Apple has built a reputation for style, and this is what they get if there's even a little chink in the armor. If they don't want stories like this, they should be more like Dell and have this stuff be so common nobody bothers to write about it.
Whatch where you point that thing, you might shoot yourself.
As for me, I'm under no delusions.... But apparently you haven't checked my profile. Plus, the choice between the two is obvious. At least people *actually read* slashdot comments.
The point is to extract the maximum amount of cash possible from the obsessive early adopters before coming out with more reasonably priced models.
Additionally, these early units usually contain all the bells and whistles in order to prove out every aspect of the technology. Later, cheaper models, often have expensive, but little used features dropped from the product.
It seems pretty easy to me, but then again, I used to work for Iris as a Notes/Domino developer (developing the product itself, not databases that run on it), so maybe I have an unreasonable perspective.
Experiences with it as an e-mail application I would say give poor representation as to how it would function as a database manager. The e-mail functionality in Notes is implemented as a Notes database application, and the shortcomings you describe are not something that would have to be translated into pain points in shared databases you custom develop.
I assure you, once you reach a mild level of complexity like the person who posed this question in the article is describing, you will have an easier time, and a quicker rollout on Notes than you will on Access. You'll also get scalability, which is impossible with Access. I think it's a good middle ground between an Access-like product and writing a custom database application with something like PHP or Ruby, etc... If you can afford it, it's the perfect solution for this guy.
This is what Notes was designed for. Everything is a database, and it's just as easy as in access to create nice little front-ends for them. Plus it was designed to be stable and secure in multi-thousand user environments.
Notes got a bad rep, because they put the Notes v4 UI up against Outlook when they tried to compete against exchange. The UI isn't that sucky anymore, and Notes does 10x more stuff than Exchange, so it's not even close to a fair comparison. Unfortunatly, once you lose market share to Microsoft, you never get it back, and 80% of the Notes customers weren't using it to anywhere close to it's full potential anyway.It sounds *exactly* like what you need though......either that, or you need to hire a software development staff (perhaps a small one) and have your employees ask them to implement their databases for them.
It's Web 1.0 with mandatory Flash support and new fonts, apparently.
People keep spouting off about all this innovation that makes up Web 2.0, but it looks like the same old stuff to me with the exception that the companies haven't run out of venture capital yet. That and what we used to call an AOL user, we now call a 'blogger'.
Startups pay very little with the expectation of it becoming something big and rewarding the people who stand with it at the end.
I am currently working at my fourth startup in a row, and fifth overall, and I've had offers from countless others in the process of finding these four jobs. I can say from personal experience that what you're saying is absolutely false. Unless you're in pre-funding and have a period with no pay, startups invariably seem to may *considerably* more than established companies. You don't get bonuses or vacation time though, and you're dreaming if you think you'll ever work only 40 hours in a week.
If you can't survive the bad times then you aren't right for a startup.
I don't see what that has do do with what I said about vesting schedules. It is unreasonable to assume that anybody will stay in the same job for more than 5 years. This is especially true of the types of people who look to work at startups. Therefore I'd say that any vesting schedule longer than 5 years is unreasonable. That has nothing to do with sticking around during the bad times.
The only way to protect yourself is is a partnership agreement. Make sure your percentage of input is recorded and everyone involved understands what percent of the end reward is yours. Options are for employees that are not major parts of the business, but loyal and deserving.
It's unreasonable to expect that any but a tiny minority can get those deals. In any company that starts down the path to success there will be five, maybe six of those. We're talking out of what could be 100+ people by the time you get a payout. The best way to protect yourself, beyond managing expectations and getting a fair salary, is knowing how to pick the winners. There's a lot of luck and instinct involved there though, and it's not something you can tell somebody they have to do. Incidentally, so far I've had a 50% success rate and the jury is still out on the current company, but things look good.
This could be a useful slashdot section, but we keep getting these stories that don't have anything to do with 'rights' at all, much less the reader's rights... Somtimes even the online part is a stretch.
So, some website actually implemented their policy, and some self-important people with a misguided sense of propriety got pissed about it. News for Nerds? Absolutely! Your rights online? Not a chance.
It really does seem like we're saying to the world, "Do as we say, not as we do."
So what?
Why should we care too much about what it 'seems' like?
In reality though, what we're saying isn't 'We can have them and nobody else can'. What we're saying is 'Have 100 years of stable government before you build nuclear weapons'.
When you actually consider the entierty of the situation instead of making kneejerk judgements it doesn't actually *seem* all that bad.
while it may be technically possible to use nighttime freezing for sap concentration, no one has worked out the details of such a system
Yes they have. In fact, that's how natives made the syrup that taught us european colonists what maple sugar was. Plenty of people still do it today. The trick seems to be using large shallow pans. There are also some articles online about stashing the batch of sap in a chest freezer, which seems like it would take much less energy than boiling, but doesn't seem well suited to large scale production.
I don't know any commercial producers, so I only know about home production. You seem to know signifigantly more than me on that front, however even with what you describe it doesn't sound like you're boiling off as much of the volume as the worst case.
If you aren't getting what you want out of your job, get another job. It isn't your employer's job to fulfill your life.
I agree in principle, but where I was really going with that was trying to come up with a question that would tell if the employer was exploiting the workers. It's not your employer's job to be life fufilling, but it is their responsibility to be fair.
And these people are not skilled welders. Skilled workers are making more than the minimum which was presented here for maximum shock value.
And I picked the other end of the spectrum for the same reason.
[...] because of the real risk to fall on his ass for X months earning nothing. That's opportunity cost. [...]
You have that risk practically everywhere, with one exception, which...
As opposed to a gouverment union job with life employment guarantees....you've mentioned, but I guarantee you that he was much better paid at this job.
They said "no way" so he knew they were planning to devalue his shares at some point and avoided that potential trainwreck while learning the kind of folks he was dealing with.
Every early round startup will probably raise more money eventually. Practically every startup will tell you to go screw if you ask for a different equity deal than everybody else. They only want to pay the lawyers once.
The proper way not to get diluted in a startup is to go to a company that has pre-alocated shares for the later finance rounds so that the pool of shares doesn't grow when the company raises money, or to ask for more shares. The people hiring you get diluted when the company raises money too, and it's totally unreasonable for you to expect a better deal than they got.
Startups are a risk. You can't contract your way into a sure thing.
The only way you get that deal is if you have an unhealthy business relationship with the company founders, the investors are complete idiots (in which case you'll probably end up with nothing in the end anyway), or if you're the 1 guy in 100 million that can do what you do.
Clearly this guy didn't have a good-ol-boys relationship with the founders (if he did they'd have just given him a stake anyway, or they would have canned everybody but him). I like my odds that this guy wasn't 1 in 100 million, and that you, I, or anybody else reading this aren't either.
You can come up with all sorts of clever contracts to 'protect' yourself from this kind of thing. Either they'll work, which means you'll never get that contract, or they won't, and you'll be in the same boat you were in without it.
Do factory workers make average or better money for the economy as a whole in the US?
In many cases, yes. That's why their work is being exported or replaced by automation. Even in a non-union shop, a skilled welder, for example, can make over $70,000 a year.
I know now that I've said that some people are going to say "I'm a welder and I only make $38k." I said skilled welders. Anybody can weld. Very few people can do a good job of it. Plus most of the people would say that in this venue are probably just little kids who like to troll.
Should factory workers make above average wages? That's a hard question to answer, and if it could be answered, the answer wouldn't be 'yes', or 'no'. I'd start by figuring out if the "average wage" was actually a meaningful statistic in any way whatsoever in the context of this discussion. I'm guessing it isn't. A more interesting question to answer would be "Is the job making the factory worker's life better?"
1. Have zero expectation of monetary compensation beyond your salary. 2. Don't take a job for less salary than you would be satisfied with in exchange for equity. 3. Don't sign on to a vesting schedule you know you won't stick around through.
If you hadn't vested at all yet, you either weren't working there very long, or had a crappy vesting schedule. Were you there for less than a year? If so, don't worry about it. All you lost was the value of less than a year's work. I know it feels crappy that somebody else made money and you didn't, but you'll die an unhappy cynic if you look at life that way.
For people making maple syrup by direct evaporation (requires 30-40 to 1 concentration), it takes about two gallons of Diesel to make a gallon of maple syrup (an appetizing thought when you pour that syrup on your pancakes).
I never understood why anybody would use direct evaporation for that entire process. It's naturally cold where sugar maples grow, and a signifigant portion of the concentration process could be done just by letting the sap freeze and removing the (almost pure) water ice from the vessel. Then you only have to boil off a little bit of the water.
Besides, do you see working PS2, GameCube, or Xbox emulators on modern PCs?
Yes.
The compatability isn't there, but unlike Microsoft, unofficial emulator developers don't have specs and have to reverse engineer things. The speed is there though. Your generation generalization is really not a factor this time, since processor speeds grew by a signifigantly higher factor than they did during any previous console generation.
I think you would probably be surprised how few special cases Microsoft has in their Xbox emulator. Xbox just isn't that powerful or complex by today's standards, and the 360 is really well suited to emulating it. The troubles they are having with emulation right now are probably because they took a bunch of high-level shortcuts to get the product done quickly, and now they are busy replacing that code with general purpose code that accuratly provides low level emulation.
Porn downloading amongst Teens and pre-teens in Oklahoma is down... When asked why many young men and boys have slowed their consumption at the fountain of sex that is the internet, the boys generally respond with: "We need some of that bandwidth to pirate games now". State legislators couldn't be reached for comment, as they were busy receiving emergency treatment for a self inflicted pedal bullet wounds.
I wonder whether anyone in the state government is paying attention to the care and feeding of those small businesses?
Of course not. Anti-corporate public servants only pay enough lip service to businesses to keep their constituents in jobs between now and election day. The only businesses worth keeping around are the ones you can tax sufficiently to pay for universal health care, and professional grade facilities for high-school football.
However, skilled machinists are hard to come by, and the small shops that are left tend to be busy... As CNC becomes cheap though, who knows what will happen to them.
If a small company runs on politics, rather than business sense, it goes out of business. Yes there are exceptions - owner has a huge chunk of cash to burn - but this is very largely true. So there is very little b.s. in small business.
That's true with the exception of venture capital backed small business. In those environments there is a very high likelyhood that 80-90% of the 'upper management' are both stupid-idealistic (How do I define that? Think about the type people who would participate in an Emacs/Vi flamewar to the point where the don't think the other guy's editor should be allowed to exist. They've always thought their way is *the* way, and now they're in a position to enforce it.), and inexperienced at leadership. At those companies it's all about the BS and the politics... Of course, nine out of ten venture backed startups *do* go out of business, so you've got a bit of a point there.
Every two to three years I interview at several startups, and it's become quite apparent which ones are brain-dead. The trick is figuring out which one isn't. Of course, because such a high percentage of people generally care about nothing other than themselves, there is always going to be a little bit of 'Dilbert Factor' at any company, but you suck it up and get your job done, and if you don't get ahead because of politics it doesn't matter... The people around you notice who does a good job and who doesn't, even if they're not in a position of power. It's a small world, and you'll be working with those people again. If you do a good job you may not get ahead where you are, but you'll get ahead.
A lot of times it's more a matter of latency than data volume... But still, you could be surprised by how low the latency can be over raw 100mbit ethernet, or using VI over ethernet. Fancy interconects are typically only for people who need high data rates *and* low latency, or for people who didn't do their homework.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has built a reputation for style, and this is what they get if there's even a little chink in the armor. If they don't want stories like this, they should be more like Dell and have this stuff be so common nobody bothers to write about it.
Whatch where you point that thing, you might shoot yourself.
As for me, I'm under no delusions.... But apparently you haven't checked my profile. Plus, the choice between the two is obvious. At least people *actually read* slashdot comments.
The point is to extract the maximum amount of cash possible from the obsessive early adopters before coming out with more reasonably priced models.
Additionally, these early units usually contain all the bells and whistles in order to prove out every aspect of the technology. Later, cheaper models, often have expensive, but little used features dropped from the product.
It seems pretty easy to me, but then again, I used to work for Iris as a Notes/Domino developer (developing the product itself, not databases that run on it), so maybe I have an unreasonable perspective.
Experiences with it as an e-mail application I would say give poor representation as to how it would function as a database manager. The e-mail functionality in Notes is implemented as a Notes database application, and the shortcomings you describe are not something that would have to be translated into pain points in shared databases you custom develop.
I assure you, once you reach a mild level of complexity like the person who posed this question in the article is describing, you will have an easier time, and a quicker rollout on Notes than you will on Access. You'll also get scalability, which is impossible with Access. I think it's a good middle ground between an Access-like product and writing a custom database application with something like PHP or Ruby, etc... If you can afford it, it's the perfect solution for this guy.
I'll give a third nod to Notes.
...either that, or you need to hire a software development staff (perhaps a small one) and have your employees ask them to implement their databases for them.
This is what Notes was designed for. Everything is a database, and it's just as easy as in access to create nice little front-ends for them. Plus it was designed to be stable and secure in multi-thousand user environments.
Notes got a bad rep, because they put the Notes v4 UI up against Outlook when they tried to compete against exchange. The UI isn't that sucky anymore, and Notes does 10x more stuff than Exchange, so it's not even close to a fair comparison. Unfortunatly, once you lose market share to Microsoft, you never get it back, and 80% of the Notes customers weren't using it to anywhere close to it's full potential anyway.It sounds *exactly* like what you need though...
It's Web 1.0 with mandatory Flash support and new fonts, apparently.
People keep spouting off about all this innovation that makes up Web 2.0, but it looks like the same old stuff to me with the exception that the companies haven't run out of venture capital yet. That and what we used to call an AOL user, we now call a 'blogger'.
Startups pay very little with the expectation of it becoming something big and rewarding the people who stand with it at the end.
I am currently working at my fourth startup in a row, and fifth overall, and I've had offers from countless others in the process of finding these four jobs. I can say from personal experience that what you're saying is absolutely false. Unless you're in pre-funding and have a period with no pay, startups invariably seem to may *considerably* more than established companies. You don't get bonuses or vacation time though, and you're dreaming if you think you'll ever work only 40 hours in a week.
If you can't survive the bad times then you aren't right for a startup.
I don't see what that has do do with what I said about vesting schedules. It is unreasonable to assume that anybody will stay in the same job for more than 5 years. This is especially true of the types of people who look to work at startups. Therefore I'd say that any vesting schedule longer than 5 years is unreasonable. That has nothing to do with sticking around during the bad times.
The only way to protect yourself is is a partnership agreement. Make sure your percentage of input is recorded and everyone involved understands what percent of the end reward is yours. Options are for employees that are not major parts of the business, but loyal and deserving.
It's unreasonable to expect that any but a tiny minority can get those deals. In any company that starts down the path to success there will be five, maybe six of those. We're talking out of what could be 100+ people by the time you get a payout. The best way to protect yourself, beyond managing expectations and getting a fair salary, is knowing how to pick the winners. There's a lot of luck and instinct involved there though, and it's not something you can tell somebody they have to do. Incidentally, so far I've had a 50% success rate and the jury is still out on the current company, but things look good.
When it's the only cop, it is.
This could be a useful slashdot section, but we keep getting these stories that don't have anything to do with 'rights' at all, much less the reader's rights... Somtimes even the online part is a stretch.
So, some website actually implemented their policy, and some self-important people with a misguided sense of propriety got pissed about it. News for Nerds? Absolutely! Your rights online? Not a chance.
It really does seem like we're saying to the world, "Do as we say, not as we do."
So what?
Why should we care too much about what it 'seems' like?
In reality though, what we're saying isn't 'We can have them and nobody else can'. What we're saying is 'Have 100 years of stable government before you build nuclear weapons'.
When you actually consider the entierty of the situation instead of making kneejerk judgements it doesn't actually *seem* all that bad.
What's the UN supposed to be then?
Ever hear of a dirty cop?
while it may be technically possible to use nighttime freezing for sap concentration, no one has worked out the details of such a system
Yes they have. In fact, that's how natives made the syrup that taught us european colonists what maple sugar was. Plenty of people still do it today. The trick seems to be using large shallow pans. There are also some articles online about stashing the batch of sap in a chest freezer, which seems like it would take much less energy than boiling, but doesn't seem well suited to large scale production.
I don't know any commercial producers, so I only know about home production. You seem to know signifigantly more than me on that front, however even with what you describe it doesn't sound like you're boiling off as much of the volume as the worst case.
If you aren't getting what you want out of your job, get another job. It isn't your employer's job to fulfill your life.
I agree in principle, but where I was really going with that was trying to come up with a question that would tell if the employer was exploiting the workers. It's not your employer's job to be life fufilling, but it is their responsibility to be fair.
And these people are not skilled welders. Skilled workers are making more than the minimum which was presented here for maximum shock value.
And I picked the other end of the spectrum for the same reason.
[...] because of the real risk to fall on his ass for X months earning nothing. That's opportunity cost. [...]
...you've mentioned, but I guarantee you that he was much better paid at this job.
You have that risk practically everywhere, with one exception, which...
As opposed to a gouverment union job with life employment guarantees.
They said "no way" so he knew they were planning to devalue his shares at some point and avoided that potential trainwreck while learning the kind of folks he was dealing with.
Every early round startup will probably raise more money eventually. Practically every startup will tell you to go screw if you ask for a different equity deal than everybody else. They only want to pay the lawyers once.
The proper way not to get diluted in a startup is to go to a company that has pre-alocated shares for the later finance rounds so that the pool of shares doesn't grow when the company raises money, or to ask for more shares. The people hiring you get diluted when the company raises money too, and it's totally unreasonable for you to expect a better deal than they got.
Startups are a risk. You can't contract your way into a sure thing.
That way, you're unemployed.
The only way you get that deal is if you have an unhealthy business relationship with the company founders, the investors are complete idiots (in which case you'll probably end up with nothing in the end anyway), or if you're the 1 guy in 100 million that can do what you do.
Clearly this guy didn't have a good-ol-boys relationship with the founders (if he did they'd have just given him a stake anyway, or they would have canned everybody but him). I like my odds that this guy wasn't 1 in 100 million, and that you, I, or anybody else reading this aren't either.
You can come up with all sorts of clever contracts to 'protect' yourself from this kind of thing. Either they'll work, which means you'll never get that contract, or they won't, and you'll be in the same boat you were in without it.
Do factory workers make average or better money for the economy as a whole in the US?
In many cases, yes. That's why their work is being exported or replaced by automation. Even in a non-union shop, a skilled welder, for example, can make over $70,000 a year.
I know now that I've said that some people are going to say "I'm a welder and I only make $38k." I said skilled welders. Anybody can weld. Very few people can do a good job of it. Plus most of the people would say that in this venue are probably just little kids who like to troll.
Should factory workers make above average wages? That's a hard question to answer, and if it could be answered, the answer wouldn't be 'yes', or 'no'. I'd start by figuring out if the "average wage" was actually a meaningful statistic in any way whatsoever in the context of this discussion. I'm guessing it isn't. A more interesting question to answer would be "Is the job making the factory worker's life better?"
1. Have zero expectation of monetary compensation beyond your salary.
2. Don't take a job for less salary than you would be satisfied with in exchange for equity.
3. Don't sign on to a vesting schedule you know you won't stick around through.
If you hadn't vested at all yet, you either weren't working there very long, or had a crappy vesting schedule. Were you there for less than a year? If so, don't worry about it. All you lost was the value of less than a year's work. I know it feels crappy that somebody else made money and you didn't, but you'll die an unhappy cynic if you look at life that way.
For people making maple syrup by direct evaporation (requires 30-40 to 1 concentration), it takes about two gallons of Diesel to make a gallon of maple syrup (an appetizing thought when you pour that syrup on your pancakes).
I never understood why anybody would use direct evaporation for that entire process. It's naturally cold where sugar maples grow, and a signifigant portion of the concentration process could be done just by letting the sap freeze and removing the (almost pure) water ice from the vessel. Then you only have to boil off a little bit of the water.
If they're making a profit on every one, I doubt they care if they're selling replacements....
Even without old ones dying, many people are buying a second one to get the new, smaller unit.
Besides, do you see working PS2, GameCube, or Xbox emulators on modern PCs?
Yes.
The compatability isn't there, but unlike Microsoft, unofficial emulator developers don't have specs and have to reverse engineer things. The speed is there though. Your generation generalization is really not a factor this time, since processor speeds grew by a signifigantly higher factor than they did during any previous console generation.
I think you would probably be surprised how few special cases Microsoft has in their Xbox emulator. Xbox just isn't that powerful or complex by today's standards, and the 360 is really well suited to emulating it. The troubles they are having with emulation right now are probably because they took a bunch of high-level shortcuts to get the product done quickly, and now they are busy replacing that code with general purpose code that accuratly provides low level emulation.
Porn downloading amongst Teens and pre-teens in Oklahoma is down... When asked why many young men and boys have slowed their consumption at the fountain of sex that is the internet, the boys generally respond with: "We need some of that bandwidth to pirate games now". State legislators couldn't be reached for comment, as they were busy receiving emergency treatment for a self inflicted pedal bullet wounds.
I wonder whether anyone in the state government is paying attention to the care and feeding of those small businesses?
Of course not. Anti-corporate public servants only pay enough lip service to businesses to keep their constituents in jobs between now and election day. The only businesses worth keeping around are the ones you can tax sufficiently to pay for universal health care, and professional grade facilities for high-school football.
However, skilled machinists are hard to come by, and the small shops that are left tend to be busy... As CNC becomes cheap though, who knows what will happen to them.
If a small company runs on politics, rather than business sense, it goes out of business. Yes there are exceptions - owner has a huge chunk of cash to burn - but this is very largely true. So there is very little b.s. in small business.
That's true with the exception of venture capital backed small business. In those environments there is a very high likelyhood that 80-90% of the 'upper management' are both stupid-idealistic (How do I define that? Think about the type people who would participate in an Emacs/Vi flamewar to the point where the don't think the other guy's editor should be allowed to exist. They've always thought their way is *the* way, and now they're in a position to enforce it.), and inexperienced at leadership. At those companies it's all about the BS and the politics... Of course, nine out of ten venture backed startups *do* go out of business, so you've got a bit of a point there.
Every two to three years I interview at several startups, and it's become quite apparent which ones are brain-dead. The trick is figuring out which one isn't. Of course, because such a high percentage of people generally care about nothing other than themselves, there is always going to be a little bit of 'Dilbert Factor' at any company, but you suck it up and get your job done, and if you don't get ahead because of politics it doesn't matter... The people around you notice who does a good job and who doesn't, even if they're not in a position of power. It's a small world, and you'll be working with those people again. If you do a good job you may not get ahead where you are, but you'll get ahead.
A lot of times it's more a matter of latency than data volume... But still, you could be surprised by how low the latency can be over raw 100mbit ethernet, or using VI over ethernet. Fancy interconects are typically only for people who need high data rates *and* low latency, or for people who didn't do their homework.