Trains are fine if you happen to be near one that is going to where you want to go. Otherwise taking the train adds a lot of travel time, even in areas with a dense network of them. And sometimes they are overcrowded and/or inhabited with inconsiderate asshats.
This tunnel idea is cute and the lifts are a nice solution to the problem of on/off ramps that require a huge footprint. The lifts don't allow a large volume of traffic though, even if they only take a few seconds to cycle (all existing car lifts I have seen are slooooow). And in an urban environment you're going to have to dig deep.
That's a sensible policy that reflects mutual trust and respect. And it can work in larger organisations too, where I have worked as a contractor billing by the hour. I interviewed for what were essentially full time positions at large corporations, where I disclosed that every now and then I might have to do a bit of work for a couple of previous clients. They were ok with that, as long as they were notified up front when this happened, with the understanding that it wouldn't interfere with my work and that they would come first, and that of course I would bill the right hours. In one of those companies there were a few employees working under a similar arrangement, HR had no problem with that as long as they were aware, and let the line manager handle the day to day stuff.
Maybe not a useful book on starting a business, but this certainly was one of the most often used books in my collection. Still got a well-worn copy with my dad's annotations in it, sitting on a shelf somewhere. Ah, the days when my electronics projects weren't Arduino + some stuff and software, but all hardware: just a bunch of gates and some special purpose chips. Thanks for bringing up some good memories.
Collections of cautionary tales like that one make excellent books on starting a business. Knowing what not to do is probably the best thing you are going to glean from any book on startups. Don't read stuff like "7 Habits of highly effective people", instead read "10 Amazing ways we continue to f*ck up our careers" (I made that one up).
And speaking of books that focus on successful persons: don't bother. Apple wasn't successful because Steve decided to only wear black turtlenecks. Oracle didn't become the powerhouse it is today because Larry got up at arse o' clock every day and ran 14 furlongs before breakfast. And you're not going to replicate their success by emulating them. Some self-help books can help you become more effective as a person, especially in terms of better managing your time, but they are not going to help super-charge your startup.
There are a few other useful books focusing on success rather than failure, like some already mentioned in this thread. Another one is "Crossing the chasm"; this deals mostly with marketing but has some useful examples in it. By all means read all that stuff, but don't expect it to greatly improve business or even your odds, and certainly don't expect a roadmap towards starting your own business. Look for tips, inspiration, little nuggets of wisdom, useful lessons learned. And that's my advice for reading any book on business, management, or self-improvement.
Nice. But to be fair, the bill seems to be about declaring the landing site a national park, not actually building something there. That article even mentions that only the artifacts would be declared as such, which makes more sense as the moon is not US territory.
That's a good method; unlike simply overestimating the task, it allows you to build in some contingency while still start out with a planning that follows the most optimistic path. Hope for the best and plan for the best. Because another truism of software development is that any overestimated task will stretch to fill the allotted time.
Replying to undo an incorrect (-1) moderation. I'm surprised this got modded down by the way, at the very least this is "interesting".
I do think that a good CEO is worth millions, and it is also good if part of that reward comes in the form of shares or options so that they are personally vested in the fate of the company. What I do object to is execs raking in substantial sums when they are fired, even for doing a shit job. And I don't see why they should sometimes receive staggering sums for successfully completing a merger or takeover (after all that's all in their day's work). But that is just my personal view.
Not just that, the data from radar or lidar is rather different from visual information. But if they are going to train cars just on what they can see with a single cam, I have a way more fertile training ground for self driving cars: Russian dash cam vids on Youtube. Endless dangerous situations and vehicular asshattery to hone AI driver skills on.
Only if he actually wrote down the purchase history. At a glance there is no difference between remembering such data and storing it on paper or electronically, but in practice there's a reasonable limit on what a clerk can remember... and shoppers would be suitably freaked out by a clerk who has perfect recall of each customer's history; it's probably not going to be a big selling point for the store. Another difference is that the clerk's memory cannot be mined or stolen.
But I am sure some legal eagle can come up with a much better demarcation. No need to quibble over semantics.
Time for a complete ban on collecting information about minors and targeting them with marketing, a complete across the board ban.
How about it's time for a complete ban on collecting information about anyone without consent. Make it opt-in. If targeted ads are better and really lead to "an enriched and engaging experience that customers will enjoy interacting with", as all privacy-averse marketing drones claim, then people will opt-in en masse in order not to be stuck with the boring old untargeted ads.
I don't know the particulars of applicable US law, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to be punished for knowingly spreading classified materials. If you don't have a security clearance, didn't sign an NDA, and wasn't sworn to secrecy, there's probably still some articles that apply. A quick google turns up 18 U.S. Code 798
That's one of the nice things about Kickstarter: you can pitch your idea and gauge the market before spending or raising a dime, but those who say they'll buy it if you build it will have to put their money where their mouth is. And apparently thousands of backers did think having a lot of cards was a problem worth solving. Ages ago I too had a thought that it would be nice if I could clone all my cards onto a single one, but over here things have been moved to chip & pin for years now.
It's not always the unknowns and setbacks in turning new hardware into a product that trip up these projects, often it simply comes down to inexperience with the process. Time, effort and cost to go to manufacturing are underestimated, and sometimes entire steps are missed. "It costs how much to have an injection mould made?". "Oh right, we need FCC, EC and GOST certification to sell in these markets... how do we get these?" Even making a simple product like the Plinth turned out to be a struggle (the guy posted every single bit of progress (or setback) back when this was a kickstarter project).
it's a bit difficult to move this data off to another service because you loose all data integration with other processes
And this is why, in general, tight integration across processes and functions can be a horrible,horrible liability as well as an asset (hello SAP). One where the downsides of lock-in and migration issues far outweigh the benefits of being integrated (hello Sharepoint). When there is a huge data migration effort involved in moving to the new environment, that's a hint that moving off the platform may well be even more painful.
The good ones from brands like Jura or Krups easily beat Keurig or Nespresso, especially if you use quality beans (which still comes out cheaper than the prepackaged cups), but they are not as good as manual espresso machines. I can taste the difference but a manual setup is too much trouble; I can barely manage a croissant and egg in the morning, so I'm not going to try being a barista, and I'll stick with the "good enough" automatic.
Automatic espresso machines are as easy to use and less wasteful: you only need to keep the water and bean reservoir topped up, and empty the coffee grounds bin every now and then. In terms of convenience, when you stumble down the stairs half asleep for a cuppa, all you need to do is push a button twice (once to wake up the machine and start the heater, once to have it brew a cup of coffee), same as the Keurig. Decent machines are not that expensive anymore, and the price per cup is hard to beat. (Currently on Nespresso until I get around to fixing my espresso machine...)
Not all last names derive from a profession or a location, some of them might have been nicknames. Over here there are some surnames that describe physical appearance or character: de Lange (the long one), Braafheid (goodness), den Dikkeboer (the fat farmer), de Kwaadsteniet ("a decent fellow"). Sometimes it's the name of a father, or lack thereof: Vaderloos (fatherless). Some are just weird, like Naaktgeboren (born naked) or Riool (sewer). In English I've come across Dangerman and Stranger. So why not Goodenough?
Besides standards, there are probably a lot of technical and economical issues to deal with if you take an incremental approach ("working towards"). Having factories up there for recycling old satellites isn't enough, you will also need to somehow bring those satellites to one of the factories (or bring the factory to the satellite), which isn't free. Now suppose we've gotten to the point where we're able to recycle some less complex components, like solar panels, radiators, etc. Now you can build and launch your satellites without those and have them added in an orbital factory. Even assuming this gives a benefit in launch costs and doesn't add costs due to more complex engineering or the transfer to the orbital factory, you'd still need to move the sat from the factory to its intended orbit. With all that, it sounds a hell of a lot simpler and cheaper to add a de-orbiting mechanism to each satellite.
Maybe it'll be viable if we could improve recycling and manufacturing to the point where we could build a satellite "containers" in orbit: a standardized structure, solar panels, wiring for power, plumbing for heat management, perhaps some shielding. These could be relatively large and weak since they never have to go through launch. Operators would then launch only the functional guts and plug them into a container of the right size once in orbit. Technical challenges aside, I'd like to know if this would at all make economic sense (would you save 90% of payload weight or 10% or what?)
Anyone here had one of those Digital Group machines? (not DEC)
My dad got one around '75 or so, I was in elementary school at the time. The thing came in boxes filled with PCBs and tubes of ICs, but not the fancy case shown on that website; my dad built one himself. Z80, loads of memory (I think 64k), and a twin fully automatic tape deck that functioned more or less like a floppy drive with a directory and a simple load command to get the program you wanted. An old teletype served as a printer. It must have cost a fortune, perhaps half a year's wages or so. I still remember him spending an evening winding the transformer torus.
That's the machine I learned to program on, first BASIC, then assembly. My dad made it a point to teach us first before letting us get our hands on that shiny new toy, about how a computer functions, CPU registers, memory, etc.
What I miss most about those days is the trade shows. Back then there was no such thing as a "computer store"; you got your gear by mail order, perhaps from another hobbyist running a little business out of his living room... or trade shows. Going to a trade show meant seeing all the cool new stuff for the first time, seeing hobbyists show off their homebrew creations, and perhaps coming away with a few new friends or goodies of your own.
Not available in the Netherlands. But it's not really a surprise, people have complained for ages about the selection on Netflix here compared to other countries.
It's not for everyone. I remember first seeing MST3K when our cable (in the Netherlands) offered the SciFi Channel for 6 months as a sort of trial, and I was watching with a friend when an episode came on. First thought was "What the hell...", half an hour later we were fans. When I was in the States for work for a few months, I faithfully recorded every episode that aired during that time. My brothers didn't get it at all though, and with the many people I've tried to introduce to the show it's been hit-and-miss: people who I thought might enjoy it hated it, and others unexepectedly loved it. Same for Rifftrax, of which my wife (thankfully) became a big fan as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you would be hardpressed to identify if a person was standing in the room
Unless they are wearing their tinfoil hat. Think about it...
Trains are fine if you happen to be near one that is going to where you want to go. Otherwise taking the train adds a lot of travel time, even in areas with a dense network of them. And sometimes they are overcrowded and/or inhabited with inconsiderate asshats.
This tunnel idea is cute and the lifts are a nice solution to the problem of on/off ramps that require a huge footprint. The lifts don't allow a large volume of traffic though, even if they only take a few seconds to cycle (all existing car lifts I have seen are slooooow). And in an urban environment you're going to have to dig deep.
That's a sensible policy that reflects mutual trust and respect. And it can work in larger organisations too, where I have worked as a contractor billing by the hour. I interviewed for what were essentially full time positions at large corporations, where I disclosed that every now and then I might have to do a bit of work for a couple of previous clients. They were ok with that, as long as they were notified up front when this happened, with the understanding that it wouldn't interfere with my work and that they would come first, and that of course I would bill the right hours. In one of those companies there were a few employees working under a similar arrangement, HR had no problem with that as long as they were aware, and let the line manager handle the day to day stuff.
Maybe not a useful book on starting a business, but this certainly was one of the most often used books in my collection. Still got a well-worn copy with my dad's annotations in it, sitting on a shelf somewhere. Ah, the days when my electronics projects weren't Arduino + some stuff and software, but all hardware: just a bunch of gates and some special purpose chips. Thanks for bringing up some good memories.
Collections of cautionary tales like that one make excellent books on starting a business. Knowing what not to do is probably the best thing you are going to glean from any book on startups. Don't read stuff like "7 Habits of highly effective people", instead read "10 Amazing ways we continue to f*ck up our careers" (I made that one up).
And speaking of books that focus on successful persons: don't bother. Apple wasn't successful because Steve decided to only wear black turtlenecks. Oracle didn't become the powerhouse it is today because Larry got up at arse o' clock every day and ran 14 furlongs before breakfast. And you're not going to replicate their success by emulating them. Some self-help books can help you become more effective as a person, especially in terms of better managing your time, but they are not going to help super-charge your startup.
There are a few other useful books focusing on success rather than failure, like some already mentioned in this thread. Another one is "Crossing the chasm"; this deals mostly with marketing but has some useful examples in it. By all means read all that stuff, but don't expect it to greatly improve business or even your odds, and certainly don't expect a roadmap towards starting your own business. Look for tips, inspiration, little nuggets of wisdom, useful lessons learned. And that's my advice for reading any book on business, management, or self-improvement.
Nice. But to be fair, the bill seems to be about declaring the landing site a national park, not actually building something there. That article even mentions that only the artifacts would be declared as such, which makes more sense as the moon is not US territory.
That's a good method; unlike simply overestimating the task, it allows you to build in some contingency while still start out with a planning that follows the most optimistic path. Hope for the best and plan for the best. Because another truism of software development is that any overestimated task will stretch to fill the allotted time.
Replying to undo an incorrect (-1) moderation. I'm surprised this got modded down by the way, at the very least this is "interesting".
I do think that a good CEO is worth millions, and it is also good if part of that reward comes in the form of shares or options so that they are personally vested in the fate of the company. What I do object to is execs raking in substantial sums when they are fired, even for doing a shit job. And I don't see why they should sometimes receive staggering sums for successfully completing a merger or takeover (after all that's all in their day's work). But that is just my personal view.
Only on leap days; I think they missed that.
More interesting, though harder to measure, would be the average level of intoxication while coding in each of these languages.
Not just that, the data from radar or lidar is rather different from visual information. But if they are going to train cars just on what they can see with a single cam, I have a way more fertile training ground for self driving cars: Russian dash cam vids on Youtube. Endless dangerous situations and vehicular asshattery to hone AI driver skills on.
Only if he actually wrote down the purchase history. At a glance there is no difference between remembering such data and storing it on paper or electronically, but in practice there's a reasonable limit on what a clerk can remember... and shoppers would be suitably freaked out by a clerk who has perfect recall of each customer's history; it's probably not going to be a big selling point for the store. Another difference is that the clerk's memory cannot be mined or stolen.
But I am sure some legal eagle can come up with a much better demarcation. No need to quibble over semantics.
Time for a complete ban on collecting information about minors and targeting them with marketing, a complete across the board ban.
How about it's time for a complete ban on collecting information about anyone without consent. Make it opt-in. If targeted ads are better and really lead to "an enriched and engaging experience that customers will enjoy interacting with", as all privacy-averse marketing drones claim, then people will opt-in en masse in order not to be stuck with the boring old untargeted ads.
I don't know the particulars of applicable US law, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to be punished for knowingly spreading classified materials. If you don't have a security clearance, didn't sign an NDA, and wasn't sworn to secrecy, there's probably still some articles that apply. A quick google turns up 18 U.S. Code 798
That's one of the nice things about Kickstarter: you can pitch your idea and gauge the market before spending or raising a dime, but those who say they'll buy it if you build it will have to put their money where their mouth is. And apparently thousands of backers did think having a lot of cards was a problem worth solving. Ages ago I too had a thought that it would be nice if I could clone all my cards onto a single one, but over here things have been moved to chip & pin for years now.
It's not always the unknowns and setbacks in turning new hardware into a product that trip up these projects, often it simply comes down to inexperience with the process. Time, effort and cost to go to manufacturing are underestimated, and sometimes entire steps are missed. "It costs how much to have an injection mould made?". "Oh right, we need FCC, EC and GOST certification to sell in these markets... how do we get these?" Even making a simple product like the Plinth turned out to be a struggle (the guy posted every single bit of progress (or setback) back when this was a kickstarter project).
That, or I'm praising / thanking the colleague for something.
it's a bit difficult to move this data off to another service because you loose all data integration with other processes
And this is why, in general, tight integration across processes and functions can be a horrible,horrible liability as well as an asset (hello SAP). One where the downsides of lock-in and migration issues far outweigh the benefits of being integrated (hello Sharepoint). When there is a huge data migration effort involved in moving to the new environment, that's a hint that moving off the platform may well be even more painful.
The good ones from brands like Jura or Krups easily beat Keurig or Nespresso, especially if you use quality beans (which still comes out cheaper than the prepackaged cups), but they are not as good as manual espresso machines. I can taste the difference but a manual setup is too much trouble; I can barely manage a croissant and egg in the morning, so I'm not going to try being a barista, and I'll stick with the "good enough" automatic.
Automatic espresso machines are as easy to use and less wasteful: you only need to keep the water and bean reservoir topped up, and empty the coffee grounds bin every now and then. In terms of convenience, when you stumble down the stairs half asleep for a cuppa, all you need to do is push a button twice (once to wake up the machine and start the heater, once to have it brew a cup of coffee), same as the Keurig. Decent machines are not that expensive anymore, and the price per cup is hard to beat. (Currently on Nespresso until I get around to fixing my espresso machine...)
Not all last names derive from a profession or a location, some of them might have been nicknames. Over here there are some surnames that describe physical appearance or character: de Lange (the long one), Braafheid (goodness), den Dikkeboer (the fat farmer), de Kwaadsteniet ("a decent fellow"). Sometimes it's the name of a father, or lack thereof: Vaderloos (fatherless). Some are just weird, like Naaktgeboren (born naked) or Riool (sewer). In English I've come across Dangerman and Stranger. So why not Goodenough?
Besides standards, there are probably a lot of technical and economical issues to deal with if you take an incremental approach ("working towards"). Having factories up there for recycling old satellites isn't enough, you will also need to somehow bring those satellites to one of the factories (or bring the factory to the satellite), which isn't free. Now suppose we've gotten to the point where we're able to recycle some less complex components, like solar panels, radiators, etc. Now you can build and launch your satellites without those and have them added in an orbital factory. Even assuming this gives a benefit in launch costs and doesn't add costs due to more complex engineering or the transfer to the orbital factory, you'd still need to move the sat from the factory to its intended orbit. With all that, it sounds a hell of a lot simpler and cheaper to add a de-orbiting mechanism to each satellite.
Maybe it'll be viable if we could improve recycling and manufacturing to the point where we could build a satellite "containers" in orbit: a standardized structure, solar panels, wiring for power, plumbing for heat management, perhaps some shielding. These could be relatively large and weak since they never have to go through launch. Operators would then launch only the functional guts and plug them into a container of the right size once in orbit. Technical challenges aside, I'd like to know if this would at all make economic sense (would you save 90% of payload weight or 10% or what?)
Anyone here had one of those Digital Group machines? (not DEC)
My dad got one around '75 or so, I was in elementary school at the time. The thing came in boxes filled with PCBs and tubes of ICs, but not the fancy case shown on that website; my dad built one himself. Z80, loads of memory (I think 64k), and a twin fully automatic tape deck that functioned more or less like a floppy drive with a directory and a simple load command to get the program you wanted. An old teletype served as a printer. It must have cost a fortune, perhaps half a year's wages or so. I still remember him spending an evening winding the transformer torus.
That's the machine I learned to program on, first BASIC, then assembly. My dad made it a point to teach us first before letting us get our hands on that shiny new toy, about how a computer functions, CPU registers, memory, etc.
What I miss most about those days is the trade shows. Back then there was no such thing as a "computer store"; you got your gear by mail order, perhaps from another hobbyist running a little business out of his living room... or trade shows. Going to a trade show meant seeing all the cool new stuff for the first time, seeing hobbyists show off their homebrew creations, and perhaps coming away with a few new friends or goodies of your own.
Not available in the Netherlands. But it's not really a surprise, people have complained for ages about the selection on Netflix here compared to other countries.
It's not for everyone. I remember first seeing MST3K when our cable (in the Netherlands) offered the SciFi Channel for 6 months as a sort of trial, and I was watching with a friend when an episode came on. First thought was "What the hell...", half an hour later we were fans. When I was in the States for work for a few months, I faithfully recorded every episode that aired during that time.
My brothers didn't get it at all though, and with the many people I've tried to introduce to the show it's been hit-and-miss: people who I thought might enjoy it hated it, and others unexepectedly loved it. Same for Rifftrax, of which my wife (thankfully) became a big fan as well.
By the way, I don't get "roasts" either.
I'm card-bored.