A few years ago, I co-founded a small web design firm with a friend.
We started out on total flex time, which basically meant that we both worked whenever we could, but with no particular stipulation about the hours. This worked out pretty well because A) it was just the two of us and B) there was a lot of work to be done that we both had a personal investment in. Sometimes we would fall into these cycles where one week, every day would be 9-6ish, the next week would be 11-8ish, the next week would be 1(PM) to 10ish, and so on - sometimes we went all the way around the clock back to 9-6!
As we got more clients and had to do more client interaction, we found it wasn't feasible to make come in the office at 1 PM and expect to be able to make all the needed calls, run all the needed errands, etc. before other businesses closed, and still be professional about it. So we set some loosely defined hours of 9ish to 5ish that we both pretty much followed. That was also a happy time.
We recently hired an employee, and that changes everything. Unless employees are extremely self directed and have a significant investment in what they're doing, I think the need to have someone around to answer questions and provide some guidance when appropriate. It wouldn't work at all to have a 3 (or 4, or 5, or more) person company where everyone comes in at their leisure and just hopes that the tasks that require 2 or more people to be present at one time would get done. So now we have pretty standard 9-5 hours, with a policy that it's fine if you're out of the office for a while or if you want to vary those hours, just make sure to give some notice, and make sure to make up any lost time somehow.
I agree with other posters that the hours should depend on what kind of company it is, what kind of people are working there, and what the needs for interaction with the outside world require.
A few years ago, while a CS student at a small liberal arts college in Indiana, one day I decided it would be neat to have ESR come speak to some folks at my school.
I wrote him an e-mail asking him to come, and he wrote me an e-mail back saying "Okay." After negotiating the costs of airfare and doing a little publicity, things were all set.
A month or so later, there I am, with Eric Raymond sitting in my passenger seat on the way back from the airport, an unfinished "Halloween Document" in his bag and lots of good stories to tell.
We hung out, had dinner, he slept in a guestroom at a prof's house, and the next day, there he was speaking to a group of folks interested in open source in some way or another.
It was a surprisingly straightforward visit to organize. I attribute this in part to ESR's flexibility and adaptability, and in part to the notion that people who have something interesting to say and people who want to hear something interesting will find each other pretty well on their own.
The MLA (which maintains a widely used standard for journalists and writers) says it's "e-mail". At least, that's what they use on their website, and you'd hope they'd practice internal consistency - anyone have a copy of the Guide to reference?.
Hey, look, the Apache website server status says they're serving 17 hits per second. That's around 1.4 million per day. Looks pretty fast. Looks like they're running Apache. Hmmmm.
I agree that the Bill of Rights is not a self-enforcing document (at least not in the less-than-ideal world that exists at present). But I think that the person to whom I was responding originally was implying that enforcement of any kind will always require money, and that the private citizen should not attempt to exercise their right to free speech unless they were prepared to spend that money. The right to free speech is (or should be) unconditional, at least in the sense that there should be no pre-requisitve of wealth in order to enjoy its privileges.
I do concede that questions of legal free speech require a complex process to resolve them, and that the process can be expensive. But just as alleged criminals are theoretically presumed innocent until proven guilty, potential violators of free speech law who are acting in good conscience (i.e. what they're saying isn't, to them, clearly illegal) should have an opportunity to make their statements independent of whether or not they have the finacial backing to survive the legal process.
If you're going to post something to the net and you think you could get in legal trouble, then fuck you, stop whining, go talk to a lawyer. Lesser of three evils: spend money on a lawyer, go to jail, don't publish. Well?! CHOOSE DAMMIT! If you don't, someone else will.
To me, this translates to "if you want to exercise your right to free speech, you have to be prepared to spend money to defend that right." I disagree that this should ever be the case, and think the notion that there needs to be any sort of safety net in place beyond the Bill of Rights (and that the saftey net should cost the individual citizen money on a per incident basis) is appalling.
If you're going to bother at all with the whole "right to free speech" rigamarole, you have to be prepared to go all the way.
Instead of trying to create exercises or projects that will only be useful in the context of your particular classroom environment (although that could be very instructive), consider having the students sign up to work on existing open-source projects.
Even if they are contributing small amounts of code or insight or peer review or documentation, they are still benefitting themselves AND lots of others in the process.
There is such a wide variety of projects out there - just look at SourceForge and the like - that would allow students to make significant contributions to real-world projects while utilizing the principles and practice of good computer science. You would probably have to be the one enforcing that last part, but I can't emphasize enough the value of real-world experience as a complement to the AP/IEEE curriculum.
You would also have the advantage of having lots of infrastructure already set up - no need to worry about establishing project workspaces, titles, task assignments, etc...many projects will already have these in place.
My point was that if we recognize the government as having the ability and power to decide whether or not drugs should be legal, we are effectively giving up our freedom to decide for ourselves. Even if they happen to decide in our "favor" in one particular case or another, we still only gain a sort of pseudo-freedom that is still at the mercy of the decision makers whom we have empowered to take it away.
By banning drugs or publications about them, you coercively make a choice for all citizens about what is "right" for them.
By legalizing drugs or publications about them, you coercively make a choice for all citizens about what is "right" for them.
Politicians have no place making these decisions. Human beings are not all the same. We don't all live in the same house, community, or world. I assure you that 90% of the world's problems exist because we have decision makers who are empowered to make decisions for EVERYONE about how to live.
Naw, just trolling for intelligent conversation about an issue that, when brought up, too many people blow off with some comment about trolling for babes...
A related question...what should co-location services reasonably be able to promise?
I run a web hosting firm that currently does only virtual domains, but is looking at starting to offer co-location services. We're trying to figure out how much headache/cost is associated with each "level" of service: UPS backups, 24/7 support, multiple net connections, sysadminning, etc.
For those of you who already offer co-location services, what's reasonable to offer your customers who want an "average" (i.e. not ridiculously expensive) co-location experience?
I maintain an anti-spam HOWTO that discusses some of the general issues of spam policies and prevention; it might be useful for this discussion. (Note that it was originally written for folks who use qmail, but much of it is relevant on a mailer-independent basis.)
This AP Wire News story stupidly reports that the "Area 51 site is not responding". I'm not sure when it became news that a website is slow, but it sure seems kinda ironic that one news organization (AP) is reporting on the effect created by another news organization (Slashdot).
Surely it would be something you could turn on and off like Java or Javascript or cookies. You could specify how many levels down the "pingbot" should go, e.g. "stay in this domain" or "only go to the top level of other sites" or "don't visit CGI scripts", etc.
Considering how little bandwidth a ping takes, and how willing people have become to let Napster sends bursts of them in the name of pirating music, I'm pretty sure it would be feasible.
Even if browsers didn't do it, it would be neat if search engine sites did. On most of them, you're only looking at about 10 results at a time, so it would be cool if they would return an "availability code" with each result in exchange for slightly slower search time. I'd rather their bot "click" on the potential results instead of me.
Admittedly, there's something to be said for simplicity. But I really like knowing that I can log onto Napster and look at files that are there *now*. If I could do this with the web, it's increasing lack of integrity wouldn't be such a problem.
Okay, I think this conversation should probably only continue with someone who knows something about building browsers...
It would be neat, I think, if in addition to sort of re-building or re-creating the way files are shared and transferred over the Internet, there was also some integration of this method into existing software and protocols.
Imagine, for example, a browser that, while a given page is loading, goes out and pings the pages that are linked to, checks their existence and the time it takes to get to them, and displays this information when you roll over the link. Suddenly, a user's experience of the "web" becomes much more reliable: they follow the links that they know to exist and be available at that moment, instead of floundering around hitting pages that went away a long time ago.
Napster's success has been largely because of the reliability (and therefore time-saving) that it promises someone looking for a given resource. That's also why it's being extended to include additional media times. It would be great if we could build this reliability into existing technology.
What if it went off while you were on a date?
on
Date Pagers
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· Score: 1
I did some research into these issues about two years ago and produced this report. It's definitely not the most refined or expert look at the issues, but may be of use.
This bothers me - rather than respond to communities and markets, he tries to get things happening behind closed doors.
What more do you want? It appears Jeff called Tim out of the blue in a coffee shop or something, and the next day Tim posts as much as he can remember about the conversation on a website, asking the community to join the conversation. Short of putting his cell phone on virtual speakerphone, I think he's doing everything but work behind closed doors.
If you're interested in finance packages (personal and professional) that are open-source or web-based, I highly recommend Todd Boyle's list of links - an excellent starting point.
And, of course I'm always trying to garner support for my own web-based accounting project, WebAccountant.
A copy of the official transcript of the interview, as released by the White House, is here. No mention of the "incident", though there are some good questions posed to the President and some answers worth reading.
Many of the questions posted so far ask you to discuss how the website and its upkeep influence the voters and the campaign. I'd like to you to discuss how having a website affects the candidate, his views, his methods, his public personality.
That's my main question, here are some points to ponder:
It seems that having a website as large and significant to the campaign as Gore's or most of the others would tend to force them to be more responsible, to be held more accountable for each and every utterance. In a world where disinformation and twisting of facts is commonplace in the popular media, how does a website like yours influence the candidates` ability to take advantage of this?
Are Gore or any of the others more or less likely to refer back to their campaign managers and website before making statements about policy and moral issues? Or is it just as easy to perform an "about face" because the website can be updated just as quickly? Can campaigners now say "please see the FOO section of my website" instead of answering questions about specific issues?
As one of my former classmates has already commented, "I was in that class", and while it may be a dead project now and an uncompleted one in general, it was still pretty interesting, and a pretty cool thing to do for credit in a college course.
You can read about some of the other neat stuff that was done (or at least started) in the course on the course homepage.
In general, you should check out the Computer Science program at Earlham College if you're looking for a great, open-minded, small liberal arts school to study CS and all the related topics at an undergraduate level.
Slashdot Mirror
We started out on total flex time, which basically meant that we both worked whenever we could, but with no particular stipulation about the hours. This worked out pretty well because A) it was just the two of us and B) there was a lot of work to be done that we both had a personal investment in. Sometimes we would fall into these cycles where one week, every day would be 9-6ish, the next week would be 11-8ish, the next week would be 1(PM) to 10ish, and so on - sometimes we went all the way around the clock back to 9-6!
As we got more clients and had to do more client interaction, we found it wasn't feasible to make come in the office at 1 PM and expect to be able to make all the needed calls, run all the needed errands, etc. before other businesses closed, and still be professional about it. So we set some loosely defined hours of 9ish to 5ish that we both pretty much followed. That was also a happy time.
We recently hired an employee, and that changes everything. Unless employees are extremely self directed and have a significant investment in what they're doing, I think the need to have someone around to answer questions and provide some guidance when appropriate. It wouldn't work at all to have a 3 (or 4, or 5, or more) person company where everyone comes in at their leisure and just hopes that the tasks that require 2 or more people to be present at one time would get done. So now we have pretty standard 9-5 hours, with a policy that it's fine if you're out of the office for a while or if you want to vary those hours, just make sure to give some notice, and make sure to make up any lost time somehow.
I agree with other posters that the hours should depend on what kind of company it is, what kind of people are working there, and what the needs for interaction with the outside world require.
I wrote him an e-mail asking him to come, and he wrote me an e-mail back saying "Okay." After negotiating the costs of airfare and doing a little publicity, things were all set.
A month or so later, there I am, with Eric Raymond sitting in my passenger seat on the way back from the airport, an unfinished "Halloween Document" in his bag and lots of good stories to tell.
We hung out, had dinner, he slept in a guestroom at a prof's house, and the next day, there he was speaking to a group of folks interested in open source in some way or another.
It was a surprisingly straightforward visit to organize. I attribute this in part to ESR's flexibility and adaptability, and in part to the notion that people who have something interesting to say and people who want to hear something interesting will find each other pretty well on their own.
Hey, look, the Apache website server status says they're serving 17 hits per second. That's around 1.4 million per day. Looks pretty fast. Looks like they're running Apache. Hmmmm.
I do concede that questions of legal free speech require a complex process to resolve them, and that the process can be expensive. But just as alleged criminals are theoretically presumed innocent until proven guilty, potential violators of free speech law who are acting in good conscience (i.e. what they're saying isn't, to them, clearly illegal) should have an opportunity to make their statements independent of whether or not they have the finacial backing to survive the legal process.
To me, this translates to "if you want to exercise your right to free speech, you have to be prepared to spend money to defend that right." I disagree that this should ever be the case, and think the notion that there needs to be any sort of safety net in place beyond the Bill of Rights (and that the saftey net should cost the individual citizen money on a per incident basis) is appalling.
If you're going to bother at all with the whole "right to free speech" rigamarole, you have to be prepared to go all the way.
World Unification Copyright Infringement Trade Act?
Well, U Can't Innovate Trade Act?
Okay, that was dumb, I'm sorry.
Even if they are contributing small amounts of code or insight or peer review or documentation, they are still benefitting themselves AND lots of others in the process.
There is such a wide variety of projects out there - just look at SourceForge and the like - that would allow students to make significant contributions to real-world projects while utilizing the principles and practice of good computer science. You would probably have to be the one enforcing that last part, but I can't emphasize enough the value of real-world experience as a complement to the AP/IEEE curriculum.
You would also have the advantage of having lots of infrastructure already set up - no need to worry about establishing project workspaces, titles, task assignments, etc...many projects will already have these in place.
Sigh.
My point was that if we recognize the government as having the ability and power to decide whether or not drugs should be legal, we are effectively giving up our freedom to decide for ourselves. Even if they happen to decide in our "favor" in one particular case or another, we still only gain a sort of pseudo-freedom that is still at the mercy of the decision makers whom we have empowered to take it away.
By banning drugs or publications about them, you coercively make a choice for all citizens about what is "right" for them.
By legalizing drugs or publications about them, you coercively make a choice for all citizens about what is "right" for them.
Politicians have no place making these decisions. Human beings are not all the same. We don't all live in the same house, community, or world. I assure you that 90% of the world's problems exist because we have decision makers who are empowered to make decisions for EVERYONE about how to live.
More on my thoughts about drugs and alcohol.
C'mon, be funny AND insightful! :)
I run a web hosting firm that currently does only virtual domains, but is looking at starting to offer co-location services. We're trying to figure out how much headache/cost is associated with each "level" of service: UPS backups, 24/7 support, multiple net connections, sysadminning, etc.
For those of you who already offer co-location services, what's reasonable to offer your customers who want an "average" (i.e. not ridiculously expensive) co-location experience?
I maintain an anti-spam HOWTO that discusses some of the general issues of spam policies and prevention; it might be useful for this discussion. (Note that it was originally written for folks who use qmail, but much of it is relevant on a mailer-independent basis.)
This AP Wire News story stupidly reports that the "Area 51 site is not responding". I'm not sure when it became news that a website is slow, but it sure seems kinda ironic that one news organization (AP) is reporting on the effect created by another news organization (Slashdot).
Surely it would be something you could turn on and off like Java or Javascript or cookies. You could specify how many levels down the "pingbot" should go, e.g. "stay in this domain" or "only go to the top level of other sites" or "don't visit CGI scripts", etc.
Considering how little bandwidth a ping takes, and how willing people have become to let Napster sends bursts of them in the name of pirating music, I'm pretty sure it would be feasible.
Even if browsers didn't do it, it would be neat if search engine sites did. On most of them, you're only looking at about 10 results at a time, so it would be cool if they would return an "availability code" with each result in exchange for slightly slower search time. I'd rather their bot "click" on the potential results instead of me.
Admittedly, there's something to be said for simplicity. But I really like knowing that I can log onto Napster and look at files that are there *now*. If I could do this with the web, it's increasing lack of integrity wouldn't be such a problem.
Okay, I think this conversation should probably only continue with someone who knows something about building browsers...
Imagine, for example, a browser that, while a given page is loading, goes out and pings the pages that are linked to, checks their existence and the time it takes to get to them, and displays this information when you roll over the link. Suddenly, a user's experience of the "web" becomes much more reliable: they follow the links that they know to exist and be available at that moment, instead of floundering around hitting pages that went away a long time ago.
Napster's success has been largely because of the reliability (and therefore time-saving) that it promises someone looking for a given resource. That's also why it's being extended to include additional media times. It would be great if we could build this reliability into existing technology.
What if it went off while you were on a date?
What more do you want? It appears Jeff called Tim out of the blue in a coffee shop or something, and the next day Tim posts as much as he can remember about the conversation on a website, asking the community to join the conversation. Short of putting his cell phone on virtual speakerphone, I think he's doing everything but work behind closed doors.
And, of course I'm always trying to garner support for my own web-based accounting project, WebAccountant.
A copy of the official transcript of the interview, as released by the White House, is here. No mention of the "incident", though there are some good questions posed to the President and some answers worth reading.
That's my main question, here are some points to ponder:
It seems that having a website as large and significant to the campaign as Gore's or most of the others would tend to force them to be more responsible, to be held more accountable for each and every utterance. In a world where disinformation and twisting of facts is commonplace in the popular media, how does a website like yours influence the candidates` ability to take advantage of this?
Are Gore or any of the others more or less likely to refer back to their campaign managers and website before making statements about policy and moral issues? Or is it just as easy to perform an "about face" because the website can be updated just as quickly? Can campaigners now say "please see the FOO section of my website" instead of answering questions about specific issues?
You can read about some of the other neat stuff that was done (or at least started) in the course on the course homepage.
In general, you should check out the Computer Science program at Earlham College if you're looking for a great, open-minded, small liberal arts school to study CS and all the related topics at an undergraduate level.