<ECODE> I never understood why this hasn't been done before. But a lot of times you go backone or more pages, go to another page, then all your previous stuff is lost.
We need a way to say, from this page you want to these places.. Currently we are limited to:
S--->--->--->--->---> But we need: S--->--->--->--->---> +---> +--->--->---> +---> +--->--->---->--->---> Where the '+' are junctions where two mor more links were followed </ECODE>
Firings will continue until moral improves. Those with the lowest moral will be fired first, as to more significantly increase the average moral rating.
Unchanged for 50 years, it's incredibly syncronous. Your content is time-slotted, and you have to make plans to watch TV. Tivo and Reply fix that, which i s why I still watch at least 10 hours a week. If it weren;t for that, I'd have given up long ago.
With a PVR, TV is becomes a high-bandwidth syncronous bit stream. On my PVR it becomes richer, I can fast forward, pause, slow, and rewind. While that is going on, I'm on the computer assililating on-dempand content. Content like the famous nipple shot.
Which brings the FCC in. They keep TV uninteresting. They signifigantly devalue it. I have to go to the web for all the juicy stuff.
Now I've often wondered about a Hybrid channel. Most have an online presence, but something that is really on-line, with a content delivery channel on TV. Say like TRL on MTV being TRL via internet. Hell make all of MTV TRL and have software order the videos on a ranking. Get people out of TV, and get your audiance controlling it. Then let thier PVRs pick it up... TV will cease to be the medium it has been, in instead it'll be a one-way high broacast bandwidth stream. Hell, "download" a linux ditribution at 51 megabytes/sec by capturing it to your PVR (~500x400, 256colors) then decode the frames. (And that does not include the 2 22.1kHz stereo channels)
Novell is ripping SCO a new one in the court case. Do you think for one minute that the Novell team is that incompetent that they'd base theit next gen tech on a feeble legal product?
I think not. Stop spreading your FUD. You're using it on a crowed trained to detect and dismiss FUD. You're not worth the bandwidth you waste!
How widespread do you think Linux would be if it had the same license as Qt?
Actually MORE. Because there is commercial support. Businesses would have picked it up and ran with it years ago. If you don't belive that then you are too young to understand businesses.
They don't care about open source. They care about profit margins and who to yell at when somethign goes wrong. If OpenSource results in a better product then they don't care as long as they are benefitted by it and not harmed. If it were proprietary, they'd still not care.
History has computers as a trickle-down from companties to homes. If you run XYZ OS at work, then tog et work done at home you prolly have to run XYZ at home. Having business penetration would mean overal penetrations sooner. The company -wide linux deployments and tests would have happened years ago.
You don't get it. I thought I made it clear - Yarrow is only McBride's boss in so much that Yarrow's company invested money in SCO. McBride cares only about SCO. It's like the military -chain of command goes down, not up. McBride and his ramplings don't go up the chain, they only go down it. If you have a prtfolio with two companies duking it out, you're going to drop one because they are both going to beat each other down. It's actually good that Yarro is involved with both, as he will work to balance the two and maximize the both of them.
You are using FUD, you Microsoft Troll.
Yarrow cares not about TrollTech. SCO cares not about TrollTech. SCO has not ever made a claim to any Qt product, nor will they ever.
Besides, SCO won't be around long.
And if you'd read the KDE myth you fuck-head, you'd see that if no updates are released for a year the last version of Qt goes under an open license. So it doesn't matter.
Give it up man. Everytime I see Qt mentioned, someone posts this FUD. Yeap, you're uding your own FUD against Linux.
I'll admit it, the first time I read this conspiracy thoery I was worried. I looked into it. Trust me there are no black helicopters being dispatched from SCO.
KDE Myths #60: http://kdemyths.urbanlizard.com/viewMyth.php?mythI D=60 "According to http://www.trolltech.com/newsroom/investors.html the Canopy Group only has 5.7% shares of Trolltech while 64.7% are in posession of Trolltech employees with an additional 5% controlled by the Trolltech founders. One can hardly say that the Canopy Group owns or controls Trolltech."
Don't forget Canopy is just an investent group. They'd probably like to see TrollTech get this boost because SCO is a loss at the moment, and they aren't going to get better.
It is like saying that you own a mutual fun that invests in two competitors, and that you are going to devalue one so the other can rise. The problem is that you want BOTH to perform.
I can say that there is nothing easier outside of web development. I am an old MFC programmer. I am often lost in developing Qt apps, but I am very comforatable with that because the documentation is copius cnad clear. Whats more is it is soooooooo well thought out. It makes MFC look like the crap that it is (C++ wrappers for C objects). Learning Qt is like learning to walk the right way. It's amazingly simple. I will always request that Qt be used regardless of platform in future jobs.
Now the license is different. I often wish there was a small-business or starting-business license, but this is only pertanant if you are going commercial work. for GPL work it is completely free.
Right now I'm doing some advanced work with QSA (Javascripted Qt apps) It is easy and cross platform. I can now replace a browser (and the rendering issues with a user interface file (loaded at run-time) and ECMA script code (platform indep. cause we run on various architectures with limited space, whose list may change at any time)
MS slacked off when it comes to browsers, and Mozilla is surely catching up.
Um, from all I can tell the only thing that Mozilla is catching up in is market share. All other areas (stanards compliance and optional features) Mozilla dominates in.
Soon Moz will have built-in SVG. Moz has the developer pool to crush the IE staff in production , quality and innovation.
Let me clarify some things. I'm trying to compare it to MIDI, though most of you are taking it too literally.
Music notes have a pitch and duration. Instruments have 'tombre' which is the squigglies on a regular wave form that make a violin sound like a violin and a piano sounds like a piano.
If you could encode the tombre, then it is a small mathmatical transform away from any pitch.
Then it is only a matter of assembling "tombre" files (aka voices) Then specifying their use.
Traditional MIDI was designed 20 years ago, for the computing power back then, as a result everythign soudns 8 bit and like a Nintendo game.
Today the computers can brease through the calucations needed to render sounds on the fly. You can specify a voice and have it 'use' it (a la SVG command 'use') transform it with everythign from a pitch variation to added synth distortion. the facilites and power exists to get Spear's "Toxic" song down pat with everythign but her voice.
The human voice is the last thing needed. You could record it and overlay it, but you wouldn't save much. Instead we need to devise some archive of sounds, how they transition from sound to sound and some sort of descriptor to describe how the speach is comingout of the person (like Mad, Happy, etc). That "mood" is the most complicated part. But once solved, you have all you need to render music 99% accurately but in only a few k per song.
Even if you have to overlay a raw voice or two, the codec could be heavily optimized for human voice because we can only be at once place in the scale at a time.
Adobe SVG plug in Beta 6 is the best out there (and works with IE and Firebird), KSVG is also very close. Mozilla is the worst: not in default branch (yet) and Adobe would have to write a lot of binding code for the in-document JS to work for Moz.
Some of you have remarked that MIDI has lost. Well, ear interpretations are not analogous to visual interpretations.
I was more referring about the costs to a computer of using them.
However if you do compare SVG icons to Bit-map icons, visually, the SVG icon will not only be simpler, and usually just as apealing.
Look at the SVG icon sets referenced and the background of Slax (Slackware's LiveCD) The #1 comment is "aww he's so cute". Clearly, the visual accptance is much higher to the human eye than MIDI's acceptance to the human ear.
MIDI could be re-invented to include wavelets which are a base representation of a voice (instrument or human) then define the mathmatical operations. You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size.
Example (as SVG):
Now human voices are harder, but once downloaded you could just download the contents of the tree.
You could also hear brittney sing "Opps.." in her original voice or her aged voice, which would be interesting. Or even make Christina Agulera sing Spear's songs.
If you're seeing the potential of re-defining MIDI like that, surely you can see hwo awesome SVG is...
I recently dabbled in SVG for a website. I learned with that and a dash of javascript I could completely replace a java applet with a few kilobytes of code.
SVG is finding its way into everything, browsers, icons, etc. I forsee a world where SVG is dominant and regular pixel based images are seen as WAV files as in comparison to MIDI.
As a matter of fact that is a good analogy: MIDI vs WAV. One is intrections on how to draw the other is the final outcome.
Imagine how many songs you could fit on a CD if it were midi, with human voice parameters. Ignoring the vocals, you'd get thousands of songs on a CD.
SVG also fixes the pixelation issue, whenyou try to stretch and compress the image. As a matter of fact, do that once with a regualr image and you're working with crap. You can shrink SVG blow it up, and rotate without any kind of distortion.
It is kind of suprising it took us this long to get a cross-platform standard on how to specify how to draw shapes! But it is a good thing.
I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off.
It's pretty sad when everything west of the Missisippi is bested by a West Virginian, and an Alleganey Co. student (right next to WV).
Not cutting on the students, but the annual bughet of those school districts is small, WV is the poorest state in the union, and A. Co. isn't much better. The best schools in MD are in Baltimore, Howard and Montgomery counties, with Montgomery having a budget an order of magnitude more than the rest.
Considering another angle, it could be that these places are so rural there is nothing better to do. I's the same reason why Linus started Linux...
Listening to all the new terms and phrases we come up with to skirt around the forbidden subjects. This does nothing to curtail the subject matter, only the vocabulary.
You can't contain thought, because thought wants to be free.
Also, anyone notice how EFF (Electric Fronteirs Fountation) shares the "Eff" in "F-word"? Rather ironic.
In a world where free speech is a right and supposedly the most protected freedom, this thouroghly dissapoints me.
South Park's Night of "1000 shits" is a good example. You giggle ath the first 20 shits, but byt the time they are into the 100s, you are completely disintrested. People would forget if it wasn't for the counter. If it wasn't so taboo, it'd loose focus and purpose. Its not like ears are staying virgin untl 13,no, the kid will hear Cunt, shit, fuck and like like by the time they are 5, and learn what they are by 8.
Simularly, shock jocks operate over the same concept. Open it up and the shock goes away. They always have to top themselves to get raitings, but you can only go so far in reality.
While I don't want my 5 year old saying the "fucking cunt is a bitch", I also think that if everyone allowed it, it would either go unnoticed or he'd not bother to use that language and would have to articulate his feelings in a more artistic way. Shock is easy and cheap. Art and structure are hard. Lets get the shock out of the way and get to the good stuff.
I suggest we user UberBowl to refer to the final playoff game of the nationwide professional football leage.
W're gonna stick a penis in it!
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Did you see that probe thing? Looks like a diant dildo. We get to a moon, and the first thign we do is have sex with it. (Yeah, we drilled the moon too)
The male sex drive is at least as big as the solar system.
I'm just glad we have no plans to do it yo Uranus.
Plumbers, Electricians, mechanics have to be certified by an organization. Usually the state that they operate in. These cost money and are non-trivial tests, though I think a computer cert beats the pants off them.
I recently read a story in the Baltimore Sun, about "Handymen" These people charge 50-70/hr, and take 2-3 hours on an average job. Most of them are uncertified, though they need to be (in this state). Handymen are attractive in that they will take the small jobs a 'legitimate' operation will not, because legit operations are required to create and submit a proposal and estimate, and give the home owner 3 days to cancel the contract before work can even start. Contractors are less though - $30-40hr. Still, when people need it done ASAP. They are willing to bypass the protections and paya premium.
Computer failures usually are urgent, (no one can wait 3 days) but for the $150 charge for just labor for 3 hours can [almost] cover the cost of a new computer. The only time it is cost effective is when the IP on the drive costs much more to replace (and that is surprisingly achieved).
So I don't see why we can't charge 50-70 minimum. It'd help if there was a state certification program though, where we could establish our skills in geographically uniform way. (MD digiticians are all on the same raking, thus easy comparisons- because you pull from local talent.)
The owner/founder was married to the president. The Pres was the woman, and she was a bitch. Their daugter worked there too. Everyone got along and were good for the company except for the pres. The pres was more interested in perserving her 'way of life' in the office and not really growing the company. As a small company (20 emps), you can only grow or shut down. We were on the cusp of breaking into big time and all she ever did was to work against that. I could completely prove that she was counter productive to the company. I brought it up to the COO, and he was like 'that's nepatism for ya' He was 10x as fustrated at her for limiting him (he was responsible for gorwing the company, but she never wanted to say yes to any of his ideas (and he had some good ones))
So you must be careful about the nepotism factor. You either have to stay small enough for it to never matter or for you to luck out and never arrive there. You can't fire your wife/gf.. well maybe you can, but I bet you'll be on the couch or in divorce court.
I leave you with this: http://www.despair.com/nepotism.html
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62687,00. html
:-/
A rather interesting phenomenon.
Too bad I can't get into it
<ECODE>
I never understood why this hasn't been done before. But a lot of times you go backone or more pages, go to another page, then all your previous stuff is lost.
We need a way to say, from this page you want to these places.. Currently we are limited to:
S--->--->--->--->--->
But we need:
S--->--->--->--->---> +--->
+--->--->---> +--->
+--->--->---->--->--->
Where the '+' are junctions where two mor more links were followed
</ECODE>
Firings will continue until moral improves. Those with the lowest moral will be fired first, as to more significantly increase the average moral rating.
Don't get me started! Every 2 years comcast re-arranges the channel lineups!
We need a meta-channel allocation system! If I can tag a channel "HGTV" in my TV, then it should be able to find the HGTV channel allocation.
Math correction: 6 MB/s @ 256 color.
Still decent.
Unchanged for 50 years, it's incredibly syncronous. Your content is time-slotted, and you have to make plans to watch TV. Tivo and Reply fix that, which i s why I still watch at least 10 hours a week. If it weren;t for that, I'd have given up long ago.
With a PVR, TV is becomes a high-bandwidth syncronous bit stream. On my PVR it becomes richer, I can fast forward, pause, slow, and rewind. While that is going on, I'm on the computer assililating on-dempand content. Content like the famous nipple shot.
Which brings the FCC in. They keep TV uninteresting. They signifigantly devalue it. I have to go to the web for all the juicy stuff.
Now I've often wondered about a Hybrid channel. Most have an online presence, but something that is really on-line, with a content delivery channel on TV. Say like TRL on MTV being TRL via internet. Hell make all of MTV TRL and have software order the videos on a ranking. Get people out of TV, and get your audiance controlling it. Then let thier PVRs pick it up... TV will cease to be the medium it has been, in instead it'll be a one-way high broacast bandwidth stream. Hell, "download" a linux ditribution at 51 megabytes/sec by capturing it to your PVR (~500x400, 256colors) then decode the frames. (And that does not include the 2 22.1kHz stereo channels)
Novell is ripping SCO a new one in the court case. Do you think for one minute that the Novell team is that incompetent that they'd base theit next gen tech on a feeble legal product?
I think not.
Stop spreading your FUD. You're using it on a crowed trained to detect and dismiss FUD. You're not worth the bandwidth you waste!
How widespread do you think Linux would be if it had the same license as Qt?
Actually MORE. Because there is commercial support. Businesses would have picked it up and ran with it years ago. If you don't belive that then you are too young to understand businesses.
They don't care about open source. They care about profit margins and who to yell at when somethign goes wrong. If OpenSource results in a better product then they don't care as long as they are benefitted by it and not harmed. If it were proprietary, they'd still not care.
History has computers as a trickle-down from companties to homes. If you run XYZ OS at work, then tog et work done at home you prolly have to run XYZ at home. Having business penetration would mean overal penetrations sooner. The company -wide linux deployments and tests would have happened years ago.
Yeap its true.
You don't get it. I thought I made it clear - Yarrow is only McBride's boss in so much that Yarrow's company invested money in SCO. McBride cares only about SCO. It's like the military -chain of command goes down, not up. McBride and his ramplings don't go up the chain, they only go down it. If you have a prtfolio with two companies duking it out, you're going to drop one because they are both going to beat each other down. It's actually good that Yarro is involved with both, as he will work to balance the two and maximize the both of them .
You are using FUD, you Microsoft Troll.
Yarrow cares not about TrollTech. SCO cares not about TrollTech. SCO has not ever made a claim to any Qt product, nor will they ever.
Besides, SCO won't be around long.
And if you'd read the KDE myth you fuck-head, you'd see that if no updates are released for a year the last version of Qt goes under an open license. So it doesn't matter.
GIVE IT UP.
Yes, I suffer from the same verbage problems. I do understand that a commercial entity can use Qt for free, provided that it is GPL.
Hence how Novell can use Qt in Suse Linux w/o a license...
Give it up man. Everytime I see Qt mentioned, someone posts this FUD. Yeap, you're uding your own FUD against Linux.
I D=60
I'll admit it, the first time I read this conspiracy thoery I was worried. I looked into it. Trust me there are no black helicopters being dispatched from SCO.
KDE Myths #60: http://kdemyths.urbanlizard.com/viewMyth.php?myth
"According to http://www.trolltech.com/newsroom/investors.html the Canopy Group only has 5.7% shares of Trolltech while 64.7% are in posession of Trolltech employees with an additional 5% controlled by the Trolltech founders. One can hardly say that the Canopy Group owns or controls Trolltech."
Don't forget Canopy is just an investent group. They'd probably like to see TrollTech get this boost because SCO is a loss at the moment, and they aren't going to get better.
It is like saying that you own a mutual fun that invests in two competitors, and that you are going to devalue one so the other can rise. The problem is that you want BOTH to perform.
I can say that there is nothing easier outside of web development. I am an old MFC programmer. I am often lost in developing Qt apps, but I am very comforatable with that because the documentation is copius cnad clear. Whats more is it is soooooooo well thought out. It makes MFC look like the crap that it is (C++ wrappers for C objects). Learning Qt is like learning to walk the right way. It's amazingly simple. I will always request that Qt be used regardless of platform in future jobs.
Now the license is different. I often wish there was a small-business or starting-business license, but this is only pertanant if you are going commercial work. for GPL work it is completely free.
Right now I'm doing some advanced work with QSA (Javascripted Qt apps) It is easy and cross platform. I can now replace a browser (and the rendering issues with a user interface file (loaded at run-time) and ECMA script code (platform indep. cause we run on various architectures with limited space, whose list may change at any time)
The Troll Tech stuff is top notch.
MS slacked off when it comes to browsers, and Mozilla is surely catching up.
Um, from all I can tell the only thing that Mozilla is catching up in is market share. All other areas (stanards compliance and optional features) Mozilla dominates in.
Soon Moz will have built-in SVG. Moz has the developer pool to crush the IE staff in production , quality and innovation.
Music notes have a pitch and duration. Instruments have 'tombre' which is the squigglies on a regular wave form that make a violin sound like a violin and a piano sounds like a piano.
If you could encode the tombre, then it is a small mathmatical transform away from any pitch.
Then it is only a matter of assembling "tombre" files (aka voices) Then specifying their use.
Traditional MIDI was designed 20 years ago, for the computing power back then, as a result everythign soudns 8 bit and like a Nintendo game.
Today the computers can brease through the calucations needed to render sounds on the fly. You can specify a voice and have it 'use' it (a la SVG command 'use') transform it with everythign from a pitch variation to added synth distortion. the facilites and power exists to get Spear's "Toxic" song down pat with everythign but her voice.
The human voice is the last thing needed. You could record it and overlay it, but you wouldn't save much. Instead we need to devise some archive of sounds, how they transition from sound to sound and some sort of descriptor to describe how the speach is comingout of the person (like Mad, Happy, etc). That "mood" is the most complicated part. But once solved, you have all you need to render music 99% accurately but in only a few k per song.
ExampleThen zip the whole thing.
Even if you have to overlay a raw voice or two, the codec could be heavily optimized for human voice because we can only be at once place in the scale at a time.
Adobe SVG plug in Beta 6 is the best out there (and works with IE and Firebird), KSVG is also very close. Mozilla is the worst: not in default branch (yet) and Adobe would have to write a lot of binding code for the in-document JS to work for Moz.
Some of you have remarked that MIDI has lost. Well, ear interpretations are not analogous to visual interpretations.
I was more referring about the costs to a computer of using them.
However if you do compare SVG icons to Bit-map icons, visually, the SVG icon will not only be simpler, and usually just as apealing.
Look at the SVG icon sets referenced and the background of Slax (Slackware's LiveCD) The #1 comment is "aww he's so cute". Clearly, the visual accptance is much higher to the human eye than MIDI's acceptance to the human ear.
MIDI could be re-invented to include wavelets which are a base representation of a voice (instrument or human) then define the mathmatical operations. You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size.
Example (as SVG):
Now human voices are harder, but once downloaded you could just download the contents of the tree.
You could also hear brittney sing "Opps.." in her original voice or her aged voice, which would be interesting. Or even make Christina Agulera sing Spear's songs.
If you're seeing the potential of re-defining MIDI like that, surely you can see hwo awesome SVG is...
I recently dabbled in SVG for a website. I learned with that and a dash of javascript I could completely replace a java applet with a few kilobytes of code.
SVG is finding its way into everything, browsers, icons, etc. I forsee a world where SVG is dominant and regular pixel based images are seen as WAV files as in comparison to MIDI.
As a matter of fact that is a good analogy: MIDI vs WAV. One is intrections on how to draw the other is the final outcome.
Imagine how many songs you could fit on a CD if it were midi, with human voice parameters. Ignoring the vocals, you'd get thousands of songs on a CD.
SVG also fixes the pixelation issue, whenyou try to stretch and compress the image. As a matter of fact, do that once with a regualr image and you're working with crap. You can shrink SVG blow it up, and rotate without any kind of distortion.
It is kind of suprising it took us this long to get a cross-platform standard on how to specify how to draw shapes! But it is a good thing.
I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off.
East cost is representing!
It's pretty sad when everything west of the Missisippi is bested by a West Virginian, and an Alleganey Co. student (right next to WV).
Not cutting on the students, but the annual bughet of those school districts is small, WV is the poorest state in the union, and A. Co. isn't much better. The best schools in MD are in Baltimore, Howard and Montgomery counties, with Montgomery having a budget an order of magnitude more than the rest.
Considering another angle, it could be that these places are so rural there is nothing better to do. I's the same reason why Linus started Linux...
Listening to all the new terms and phrases we come up with to skirt around the forbidden subjects. This does nothing to curtail the subject matter, only the vocabulary.
You can't contain thought, because thought wants to be free.
Also, anyone notice how EFF (Electric Fronteirs Fountation) shares the "Eff" in "F-word"? Rather ironic.
In a world where free speech is a right and supposedly the most protected freedom, this thouroghly dissapoints me.
South Park's Night of "1000 shits" is a good example. You giggle ath the first 20 shits, but byt the time they are into the 100s, you are completely disintrested. People would forget if it wasn't for the counter. If it wasn't so taboo, it'd loose focus and purpose. Its not like ears are staying virgin untl 13,no, the kid will hear Cunt, shit, fuck and like like by the time they are 5, and learn what they are by 8.
Simularly, shock jocks operate over the same concept. Open it up and the shock goes away. They always have to top themselves to get raitings, but you can only go so far in reality.
While I don't want my 5 year old saying the "fucking cunt is a bitch", I also think that if everyone allowed it, it would either go unnoticed or he'd not bother to use that language and would have to articulate his feelings in a more artistic way. Shock is easy and cheap. Art and structure are hard. Lets get the shock out of the way and get to the good stuff.
Itis the property of NFL and its owners.
I suggest we user UberBowl to refer to the final playoff game of the nationwide professional football leage.
Did you see that probe thing? Looks like a diant dildo. We get to a moon, and the first thign we do is have sex with it. (Yeah, we drilled the moon too)
The male sex drive is at least as big as the solar system.
I'm just glad we have no plans to do it yo Uranus.
Plumbers, Electricians, mechanics have to be certified by an organization. Usually the state that they operate in. These cost money and are non-trivial tests, though I think a computer cert beats the pants off them.
I recently read a story in the Baltimore Sun, about "Handymen" These people charge 50-70/hr, and take 2-3 hours on an average job. Most of them are uncertified, though they need to be (in this state). Handymen are attractive in that they will take the small jobs a 'legitimate' operation will not, because legit operations are required to create and submit a proposal and estimate, and give the home owner 3 days to cancel the contract before work can even start. Contractors are less though - $30-40hr. Still, when people need it done ASAP. They are willing to bypass the protections and paya premium.
Computer failures usually are urgent, (no one can wait 3 days) but for the $150 charge for just labor for 3 hours can [almost] cover the cost of a new computer. The only time it is cost effective is when the IP on the drive costs much more to replace (and that is surprisingly achieved).
So I don't see why we can't charge 50-70 minimum. It'd help if there was a state certification program though, where we could establish our skills in geographically uniform way. (MD digiticians are all on the same raking, thus easy comparisons- because you pull from local talent.)
The owner/founder was married to the president. The Pres was the woman, and she was a bitch. Their daugter worked there too. Everyone got along and were good for the company except for the pres. The pres was more interested in perserving her 'way of life' in the office and not really growing the company. As a small company (20 emps), you can only grow or shut down. We were on the cusp of breaking into big time and all she ever did was to work against that. I could completely prove that she was counter productive to the company. I brought it up to the COO, and he was like 'that's nepatism for ya' He was 10x as fustrated at her for limiting him (he was responsible for gorwing the company, but she never wanted to say yes to any of his ideas (and he had some good ones))
So you must be careful about the nepotism factor. You either have to stay small enough for it to never matter or for you to luck out and never arrive there. You can't fire your wife/gf.. well maybe you can, but I bet you'll be on the couch or in divorce court.
I leave you with this:
http://www.despair.com/nepotism.html