Looks like it's a dance club. Am i reading this wrong? Is there some slightly more geek-friendly part of this place?
mahlen
Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a Cabinet Minister.
--Su Tung-p'o
More interesting, I think, is the ever-thoughtful Malcolm Gladwell's review of two books about Philo T. Farnsworth. Contrary to the expected take of how small genius inventors are destroyed by large credit-stealing corporations, Gladwell argues that corporations are the safest and sanest way to let genius inventors concentrate on inventing. Worth reading.
mahlen
"In Trash Tango, the human race has become so feeble that the alien invasion of Earth occurs by means of a memo." -- Steve Aylett, _slaughtermatic_
Most people who land on my site are looking for something free that other people don't want them to have (frequently, I suspect, a book report). And since I never have it either, people must be disappointed.
I wrote something like this two years ago (though i was unaware of Sims's paper) based on the image generation ideas from this 1999 Slashdot piece, referring to the apparently still active Gallery of Random Art. My stuff allows you pick a size, though, so you can make desktop backgrounds:) You act as the environment, selecting images that you would like to see mutated. The mutations are frequently fairly subtle, so it can take several iterations. Sadly, there is no cross-breeding yet.
With some trepidation, I'll point to my server which is running this. Be gentle, it's just one box and it's on a cheap DSL line (128Kb upload). You can see and download some examples of what it's produced on my server and also on WebShots here and here.
On the odd chance that you'd like to see my code, email me. I don't have the ego to presume that this stuff is so interesting to people to have published it myself.
mahlen
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
--Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel, "The Cyberiad"
There's a PBS Cringely and an Infoworld one.
on
Cringely's Bank Shot
·
· Score: 1
Readers of both ``I, Cringely'' and InfoWorld may wonder why, if Cringely no longer writes for InfoWorld, there's still a Notes from the Field written by Robert X. Cringely.
Stevens-as-Cringely was fired from InfoWorld in 1995 but continued to use the pseudonym. He was in post-production on ``Triumph of the Nerds'' with PBS, in which his identification as Cringely was everywhere.
InfoWorld sued him, demanding he stop using the name. He counter-sued InfoWorld. The result: He's now able to use the name under a license agreement, and InfoWorld has someone else doing the column under the name.
But, as he insists on his Web site, there's only ``one true Cringely.''
Like many of the previous posts, I'd say that a CS degree has the most prestige and carrying power for your career. But I'll add that _where_ you get the degree may matter more than the kind of degree. Check out the classes available and required for the degree at the schools you're considering. There's a big difference between a degree at Berkeley and one at your local Junior College.
First, read this essay: The Big Ball of Mud. It is an interesting look at why, when we all know that spaghetti, gnarly, twisted code is bad, that it happens anyway (hint: it may mirror your understanding of the problem).
Ignore the "don't touch it" naysayers. Even before it's done, it'll be much nicer code to deal with. You can make decisions with less nagging doubts. You'll code onward with gusto. You'll be able to accurately predict the names of methods without looking them up.
Test the current state of things at all points through the process. I'm hoping that you have lots of automated tests you can run everytime code is checked in; if not, make them FIRST, before the overhaul. You are majorly diverting the intent of the code at hundreds of points; you can run astray in so many places that the above naysayers would be correct. Constantly assure yourseleves that the code is working. Go out of your way to ensure that the code is buildable and runnable, even to the point of writing scaffolding you know will be soon thrown away.
Burning a little incense every day in obesience to the Gods can't hurt, and will make the room smell nice.
mahlen
Shantytowns are usually built from common, inexpensive materials and simple tools.
Shantytowns can be built using relatively unskilled labor.
Even though the labor force is
"unskilled" in the customary sense, the construction and maintenance of this
sort of housing can be quite labor intensive.
There is little specialization.
Each housing
unit is constructed and maintained primarily by its inhabitants, and each inhabitant must
be a jack of all the necessary trades.
There is little concern for infrastructure, since
infrastructure requires coordination and capital, and specialized resources, equipment,
and skills.
There is little overall planning or regulation of growth. Shantytowns emerge
where there is a need for housing, a surplus of unskilled labor, and a dearth of capital
investment.
Shantytowns fulfill an immediate, local need for housing by bringing available
resources to bear on the problem. Loftier architectural goals are a luxury that has to
wait. -- from "The Big Ball of Mud"
Word History: Robot is a word that is both a coinage by an individual person and a borrowing. It has been in English since 1923 when the Czech writer Karel Capek's play R.U.R. was translated into English and presented in London and New York. R.U.R., published in 1921, is an abbreviation of Rossum's
Universal Robots; robot itself comes from Czech robota, "servitude, forced labor," from rab, "slave." The Slavic root behind robota is orb-,
from the Indo-European root *orbh-, referring to separation from one's group or passing out of one sphere of ownership into another. This seems to be the sense that binds together its somewhat
diverse group of derivatives, which includes Greek orphanos, "orphan," Latin orbus, "orphaned," and German Erbe, "inheritance," in addition to the
Slavic word for slave mentioned above. Czech robota is also similar to another German derivative of this root, namely Arbeit, "work" (its Middle High German form arabeit
is even more like the Czech word).
Arbeit may be descended from a word that meant "slave labor," and later generalized to just "labor."
mahlen
If I want your opinion, I'll ask you to fill out the necessary form.
A great U.S. source for recumbent trikes and other non-traditional human-powered vehicles is HumanPowered Machines in Eugene, Oregon. The Triton (US$1900), which i rode several years ago, is just a joy to ride, and as the inventor pointed out to me, "You can have five beers and get this thing home." Also note-worthy is the Long Haul, which can carry a couple hundred pounds, and is used by Pedal Express in Berkeley (and many other cities).
No one kills 5,000 innocent civilians without being hunted to the very ends of the earth and brought to a very stern account.
On the contrary, the past presidents of the U.S. seem to doing quite well. About 5000 innocent Panamanian civilians died in the bombing of Panama. 800,000 to 1 million North Vietnamese died in the Vietnam war. And those are only the examples from the top of my memory, and the ones where the planes have U.S. markings on them. Don't be so blind to what your country has done in your name...
mahlen
That's the American way. If little kids don't aspire to make money like I
did, what the hell good is this country?
--Lee Iacocca
The late Steve Holtzman told me that they used to do the same demo when he was selling machines for GRiD. Walk into the room, through the computer across the room, pick it up, turn it on, sell lots of machines. This worked especially well for military contracts.
mahlen
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
--Poul Anderson
Books I've read about culture often pose it as a guerilla war between producers of stuff (who'd be a lot happier if everyone bought the same thing) and consumers (who like to be individuals). But rather than a top-down cool system, many would argue that it is a process of discovery, wherein cool people are continually surveyed by the producers of stuff, so that they can tell which way the wind is blowing. I know, it's much more pleasant to blame the state of pop culture on corporations than on the general public, but that don't make it so.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of the wonderful The Tipping Point, has this New Yorker piece about people who are paid to figure out what's cool now. That's an Amazon link for the book, BTW; did you know they have a recommendation engine too?
mahlen
To have ambition was my ambition. --Gang of Four, "I Love Man in a Uniform"
Re:If you didn't like this, you also may not like
on
The Business
·
· Score: 1
I recall hearing that "Stephen Bury" is actually a collaboration between Neal Stephenson and his uncle. Whatever the case may be, both Interface (which posits several such Large Invisible Entities) and The Cobweb are very much worth reading.
mahlen
Q: How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: NONE! Californians screw in hot tubs, not light bulbs!
So many other articles and sources claim that it has to do with Spam splattering when you drop it, or some such other odd idea. Kudos to the author for getting it correct.
Velilind's Laws of Experimentation:
1. "If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once."
2. "If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data points."
I ran into my headhunter, the one who set me up where I am now, on the street last week, and he confirms most of these notions. He said, "For senior people, no problem, but you'll need to be a bit less picky, and salaries are down a bit. But we have a lot of junior people and a lot of fodder."
So, to those posts about "Why should i bother with college?", this may be the answer. The expertise that a degree represents is better insurance against non-boom times.
mahlen
VIRGO (August 23-September 22)
You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nitpicking is sickening to
your friends. You are cold and unemotional and sometimes fall asleep while
making love. Virgos make good bus drivers.
This stuff allows me to browse the web wirelessly. I'm not actually sure how you'd upload starting with this setup; I suspect that's a software problem, and I'm hoping it's solved elsewhere in this thread.
That said, I'll throw out some other notes on systems like this. First, they are flaky, and don't like you moving, so when you get a connection, stop moving. A modem connection seems to be much more fragile when switching between network cells than a phone call is. Second, think redundant. Get multiple paths of connection, because there are so many places where the connection can break down, and you'll go crazy if you absolutely depend on any of them. Lastly, forget about sending up pictures and enjoy the ride. Experiences like that aren't for sharing with other people over the web, they are for experiencing first hand, while it's going on. The 3rd California AIDS Ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles changed my life, but it wouldn't have if I'd been fretting over hardware the whole time.
mahlen
See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion; see how possession
always cheapens the thing that was precious.
--William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
I have no idea if the gender of the parents makes any difference to the "success" of raising of a child. Recent research (for example, this) seems to indicate that ones peer group is far more important than ones parents in shaping your personality.
But who can raise children "better" isn't really the point. Raising children (which, for the record, my wife and I have opted not to do) isn't about who can do it best; as it stands, there's no test or qualifying exam or rigorous series of controls involved. I'll draw an analogy; maybe I think my posts are "better" than yours, because I'm smarter than you are, more informed and cosmopolitan in my tastes, and my arguments are sharper and funnnier than yours. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to post on/.? No.
Similarly, just because you may think that certain sets of people wouldn't make the ideal parents doesn't make it correct to disallow them from the activity. If it were up to me, i can think of scads of people who I think make less-than-ideal parents, but that wouldn't make it ethical for me to try to forbid them from doing so, dig?
mahlen
I cheated in the final of my metaphysics examination: I looked into the soul
of the boy sitting next to me. --Woody Allen, "Daily Mail" 1964
Excite.com has been converting to a home-grown variant of JSP. That's what running behind the scenes on the Excite main page, and the different sub-products were quickly converting to it when i was there, to a 2x improvement in performance. While not the whole site uses this tech, Excite on a good day can do 250 Million page views.
mahlen
I hope he [Steve Martin] wins an Oscar [for Roxanne], because he has prepared
a tremendously funny acceptance speech. If the Academy members want to hear
it, they know what to do.
--Martin Short
When I was at UC Berkeley in the late 1980's, there was a company in Berkeley called Mt Xinu (read it backwards) doing Unix software development. They were a full-on collective of, I think, around 40 people or so, making decisions and sharing ownership in much the way discussed here. They were quite successful in it's time, although I don't know where they are now (of course, the software market has changed quite a bit since then. I was working for the Computer Systems Research Group at UCB, the team that developed BSD Unix then, and Mt Xinu were in fact the first people in the world to take delivery of BSD 4.3 in the summer of 1986 (I think Mt Xinu's founders were friends of CSRG members).
So, be careful when you go around waving that 'first' sign, folks, or cranky old-timers like me will complain!:) There are, at least here in California, quite a few successful collectively run companies.
mahlen
My old mother...always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away. She is a very
courageous woman, my lord.
--Mervyn Bunter, "Clouds of Witness" by Dorothy Sayers
I don't know exactly why they dropped beaming money (that was the cool factor that got me to try it), but the technique you describe wouldn't work. When Alice beamed Bob money, the proof of that fact was in Bob's Palm, not Alice's. So if Bob didn't sync or lost his Palm, only then would the transaction be lost. You know, just like if Alice gave me a bill or check, and i lost my wallet, well, I don't get the money.
mahlen
Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.
--Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Actually, his uncle is right; 6% is a lot for the company founder to retain. More typical is 3-4%. Nesheim's "High Tech Startup" says this has been true for the last 20 years of startups. And after all, the people who put money into it are risking quite a bit; all of that money could be lost in the lawsuits; much will be used just to pay for the lawyers. So don't feel too sorry for Shawn; it's not like he could have done this on his own (well, maybe he could have with a lot more time, but he decided not too).
mahlen
We are born naked; all the rest is drag. --Tede Mitchell
"When Bill Gates sent his message to all the people copying DOS saying: "Hey you kids! Get outta my yard!" that set the stage for something different."
Just to set the record straight, it was paper tape copies of a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 that Gates and Paul Allen complained about, not people copying DOS.
mahlen
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them. --Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, French author-dramatist (1732-1799)
Upon further examination, the album was in fact called "Switched On Country", but it was by Rick Powell, not Wendy Carlos. Found that out on someone's list of Moog recordings.
Now i need to go bug my parents and see if they still have it. I just ordered her recently remastered Switched On Bach; can't wait to hear it.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.cafecocomo.com/infonf.htm
Looks like it's a dance club. Am i reading this wrong? Is there some slightly more geek-friendly part of this place?
mahlen
Families, when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister.
--Su Tung-p'o
More interesting, I think, is the ever-thoughtful Malcolm Gladwell's review of two books about Philo T. Farnsworth. Contrary to the expected take of how small genius inventors are destroyed by large credit-stealing corporations, Gladwell argues that corporations are the safest and sanest way to let genius inventors concentrate on inventing. Worth reading.
mahlen
"In Trash Tango, the human race has become so feeble that the alien invasion of Earth occurs by means of a memo." -- Steve Aylett, _slaughtermatic_
Most people who land on my site are looking for something free that other people don't want them to have (frequently, I suspect, a book report). And since I never have it either, people must be disappointed.
look at my logs
mahlen
On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." --Wolfgang Pauli
You could try Swish, which does text effects (among other things) quite well and is only $50.
mahlen
"The carrot is the agent of the coleslaw." -- Berkeley Bob
I wrote something like this two years ago (though i was unaware of Sims's paper) based on the image generation ideas from this 1999 Slashdot piece, referring to the apparently still active Gallery of Random Art. My stuff allows you pick a size, though, so you can make desktop backgrounds :) You act as the environment, selecting images that you would like to see mutated. The mutations are frequently fairly subtle, so it can take several iterations. Sadly, there is no cross-breeding yet.
With some trepidation, I'll point to my server which is running this. Be gentle, it's just one box and it's on a cheap DSL line (128Kb upload). You can see and download some examples of what it's produced on my server and also on WebShots here and here.
On the odd chance that you'd like to see my code, email me. I don't have the ego to presume that this stuff is so interesting to people to have published it myself.
mahlen
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach spaceLet superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
--Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel, "The Cyberiad"
(From http://computernewsdaily.com/live/Latest/209_07289 7_114210_8316.html.)
Readers of both ``I, Cringely'' and InfoWorld may wonder why, if Cringely no longer writes for InfoWorld, there's still a Notes from the Field written by Robert X. Cringely.
Stevens-as-Cringely was fired from InfoWorld in 1995 but continued to use the pseudonym. He was in post-production on ``Triumph of the Nerds'' with PBS, in which his identification as Cringely was everywhere.
InfoWorld sued him, demanding he stop using the name. He counter-sued InfoWorld. The result: He's now able to use the name under a license agreement, and InfoWorld has someone else doing the column under the name.
But, as he insists on his Web site, there's only ``one true Cringely.''
Like many of the previous posts, I'd say that a CS degree has the most prestige and carrying power for your career. But I'll add that _where_ you get the degree may matter more than the kind of degree. Check out the classes available and required for the degree at the schools you're considering. There's a big difference between a degree at Berkeley and one at your local Junior College.
mahlen
First, read this essay: The Big Ball of Mud. It is an interesting look at why, when we all know that spaghetti, gnarly, twisted code is bad, that it happens anyway (hint: it may mirror your understanding of the problem).
Ignore the "don't touch it" naysayers. Even before it's done, it'll be much nicer code to deal with. You can make decisions with less nagging doubts. You'll code onward with gusto. You'll be able to accurately predict the names of methods without looking them up.
Test the current state of things at all points through the process. I'm hoping that you have lots of automated tests you can run everytime code is checked in; if not, make them FIRST, before the overhaul. You are majorly diverting the intent of the code at hundreds of points; you can run astray in so many places that the above naysayers would be correct. Constantly assure yourseleves that the code is working. Go out of your way to ensure that the code is buildable and runnable, even to the point of writing scaffolding you know will be soon thrown away.
Burning a little incense every day in obesience to the Gods can't hurt, and will make the room smell nice.
mahlen
Shantytowns are usually built from common, inexpensive materials and simple tools. Shantytowns can be built using relatively unskilled labor. Even though the labor force is "unskilled" in the customary sense, the construction and maintenance of this sort of housing can be quite labor intensive. There is little specialization. Each housing unit is constructed and maintained primarily by its inhabitants, and each inhabitant must be a jack of all the necessary trades. There is little concern for infrastructure, since infrastructure requires coordination and capital, and specialized resources, equipment, and skills. There is little overall planning or regulation of growth. Shantytowns emerge where there is a need for housing, a surplus of unskilled labor, and a dearth of capital investment. Shantytowns fulfill an immediate, local need for housing by bringing available resources to bear on the problem. Loftier architectural goals are a luxury that has to wait. -- from "The Big Ball of Mud"
From dictionary.com:
Word History: Robot is a word that is both a coinage by an individual person and a borrowing. It has been in English since 1923 when the Czech writer Karel Capek's play R.U.R. was translated into English and presented in London and New York. R.U.R., published in 1921, is an abbreviation of Rossum's
Universal Robots; robot itself comes from Czech robota, "servitude, forced labor," from rab, "slave." The Slavic root behind robota is orb-,
from the Indo-European root *orbh-, referring to separation from one's group or passing out of one sphere of ownership into another. This seems to be the sense that binds together its somewhat
diverse group of derivatives, which includes Greek orphanos, "orphan," Latin orbus, "orphaned," and German Erbe, "inheritance," in addition to the
Slavic word for slave mentioned above. Czech robota is also similar to another German derivative of this root, namely Arbeit, "work" (its Middle High German form arabeit
is even more like the Czech word).
Arbeit may be descended from a word that meant "slave labor," and later generalized to just "labor."
mahlen
If I want your opinion, I'll ask you to fill out the necessary form.
A great U.S. source for recumbent trikes and other non-traditional human-powered vehicles is HumanPowered Machines in Eugene, Oregon. The Triton (US$1900), which i rode several years ago, is just a joy to ride, and as the inventor pointed out to me, "You can have five beers and get this thing home." Also note-worthy is the Long Haul, which can carry a couple hundred pounds, and is used by Pedal Express in Berkeley (and many other cities).
mahlen
No one kills 5,000 innocent civilians without being hunted to the very ends of the earth and brought to a very stern account.
On the contrary, the past presidents of the U.S. seem to doing quite well. About 5000 innocent Panamanian civilians died in the bombing of Panama. 800,000 to 1 million North Vietnamese died in the Vietnam war. And those are only the examples from the top of my memory, and the ones where the planes have U.S. markings on them. Don't be so blind to what your country has done in your name...
mahlen
That's the American way. If little kids don't aspire to make money like I
did, what the hell good is this country?
--Lee Iacocca
mahlen
The late Steve Holtzman told me that they used to do the same demo when he was selling machines for GRiD. Walk into the room, through the computer across the room, pick it up, turn it on, sell lots of machines. This worked especially well for military contracts.
mahlen
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
--Poul Anderson
Books I've read about culture often pose it as a guerilla war between producers of stuff (who'd be a lot happier if everyone bought the same thing) and consumers (who like to be individuals). But rather than a top-down cool system, many would argue that it is a process of discovery, wherein cool people are continually surveyed by the producers of stuff, so that they can tell which way the wind is blowing. I know, it's much more pleasant to blame the state of pop culture on corporations than on the general public, but that don't make it so.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of the wonderful The Tipping Point, has this New Yorker piece about people who are paid to figure out what's cool now. That's an Amazon link for the book, BTW; did you know they have a recommendation engine too?
mahlen
To have ambition was my ambition. --Gang of Four, "I Love Man in a Uniform"
I recall hearing that "Stephen Bury" is actually a collaboration between Neal Stephenson and his uncle. Whatever the case may be, both Interface (which posits several such Large Invisible Entities) and The Cobweb are very much worth reading.
mahlen
Q: How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: NONE! Californians screw in hot tubs, not light bulbs!
So many other articles and sources claim that it has to do with Spam splattering when you drop it, or some such other odd idea. Kudos to the author for getting it correct.
mahlen
Perhaps this long juicy piece on Gamespot will satisfy your curiosity.
mahlen
Velilind's Laws of Experimentation:
1. "If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once."
2. "If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data points."
I ran into my headhunter, the one who set me up where I am now, on the street last week, and he confirms most of these notions. He said, "For senior people, no problem, but you'll need to be a bit less picky, and salaries are down a bit. But we have a lot of junior people and a lot of fodder."
So, to those posts about "Why should i bother with college?", this may be the answer. The expertise that a degree represents is better insurance against non-boom times.
mahlen
VIRGO (August 23-September 22)
You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nitpicking is sickening to
your friends. You are cold and unemotional and sometimes fall asleep while
making love. Virgos make good bus drivers.
My wireless Web setup is:
This stuff allows me to browse the web wirelessly. I'm not actually sure how you'd upload starting with this setup; I suspect that's a software problem, and I'm hoping it's solved elsewhere in this thread.
That said, I'll throw out some other notes on systems like this. First, they are flaky, and don't like you moving, so when you get a connection, stop moving. A modem connection seems to be much more fragile when switching between network cells than a phone call is. Second, think redundant. Get multiple paths of connection, because there are so many places where the connection can break down, and you'll go crazy if you absolutely depend on any of them. Lastly, forget about sending up pictures and enjoy the ride. Experiences like that aren't for sharing with other people over the web, they are for experiencing first hand, while it's going on. The 3rd California AIDS Ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles changed my life, but it wouldn't have if I'd been fretting over hardware the whole time.
mahlen
See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion; see how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious. --William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
I have no idea if the gender of the parents makes any difference to the "success" of raising of a child. Recent research (for example, this) seems to indicate that ones peer group is far more important than ones parents in shaping your personality.
But who can raise children "better" isn't really the point. Raising children (which, for the record, my wife and I have opted not to do) isn't about who can do it best; as it stands, there's no test or qualifying exam or rigorous series of controls involved. I'll draw an analogy; maybe I think my posts are "better" than yours, because I'm smarter than you are, more informed and cosmopolitan in my tastes, and my arguments are sharper and funnnier than yours. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to post on /.? No.
Similarly, just because you may think that certain sets of people wouldn't make the ideal parents doesn't make it correct to disallow them from the activity. If it were up to me, i can think of scads of people who I think make less-than-ideal parents, but that wouldn't make it ethical for me to try to forbid them from doing so, dig?
mahlen
I cheated in the final of my metaphysics examination: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me. --Woody Allen, "Daily Mail" 1964
Excite.com has been converting to a home-grown variant of JSP. That's what running behind the scenes on the Excite main page, and the different sub-products were quickly converting to it when i was there, to a 2x improvement in performance. While not the whole site uses this tech, Excite on a good day can do 250 Million page views.
mahlen
I hope he [Steve Martin] wins an Oscar [for Roxanne], because he has prepared
a tremendously funny acceptance speech. If the Academy members want to hear
it, they know what to do.
--Martin Short
When I was at UC Berkeley in the late 1980's, there was a company in Berkeley called Mt Xinu (read it backwards) doing Unix software development. They were a full-on collective of, I think, around 40 people or so, making decisions and sharing ownership in much the way discussed here. They were quite successful in it's time, although I don't know where they are now (of course, the software market has changed quite a bit since then. I was working for the Computer Systems Research Group at UCB, the team that developed BSD Unix then, and Mt Xinu were in fact the first people in the world to take delivery of BSD 4.3 in the summer of 1986 (I think Mt Xinu's founders were friends of CSRG members).
:) There are, at least here in California, quite a few successful collectively run companies.
So, be careful when you go around waving that 'first' sign, folks, or cranky old-timers like me will complain!
mahlen
My old mother...always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away. She is a very
courageous woman, my lord.
--Mervyn Bunter, "Clouds of Witness" by Dorothy Sayers
I don't know exactly why they dropped beaming money (that was the cool factor that got me to try it), but the technique you describe wouldn't work. When Alice beamed Bob money, the proof of that fact was in Bob's Palm, not Alice's. So if Bob didn't sync or lost his Palm, only then would the transaction be lost. You know, just like if Alice gave me a bill or check, and i lost my wallet, well, I don't get the money.
mahlen
Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.
--Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Actually, his uncle is right; 6% is a lot for the company founder to retain. More typical is 3-4%. Nesheim's "High Tech Startup" says this has been true for the last 20 years of startups. And after all, the people who put money into it are risking quite a bit; all of that money could be lost in the lawsuits; much will be used just to pay for the lawyers. So don't feel too sorry for Shawn; it's not like he could have done this on his own (well, maybe he could have with a lot more time, but he decided not too).
mahlen
We are born naked; all the rest is drag.
--Tede Mitchell
"When Bill Gates sent his message to all the people copying DOS saying: "Hey you kids! Get outta my yard!" that set the stage for something different."
Just to set the record straight, it was paper tape copies of a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 that Gates and Paul Allen complained about, not people copying DOS.
mahlen
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
--Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, French author-dramatist
(1732-1799)
Upon further examination, the album was in fact called "Switched On Country", but it was by Rick Powell, not Wendy Carlos. Found that out on someone's list of Moog recordings.
Now i need to go bug my parents and see if they still have it. I just ordered her recently remastered Switched On Bach; can't wait to hear it.