If I could ask one question about every single post on Slashdot, it would be "Why does this story matter to me, a geek?" If it could possibly impact me, or if it is a good or amusing story, I read it.
It's relevant because it was an IPO many geeks were invited to particpate in. It's relevant because a lot of geeks are in a position that they weren't 20 years ago - participating in the dubious joys of modern capitalism. That sounds penty relevant for me.
The only reputation Dell has in my neck of the woods is shipping my company with a bunch of servers with a >100% failure rate (originals plus replacements), including DOA systems, and one with a PCI card floating loose inside the server.
Further, they obviously hadn't even been following their own proceedures, since the assembly stickers showed they were all either uninspected or had been inspected by the assembler.
Re:Starting your own successful company is difficu
on
Sizing Up a Start-Up
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· Score: 1
A few of my own observations:
Take the risk when you can afford to do so. Getting a mortgage is not the thing to do before joining a startup.
Find one that does something you're interested in. At least it's fun.
Listen to whether the management are on crack. If they want you to work 100 hours per week for stock options in a company that believes market share is all that matters, don't go. If they believe in having you work reasonable hours for a market salary and options in a company that believes that making a profit is good, go for it.
That's my experience. If you plan on building a company that follows orthodox business rules, you have a good change of succeeding.
The.com I joined has been in a stage of positive cashflow since it started operating (a month before I joined). Just because a company is a.com doesn't mean the business plan is on crack.
That's pretty much my take; my cable provider in New Zealand (I'm stuck in the backward hellhole of the.uk at the moment) will hook me up to a metered ISP or a flat rate one. I took the metered. They give me a static IP and basically have no restrictions on what I do - after all, if I were to run a popular server or gnaptser, I'd just make them richer - they're incented to give me as much connectivity at as high a quality as I can pay for.
The nz comp newsgroups, OTOH, are full of morons whining about the flat rate service with its huge range of restrictions and poor performance - and I call them morons because they seem unable to grasp that a flat rate incents a provider to provide as little as they can get away with - of course they're going to place restrictions on servers, total usage, etc, etc.
Ahh, you mean 'standard' as in 'complete load of crap formulated by people who know nothing about the history or usage of English in particular, or anything about linguistics in general'.
Of course, you could attempt to learn about contemporary evolutionary theory from a creationist tract, too. It would be about as good an idea. Maybe better.
While many greedy, stupid people have attempted to assert all manner of stupid things derived from Smith's premises (Ayn Rand and the Boston School of Economics being prime offenders), it's worth noting Smith never believed in the kind of nonsense being spouted earlier in the thread. Smith himself concieved of capitalism as a useful tool to advance society, and was well aware of the problems uninhibited capitalism could cause, which led to him to write one The Moral Problems of Capitalism - fans of Rand would do well to read the father of modern capitalism on how uninhibited capitalism will destroy itself and the society it is foisted upon.
every spoken English variety known people say sentences which end in prepositions, and use double negatives, still the standard forbids this.
Neither double negatives or ending in prepositions have ever, ever, ever been forbidden in standard English. Read Shakespeare, Churchill, Fowlers, and the OED. The only people who assert this are those who don't have a fucking clue what they are on about.
Double negatives have been a part of good English going back to the founding of the language; there are extant examples of Old and Middle English use of double negatives in scholarly writing of the time. The notion that split infinitives, double negatives, and ending with prepositions shouldn't be part of English is the creation of a group of people trying to engineer English to be more like Latin in the Enlightenment era. it is a complete load of bullshit, sadly perpetuated by those who know enough to be dangerous, not informative.
The TOEFL test tests WRITTEN english skills, not one'a ability to pronounce it so that native speakers of the language can understand.
Which native speakers? Lazy North America listeners who need Taggert subtitles because stretching to understand a native English speaker with a Glasgwegian accent is too hard? Hell, I've known people from the States who've had to lose an accent or dialect because other people in their own country are bigoted towards people with say, Texan, Georgian, or other accents.
For that matter, English is one of the official languages of India; many Indians grow up learning English as a native language.
Although I don't like all of his tactics, I wouldn't be typing this on a Mac if Jobs hadn't been using them.
Whereas I won't be typing on a Mac because Apple chose to employ them. I was lining up a Mac laptop for my next work PC, but I don't think I'll bother...
Yeah, right. I worked in the print media, too. And I've watched technology publications whore themselves out to the highest bidder. The company I work for was approached in the last few months by a supposedly reputable tech rag; the salesweasel flat out told the General Manager than editorial column inches on us were entirely dependant on buying an ad - the bigger the ad, the more column inches.
The seperation is generally considered cleaner in more mainstream publications, but there are well-known examples of so-called respectable publishers selling themselves to the highest bidder.
It's a big conspiracy all right - to make the ia32 architectures on the market more gratuitiously incompatible with one another. This was Intel can nobble AMD and VIA some by forcing suppliers to choose between desinging systems suitable for VIA and AMD kit, or Intel. VIA and AMD then either have to convince manufacturers to keep two product lines going, or drop a bundle on redesigning their product lines.
Perfect monopoly behaviour, and a great way of hitting the second-sourcing market.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Please no-one try this unless you are completely sure you can pull it off, I have visions of hundreds of wrecked palms from people try to do this.
And if the OC craze is anything to go by, they'll go around whining about it.
Don't get me wrong; hardware hacking is fun, and clueful hardware hackers can do way cool stuff, but I get sick of people complaining that a product line is unreliable (because they keep OCing components until they fail), or who turn up on mailing lists complaining about hardware bugs (and then let slip that they're running heavily - 1.5-2x normal - OCed components, and whine that OCing can't be the problem). Too many people, IMO, are delving into stuff they don't really understand, and then bleating when they wind up with broken stuff.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
We had this discussion at work recently, WTR LoTR; one of my workmates wanted to know why Peter Jackson is building real, huge sets up and down the country for filming, and not just use CGI. The answers are simple: CGI doesn't look as good and it costs a whole lot more.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Slashdot Mirror
It's relevant because it was an IPO many geeks were invited to particpate in. It's relevant because a lot of geeks are in a position that they weren't 20 years ago - participating in the dubious joys of modern capitalism. That sounds penty relevant for me.
The only reputation Dell has in my neck of the woods is shipping my company with a bunch of servers with a >100% failure rate (originals plus replacements), including DOA systems, and one with a PCI card floating loose inside the server.
Further, they obviously hadn't even been following their own proceedures, since the assembly stickers showed they were all either uninspected or had been inspected by the assembler.
A few of my own observations:
That's my experience. If you plan on building a company that follows orthodox business rules, you have a good change of succeeding.
The .com I joined has been in a stage of positive cashflow since it started operating (a month before I joined). Just because a company is a .com doesn't mean the business plan is on crack.
That's pretty much my take; my cable provider in New Zealand (I'm stuck in the backward hellhole of the .uk at the moment) will hook me up to a metered ISP or a flat rate one. I took the metered. They give me a static IP and basically have no restrictions on what I do - after all, if I were to run a popular server or gnaptser, I'd just make them richer - they're incented to give me as much connectivity at as high a quality as I can pay for.
The nz comp newsgroups, OTOH, are full of morons whining about the flat rate service with its huge range of restrictions and poor performance - and I call them morons because they seem unable to grasp that a flat rate incents a provider to provide as little as they can get away with - of course they're going to place restrictions on servers, total usage, etc, etc.
Ahh, the delicious irony. Microsoft's vapourware campaign is doing unto the PS2 what Sony has done unto the Dreamcast.
Use the 7.0 Powertools CD - it has a large chunk of the common CPAN goodies in RPM form.
Ahh, you mean 'standard' as in 'complete load of crap formulated by people who know nothing about the history or usage of English in particular, or anything about linguistics in general'.
Of course, you could attempt to learn about contemporary evolutionary theory from a creationist tract, too. It would be about as good an idea. Maybe better.
I'm not quite sure what your point is, in terms of relevance to the issue at hand...
One of life's little ironies. A city full of people who fancy themselves amongst the hardest in the world, and they produce so many actors.
Personally, I find Scots accents easier to parse the further north I go.
While many greedy, stupid people have attempted to assert all manner of stupid things derived from Smith's premises (Ayn Rand and the Boston School of Economics being prime offenders), it's worth noting Smith never believed in the kind of nonsense being spouted earlier in the thread. Smith himself concieved of capitalism as a useful tool to advance society, and was well aware of the problems uninhibited capitalism could cause, which led to him to write one The Moral Problems of Capitalism - fans of Rand would do well to read the father of modern capitalism on how uninhibited capitalism will destroy itself and the society it is foisted upon.
Neither double negatives or ending in prepositions have ever, ever, ever been forbidden in standard English. Read Shakespeare, Churchill, Fowlers, and the OED. The only people who assert this are those who don't have a fucking clue what they are on about.
Double negatives have been a part of good English going back to the founding of the language; there are extant examples of Old and Middle English use of double negatives in scholarly writing of the time. The notion that split infinitives, double negatives, and ending with prepositions shouldn't be part of English is the creation of a group of people trying to engineer English to be more like Latin in the Enlightenment era. it is a complete load of bullshit, sadly perpetuated by those who know enough to be dangerous, not informative.
Which native speakers? Lazy North America listeners who need Taggert subtitles because stretching to understand a native English speaker with a Glasgwegian accent is too hard? Hell, I've known people from the States who've had to lose an accent or dialect because other people in their own country are bigoted towards people with say, Texan, Georgian, or other accents.
For that matter, English is one of the official languages of India; many Indians grow up learning English as a native language.
Of course, they'd never do anything like run an astroturf campaign.
Why would I be using a Microsoft operating system?
And I'll see whether it's an Intel or AMD chip. Heck, I might even scrape up enough budget for an Alpha.
Any of those choices are the lessr of evils...
Whereas I won't be typing on a Mac because Apple chose to employ them. I was lining up a Mac laptop for my next work PC, but I don't think I'll bother...
The small sites are the easiest to break. Apple aren't going to go after the big boys, who might hit back even harder than Apple can.
Yeah, right. I worked in the print media, too. And I've watched technology publications whore themselves out to the highest bidder. The company I work for was approached in the last few months by a supposedly reputable tech rag; the salesweasel flat out told the General Manager than editorial column inches on us were entirely dependant on buying an ad - the bigger the ad, the more column inches.
The seperation is generally considered cleaner in more mainstream publications, but there are well-known examples of so-called respectable publishers selling themselves to the highest bidder.
Which nightly news? The one owned by Waner Brothers? The one owned by Microsoft?
Like the nightly news programs are going to run a story their owners want killed.
It's a big conspiracy all right - to make the ia32 architectures on the market more gratuitiously incompatible with one another. This was Intel can nobble AMD and VIA some by forcing suppliers to choose between desinging systems suitable for VIA and AMD kit, or Intel. VIA and AMD then either have to convince manufacturers to keep two product lines going, or drop a bundle on redesigning their product lines.
Perfect monopoly behaviour, and a great way of hitting the second-sourcing market.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
And if the OC craze is anything to go by, they'll go around whining about it.
Don't get me wrong; hardware hacking is fun, and clueful hardware hackers can do way cool stuff, but I get sick of people complaining that a product line is unreliable (because they keep OCing components until they fail), or who turn up on mailing lists complaining about hardware bugs (and then let slip that they're running heavily - 1.5-2x normal - OCed components, and whine that OCing can't be the problem). Too many people, IMO, are delving into stuff they don't really understand, and then bleating when they wind up with broken stuff.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Like that's a secure approach.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
From my experience of being slashdotted, there are plenty of script kiddies who turn up with DOSes around the same time legit visitors do.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
We had this discussion at work recently, WTR LoTR; one of my workmates wanted to know why Peter Jackson is building real, huge sets up and down the country for filming, and not just use CGI. The answers are simple: CGI doesn't look as good and it costs a whole lot more.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Is that it will soon be buried in lawsuits. Which is a shame, because it's a brilliant initiative.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!