program, and have occasionally had instructors discourage the posting of links, but I have always been given a different explanation: either they were concerned about plagiarism, or people posting links that "gave away" the answers to whatever the homework topic was. They didn't mind the outside research as much as the sharing, which probably seems like the 21st century equivalent of passing around a copy of Cliff's Notes.
Out of the last five courses, I have not had a single professor discourage me from seeking any outside sources of material. In fact, my most recent class the professor apologized that school guidelines compelled him to require no more than one textbook, but he felt we should have at least two, and he encouraged us to do external reading.
That said, I did have one prof who stood out as "more sure of himself" than I cared for, but I chalked that one up to cultural differences between us. And he didn't discourage us from learning elsewhere. He just wanted us to know (repeatedly) that he was an authority on the topic.
Even in college, I witnessed more than one teacher who outwardly frowned upon students doing more work than the syllabus required.
The way you phrased that doesn't make it clear why your teachers didn't want "extra" work. If I were teaching a course and asked for a 5-8 page term paper, I'd let the students know I wouldn't have time to read a 10+ page report. I'd also let them know that I was looking for a certain level of breadth plus depth in the subject. Anyone can prattle on for 20 pages talking about the minutiae of one aspect of the topic, but I'd rather have the higher level summary that shows knowledge across the entire subject.
On the other hand, if your teacher said "you will learn the DIR and CD commands, but do not study the FOR or SET commands because I do not want you to use them in this class" then he's the ineffective power freak you described.
Defragmenting RAM in this way is pretty much pointless. That said, an individual program can more effectively use its RAM by using physical memory instead of swapping whenever possible. By keeping the frequently used memory to the fewest possible pages, it will swap less frequently. Microsoft's latest C++ compilers do this through a process called Profile Guided Optimization (PGO).
First, they developed an optimizing scheme called Link Time Code Generation, which defers the actual generation and optimization of the code until all the modules have been parsed. This lets the optimizer "see" into every module all at once, and optimize away common stuff like nested references. (Very useful in Microsoft's Visual Studio land, where it's the default to put each new class into its own source file.) That gave some solid performance boosts.
Now, with PGO, what you do is tell the compiler to instrument the code for a special trial run of your program. After compiling, you execute the code and walk through your most common usage scenario imaginable, then you exit. You don't click on every feature, you just try to exercise the bare bones functionality. When you're done, the instrumentation will have recorded the access patterns of the variables and memory, creating a profile of your code. Now, you go back and recompile your code, this time without the instrumentation, and you feed the profile to the linker. The linker looks at the profile and tries to cram all of the most-used variables into the minimum number of pages possible.
The idea is that those pages of memory always stay busy due to how your users will likely run the program, so they never get swapped out, and the performance for that execution remains as fast as possible. The less-used functions will have to pay the swapping penalty, but that's the whole idea -- sacrifice the performance of the little-or-never used features for mainstream performance. It's damn clever.
No he isn't. He critisizes the incorrect use and application of the term MVC and the misconception and the pointless enforcement of a wrong concept of MVC in places where it is often more than pointless to do so. Like in most modern web application scenarious.
I think you just pretty much quoted the dictionary definition of a pedant, specifically definition 2B.
How do you reconcile view caching with this idea? I'm not arguing with you, mind you, but I'm wondering that if there's a cache involved does that immediately negate calling the pattern MVC? Another violation of this is AJAX. It has logic as client-side as you can get.
I think what the TF author might be thinking is that MVC means exactly this pattern applied at this level, and not scaling the pattern up to web server / app server / database server. Or if that's it, then we shouldn't call it MVC but something else like "P-BL-DA" for "Presentation / Business Logic / Data Access". (Or maybe DA-P-BL, in honor of the original screwing up of the order of the layers in the name.)
I really hope you aren't as miserable as your post sounds...man, really life is WAY too short....take advantage of any chance you can to get out and enjoy it. I'm not even saying you have to celebrate Xmas itself, but, no reason to not have fun with othere just to make a 'point' ya know? Doing that hurts no one but yourself.
Don't forget that to fully enjoy the yin, you must also experience the yang. His idea is that he'll enjoy it based on his own time schedule, rather than the commercialized schedule. Makes sense to me. And maybe his friends and family also like having their own Uncle Ebeneezer, someone who increases the contrast of their own joy, making it stand out further. And maybe he even enjoys playing the role of the humbugger.
As for me, I'm not going to worry about his feelings much more than this post. I'll be enjoying the season in my own way.
So if we used that algorithm ourselves and just started querying a seedy registrar for these domain names, they'd squat them all in advance. Then we could query some of the other seedy registrars, who would check with the first domain squatter, who would then jack up his prices so high the botherders couldn't afford them anymore.
Sounds like killing two birds with one stone, if you ask me.
I didn't say we couldn't fly, I just said society has a lot of reasons to discourage it.
For example: I'm flying to Florida this weekend just because I want to go see palm trees and lie on a beach, and because I have frequent flyer miles coming out of my ears. If this flight were to cost me $1,000 out of pocket I wouldn't consider it. So I'm going out there to help plug up the airports during the busiest travel weekend of the year, just because Minnesota is cold and boring. Does society need me to fly there? No -- I'm just more tarmac clutter, as far as the rest of you are concerned. Why should you encourage me to fly?
There's an easier way to solve the problem of lack of runways that nobody seems to want to discuss: raise the cost of flying. Pile on airport fees and jet fuel taxes. It's simple economics: if you raise the price, demand will drop. The runways will clear themselves.
There's a lot of reasons for society to not encourage flying: the pollution it causes (delivering particulates directly into the upper atmosphere may be a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect,) the increased ability of diseases to spread across the planet like wildfire, the noise, security, fossil fuel usage, etc. And it's not like business needs as much face-to-face communications with today's networking technologies.
Raising the price will clear the skies of today's casual travelers, and that's a good thing.
DISH Network was a spinoff from EchoStar Communications Corporation. There is still an independent entity called EchoStar Corporation. Read the first line.
Slashdot Mirror
There's always a catch.
I have several friends who have tried this over the years, and know other people who have tried this. The bottom line is: friendships can fail under the strain of a business relationship, and when the friendship fails, the business is not far behind. My wife has worked for three of these ventures over the last 15 years, where two friends created a business, had a falling out, and the business collapsed as a result. All three times. In none of those cases were the owners able to remain friends. She is now with a family owned business who are having their own difficulties right now, but there's no risk of a partnership collapsing here to accelerate it.
Being in it with a friend at a stressful time, when you have one idea about how to save the company, and your friend has a different-and-incompatible idea, and there's just enough money left to try one of your ideas, that's a pressure cooker not many relationships can survive.
Now, you may have a "less permanent" idea about business. Maybe you just want to start a company for the purpose of working, but don't care if it stays together longer than three years or so. As long as you and your partners agree up front, that may work for you.
One other piece of advice -- hire an independent person to do the books, someone you both can trust. Not just an external accountant, but a bookkeeper who sees the day-to-day spending, and lets you both know that the other isn't spending money foolishly.
I will say that family owned businesses seem to be the exception to the rule, as long as Dad or Mom or Grandpa is the "boss" and everyone else understands that.
What bothers me is the exaggerated claims of herbal medicine industry in general.
That's why I have a hard time walking into a GNC store even when looking for something specific, like whey protein. The cashier doesn't care what he or she sells you, as long as you're buying, but they sure act like whatever it is it's the greatest thing ever for Condition "X". Not only do I not know when they're being truthful, but I don't think they know either.
Overall I have a lot of faith in science but when there are multi billion-dollar markets involved like the one pharmaceutical companies are in, there tend to be some less than scrupulous people around and as a result it wouldn't surprise me if results are skewed for the sole purpose of maintaining their hold on the market.
This was exactly the case with Synthroid. In the 1990s the patent had run out on levothyroxine (the generic name for Synthroid.) Knoll Pharmaceuticals, the maker of Synthroid, suppressed a study that proved the generic forms were equally as effective as the brand name, and convinced many doctors to tell their patients to only purchase Synthroid-brand drugs. Knoll finally settled in 2000 for about $100 million dollars, which was a bargain considering the business they get from people who are still afraid of the generics, driven by doctors who still don't know the difference.
The difference between this case and the alternative medicine believers is that the case revolved around legitimate science on both sides of the issue, and it was humans tampering with the data that made the difference (just as you speculated above.) The alternative medicine purveyors, on the other hand, have no such data but tries to claim the same types of protections. Without actual studies, though, they deserve nothing. It's just a shame that some people believe that because they're mocked it gives them some kind of moral high ground, when they truly deserve nothing but mockery.
Thank goodness we're prepared for when the sinister Kythera device is unearthed.
EdZ, you win at the internets today! Congratulations! Taco, tell him what he's won!
And to the rest of you, thanks for playing. Vanna has some nice take-home gifts for you, including the play-at-home edition of Slashdot complete with working mini-flame throwers and tiny troll-bridges. Collect karma while you play your mod cards, but watch out for the copypastas! Slashdot, by Milton Bradley.
Probably because those victims were offered a year of "credit monitoring" and those victims took them up on it. It made them more paranoid than they had been before, so they watched their financial data more carefully, and were perhaps more cautious when using their credit cards. (Of course that doesn't reduce the number of attacks, just the number that are successful, but the data posted is a "fraud rate", and doesn't denote "successful vs. unsuccessful.")
Or maybe many of them closed out a bunch of unused credit accounts to minimize their footprints, which actually did spare them from further breaches.
I don't think it's a scalability problem. What are you supposed to do about any particular breach you read about in the news? Worry harder? "Serious" is not a matter of public opinion -- it's a boolean issue to the victims.
DidMyDataGetLeaked() ? MyProblems(serious) : MyProblems(NULL) ;
How does that differ if it happens one time or one million times? It doesn't affect us as a society any differently.
Where scalability makes a difference is in the organization who had the breach. If they have to answer to a single angry customer, they can probably deal with it. If they have to answer to a horde of a million angry customers, they may go out of business. Even that doesn't have a "scalability" problem to society. Either the TV news says "XYZ corp filed for chapter 11 today because an angry horde of customers whose data was leaked sued them into oblivion" or they don't.
There is another place where scalability does matter, and that is in defending against breaches. If I own a restaurant and hear that there's a ring of card skimmers in town, and they've hit 9 restaurants so far, I'd want to take extra measures to avoid becoming the 10th. But that's a matter of geography and modus operandi, not "did they steal 10 or 1000 cards from each?"
Kelsey Grammer is a Nazi?
No, it was Kelsey's Gramper.
The cyber-term "cyber" will become an ubiquitous cyber-prefix to all cyber-nouns. And half of all cyber-verbs.
It'll just get creepier. Just as we are now all cyber-complacent, the digerati will start shortening it to cy-. Cyverbs will creep into the cylanguage. We already have cyborgs, why not cyarms and cylegs? They'll "log on" to the cyweb with their cyphones.
Ish. Someone get me a cygun before this goes any further. Or a cylon. That'll stop 'em.
My status reports are never more than half a page, they're usually a dozen simple sentences hastily emailed moments before I have my weekly chat with my manager. We both agreed that this format works -- she can keep tabs on my projects, and it makes for a good agenda for the chat.
The lesson for you would be to discuss it with your new employees: "how can you get me a status report in the least painful way possible?"
I'm in an online graduate program, and have occasionally had instructors discourage the posting of links, but I have always been given a different explanation: either they were concerned about plagiarism, or people posting links that "gave away" the answers to whatever the homework topic was. They didn't mind the outside research as much as the sharing, which probably seems like the 21st century equivalent of passing around a copy of Cliff's Notes.
Out of the last five courses, I have not had a single professor discourage me from seeking any outside sources of material. In fact, my most recent class the professor apologized that school guidelines compelled him to require no more than one textbook, but he felt we should have at least two, and he encouraged us to do external reading.
That said, I did have one prof who stood out as "more sure of himself" than I cared for, but I chalked that one up to cultural differences between us. And he didn't discourage us from learning elsewhere. He just wanted us to know (repeatedly) that he was an authority on the topic.
as opposed to, "In Shitty Old Economy, smartphone blows you"?
"In Shitty Old Motorola, smartphones blow."
Even in college, I witnessed more than one teacher who outwardly frowned upon students doing more work than the syllabus required.
The way you phrased that doesn't make it clear why your teachers didn't want "extra" work. If I were teaching a course and asked for a 5-8 page term paper, I'd let the students know I wouldn't have time to read a 10+ page report. I'd also let them know that I was looking for a certain level of breadth plus depth in the subject. Anyone can prattle on for 20 pages talking about the minutiae of one aspect of the topic, but I'd rather have the higher level summary that shows knowledge across the entire subject.
On the other hand, if your teacher said "you will learn the DIR and CD commands, but do not study the FOR or SET commands because I do not want you to use them in this class" then he's the ineffective power freak you described.
Defragmenting RAM in this way is pretty much pointless. That said, an individual program can more effectively use its RAM by using physical memory instead of swapping whenever possible. By keeping the frequently used memory to the fewest possible pages, it will swap less frequently. Microsoft's latest C++ compilers do this through a process called Profile Guided Optimization (PGO).
First, they developed an optimizing scheme called Link Time Code Generation, which defers the actual generation and optimization of the code until all the modules have been parsed. This lets the optimizer "see" into every module all at once, and optimize away common stuff like nested references. (Very useful in Microsoft's Visual Studio land, where it's the default to put each new class into its own source file.) That gave some solid performance boosts.
Now, with PGO, what you do is tell the compiler to instrument the code for a special trial run of your program. After compiling, you execute the code and walk through your most common usage scenario imaginable, then you exit. You don't click on every feature, you just try to exercise the bare bones functionality. When you're done, the instrumentation will have recorded the access patterns of the variables and memory, creating a profile of your code. Now, you go back and recompile your code, this time without the instrumentation, and you feed the profile to the linker. The linker looks at the profile and tries to cram all of the most-used variables into the minimum number of pages possible.
The idea is that those pages of memory always stay busy due to how your users will likely run the program, so they never get swapped out, and the performance for that execution remains as fast as possible. The less-used functions will have to pay the swapping penalty, but that's the whole idea -- sacrifice the performance of the little-or-never used features for mainstream performance. It's damn clever.
Author is Pedantic
No he isn't. He critisizes the incorrect use and application of the term MVC and the misconception and the pointless enforcement of a wrong concept of MVC in places where it is often more than pointless to do so. Like in most modern web application scenarious.
I think you just pretty much quoted the dictionary definition of a pedant, specifically definition 2B.
Rather a lot like I'm doing now. </pedantic>
How do you reconcile view caching with this idea? I'm not arguing with you, mind you, but I'm wondering that if there's a cache involved does that immediately negate calling the pattern MVC? Another violation of this is AJAX. It has logic as client-side as you can get.
I think what the TF author might be thinking is that MVC means exactly this pattern applied at this level, and not scaling the pattern up to web server / app server / database server. Or if that's it, then we shouldn't call it MVC but something else like "P-BL-DA" for "Presentation / Business Logic / Data Access". (Or maybe DA-P-BL, in honor of the original screwing up of the order of the layers in the name.)
Don't forget that to fully enjoy the yin, you must also experience the yang. His idea is that he'll enjoy it based on his own time schedule, rather than the commercialized schedule. Makes sense to me. And maybe his friends and family also like having their own Uncle Ebeneezer, someone who increases the contrast of their own joy, making it stand out further. And maybe he even enjoys playing the role of the humbugger.
As for me, I'm not going to worry about his feelings much more than this post. I'll be enjoying the season in my own way.
So if we used that algorithm ourselves and just started querying a seedy registrar for these domain names, they'd squat them all in advance. Then we could query some of the other seedy registrars, who would check with the first domain squatter, who would then jack up his prices so high the botherders couldn't afford them anymore.
Sounds like killing two birds with one stone, if you ask me.
I don't want Crystal Balls! I like mine just the way they are, thank you very much.
I didn't say we couldn't fly, I just said society has a lot of reasons to discourage it.
For example: I'm flying to Florida this weekend just because I want to go see palm trees and lie on a beach, and because I have frequent flyer miles coming out of my ears. If this flight were to cost me $1,000 out of pocket I wouldn't consider it. So I'm going out there to help plug up the airports during the busiest travel weekend of the year, just because Minnesota is cold and boring. Does society need me to fly there? No -- I'm just more tarmac clutter, as far as the rest of you are concerned. Why should you encourage me to fly?
There's an easier way to solve the problem of lack of runways that nobody seems to want to discuss: raise the cost of flying. Pile on airport fees and jet fuel taxes. It's simple economics: if you raise the price, demand will drop. The runways will clear themselves.
There's a lot of reasons for society to not encourage flying: the pollution it causes (delivering particulates directly into the upper atmosphere may be a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect,) the increased ability of diseases to spread across the planet like wildfire, the noise, security, fossil fuel usage, etc. And it's not like business needs as much face-to-face communications with today's networking technologies.
Raising the price will clear the skies of today's casual travelers, and that's a good thing.
On the other hand... screw it, take his kidney.
If they use an anesthetic, it's not really cruel, is it?
DISH Network was a spinoff from EchoStar Communications Corporation. There is still an independent entity called EchoStar Corporation. Read the first line.
Perhaps Larry and Sergey are trying to write off donations to the Mozilla Foundation, and the IRS is examining if that's a bit too close to home.
Why not blame Microsoft? Maybe they filed a complaint with the IRS.
Unleash the conspiracy theories!
Well then I get an extra punch on my geek card. I always referred to her as "three of nine".