You're missing the point. Hypercard is SUPPOSED to be simple. It's not for real programmers like you and I, but for those near-extinct "power users" who do a little more than just click lolcats and play Farmville all goddamned day long. It's in the same niche as MS Access - not a full-blown DB, but for many casual uses it's quite sufficient, and accessible to non-programmers.
XCode is not Hypercard. There is a giant chasm between the two.
I use XCode, but I'm a software developer by trade. XCode is like Visual Studio with more bugs. Hypercard was more like Apple's minimalist take on MS Access + VBA... and yes, I know Hypercard came first, I'm just making a comparison.
My mother wouldn't know what to do with XCode, but she's quite handy with MS Access or Excel and a few simple macro scripts. If she'd been a Mac person, she would have used Hypercard a fair bit. You could throw her all the free IDEs in the world, it won't magically turn her into a C developer.
The computers I use are nothing like the ones my wife or parents need. They have no use for 12 cores and 48 gigs of ram . They don't know what a compiler is. They mostly think programmers are weird magical beings that speak in "binary" and know how to do their own taxes. When I talk of all the work I do with virtual machines, I now make references to Inception, because that's as close as they will ever get to understanding the concept. They think a server is a mythical hyper-expensive meta-machine that is neither PC nor Mac, that houses mysterious super electronics including quantum processors and dilithium cores.
These people never had a use for Hypercard, and never will. They can barely distinguish the two buttons on a standard mouse, and have to retype their password 10 times until they get it right (it's "password2", because "password1" would be too obvious!). For their uses, the more appliance-like things are, the better. Most users today are stumped by a command line. God forbid they'd have to use that thing with all the letters on it, that's for "serious hacker shit" only.
Apple simple saw that the so-called "power users" were a dwindling species, replaced by Lifehackers and Redditors and other barely-technical wanna-bes. Now you're either a user or a developer, with not much of a market for people stuck in the middle, where Hypercard thrived.
Not so hard to find, if you check ebay or craigslist.
The ones that are truly hard to find are the super-high-end dual-GPU cards. And by "hard to find", I mean you usually have to pay some goddamned scalper a ton of money because the retail inventory sold out in mere weeks.
Strictly speaking, it costs the same to make this new 560 Ti chip as a balls-out 580 chip. They're identical from the fab's perspective. In practice, the 560 Ti is a way to maximize yield by salvaging defective 580s. This is very much like Celerons being Pentiums with the defective parts lasered or fused off.
If it weren't for this binning, they would have to toss these chips in the garbage. In theory, salvaging imperfect chips allows them to price things more aggressively across the product line, since the sunk cost of manufacturing is averaged out over a much greater volume.
Here's an example, and note these numbers are purely arbitrary, I know nothing about fab economics:
Suppose they had to throw 4 out of every 5 GTX chip away, and each one cost $100 to make, then each good GTX would cost $500 on average. The yield is thus 20%.
If instead, they can sell those 4 bad chips as lower-spec products, each chip costs $100. The yield is now 100%.
So yes, the higher binned cards theoretically cost the same to build as the cheap ones (assuming similar memory/outputs/PCB). They are thus higher-margin, but also scarce due to manufacturing limitations. The smaller the pitch, the harder it is to produce a perfect chip. This scarcity is what leads to the increased cost. After all, if a 580 cost the same as a 560, everyone would want the faster one and no one would buy the rejects. OEMs partially compensate by bundling a bunch of stuff with the high-end cards, like pack-in games, DP converters and assorted swag - cheap stuff with a higher perceived value. Put it this way: a recent title like Battlefield 3 might sell for $69 in stores, but you can be sure the OEM is paying much less to bundle it with their product. That goes a long way toward buttering up prospective buyers.
I'm sure NVIDIA would rather be stuck with a handful of "true" 570s than a shit ton of useless defective chips. People will choose the cheaper product, that's the point! If it weren't for binning, these chips would be worth zero dollars, destined for the incinerator. Pricing doesn't really matter that much, this late in the generation. The GTX 6xx (Kepler) is due out in March 2012, and will probably be available only as a high-end part at first. Bleeding-edge nutjobs like myself will be able to blow $1500 on a pair of the latest and greatest, while the sane people buy out the remainder of 5xx inventory at clearance prices, and only then will the new low-end cards be launched. They've got it down to a science.
In case you hadn't noticed, this place has been invaded by a succession of increasingly dumber editors, which are probably rejects from Boingboing.
Google didn't throw anything under the bus, they just pointed out what we/.ers have known for 15 years. They're not patenting Slashcode, they're patenting "weighted moderation" or something along those lines, where each user has a certain numeric authority assigned to them, which affects how strongly their opinion is weighted in the scoring process. Still, boo urns on Google for patenting such a trivial algorithm, but I'm pretty sure they repealed "Do no evil" a long-ass motherfucking time ago.
There isn't a whole lot to optimize in your process. Backups and wipes take time. One thing that could save you a step is to run the backup from the pen drive. That would allow you to script the entire process, such that you only need to boot off the pen drive, preferably have it cache itself into a ramdisk and start the script automatically, then move on to the next box. That would bring the whole process down to maybe 2 minutes per box.
Having ghosted a bazillion machines this way, it's monotonous but if you create 4-5 of those pen drives, you can do a bunch in parallel.
I understand why IM / Skype are preferred, and I do the same with my coworkers, but not every communication needs to be real-time. When email and IM are both available, email becomes a "when you have a moment" queue, while IM is "Right Fucking Now (tm)". If someone sends me an email, I'll quickly scan it, maybe flag it on a to-do list, and deal with it when I'm idle or bored.
My expected response times:
Email: 24hrs IM: 10 mins Phone: immediate (duh)
The best way to get me to yell at someone, is to mis-prioritize something. Email me a work order, then call 5 minutes later asking why it hasn't been done: yelling. Call me to post an event on the site that's 3 months away, which details you have yet to finalize: yelling. Text me from McBurgerWay to ask if I want anything: yelling.
All three channels have their pros and cons, and should be used appropriately. To completely shun one or two of them, to me at least, seems incredibly foolish and even ignorant.
The problem I've found with online freelancing sites is they are completely flooded with 3rd world bids. I cannot, and will not, compete on price with a developing nation. I also got really sick of seeing dozens of "Create a facebook clone for $500" projects. If these sites were better curated against such garbage, I'd reconsider but as they currently stand, I find them a colossal waste of time.
In case you hadn't noticed, he posted as AC. You clearly are new here...
Despite what the internet would have you believe, there are some of us who choose not to self-promote our garbage at every opportunity. I'm not here to sell shit, I'm here to talk shit:)
This is my exact story. When I don't know something, I say so. My skills cover a very broad palette, but there are certain topics for which I simply didn't have the time or motivation, like Java and mobile dev, so when a business acquaintance asked me if I knew anything about iPhone development, I said "I have zero experience, but I'm curious". About a third of my 2011 income was from mobile dev alone, for that one guy.
You can learn stuff on-the-fly, but what employers and clients tend to value above all is trust. Having you work outside your comfort zone might cost them a little more in billable hours, but most clients would rather work with someone they know and trust, with good communication, than risk bringing in a total stranger just to save a thousand bucks.
And no, I don't have a CS degree. I was pretty much born a geek, and college consisted of me skipping classes to do contract work, showing up to exams, and then getting in trouble with incompetent profs who were reading incoherent bullshit off of textbooks. The way I see it, if an employer is dead-set on requiring a degree, and won't even consider my experience, then I don't want to work for such cretins anyway. In my opinion, there are very few small-to-medium businesses whose needs truly mandate a degree, especially in I.T. and software dev. In our industry, a piece of parchment paper means little when the course curriculum is typically obselete by the time classes start.
Being self-employed or running a business isn't all that hard
I wish you had said that at the beginning of your post, so I could have stopped reading. This is absolutely false!
You can be the most brilliant technician in the universe, and still crater your business if you don't have the sales persistence to turn those technical skills into money, and the support team to handle users' invariably simple problems while you focus on the next big thing, whether that's the next version of your product, or a separate item with strong cross-marketing potential. Just because a handful of ethically-questionable teenagers won the dot-com lottery, does not mean the same will happen to anyone with basic web development skills they picked up from a few Youtube videos narrated by 12-year-olds.
To the OP: if you want to find work, contact staffing/contracting agencies near you. They will find you paying gigs, and the experience you gain there will be more valuable than any paper knowledge you have amassed up to this point. There are lots of hobbyists like you, but companies are interested in people who can efficiently solve business challenges. If you really want to stick with web development as a serious career, then start putting together a portfolio. Don't rely on web sites staying up indefinitely with your old code, take screenshots and document them, briefly explaining (to prospective clients) why you were the right person for the job and what kind of unique or high-level skills helped bring it together. Take a dozen of your best examples and arrange them into a nice sleek gallery page. Get stupid old business cards printed with an eye-catching design and a memorable URL to your portfolio, and pass them around. You want people to see your work, be wowed, and contact you because you're the designer/developer they want for their business. Sell yourself!
One of the main reasons I'll download a cracked game is to try it out. Nobody releases demos anymore, and you can't trust reviews with all the goddamned shills out there. I did it for SC2, because I didn't know if it would be my thing. Well, sure enough I liked it, and bought it online the next day.
Case in point: Need For Speed - The Run. I knew it was coming from EA Black Box, responsible for all the "wigger" installments of the NFS franchise. Installed, played for about 10 minutes, deleted. Had I paid $70 for it, I would have put it in a box, shit on it, and Fedexed it to Trip Hawkins' home address with the note "Fixed it for you".
So, yes, Gabe is right, 'service" aka availability is a primary issue, and while price itself is not the most important factor, VALUE is. A staggering majority of major-brand games today lack value. They cost more than they're worth. In that sense, NFS The Run held very little value for me, because it's a shit game produced by a cut-rate studio and certainly does not belong in the same price bracket as, say, Skyrim, Arkham City or even F1 2011.
Price fixing is nothing new in the manufacturing world. I would not be surprised one bit. In my case, I've made a very simple and rash decision: I'm not buying any hard drives until prices come back down to normal. A SAS expander I built two months ago for $15k would now cost $30k. My clients aren't going for that, so I'm waiting it out.
The manufacturers knew what they were getting into, when they built their factories on flood plains. The burden for that mistake should not be born by the customer.
That's nonsense, if you have a switch that integrates two or more HDCP endpoints, there is nothing preventing you from mixing the decoded signals thereafter. The problem is a legal one, not technical. There just aren't enough HDCP-enabled pro devices on the market, because the consortium is excessively protective of its stupid-ass DRM scheme.
Bike messenger companies are rolling their eyes at this. This hub-and-spoke concept has been around for ages, it's just a larger scale application of what most transit systems already do.
- Park and ride - bus and subway - taxi and airport - highway and offramp
Frankly, it sounds like if we could optimize bus routes, these feeder trains would not be needed. Here in Ottawa, the great majority of commuters ride the "Transitway", which is a dedicated high-speed road for buses and it's quite fast, but the feeder routes are such a mess that you might ride 40 minutes on a suburban route just to get to a Transitway hub. We need shorter, more diversified routes that cover more of the city. Have them circle around a neighbourhood, then jet down a main artery to the hub station - and don't stop every 50 feet along that artery, they should have their own feeder route. It's so laughable that our primary criteria for house-hunting is proximity to the Transitway, and it will be faster for me to bus the 10 km back to the downtown core via the Transitway, than it currently is to bus or walk 10 blocks because of shitty bus routes.
I very much prefer to be part of a team, not alone
I telecommute, and I've only met two of the 20 or so guys I work with. We form a stronger team than any office environment I've ever worked in, despite being scattered all around the globe. We do just fine with IM, Skype, and screen sharing. If text communication leaves us frustrated and uncoordinated, a 10-minute conference call usually clears it all up. Most importantly, we all trust and respect each other. The only thing I hate about telecommuting is I can't drag them all out to the pub and buy a round.
We don't telecommute to save money, we do it because it is how we like to work, and it allows us to recruit the best and brightest, regardless of physical location. My boss doesn't have to rent super-expensive office space to house us, so his overhead is reduced, and so is mine because I don't need to travel to an oversaturated downtown core with $15 parking spaces and $20 lunch "specials". The pay expectation is the same, but the company still benefits because I'm happier and more energetic. I still average 35-40 hour weeks, but if I'm feeling inspired or there is a short-term crunch, I have no trouble raising that figure to 50-60 hours; after all, it's all billable time - time that other people waste by sitting in a bus or car 90 minutes a day.
If you want to see telecommuting as a negative, and allow your boss to shit all over you, that's not something I can fix. Your employer can only abuse you as much as you allow them to. If you're afraid to put your foot down and say no from time to time, you have only yourself to blame.
You really nailed it with your last two sentences. People who knock telework are quite plainly saying "I will defraud you unless I'm being watched".
For me, it's the opposite. I hate being scrutinized, I need my boss to show confidence in me. I don't work because I'm expected to, I work because I'm glad to help my coworkers. We have mutual goals and we collaborate to achieve them. We're all good at what we do, and we earn an honest pay doing it. I respect them, they respect me. If there were to be a parasite in the group, coasting and leeching money for nothing, we'd get rid of them. It really is that simple. Unsurprisingly, we all get along quite well, sure sometimes deadlines turn us into stress buckets, but we air it out and deal with it, and go back to being IM buddies. I'm kind-of glad they all live far away, otherwise we'd spend all our money buying rounds of beer for each other. Despite having never met most of these guys, we form a stronger team than any office environment I've ever been in.
Why is promotion such a big issue ? I like the job I'm currently doing. I don't want to be "promoted" to managing a team of lesser minds. I don't need a raise, I earn good money already. I don't need to kiss up to my boss, because he's just a cool guy, we all are, and we're all equals as far as relationships are concerned.
The funny thing, we've only met once, and the next time he's in my city or vice versa, we're not going to talk about work, we're going to hit a pub and shoot the shit. Same goes for all my other coworkers too. Contrast that with my previous five jobs, where I can count on two fingers the times I've actually hung out with coworkers just because they were cool. Social functions at those offices felt like forced attendance, where you sit around, laugh at the seniors' bad jokes, and try not to say anything even remotely insightful, or you will shatter their fantasy of you being a subservient profit device.
Funny, I get at least the same amount of work done, but I waste less time on the company dime.
At home, I don't have to deal with
- office gossip - stressed out coworkers yammering all day about their psychological issues - walking over to a boss/manager/secretary/idiot's desk to stare at an error message they could have pasted in an email - petty one-upmanship - bathrooms halfway around the building - staff managers timing my shit breaks - pointless unit meetings that exist solely to justify having so many goddamned staff managers - playing bejeweled for hours because the office environment depresses me - noisy coworkers threatening to call the union and/or burn down the building if I deprive them of their precious Kanyé
If I want to waste time playing video games or watching TV, it's my problem and my boss/clients don't pay for that idle time. The corollary is that I am motivated to work more efficiently and waste less time, because that time is now MY money and not my employer's. In that sense, I get a heck of a lot more done since I started telecommuting, and cutting out that hour or two of bus/traffic every day makes a huge difference in my energy level and mood. I have no trouble pulling a 10 or 12 hour work day at home, when inspiration strikes, but in an office those 7.5 hours seem like eternity.
If the idea of your "personal" devices becoming work devices is what irks you, then get a second phone dedicated to work. I bought a laptop "for work", and while it is my own deductible expense, I only have work stuff on it. It is my work computer: when I'm typing at that laptop, I'm working and getting paid. If I feel like using my desktop peripherals and displays, then I remote into that laptop to keep everything focused.
I don't use my phone much for work, other than checking email when I'm bored, so I suppose I'm lucky for that, but if work were spilling into my personal life, I'd get another phone, and turn the ringer off when I'm off the clock. Then if a client or coworker calls my personal number, they know they're crossing that line and anything done on that call is either a special favour, or billed at emergency rates. With many carriers, you can add this second phone onto your existing plan, only paying a nominal fee for the second number, definitely less than $20. Don't you think a healthy work/life separation is worth $20 a month ? To me, that sounds a bargain!
If the physical aspect of an office is such a strong (de)motivator, nothing's stopping anyone from dedicating a room or portion thereof as their home office, or renting swing-space in one of countless shared office environments found in most cities these days.
Myself, I actually like working from home in total comfort. I can turn the stereo up to 11, crack a beer, open the windows and get paid to do what I'm qualified to do, rather than being asked to act like a confirmist office robot. I'm hired for my knowledge and skills, not my ability to dress sharp and gossip with the nepotists.
What you describe is a cultural issue. You have to be able to say no. If your boss doesn't respect your personal life, then you need the confidence to quit that shit job and let someone else suffer your idiot boss.
My problem is the exact opposite. I work from home, and the most difficult thing for me is shutting out the countless distractions that nag me all day. Sometimes when I can't focus, I pack up my laptop, head to a quiet pub, order a pint and some nachos and start pounding out those billable hours. No TV, no Xbox, no World of Warcraft, and no bored wife to break my concentration. See, the funny thing about being in a bar with a laptop is people tend to leave you alone... unless they're Apple fanboys, in which case you have to politely threaten their frail existence with the promise of bodily harm.
My daily schedule is very free-form, I work when I'm feeling sharp, and I veg when I feel veg. If I'm stuck in a rut and want to smash the stupid laptop, I log off and do something else, maybe even take a nap to purge the mind. I don't need a distinction between home and work places, because both roles are allowed to flow naturally. If I'm needed for some urgent task, fine, I'll deal with it. Likewise, if I need some personal time, I just say so and 9 times out of 10, there's no problem. If your boss is as flexible and understanding as you are, things work out just fine, but if you're a doormat and your job stomps all over you, no degree of work/life separation will change the fact that your work relationship sucks.
They are probably very fancy, hyper-indulgent cupcakes, along the same vein as Crumbs Cupcakes. This type of bakery have been springing up all over, my wife's addicted to that crap. They're something like $4 each, and filled with buzzwords like "organic", "gluten-free" and "machine washable". On a positive note, each one has a thick layer of perfectly laid cream cheese frosting. The ones made by non-ginger non-vegans, you know, with actual sugar, like those from Crumbs, I find them pretty awesome. It's a palm-sized ball of happy crack-laced diabetes.
Of course, since they're the latest fad, everyone and their celiac mother are jumping on the bandwagon with zero business acumen, like the people in TFA. They have waking dreams of endless profits, yet fail at basic arithmetic. You know how the saying goes: 9 out of 10 businesses fail within the first 2 years. Well 9 out of 10 business owners are complete imbeciles so it's really no surprise.
The problem I have with Groupon is that, for most businesses, it is the wrong approach. You pay nothing up-front, instead you give them half of your take. The more popular your deal is, the more costly Groupon is compared to traditional advertising. The whole "no money down" thing is a very treacherous lure for inexperienced business owners who simply don't have a clue how to market their products and services, and to a cynical bastard like myself, it suggests a lack of confidence in their own brand.
There is nothing wrong in running a time-limited half-off promotion, but the potential customers you should be courting are the ones who will give you repeat business. From what I've seen, Groupon users are not loyal customers. If they found you on Groupon today, tomorrow they will find something else. Easy come, easy go. Is that worth half of your already-discounted income ? I'm no marketing guru, but my spreadsheet says no. I'd rather have lower volume and higher profits.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. Hypercard is SUPPOSED to be simple. It's not for real programmers like you and I, but for those near-extinct "power users" who do a little more than just click lolcats and play Farmville all goddamned day long. It's in the same niche as MS Access - not a full-blown DB, but for many casual uses it's quite sufficient, and accessible to non-programmers.
XCode is not Hypercard. There is a giant chasm between the two.
I use XCode, but I'm a software developer by trade. XCode is like Visual Studio with more bugs. Hypercard was more like Apple's minimalist take on MS Access + VBA... and yes, I know Hypercard came first, I'm just making a comparison.
My mother wouldn't know what to do with XCode, but she's quite handy with MS Access or Excel and a few simple macro scripts. If she'd been a Mac person, she would have used Hypercard a fair bit. You could throw her all the free IDEs in the world, it won't magically turn her into a C developer.
Correct.
The computers I use are nothing like the ones my wife or parents need. They have no use for 12 cores and 48 gigs of ram . They don't know what a compiler is. They mostly think programmers are weird magical beings that speak in "binary" and know how to do their own taxes. When I talk of all the work I do with virtual machines, I now make references to Inception, because that's as close as they will ever get to understanding the concept. They think a server is a mythical hyper-expensive meta-machine that is neither PC nor Mac, that houses mysterious super electronics including quantum processors and dilithium cores.
These people never had a use for Hypercard, and never will. They can barely distinguish the two buttons on a standard mouse, and have to retype their password 10 times until they get it right (it's "password2", because "password1" would be too obvious!). For their uses, the more appliance-like things are, the better. Most users today are stumped by a command line. God forbid they'd have to use that thing with all the letters on it, that's for "serious hacker shit" only.
Apple simple saw that the so-called "power users" were a dwindling species, replaced by Lifehackers and Redditors and other barely-technical wanna-bes. Now you're either a user or a developer, with not much of a market for people stuck in the middle, where Hypercard thrived.
Not so hard to find, if you check ebay or craigslist.
The ones that are truly hard to find are the super-high-end dual-GPU cards. And by "hard to find", I mean you usually have to pay some goddamned scalper a ton of money because the retail inventory sold out in mere weeks.
Strictly speaking, it costs the same to make this new 560 Ti chip as a balls-out 580 chip. They're identical from the fab's perspective. In practice, the 560 Ti is a way to maximize yield by salvaging defective 580s. This is very much like Celerons being Pentiums with the defective parts lasered or fused off.
If it weren't for this binning, they would have to toss these chips in the garbage. In theory, salvaging imperfect chips allows them to price things more aggressively across the product line, since the sunk cost of manufacturing is averaged out over a much greater volume.
Here's an example, and note these numbers are purely arbitrary, I know nothing about fab economics:
Suppose they had to throw 4 out of every 5 GTX chip away, and each one cost $100 to make, then each good GTX would cost $500 on average. The yield is thus 20%.
If instead, they can sell those 4 bad chips as lower-spec products, each chip costs $100. The yield is now 100%.
So yes, the higher binned cards theoretically cost the same to build as the cheap ones (assuming similar memory/outputs/PCB). They are thus higher-margin, but also scarce due to manufacturing limitations. The smaller the pitch, the harder it is to produce a perfect chip. This scarcity is what leads to the increased cost. After all, if a 580 cost the same as a 560, everyone would want the faster one and no one would buy the rejects. OEMs partially compensate by bundling a bunch of stuff with the high-end cards, like pack-in games, DP converters and assorted swag - cheap stuff with a higher perceived value. Put it this way: a recent title like Battlefield 3 might sell for $69 in stores, but you can be sure the OEM is paying much less to bundle it with their product. That goes a long way toward buttering up prospective buyers.
I'm sure NVIDIA would rather be stuck with a handful of "true" 570s than a shit ton of useless defective chips. People will choose the cheaper product, that's the point! If it weren't for binning, these chips would be worth zero dollars, destined for the incinerator. Pricing doesn't really matter that much, this late in the generation. The GTX 6xx (Kepler) is due out in March 2012, and will probably be available only as a high-end part at first. Bleeding-edge nutjobs like myself will be able to blow $1500 on a pair of the latest and greatest, while the sane people buy out the remainder of 5xx inventory at clearance prices, and only then will the new low-end cards be launched. They've got it down to a science.
In case you hadn't noticed, this place has been invaded by a succession of increasingly dumber editors, which are probably rejects from Boingboing.
Google didn't throw anything under the bus, they just pointed out what we /.ers have known for 15 years. They're not patenting Slashcode, they're patenting "weighted moderation" or something along those lines, where each user has a certain numeric authority assigned to them, which affects how strongly their opinion is weighted in the scoring process. Still, boo urns on Google for patenting such a trivial algorithm, but I'm pretty sure they repealed "Do no evil" a long-ass motherfucking time ago.
There isn't a whole lot to optimize in your process. Backups and wipes take time. One thing that could save you a step is to run the backup from the pen drive. That would allow you to script the entire process, such that you only need to boot off the pen drive, preferably have it cache itself into a ramdisk and start the script automatically, then move on to the next box. That would bring the whole process down to maybe 2 minutes per box.
Having ghosted a bazillion machines this way, it's monotonous but if you create 4-5 of those pen drives, you can do a bunch in parallel.
I understand why IM / Skype are preferred, and I do the same with my coworkers, but not every communication needs to be real-time. When email and IM are both available, email becomes a "when you have a moment" queue, while IM is "Right Fucking Now (tm)". If someone sends me an email, I'll quickly scan it, maybe flag it on a to-do list, and deal with it when I'm idle or bored.
My expected response times:
Email: 24hrs
IM: 10 mins
Phone: immediate (duh)
The best way to get me to yell at someone, is to mis-prioritize something. Email me a work order, then call 5 minutes later asking why it hasn't been done: yelling. Call me to post an event on the site that's 3 months away, which details you have yet to finalize: yelling. Text me from McBurgerWay to ask if I want anything: yelling.
All three channels have their pros and cons, and should be used appropriately. To completely shun one or two of them, to me at least, seems incredibly foolish and even ignorant.
The problem I've found with online freelancing sites is they are completely flooded with 3rd world bids. I cannot, and will not, compete on price with a developing nation. I also got really sick of seeing dozens of "Create a facebook clone for $500" projects. If these sites were better curated against such garbage, I'd reconsider but as they currently stand, I find them a colossal waste of time.
In case you hadn't noticed, he posted as AC. You clearly are new here...
Despite what the internet would have you believe, there are some of us who choose not to self-promote our garbage at every opportunity. I'm not here to sell shit, I'm here to talk shit :)
This.
This is my exact story. When I don't know something, I say so. My skills cover a very broad palette, but there are certain topics for which I simply didn't have the time or motivation, like Java and mobile dev, so when a business acquaintance asked me if I knew anything about iPhone development, I said "I have zero experience, but I'm curious". About a third of my 2011 income was from mobile dev alone, for that one guy.
You can learn stuff on-the-fly, but what employers and clients tend to value above all is trust. Having you work outside your comfort zone might cost them a little more in billable hours, but most clients would rather work with someone they know and trust, with good communication, than risk bringing in a total stranger just to save a thousand bucks.
And no, I don't have a CS degree. I was pretty much born a geek, and college consisted of me skipping classes to do contract work, showing up to exams, and then getting in trouble with incompetent profs who were reading incoherent bullshit off of textbooks. The way I see it, if an employer is dead-set on requiring a degree, and won't even consider my experience, then I don't want to work for such cretins anyway. In my opinion, there are very few small-to-medium businesses whose needs truly mandate a degree, especially in I.T. and software dev. In our industry, a piece of parchment paper means little when the course curriculum is typically obselete by the time classes start.
Being self-employed or running a business isn't all that hard
I wish you had said that at the beginning of your post, so I could have stopped reading. This is absolutely false!
You can be the most brilliant technician in the universe, and still crater your business if you don't have the sales persistence to turn those technical skills into money, and the support team to handle users' invariably simple problems while you focus on the next big thing, whether that's the next version of your product, or a separate item with strong cross-marketing potential. Just because a handful of ethically-questionable teenagers won the dot-com lottery, does not mean the same will happen to anyone with basic web development skills they picked up from a few Youtube videos narrated by 12-year-olds.
To the OP: if you want to find work, contact staffing/contracting agencies near you. They will find you paying gigs, and the experience you gain there will be more valuable than any paper knowledge you have amassed up to this point. There are lots of hobbyists like you, but companies are interested in people who can efficiently solve business challenges. If you really want to stick with web development as a serious career, then start putting together a portfolio. Don't rely on web sites staying up indefinitely with your old code, take screenshots and document them, briefly explaining (to prospective clients) why you were the right person for the job and what kind of unique or high-level skills helped bring it together. Take a dozen of your best examples and arrange them into a nice sleek gallery page. Get stupid old business cards printed with an eye-catching design and a memorable URL to your portfolio, and pass them around. You want people to see your work, be wowed, and contact you because you're the designer/developer they want for their business. Sell yourself!
One of the main reasons I'll download a cracked game is to try it out. Nobody releases demos anymore, and you can't trust reviews with all the goddamned shills out there. I did it for SC2, because I didn't know if it would be my thing. Well, sure enough I liked it, and bought it online the next day.
Case in point: Need For Speed - The Run. I knew it was coming from EA Black Box, responsible for all the "wigger" installments of the NFS franchise. Installed, played for about 10 minutes, deleted. Had I paid $70 for it, I would have put it in a box, shit on it, and Fedexed it to Trip Hawkins' home address with the note "Fixed it for you".
So, yes, Gabe is right, 'service" aka availability is a primary issue, and while price itself is not the most important factor, VALUE is. A staggering majority of major-brand games today lack value. They cost more than they're worth. In that sense, NFS The Run held very little value for me, because it's a shit game produced by a cut-rate studio and certainly does not belong in the same price bracket as, say, Skyrim, Arkham City or even F1 2011.
Price fixing is nothing new in the manufacturing world. I would not be surprised one bit. In my case, I've made a very simple and rash decision: I'm not buying any hard drives until prices come back down to normal. A SAS expander I built two months ago for $15k would now cost $30k. My clients aren't going for that, so I'm waiting it out.
The manufacturers knew what they were getting into, when they built their factories on flood plains. The burden for that mistake should not be born by the customer.
That's nonsense, if you have a switch that integrates two or more HDCP endpoints, there is nothing preventing you from mixing the decoded signals thereafter. The problem is a legal one, not technical. There just aren't enough HDCP-enabled pro devices on the market, because the consortium is excessively protective of its stupid-ass DRM scheme.
Bike messenger companies are rolling their eyes at this. This hub-and-spoke concept has been around for ages, it's just a larger scale application of what most transit systems already do.
- Park and ride
- bus and subway
- taxi and airport
- highway and offramp
Frankly, it sounds like if we could optimize bus routes, these feeder trains would not be needed. Here in Ottawa, the great majority of commuters ride the "Transitway", which is a dedicated high-speed road for buses and it's quite fast, but the feeder routes are such a mess that you might ride 40 minutes on a suburban route just to get to a Transitway hub. We need shorter, more diversified routes that cover more of the city. Have them circle around a neighbourhood, then jet down a main artery to the hub station - and don't stop every 50 feet along that artery, they should have their own feeder route. It's so laughable that our primary criteria for house-hunting is proximity to the Transitway, and it will be faster for me to bus the 10 km back to the downtown core via the Transitway, than it currently is to bus or walk 10 blocks because of shitty bus routes.
I very much prefer to be part of a team, not alone
I telecommute, and I've only met two of the 20 or so guys I work with. We form a stronger team than any office environment I've ever worked in, despite being scattered all around the globe. We do just fine with IM, Skype, and screen sharing. If text communication leaves us frustrated and uncoordinated, a 10-minute conference call usually clears it all up. Most importantly, we all trust and respect each other. The only thing I hate about telecommuting is I can't drag them all out to the pub and buy a round.
We don't telecommute to save money, we do it because it is how we like to work, and it allows us to recruit the best and brightest, regardless of physical location. My boss doesn't have to rent super-expensive office space to house us, so his overhead is reduced, and so is mine because I don't need to travel to an oversaturated downtown core with $15 parking spaces and $20 lunch "specials". The pay expectation is the same, but the company still benefits because I'm happier and more energetic. I still average 35-40 hour weeks, but if I'm feeling inspired or there is a short-term crunch, I have no trouble raising that figure to 50-60 hours; after all, it's all billable time - time that other people waste by sitting in a bus or car 90 minutes a day.
If you want to see telecommuting as a negative, and allow your boss to shit all over you, that's not something I can fix. Your employer can only abuse you as much as you allow them to. If you're afraid to put your foot down and say no from time to time, you have only yourself to blame.
This!
You really nailed it with your last two sentences. People who knock telework are quite plainly saying "I will defraud you unless I'm being watched".
For me, it's the opposite. I hate being scrutinized, I need my boss to show confidence in me. I don't work because I'm expected to, I work because I'm glad to help my coworkers. We have mutual goals and we collaborate to achieve them. We're all good at what we do, and we earn an honest pay doing it. I respect them, they respect me. If there were to be a parasite in the group, coasting and leeching money for nothing, we'd get rid of them. It really is that simple. Unsurprisingly, we all get along quite well, sure sometimes deadlines turn us into stress buckets, but we air it out and deal with it, and go back to being IM buddies. I'm kind-of glad they all live far away, otherwise we'd spend all our money buying rounds of beer for each other. Despite having never met most of these guys, we form a stronger team than any office environment I've ever been in.
Why is promotion such a big issue ? I like the job I'm currently doing. I don't want to be "promoted" to managing a team of lesser minds. I don't need a raise, I earn good money already. I don't need to kiss up to my boss, because he's just a cool guy, we all are, and we're all equals as far as relationships are concerned.
The funny thing, we've only met once, and the next time he's in my city or vice versa, we're not going to talk about work, we're going to hit a pub and shoot the shit. Same goes for all my other coworkers too. Contrast that with my previous five jobs, where I can count on two fingers the times I've actually hung out with coworkers just because they were cool. Social functions at those offices felt like forced attendance, where you sit around, laugh at the seniors' bad jokes, and try not to say anything even remotely insightful, or you will shatter their fantasy of you being a subservient profit device.
Funny, I get at least the same amount of work done, but I waste less time on the company dime.
At home, I don't have to deal with
- office gossip
- stressed out coworkers yammering all day about their psychological issues
- walking over to a boss/manager/secretary/idiot's desk to stare at an error message they could have pasted in an email
- petty one-upmanship
- bathrooms halfway around the building
- staff managers timing my shit breaks
- pointless unit meetings that exist solely to justify having so many goddamned staff managers
- playing bejeweled for hours because the office environment depresses me
- noisy coworkers threatening to call the union and/or burn down the building if I deprive them of their precious Kanyé
If I want to waste time playing video games or watching TV, it's my problem and my boss/clients don't pay for that idle time. The corollary is that I am motivated to work more efficiently and waste less time, because that time is now MY money and not my employer's. In that sense, I get a heck of a lot more done since I started telecommuting, and cutting out that hour or two of bus/traffic every day makes a huge difference in my energy level and mood. I have no trouble pulling a 10 or 12 hour work day at home, when inspiration strikes, but in an office those 7.5 hours seem like eternity.
If the idea of your "personal" devices becoming work devices is what irks you, then get a second phone dedicated to work. I bought a laptop "for work", and while it is my own deductible expense, I only have work stuff on it. It is my work computer: when I'm typing at that laptop, I'm working and getting paid. If I feel like using my desktop peripherals and displays, then I remote into that laptop to keep everything focused.
I don't use my phone much for work, other than checking email when I'm bored, so I suppose I'm lucky for that, but if work were spilling into my personal life, I'd get another phone, and turn the ringer off when I'm off the clock. Then if a client or coworker calls my personal number, they know they're crossing that line and anything done on that call is either a special favour, or billed at emergency rates. With many carriers, you can add this second phone onto your existing plan, only paying a nominal fee for the second number, definitely less than $20. Don't you think a healthy work/life separation is worth $20 a month ? To me, that sounds a bargain!
If the physical aspect of an office is such a strong (de)motivator, nothing's stopping anyone from dedicating a room or portion thereof as their home office, or renting swing-space in one of countless shared office environments found in most cities these days.
Myself, I actually like working from home in total comfort. I can turn the stereo up to 11, crack a beer, open the windows and get paid to do what I'm qualified to do, rather than being asked to act like a confirmist office robot. I'm hired for my knowledge and skills, not my ability to dress sharp and gossip with the nepotists.
What you describe is a cultural issue. You have to be able to say no. If your boss doesn't respect your personal life, then you need the confidence to quit that shit job and let someone else suffer your idiot boss.
My problem is the exact opposite. I work from home, and the most difficult thing for me is shutting out the countless distractions that nag me all day. Sometimes when I can't focus, I pack up my laptop, head to a quiet pub, order a pint and some nachos and start pounding out those billable hours. No TV, no Xbox, no World of Warcraft, and no bored wife to break my concentration. See, the funny thing about being in a bar with a laptop is people tend to leave you alone... unless they're Apple fanboys, in which case you have to politely threaten their frail existence with the promise of bodily harm.
My daily schedule is very free-form, I work when I'm feeling sharp, and I veg when I feel veg. If I'm stuck in a rut and want to smash the stupid laptop, I log off and do something else, maybe even take a nap to purge the mind. I don't need a distinction between home and work places, because both roles are allowed to flow naturally. If I'm needed for some urgent task, fine, I'll deal with it. Likewise, if I need some personal time, I just say so and 9 times out of 10, there's no problem. If your boss is as flexible and understanding as you are, things work out just fine, but if you're a doormat and your job stomps all over you, no degree of work/life separation will change the fact that your work relationship sucks.
They are probably very fancy, hyper-indulgent cupcakes, along the same vein as Crumbs Cupcakes. This type of bakery have been springing up all over, my wife's addicted to that crap. They're something like $4 each, and filled with buzzwords like "organic", "gluten-free" and "machine washable". On a positive note, each one has a thick layer of perfectly laid cream cheese frosting. The ones made by non-ginger non-vegans, you know, with actual sugar, like those from Crumbs, I find them pretty awesome. It's a palm-sized ball of happy crack-laced diabetes.
Of course, since they're the latest fad, everyone and their celiac mother are jumping on the bandwagon with zero business acumen, like the people in TFA. They have waking dreams of endless profits, yet fail at basic arithmetic. You know how the saying goes: 9 out of 10 businesses fail within the first 2 years. Well 9 out of 10 business owners are complete imbeciles so it's really no surprise.
The problem I have with Groupon is that, for most businesses, it is the wrong approach. You pay nothing up-front, instead you give them half of your take. The more popular your deal is, the more costly Groupon is compared to traditional advertising. The whole "no money down" thing is a very treacherous lure for inexperienced business owners who simply don't have a clue how to market their products and services, and to a cynical bastard like myself, it suggests a lack of confidence in their own brand.
There is nothing wrong in running a time-limited half-off promotion, but the potential customers you should be courting are the ones who will give you repeat business. From what I've seen, Groupon users are not loyal customers. If they found you on Groupon today, tomorrow they will find something else. Easy come, easy go. Is that worth half of your already-discounted income ? I'm no marketing guru, but my spreadsheet says no. I'd rather have lower volume and higher profits.