I think the main issue here is expectations. Make sure you set those right. Your users' expectations sound a little off the mark for E-mail. I don't expect them to understand what's involved under the hood, so maybe you need to educate them. Servers can and do go down. A four-hour window is just way too small.
Use another medium for super-urgent communications, like IM or phone. Or just simply follow up with a phone call: "Did you get that urgent E-mail? No? OK, I'll look into it."
Yah, and as soon as a user is connected to the company VPN, I'll hack into his/her PC (weak link) and use the VPN connection.
I agree that a VPN is better than no VPN, but it does not stop a determined foe who'll just get in through some Windows flaw on the employee's home PC.
5. engineers need to be able to securely take files home
That's another Sysiphean predicament. It's hard enough to control the company network, but effectively impossible to control your engineers' home environment.
There's no magic technology bullet that'll solve your problems.
Q: Why do you call them smart "mobs"?
A: There's a dark side. The attacks of 9/11 wouldn't have been possible without cell phones or the Internet.
WTF? Try as I might, I can't follow his reasoning on this one. It might have been considerably harder to communicate with your operatives without modern tech, but certainly not impossible.
Re:Nice office... but who is going to pay for this
on
The Bionic Office
·
· Score: 1
But it's not that expensive. He write that the price per developer is 700$/Month.
According to Joel the $700 figure is for a fully staffed office. Since Joel coyly avoids more detail, we can only guess what his current cost is. FogCreek is a young company. Assuming that their new offices are 50% full (which I don't get the impression they are), that rent-per-head figure is more like $1400/month at the moment. And who knows how long it'll be before their business justifies hiring more people to fill up those empty offices.
Well, if the snazzy digs don't motivate them, then their bills will -- or at least it'll motivate the person who has to pay the rent, i.e. Joel, to crack the whip harder!:-)
Show them the article about the guy in England who got off a child-porn charge by claiming that a trojan virus on his computer downloaded all those dirty pictures...
A new Norwegian vaccine against HIV has attracted interest abroad, and is now
being tested on 40 Norwegian HIV patients.
What we have seen so far, is that
around 90 per cent of the patients have developed a new type of immunity which they did not have before joining the test project, says head of the project, Dag Kvale, Medical Director of the Ullevaal University Hospital in Oslo to TV2.
The 90% may seem like the treatment is a huge success. However, 40 patients is a very small sample size. It is exciting to hear that NIH will explore the possibility of a much larger trial. Several thousands of patients will provide more meaningful results.
I don't think one need be too cynical to imagine that the government might forbid the wearing of masks under certain circumstances, as sometime happens with gas masks during demonstrations.
In any case, some face recognition techniques can be adapted to work even when some features are concealed. For example, the eigenface method can be applied to individual facial features, resulting in eigeneyes, eigennoses and eigenmouths which can be used for matching. MIT has done this with some success (scroll down to the section titled "Modular Eigenspaces").
There's more irony here than meets the non-Australian eye. The facility at Woomera isn't a normal prison. It's a notorious "detention center" for refugees. The complaints about it and similar prisons in Australia is that people are locked away in horrible conditions and pretty much forgotten. Query Google for some back-story.
We took a Honda Civic Hybrid (new for 2003) on a test drive recently and was impressed. Of course the nifty instrument panel that shows real-time miles-per-gallon, battery charge power, etc. appeals to the geek in me. Otherwise it's hard to tell it apart from the non-hybrid Civic.
We were surprised to see that the Hybrid gets a higher gas mileage in the city than on the highway (according to EPA figures). This is apparently due to the innovative optional (i.e. you can turn it off) feature that shuts down the gasoline engine while stopped at a light. That was a bit disconcerting at first, but worked surprisingly well.
My next car is definitely going to be one of these babies!
Yahoo is reporting that AMD CEO Sanders admitted in court that hadn't even read the proposed sanctions against Microsoft, but just took Bill Gates' word for it that they are "crazy". Oh, and he also asked that Microsoft announce support for AMD's Hammer technology before support for similar technology from Intel.
often they'll go to a hacker chat room, a place on the Web using an Internet Relay Chat which provides them some anonymity
[my emphasis]
Real "hackers" use IIP (Invisible IRC Project), which provides strong anonymity on IRC. Another, somewhat related, sweet project is SILC, which, though it doesn't provide anonymity, adds strong crypto to IRC.
If you are on an H1-B visa or otherwise not a permanent resident of the USA, you can get away without reporting most of your income. Why? Because by the time the IRS figures out what hit them, you'll be back home. And they don't extradite for silly "crimes" like tax evasion.
That may be so. Ignoring ethical concerns and judgments regarding the authority of the U.S. government to levy taxes (or whatever else you might want to rant about), consider the future. If your tax liability is considerable you might as well forget about traveling to the U.S. ever again. You will likely either (a) be unable to enter the U.S. or (b) be arrested upon/after entry. I know second-hand whereof I speak.
As you don't state whether you are in the U.S. or not, I will assume that you are.
The recommendation regarding an S-corporation is sensible. If you are inclined to go that route, I would, however, advise you to consider a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC). This structure provides less stringent reporting requirements and is considerably easier to set up and run. The statutes of most, if not all, U.S. states allow single-member LLCs.
For more information regarding LLCs, S-corporations, other legal structures, and sundry issues concerning small business, I refer you to the Small Business section of Nolo's Law Center. I can also highly recommend their library of legal self-help books catering to the (prospective) small business owner.
Honestly, you don't pay for local stations, the advertisers do.
and that is exactly what it's all about. note how all annoying logos and graphics disappear completely during the broadcasts which are most important to the networks, the commercials.
btw, bottom-of-the-screen-graphic overload hasn't been so bad in a long time as during the first week of the 9/11 news coverage, with utterly uninteresting local "news" sometimes scrolling on top of the info from the network. not to mention the annoying cut-ins by the local news people with totally unimportant updates...
"we're sorry to interrupt peter jennings' breaking news. we now go to jim smith, who has an interview with sheriff barney fife about the terrorist threat here in the hinterlands."
Slashdot Mirror
I think the main issue here is expectations. Make sure you set those right. Your users' expectations sound a little off the mark for E-mail. I don't expect them to understand what's involved under the hood, so maybe you need to educate them. Servers can and do go down. A four-hour window is just way too small.
Use another medium for super-urgent communications, like IM or phone. Or just simply follow up with a phone call: "Did you get that urgent E-mail? No? OK, I'll look into it."
Yah, and as soon as a user is connected to the company VPN, I'll hack into his/her PC (weak link) and use the VPN connection.
I agree that a VPN is better than no VPN, but it does not stop a determined foe who'll just get in through some Windows flaw on the employee's home PC.
You have to address all the weak links first.
5) yikes.
That's another Sysiphean predicament. It's hard enough to control the company network, but effectively impossible to control your engineers' home environment.
There's no magic technology bullet that'll solve your problems.
WTF? Try as I might, I can't follow his reasoning on this one. It might have been considerably harder to communicate with your operatives without modern tech, but certainly not impossible.
But it's not that expensive. He write that the price per developer is 700$/Month.
According to Joel the $700 figure is for a fully staffed office. Since Joel coyly avoids more detail, we can only guess what his current cost is. FogCreek is a young company. Assuming that their new offices are 50% full (which I don't get the impression they are), that rent-per-head figure is more like $1400/month at the moment. And who knows how long it'll be before their business justifies hiring more people to fill up those empty offices.
Well, if the snazzy digs don't motivate them, then their bills will -- or at least it'll motivate the person who has to pay the rent, i.e. Joel, to crack the whip harder! :-)
Show them the article about the guy in England who got off a child-porn charge by claiming that a trojan virus on his computer downloaded all those dirty pictures...
The 90% may seem like the treatment is a huge success. However, 40 patients is a very small sample size. It is exciting to hear that NIH will explore the possibility of a much larger trial. Several thousands of patients will provide more meaningful results.
I don't think one need be too cynical to imagine that the government might forbid the wearing of masks under certain circumstances, as sometime happens with gas masks during demonstrations.
In any case, some face recognition techniques can be adapted to work even when some features are concealed. For example, the eigenface method can be applied to individual facial features, resulting in eigeneyes, eigennoses and eigenmouths which can be used for matching. MIT has done this with some success (scroll down to the section titled "Modular Eigenspaces").
There's more irony here than meets the non-Australian eye. The facility at Woomera isn't a normal prison. It's a notorious "detention center" for refugees. The complaints about it and similar prisons in Australia is that people are locked away in horrible conditions and pretty much forgotten. Query Google for some back-story.
We took a Honda Civic Hybrid (new for 2003) on a test drive recently and was impressed. Of course the nifty instrument panel that shows real-time miles-per-gallon, battery charge power, etc. appeals to the geek in me. Otherwise it's hard to tell it apart from the non-hybrid Civic.
We were surprised to see that the Hybrid gets a higher gas mileage in the city than on the highway (according to EPA figures). This is apparently due to the innovative optional (i.e. you can turn it off) feature that shuts down the gasoline engine while stopped at a light. That was a bit disconcerting at first, but worked surprisingly well.
My next car is definitely going to be one of these babies!
Yahoo is reporting that AMD CEO Sanders admitted in court that hadn't even read the proposed sanctions against Microsoft, but just took Bill Gates' word for it that they are "crazy". Oh, and he also asked that Microsoft announce support for AMD's Hammer technology before support for similar technology from Intel.
often they'll go to a hacker chat room, a place on the Web using an Internet Relay Chat which provides them some anonymity [my emphasis]
Real "hackers" use IIP (Invisible IRC Project), which provides strong anonymity on IRC. Another, somewhat related, sweet project is SILC, which, though it doesn't provide anonymity, adds strong crypto to IRC.
If you are on an H1-B visa or otherwise not a permanent resident of the USA, you can get away without reporting most of your income. Why? Because by the time the IRS figures out what hit them, you'll be back home. And they don't extradite for silly "crimes" like tax evasion.
That may be so. Ignoring ethical concerns and judgments regarding the authority of the U.S. government to levy taxes (or whatever else you might want to rant about), consider the future. If your tax liability is considerable you might as well forget about traveling to the U.S. ever again. You will likely either (a) be unable to enter the U.S. or (b) be arrested upon/after entry. I know second-hand whereof I speak.
As you don't state whether you are in the U.S. or not, I will assume that you are.
The recommendation regarding an S-corporation is sensible. If you are inclined to go that route, I would, however, advise you to consider a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC). This structure provides less stringent reporting requirements and is considerably easier to set up and run. The statutes of most, if not all, U.S. states allow single-member LLCs.
For more information regarding LLCs, S-corporations, other legal structures, and sundry issues concerning small business, I refer you to the Small Business section of Nolo's Law Center. I can also highly recommend their library of legal self-help books catering to the (prospective) small business owner.
Honestly, you don't pay for local stations, the advertisers do.
and that is exactly what it's all about. note how all annoying logos and graphics disappear completely during the broadcasts which are most important to the networks, the commercials.
btw, bottom-of-the-screen-graphic overload hasn't been so bad in a long time as during the first week of the 9/11 news coverage, with utterly uninteresting local "news" sometimes scrolling on top of the info from the network. not to mention the annoying cut-ins by the local news people with totally unimportant updates...
"we're sorry to interrupt peter jennings' breaking news. we now go to jim smith, who has an interview with sheriff barney fife about the terrorist threat here in the hinterlands."