This works for 5-10 people if the room is large enough to let people avoid sitting shoulder-to-shoulder.
But it will be a killer for 100 people. I'm in a cube farm now, and it's impossible to work without headphones, difficult even then.
(Our chief architect once wanted to talk, and he asked, "here, or in my office?" -- I said "your office, I can't think very well here" and he said "That's not good!". Then I thought, "yeah, given that we're trying to build intellectual property here...")
I understand the economics of cubes, but I think they should be limited to no more than about 12 to a room, with soundproof barriers between these "cells". You could have cells populated by teams, or by type of work. Ideally, people should be able to apply to go to the kind of cell they work well in -- the "quiet" cell or the "talkers" cell.
Also, invest in good monitors and switchboxes -- I currently have three screens crammed onto my desk, two are low-quality and difficult to use because of my limited layout options. A switchbox would actually reduce equipment costs, but someone just doesn't quite see it.
This advice isn't bad as far as it goes, but it only gets you a one-month buffer.
That's a highly desirable breathing space but still leaves you shackled to your paycheck.
If you can learn discipline -- where "savings" means "that stack of money that keeps growing and that I will never touch unless my child is dying", you will be FREE.
FREE, to take a six-month leave of absence to do something that's important to you.
FREE, to quit the job that is making you ill with stress, even though you have no prospects at this time.
FREE, where your boss and your company's CFO and any of the financial institutions you keep your money in -- all these have NO SAY in your life, except as far as you wish them to.
You can't protect against everything, but 30K ought to be enough to get ahead. I started out at 15K a year in 1987, and gave some of that away to charities. I know what humble beginnings are like. ESCAPE THEM!
This whole article just looks at the privacy debate from the point of view of commercial interests. Of course they think information-sharing is a good thing, it cuts costs.
Although the article concludes that this is great for consumers because it lowers prices...I don't believe it. I think it raises profits. What's more, I think it raises profits for large corporations while doing little to benefit locally-owned businesses.
We have very little privacy any more, and it's time to take a stand on what's left.
The most telling section was the description of how MBNA has benefited from information-sharing. How, if privacy advocates had their way, MBNA's profit model would be threatened. Well, you know what? I HATE MBNA! I detest them. They send me credit card applications continually, no matter what I do.
I regularly return their postage-paid reply envelopes stuffed with whatever other trash comes in that day's mail, and if everyone else would do the same...maybe THAT would stop them.
After all, who among us needs more credit? Are we not awash in it already?
Agreed. I talked once with a South African farm manager, and he said they used a device to do soil samples of every square meter of the land to be planted, put the results in a database, and then used the data to customize the fertilization process to put just the right amount of each fertilizer component in each section of soil. He said it just doesn't work to be old-fashioned any more, it isn't profitable enough to support the business.
I'll tell you what they need to figure out to resolve this issue.
There are four steps in shopping:
1. Find the stuff you want
2. Assemble the items
3. Pay for it.
4. Deliver it home.
If you do step 1 and 3 by computer or phone and they do 2 and 4, then it's going to take $10 for the service.
But step 2 can be semi-automated, then step 4 can be done by your high-school-age neighbor kid. This would actually drive the cost below what you pay for gas on your single shopping trip (because the kid can pick up a whole neighborhood's groceries in one trip and parcel them out on a route).
Everyone would benefit -- you save time, the kid gets spending money, and the store moves more groceries.
Offshoring isn't the same. When you buy, say, a tool or garden sculpture that's made offshore, there's a barrier to you making it locally, so there are still companies involved in producing, marketing, and shipping it to you, and taking a profit.
Instead, think Star Trek replicators. If all you really need is a design, raw material, and energy to produce something -- your tool, or a piece of art -- then marketing and shipping don't enter the picture. Designs will be easily copied digital bits and subject to the same problems we see now in the music and movie business.
I believe raw materials will be cheap for some time to come, and that the real issue will be with energy. If reliance on fossil fuels continues, then the energy sector will become the locus of control by the corporate world, and corporate capitalism will stay alive and well. If energy becomes cheap, then most corporations will lose their reason for existence and will persist only as long as they can force the issue through law. That will be an ugly time to be a human being.
Make no mistake, this is coming. Even without nanotech, the ability of individuals to make a wide variety of objects under computer control in a garage is going to turn the manufacturing world on its head. Soon after that, people will realize that they've been spending their money for no good reason, just to make other people rich, and there will be chaos.
Eliot Spitzer is amazing. His job is to oversee New York State as its attorney general, but since that includes New York City, Manhattan, and Wall Street, he has made it his business to investigate and press charges against people in the investment banking, mutual fund, and insurance industries, among others. Check out Google News or his re-election site for what he's accomplished.
I think many people who make their money on Wall Street by taking advantage of the markets would say he does far more than his job, but people all over the world benefit. He's almost like Greenspan in the way he weilds influence. If either of these two go corrupt, or are replaced by corrupt people, America will suffer a very serious setback.
This is the kicker. What is fast enough? What hardware do you have to run on?
In the early nineties, I chose a tool with high-level scripting abilities because I naively thought learning C would be overly complex, and overkill. Processing and displaying color images on a Mac, I could do one frame every few seconds. That was just barely "good enough" on our development machines but it wasn't good enough in a lab full of old machines, where the software had to run. Then someone showed us a program called NIH Image, which could do a slideshow at several frames per second at full resolution even on the old machines. The difference? THEY USED THE RIGHT TOOL, and got results that appeared almost magical.
A decade later, I figured CPU speeds had improved so much the hardware would no longer be an issue for any practical application short of weather forecasting, but even now I find people soaking processor cycles so badly with poorly chosen software architectures that a 2GHz machine slows to a crawl.
Think: HARDWARE IS NOT FREE. If you write software that requires 10 times the horsepower, then your hardware will cost 10 times as much. If your company is spending 100K a year installing new boxes, wouldn't it justify the effort to use the right tools, do your profiling, and reduce it even by half?
The greatest lesson I learned watching this merger was that you CAN convert fake wealth to real wealth. By "fake wealth" I mean paper wealth, like the stock price of a company or the price of any other paper or electronic financial instrument. You buy low and, if you get lucky, the price goes up; and if you can't convert all that wealth to cash, instead you buy a "real company", lots of real estate, or something else with intrinsic value. Then, even if your original business goes belly up (like AOL's is doing) you are sitting pretty.
Time Warner's management and stockholders made a huge mistake, because they were greedy. But if I'm ever in AOL's shoes, I'd do exactly the same thing.
News stories (and blogs) can contain any mixture of the following:
FACT - something happened
OPINION - this is what I think about what happened, or what I think it means
INFLUENCE PEDDLING & LIES - here is what I want you to believe
Clearly, many blogs are filled with OPINION. That's all they promise to do. I don't have a problem with the Drudge report's spin on things -- their primary reason for existence is to add spin, and it's obvious.
The problem comes when "journalists" use a respected platform to spout opinion, hide the facts, or report lies ("an unnamed source in the White House said today...") and thus distort or change peoples' opinions under the guise of authority.
But blogs, by definition, have no accountability to anyone. The author can't be fired for editing a news photo in Photoshop, or for reporting what isn't true, or mis-quoting someone's words. The same is true for someone standing on a soapbox in Hyde park. You, the reader, have to take it with a grain of salt and compare what you're reading with everything else you know and read.
The rallying cry used to be "Question Authority!". But these days, you have to question practically everything.
> there is more value in that flat panel monitor than just the LCD
I wonder is that why these things are so expensive in the first place? If there was a *gasp* standard for the controllers, timing, plug connectors, etc. then the price would probably come down considerably. Not that any existing manufacturer particularly wants that to happen...
selling the rights of others
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 1
"selling the rights of everyone else for a living"
This is what lots of people do for a living.
Timber corporations, insurance companies, PAC's and quite a few other types of entities spend billions on legions of lawyers, agents, and lobbyists to do just this.
If I could nullify their effect as easily as I can with spam (a few mouseclicks a day and a marginally higher ISP bill) I would be overjoyed.
Job title: Database Programmer.
Purported duties: Develop database schemas, input forms, and reporting tools for a small nonprofit.
Actual job included: Feeding envelopes into a laser printer one by one, by hand, because the individually-printed addresses would purportedly increase the willingness of donors to part with their money in our fund-raising campaigns.
I almost told them I'd do the grunt work for double the pay, but in the end I just quit.
You're right in principle, but one thing will always be true: if I can hear it or see it, then I can sample it, copy the bits, and play/distribute them. The only way to force me to keep paying the 5 cents is to threaten me with jail time under the DMCA...which is exactly what is happening now, but it's only enforceable if you can detect that I'm doing it. If I share out my bits over a network then I provide a route, but if I keep it to myself, I should be safe. Unless of course I'm running on a Trusted Computing platform...
That's coming, it's called VOD. You pay for each program. And it's going to cost you even more -- imagine, instead of $50/month, paying $2 PER PROGRAM. And more if it's a great movie or something. Sure, you'll be able to pick a la carte, but the total price is going to be higher for most people. That's the name of the game, isn't it?
In the Mission News item labeled "03.24.04 - Latest Update: X-43A Flight", NASA's site says:
"No vehicle has ever flown at hypersonic speeds powered by an air-breathing scramjet engine."
How does this relate to the run of HyShot back in August?
The X-43A won't be the first successful scramjet-powered flight....and HyShot was designed to go Mach 7.6, which I think is hypersonic. Is NASA implying that HyShot didn't really work?
If you use that loyalty card and pay with a credit card, EVEN ONCE, then they know your name. (Ever notice how the cashier thanks you by name, but never pronounces it right?) The rest is fairly easy pickings if they want it (address, phone, whatever). To truly stay anonymous, you'd have to check the box and then always pay by cash.
>But the images, though grouped roughly by quarter, don't show up on
>Fine's screen in strictly chronological order.
I'm amazed a high-end digital camera wouldn't have the option of date-stamping
the images. Wouldn't it help Fine, and editors the world over, to be have
the camera do this rather than giving image files names like IMG00037.JPG?
Alternatively, the JPEG format itself allows comments to be inserted in the file.
The cameraman could enter his/her name once and then every image would have
very handy metadata (name + date) attached.
Twenty years ago, home arcade games were expensive and the games you could find in an arcade were much better. Now, home consoles are comparatively cheap and the games are great -- and many fantastic games will run on a general-purpose PC. Why shell out quarters (four at a time!) in an arcade any more? This is a market which had to die when the price/performance ratio of home gear went through the floor.
So lessee, we've got C2 and O left over.
As long as we're talking about different byproducts,
let's posit a process that produces the C and O separately.
We can use the C in windows and semiconductors,
and the O...well, we can breathe the extra O, right?
I'm seeing lots of conjecture about greenhouse gases but no information on what the new invention actually produces.
Until we get real information, let's be optimistic, OK?
Every reply here points out that logic complexity goes up as the size of the base goes up from 2, to 3, to 4.
But the article was about communications, not logic.
What if we had broadband optical fiber transmission, where a single pulse has, say, 128 frequency levels that could be gated?
Sure, you'd have to have an array of controls on both ends, but it would be linear (N gates for N levels) and in fact, this is part of the significance of Intel's announcement.
They claim the gates can be made more cheaply in masked silicon wafers instead of the more expensive current technology, and that's reasonable.
They claim a 2 ghz clock cycle on the gating; imagine a light pipe transmitting 128-bit words at that rate. That's a fat pipe.
A book by Arther Tedlow,
Captains of Enterprise
talks about Watson and several other business titans of the 20th century. According to Tedlow, the senior Watson was quite sharklike.
As an NCR salesman early in his career, he could walk into a store,
modify the cash register to make it malfunction, and then "demonstrate" to the proprietor
how his own company's product was better. Big Blue didn't get its reputation for ruthless business practices for nothing.
IBM's public persona has changed a lot over the last few decades, several times.
My mother said it was a great place to work in the 50's, because they valued smart people.
I wonder what it's like to work there now.
This sounds like the kind of technology that Disaster Area could make use of. Just figure a way of modulating it, plug it into the preamp, and let loose!
The book is not about "teaching computer science through assembly language".
It's about PROGRAMMING. There's a huge difference.
See for example Djykstra's essay, "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science". It's a great read:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF
I really learned a lot about computers by learning assembly language. Of course, I really learned a lot by building a Z80 mainboard, too...learn all you can! The more you learn, the better you'll be.
You've never lived for a few months with your fiancee on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, have you? And now that we're married, she only sees her family once a year and in pictures. We'd pay good money for an easy videoconferencing solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand the economics of cubes, but I think they should be limited to no more than about 12 to a room, with soundproof barriers between these "cells". You could have cells populated by teams, or by type of work. Ideally, people should be able to apply to go to the kind of cell they work well in -- the "quiet" cell or the "talkers" cell.
Also, invest in good monitors and switchboxes -- I currently have three screens crammed onto my desk, two are low-quality and difficult to use because of my limited layout options. A switchbox would actually reduce equipment costs, but someone just doesn't quite see it.
That's a highly desirable breathing space but still leaves you shackled to your paycheck. If you can learn discipline -- where "savings" means "that stack of money that keeps growing and that I will never touch unless my child is dying", you will be FREE.
FREE, to take a six-month leave of absence to do something that's important to you.
FREE, to quit the job that is making you ill with stress, even though you have no prospects at this time.
FREE, where your boss and your company's CFO and any of the financial institutions you keep your money in -- all these have NO SAY in your life, except as far as you wish them to.
You can't protect against everything, but 30K ought to be enough to get ahead. I started out at 15K a year in 1987, and gave some of that away to charities. I know what humble beginnings are like. ESCAPE THEM!
We have very little privacy any more, and it's time to take a stand on what's left.
The most telling section was the description of how MBNA has benefited from information-sharing. How, if privacy advocates had their way, MBNA's profit model would be threatened. Well, you know what? I HATE MBNA! I detest them. They send me credit card applications continually, no matter what I do. I regularly return their postage-paid reply envelopes stuffed with whatever other trash comes in that day's mail, and if everyone else would do the same...maybe THAT would stop them. After all, who among us needs more credit? Are we not awash in it already?
Agreed. I talked once with a South African farm manager,
and he said they used a device to do soil samples of every square meter of the land to be planted,
put the results in a database, and then used the data to customize the fertilization process
to put just the right amount of each fertilizer component in each section of soil.
He said it just doesn't work to be old-fashioned any more, it isn't profitable enough to support the business.
1. Find the stuff you want
2. Assemble the items
3. Pay for it.
4. Deliver it home.
If you do step 1 and 3 by computer or phone and they do 2 and 4, then it's going to take $10 for the service. But step 2 can be semi-automated, then step 4 can be done by your high-school-age neighbor kid. This would actually drive the cost below what you pay for gas on your single shopping trip (because the kid can pick up a whole neighborhood's groceries in one trip and parcel them out on a route).
Everyone would benefit -- you save time, the kid gets spending money, and the store moves more groceries.
I should patent this!
there are still companies involved in producing, marketing, and shipping it to you, and taking a profit.
Instead, think Star Trek replicators. If all you really need is a design, raw material, and energy
to produce something -- your tool, or a piece of art -- then marketing and shipping don't enter the picture.
Designs will be easily copied digital bits and subject to the same problems we see now in the music and movie business.
I believe raw materials will be cheap for some time to come, and that the real issue will be with energy.
If reliance on fossil fuels continues, then the energy sector will become the locus of control by the corporate world,
and corporate capitalism will stay alive and well. If energy becomes cheap, then most corporations will lose their reason
for existence and will persist only as long as they can force the issue through law. That will be an ugly time to be a human being.
Make no mistake, this is coming. Even without nanotech, the ability of individuals to make a wide variety of objects under computer control in a garage is going to turn the manufacturing world on its head. Soon after that, people will realize that they've been spending their money for no good reason, just to make other people rich, and there will be chaos.
Eliot Spitzer is amazing. His job is to oversee New York State as its attorney general,
but since that includes New York City, Manhattan, and Wall Street, he has made it his business to
investigate and press charges against people in the investment banking, mutual fund, and insurance industries, among others.
Check out Google News or his re-election site for what he's accomplished.
I think many people who make their money on Wall Street by taking advantage of the markets would say he does far more than his job, but people all over the world benefit. He's almost like Greenspan in the way he weilds influence. If either of these two go corrupt, or are replaced by corrupt people, America will suffer a very serious setback.
In the early nineties, I chose a tool with high-level scripting abilities because I naively thought learning C would be overly complex, and overkill. Processing and displaying color images on a Mac, I could do one frame every few seconds. That was just barely "good enough" on our development machines but it wasn't good enough in a lab full of old machines, where the software had to run. Then someone showed us a program called NIH Image, which could do a slideshow at several frames per second at full resolution even on the old machines. The difference? THEY USED THE RIGHT TOOL, and got results that appeared almost magical.
A decade later, I figured CPU speeds had improved so much the hardware would no longer be an issue for any practical application short of weather forecasting, but even now I find people soaking processor cycles so badly with poorly chosen software architectures that a 2GHz machine slows to a crawl.
Think: HARDWARE IS NOT FREE. If you write software that requires 10 times the horsepower, then your hardware will cost 10 times as much. If your company is spending 100K a year installing new boxes, wouldn't it justify the effort to use the right tools, do your profiling, and reduce it even by half?
By "fake wealth" I mean paper wealth, like the stock price of a company or the price of any other paper or electronic financial instrument.
You buy low and, if you get lucky, the price goes up; and if you can't convert all that wealth to cash, instead you buy a "real company", lots of real estate, or something else with intrinsic value.
Then, even if your original business goes belly up (like AOL's is doing) you are sitting pretty.
Time Warner's management and stockholders made a huge mistake, because they were greedy. But if I'm ever in AOL's shoes, I'd do exactly the same thing.
FACT - something happened
OPINION - this is what I think about what happened, or what I think it means
INFLUENCE PEDDLING & LIES - here is what I want you to believe
All news agencies mix FACT and OPINION together pretty freely these days. Today's news that "Prime Minister Tony Blair is expected to ..." is NOT A FACT, even though it's reported by the New York Times (that bastion of journalistic integrity) and probably will be fact within 24 hours. And most talking heads on TV give us unvarnished OPINION.
Clearly, many blogs are filled with OPINION. That's all they promise to do. I don't have a problem with the Drudge report's spin on things -- their primary reason for existence is to add spin, and it's obvious.
The problem comes when "journalists" use a respected platform to spout opinion, hide the facts, or report lies ("an unnamed source in the White House said today...") and thus distort or change peoples' opinions under the guise of authority.
But blogs, by definition, have no accountability to anyone. The author can't be fired for editing a news photo in Photoshop, or for reporting what isn't true, or mis-quoting someone's words. The same is true for someone standing on a soapbox in Hyde park. You, the reader, have to take it with a grain of salt and compare what you're reading with everything else you know and read.
The rallying cry used to be "Question Authority!". But these days, you have to question practically everything.
I wonder is that why these things are so expensive in the first place?
If there was a *gasp* standard for the controllers, timing, plug connectors, etc. then the price would probably come down considerably.
Not that any existing manufacturer particularly wants that to happen...
This is what lots of people do for a living. Timber corporations, insurance companies, PAC's and quite a few other types of entities spend billions on legions of lawyers, agents, and lobbyists to do just this.
If I could nullify their effect as easily as I can with spam (a few mouseclicks a day and a marginally higher ISP bill) I would be overjoyed.
Purported duties: Develop database schemas, input forms, and reporting tools for a small nonprofit.
Actual job included: Feeding envelopes into a laser printer one by one, by hand, because the individually-printed addresses would purportedly increase the willingness of donors to part with their money in our fund-raising campaigns.
I almost told them I'd do the grunt work for double the pay, but in the end I just quit.
You're right in principle, but one thing will always be true: if I can hear it or see it, then I can sample it, copy the bits, and play/distribute them.
The only way to force me to keep paying the 5 cents is to threaten me with jail time under the DMCA...which is exactly what is happening now,
but it's only enforceable if you can detect that I'm doing it. If I share out my bits over a network then I provide a route, but if I keep it to myself, I should be safe.
Unless of course I'm running on a Trusted Computing platform...
That's coming, it's called VOD. You pay for each program.
And it's going to cost you even more -- imagine, instead of $50/month, paying $2 PER PROGRAM.
And more if it's a great movie or something. Sure, you'll be able to pick a la carte,
but the total price is going to be higher for most people.
That's the name of the game, isn't it?
"No vehicle has ever flown at hypersonic speeds powered by an air-breathing scramjet engine."
How does this relate to the run of HyShot back in August? The X-43A won't be the first successful scramjet-powered flight....and HyShot was designed to go Mach 7.6, which I think is hypersonic. Is NASA implying that HyShot didn't really work?
If you use that loyalty card and pay with a credit card, EVEN ONCE, then they know your name. (Ever notice how the cashier thanks you by name, but never pronounces it right?)
The rest is fairly easy pickings if they want it (address, phone, whatever).
To truly stay anonymous, you'd have to check the box
and then always pay by cash.
>Fine's screen in strictly chronological order.
I'm amazed a high-end digital camera wouldn't have the option of date-stamping the images. Wouldn't it help Fine, and editors the world over, to be have the camera do this rather than giving image files names like IMG00037.JPG? Alternatively, the JPEG format itself allows comments to be inserted in the file. The cameraman could enter his/her name once and then every image would have very handy metadata (name + date) attached.
Canon, are you listening?
Twenty years ago, home arcade games were expensive and the games you could find in an arcade were much better.
Now, home consoles are comparatively cheap and the games are great -- and many fantastic games will run on a general-purpose PC.
Why shell out quarters (four at a time!) in an arcade any more?
This is a market which had to die when the price/performance ratio of home gear went through the floor.
I'm seeing lots of conjecture about greenhouse gases but no information on what the new invention actually produces. Until we get real information, let's be optimistic, OK?
But the article was about communications, not logic. What if we had broadband optical fiber transmission, where a single pulse has, say, 128 frequency levels that could be gated? Sure, you'd have to have an array of controls on both ends, but it would be linear (N gates for N levels) and in fact, this is part of the significance of Intel's announcement. They claim the gates can be made more cheaply in masked silicon wafers instead of the more expensive current technology, and that's reasonable.
They claim a 2 ghz clock cycle on the gating; imagine a light pipe transmitting 128-bit words at that rate. That's a fat pipe.
A book by Arther Tedlow, Captains of Enterprise talks about Watson and several other business titans of the 20th century. According to Tedlow, the senior Watson was quite sharklike. As an NCR salesman early in his career, he could walk into a store, modify the cash register to make it malfunction, and then "demonstrate" to the proprietor how his own company's product was better. Big Blue didn't get its reputation for ruthless business practices for nothing.
IBM's public persona has changed a lot over the last few decades, several times. My mother said it was a great place to work in the 50's, because they valued smart people. I wonder what it's like to work there now.
This sounds like the kind of technology that Disaster Area could make use of.
Just figure a way of modulating it, plug it into the preamp, and let loose!
I really learned a lot about computers by learning assembly language. Of course, I really learned a lot by building a Z80 mainboard, too...learn all you can! The more you learn, the better you'll be.
You've never lived for a few months with your fiancee on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, have you?
And now that we're married, she only sees her family once a year and in pictures.
We'd pay good money for an easy videoconferencing solution.