First off, a virtual meeting space is only productive if there's a product or service that the participants are actually working on (or in the early collaboration stage). Second, you definately need to investigate this method versus face to face meetings - especially if the participants are not in the same city. Third, you need more than hardware to solve your problem.
My company was recently introduced to this solution: iPrisimGlobal. It't has a host of solutions that only require users and their net connections. The company will also work with you and your collaborators on bringing your products to market. The pricing is competitive and they provide an entire collaborative suite (shared documents, cad drawings, flash, commenting, live meetings, VoIP, etc). While my company hasn't had a need for this yet, I think it would work quite well with the right motivated people.
I second this. If you are going to charge someone have some waiver set up for them to sign before you do any work. Let them know what will be expected of you and your work but of the limits beyond that. This is easy when offering hardware changes but not as easy for spyware/viruses/software issues.
I typically do tech support for friends, neighbors and family for free (or wine or dinner). Once I had a neighbor refer me to his son who wanted me to set up his new house for an 8 PC home network. I dislike the son with a passion so I charged him $120/hr for the work thinking I'd expect to pay this for similar work. (My cable company charges this for setting up a PC on a cable modem - regardless of time used.) The son was still interested so I went ahead and did the work. Pro - easy money. Con - it's taxable income and you should report it. (I'm to lazy for one client to set up an LLC. Although your bank should be able to withold the taxes on any deposits you make without your account being an LLC - at least my bank does.) I later informed the original neighbor that any referrals he gave out shoul not expect my work to be free (or honoraria).
In short, be sure your clients, free or otherwise, know what to expect.
Sorry bluelip but I think your WAY off base thinking that companies outsource to have more productive offices - via temperature. How about benefits, insurance and (the mother of all reasons) no payroll taxes. (At least the article didn't come to the same conclusion.)
I noted, albeit by skimming, that the reviews did not discuss any glaring changed between the originals and the new DVDs. I know everyone around here yaks that Han Solo and Guido shoot each other at the same time versus Han just shooting Guido in the original, but what other significant differences are there?
So many words, so little substance.
Many reasons why the campaign failed
on
Joe Trippi Interviewed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Having volunteered in Iowa for 10 months prior to caucus I watched the campaign rise and fall from the inside. Here's just a few points:
Bad data management. While you could easily see all the kids with their "coding skills", up-all-night work schedule, and Mountain Dew were writing and re-writing database structure to help target voters, someone with very good database experience was hard to find. As such, we were contacting some people numerous times and not contacting others at all.
Bad communication with supporters, would-be supporters and lay people. The campaign decided the best method to communicate with supporters was the blog. While it was nice for insider news, it was terrible at motivations, suggestions and direction. The television ads to get as many onto the idea of Dean as possible were TERRIBLE. I felt like I could have produced better ads. Also Dean wasn't exactly media-trained. He didn't realize the power of the media and didn't conduct himself the best while in interviews on TV.
The campaign peaked too early. Although this isn't something the campaign could really control at that point. For the media and the competition at some point the appeal of the guy on top is lost. Media over-scrutenizes and the competion attacks. (Let's see if this happens again in Kerry-Bush.)
Lot's of supporters, lack of direction. While this is related to my earlier point, it deserves a follow up. With an army of 650,000 the campaign may have been able to counter it's other problems. However they didn't know how to take all of the resources they had available to them and really make it work FOR the campaign.
Moore is definitely biased, but at least he admits his bias, and gives you his supporting evidence up front. Which is more than the Bush Administration has done vis-a-vis Iraq.
Everyone knows this film is biased but since when is that a bad thing? When you go see a Moore film you know the bias to expect. The same is true when you read the editorials in The Wall Street Journal. I would much rather learn news that was presented with a bias that involves some investigative reporting than to not learn something at all. The concept of investigative reporting has been flushed down the toilet in this country in favor for corporate earnings. ABC won't report on Disney looking to block distribution of the film as Disney owns ABC. Even if ABC does report on the story it's 95% a rehash of the Disney press release.
The point is, Americans need to encourage and seek out investigative reporting even, perhaps especially, if there's a bias. We also need to seek out information from more than once source and start coming to our own conclusions. Since it seems news organizations aren't doing it for us, we need to start doing it ourselves.
Underfunding of libraries is an understatement. Fees that journals charge to libraries are becoming rediculous to where only the largest of libraries can afford to have a rather complete collection. When you tack on computer access it gets even worse. To combat this even large libraries have cut back on the availability of on-line materials. With publishers being businesses there isn't anything to control costs till Universities and libaries say no. While costs are getting better the libraries have restricted access while the publishers get their act together and only leads to block access to the papers.
The problem with a/. like moderation system is having scientists in a non-field be able to comment on the article. I don't think the molecular biologists want the particle physicsists to down mod their articles because they just don't get it and vice versa. Papers that are submitted to scientific jornals, such as Nature, are pass along to those within the same field for peer review. Also, it's occasionally of interest to have papers passed along to those in your field, but NOT doing the same work. There's a lot of competition between labs these days and you don't want to make it too easy for your competition to be down modded.
This doesn't have any relavance on the real problem, which as you say, is information glut. There are too many crappy journals popping up and there are too many crappy papers being accepted by them (and even by the larger publishers). The end result needs to be that reviews are actually being CRITICAL analysis of the papers they read and responding accordingly. I don't think increasing the number of reviewers would help this as just increasing the number of viewers probably won't correlate to a better analysis of the work.
I think it would be interesting if TV tune out week was right before the November elections... People would have to (gasp!) find other sources of information!
I second the comment of an AIW card not being all it's cracked up to be. I bought an AIW card to turn my computer into a TiVo and had problems with it from day one. Yes, it's a great card. Yes, it can do everything but not with efficency. I have a good system (P4, 2.8) and had problems doing other work while a program was recording. It would drop frames or the audio wouldn't synch right. The remote wonder control often canceled my recording when watching the beginning already in progress. In the end, if you just want to record your favorite TV shows a TiVo is a better deal and with FAR less hassle. The AIW card is now for sale on Ebay...
I was just perusing the NYTimes site and their article about the Gates Foundation donating $100 million towards India's plight of AIDS. This is the largest ever sum donated by the foundation. Then I stop by/. and read this.
Many scientists are the corporate powers who hoarde the innovations. Often when one comes up with a good idea they publish, claim a conflict of interest and get out of the Universities.
Check the other paragraph as well, Terming the U.S. ban as a violation of human rights, he stated that everyone had the right to transmit their particular characteristics to their progeny, or to use cloning to reduce infertility.
I don't see how a ban on cloning is a violation of human rights. It seems closer to be the opposite way around.
I'll also point out that none of the information in the article has been independently varified, peer-reviewed or published and thus should be taken with a grain (or a kilo!) of salt.
So let's say they do go open source which is a great idea and I'm all for the concept. I think that page costs would go up for researchers submitting work. This comes from grant money and some tax dollers depending on the researcher. This might increase the grant request of a researcher and could reduce the number of grants an organization gives out. Web published journals are likely to lack a critical peer review. There are plenty of crappy papers (in a scientific content sense) that get published with peer review anyway. It's probably the most important aspect of the scientific process. It also isn't as if the information published in scientific journals is hard to get, just go to a library at a University. Besides, how much of a demand is there for copyright free scientific publications are there? I know that people get irritated about the concept of copyright free material that they should have a right to see since it's likely that their tax dollars helped pay for it. I completely understand where that logic is, and I actually agree with it. However, can we really afford to belittle the scientific process to provide publications that people aren't going to read anyway? Chances are is that the people who read the articles have relitively easy access to them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, a virtual meeting space is only productive if there's a product or service that the participants are actually working on (or in the early collaboration stage). Second, you definately need to investigate this method versus face to face meetings - especially if the participants are not in the same city. Third, you need more than hardware to solve your problem.
My company was recently introduced to this solution: iPrisimGlobal. It't has a host of solutions that only require users and their net connections. The company will also work with you and your collaborators on bringing your products to market. The pricing is competitive and they provide an entire collaborative suite (shared documents, cad drawings, flash, commenting, live meetings, VoIP, etc). While my company hasn't had a need for this yet, I think it would work quite well with the right motivated people.
I second this. If you are going to charge someone have some waiver set up for them to sign before you do any work. Let them know what will be expected of you and your work but of the limits beyond that. This is easy when offering hardware changes but not as easy for spyware/viruses/software issues.
I typically do tech support for friends, neighbors and family for free (or wine or dinner). Once I had a neighbor refer me to his son who wanted me to set up his new house for an 8 PC home network. I dislike the son with a passion so I charged him $120/hr for the work thinking I'd expect to pay this for similar work. (My cable company charges this for setting up a PC on a cable modem - regardless of time used.) The son was still interested so I went ahead and did the work. Pro - easy money. Con - it's taxable income and you should report it. (I'm to lazy for one client to set up an LLC. Although your bank should be able to withold the taxes on any deposits you make without your account being an LLC - at least my bank does.) I later informed the original neighbor that any referrals he gave out shoul not expect my work to be free (or honoraria).
In short, be sure your clients, free or otherwise, know what to expect.
Sorry bluelip but I think your WAY off base thinking that companies outsource to have more productive offices - via temperature. How about benefits, insurance and (the mother of all reasons) no payroll taxes. (At least the article didn't come to the same conclusion.)
I noted, albeit by skimming, that the reviews did not discuss any glaring changed between the originals and the new DVDs. I know everyone around here yaks that Han Solo and Guido shoot each other at the same time versus Han just shooting Guido in the original, but what other significant differences are there?
So many words, so little substance.
Having volunteered in Iowa for 10 months prior to caucus I watched the campaign rise and fall from the inside. Here's just a few points:
Bad data management. While you could easily see all the kids with their "coding skills", up-all-night work schedule, and Mountain Dew were writing and re-writing database structure to help target voters, someone with very good database experience was hard to find. As such, we were contacting some people numerous times and not contacting others at all.
Bad communication with supporters, would-be supporters and lay people. The campaign decided the best method to communicate with supporters was the blog. While it was nice for insider news, it was terrible at motivations, suggestions and direction. The television ads to get as many onto the idea of Dean as possible were TERRIBLE. I felt like I could have produced better ads. Also Dean wasn't exactly media-trained. He didn't realize the power of the media and didn't conduct himself the best while in interviews on TV.
The campaign peaked too early. Although this isn't something the campaign could really control at that point. For the media and the competition at some point the appeal of the guy on top is lost. Media over-scrutenizes and the competion attacks. (Let's see if this happens again in Kerry-Bush.)
Lot's of supporters, lack of direction. While this is related to my earlier point, it deserves a follow up. With an army of 650,000 the campaign may have been able to counter it's other problems. However they didn't know how to take all of the resources they had available to them and really make it work FOR the campaign.
Moore is definitely biased, but at least he admits his bias, and gives you his supporting evidence up front. Which is more than the Bush Administration has done vis-a-vis Iraq.
Everyone knows this film is biased but since when is that a bad thing? When you go see a Moore film you know the bias to expect. The same is true when you read the editorials in The Wall Street Journal. I would much rather learn news that was presented with a bias that involves some investigative reporting than to not learn something at all. The concept of investigative reporting has been flushed down the toilet in this country in favor for corporate earnings. ABC won't report on Disney looking to block distribution of the film as Disney owns ABC. Even if ABC does report on the story it's 95% a rehash of the Disney press release.
The point is, Americans need to encourage and seek out investigative reporting even, perhaps especially, if there's a bias. We also need to seek out information from more than once source and start coming to our own conclusions. Since it seems news organizations aren't doing it for us, we need to start doing it ourselves.
Underfunding of libraries is an understatement. Fees that journals charge to libraries are becoming rediculous to where only the largest of libraries can afford to have a rather complete collection. When you tack on computer access it gets even worse. To combat this even large libraries have cut back on the availability of on-line materials. With publishers being businesses there isn't anything to control costs till Universities and libaries say no. While costs are getting better the libraries have restricted access while the publishers get their act together and only leads to block access to the papers.
The problem with a /. like moderation system is having scientists in a non-field be able to comment on the article. I don't think the molecular biologists want the particle physicsists to down mod their articles because they just don't get it and vice versa. Papers that are submitted to scientific jornals, such as Nature, are pass along to those within the same field for peer review. Also, it's occasionally of interest to have papers passed along to those in your field, but NOT doing the same work. There's a lot of competition between labs these days and you don't want to make it too easy for your competition to be down modded.
This doesn't have any relavance on the real problem, which as you say, is information glut. There are too many crappy journals popping up and there are too many crappy papers being accepted by them (and even by the larger publishers). The end result needs to be that reviews are actually being CRITICAL analysis of the papers they read and responding accordingly. I don't think increasing the number of reviewers would help this as just increasing the number of viewers probably won't correlate to a better analysis of the work.
I think it would be interesting if TV tune out week was right before the November elections... People would have to (gasp!) find other sources of information!
I second the comment of an AIW card not being all it's cracked up to be. I bought an AIW card to turn my computer into a TiVo and had problems with it from day one. Yes, it's a great card. Yes, it can do everything but not with efficency. I have a good system (P4, 2.8) and had problems doing other work while a program was recording. It would drop frames or the audio wouldn't synch right. The remote wonder control often canceled my recording when watching the beginning already in progress. In the end, if you just want to record your favorite TV shows a TiVo is a better deal and with FAR less hassle. The AIW card is now for sale on Ebay...
I was just perusing the NYTimes site and their article about the Gates Foundation donating $100 million towards India's plight of AIDS. This is the largest ever sum donated by the foundation. Then I stop by /. and read this.
Scary I tell you.
Many scientists are the corporate powers who hoarde the innovations. Often when one comes up with a good idea they publish, claim a conflict of interest and get out of the Universities.
Check the other paragraph as well,
Terming the U.S. ban as a violation of human rights, he stated that everyone had the right to transmit their particular characteristics to their progeny, or to use cloning to reduce infertility.
I don't see how a ban on cloning is a violation of human rights. It seems closer to be the opposite way around.
I'll also point out that none of the information in the article has been independently varified, peer-reviewed or published and thus should be taken with a grain (or a kilo!) of salt.
So let's say they do go open source which is a great idea and I'm all for the concept. I think that page costs would go up for researchers submitting work. This comes from grant money and some tax dollers depending on the researcher. This might increase the grant request of a researcher and could reduce the number of grants an organization gives out. Web published journals are likely to lack a critical peer review. There are plenty of crappy papers (in a scientific content sense) that get published with peer review anyway. It's probably the most important aspect of the scientific process. It also isn't as if the information published in scientific journals is hard to get, just go to a library at a University. Besides, how much of a demand is there for copyright free scientific publications are there? I know that people get irritated about the concept of copyright free material that they should have a right to see since it's likely that their tax dollars helped pay for it. I completely understand where that logic is, and I actually agree with it. However, can we really afford to belittle the scientific process to provide publications that people aren't going to read anyway? Chances are is that the people who read the articles have relitively easy access to them anyway.