They aren't talking about mandatory 60wpm in order to graduate, but at least push the class on people. I praise Buddha that I didn't learn my dad's way of touch typing, with his "home row" being AWEF JIO;.
It is extremely useful for separating the mechanical task of documenting your thoughts. Most people (seem to) need reinforcement of looking at their words to continue processing thoughts. Dictation requires repetition to be effective.
What you describe is slang, not a (formal) language that can be called English. From a communication perspective, what percentage of people would fully understand your sample sentence? My wife and I routinely mix English, Thai, Swedish, Spanish, and maybe even a tiny bit of Mandarin in conversation, but I'll guarantee you someone fluent in all five languages will still have trouble understanding what the heck we *mean* or how to construct a response using diction in each language that we would understand.
The "blocking of exits" isn't what architects are curious about, it is the focus on funneling exits rather than just having a certain width offer a constant carrying capacity. Fire codes are tricky, in that they try to balance safety with general application practicality. For the most part (excluding A(ssembly) occupancies), distance separation of exits is focused more on ensuring that a problem in one area doesn't keep all occupants stranded. It works in many applications, but a mob exit isn't really what codes are designed around, for many reasons.
Kind of; the goal is to allow people to accelerate through the constrained opening; the pole moves restricts flow in advance of the opening so optimal flow can happen through the door.
People panic to get to the door, so the pole helps to restore some order to traffic flow.
The building codes try to increase exit width to handle higher traffic flow. The reality, at least as suggested by the research, is similar to what landscape architects have known for generations: people walk faster on a narrow sidewalk than a broad one.
In an emergency, you hit the maximum carrying capacity of any pathway. The key to evacuating a densely occupied space is to convince people to spread out to multiple different exit points, which is confusing in an emergency situation.
I don't think anything is perfect, but when people approach a single door from a number of different angles optimum traffic flow doesn't happen.
Boeing's core compentency is composite airframes?! From an engineering perspective, sub-contracting out parts of the plane was the only chance they had of making it possible. I've been in some of the big autoclaves used for major parts, and it is a bit simplistic to think that Boeing could have done all the manufacturing in-house.
But, their supposed core competency, integration, seems to be more lacking.
Ultimately, when these things first crash it is going to be an interesting case of finger pointing.
Comcast has roughly $1B in cash, and $30B in debt. Disney has a market cap of ~$45B, and Viacom $15B, Time Warner is at ~$30B. Comcast's total market cap is $45B.
While they would love to own a "must have" content provider, so would I. I think we are both roughly in the same position for being able to pull it off. I have a $5 bill handy...
It usually isn't a problem with having bad credit; no company in their right mind would hire someone based on their FICO score. You do get a little concerned if they have 100% of their annual salary in rotating debt, or show patterns of being irresponsible and exercising poor judgment.
If someone has been laid off, looking for work for six months, and maxing out their credit cards... you tend to focus much more on why they were laid off in the first place and speculating as to why they are having trouble finding a job. That's the real prejudice you have to get over.
I used to be high-and-mighty on this one too. Now that I own a business it is a little different.
For us, the issue is that many of our clients require background checks in order to get people on-site. The credit report doesn't tell you too much, but having it pulled at least makes you comfortable that they aren't going to be rejected elsewhere.
Usually the information you look for is stuff that shows patterns, not isolated incidents. It might be a bigger issue for large companies where it can prevent you from being interviewed, but for us it is just one small document that we can check off for compliance reasons.
The interesting one for us is criminal background checks. We recently had an applicant that showed a pretty disturbing pattern of either stupidity or bad judgment. It would have been flagged as well.
The/. crowd wants control, but the average user just wants things to work. They don't want to hassle with backups or the pains of migrating to a new machine. My only gripe against hosted apps is that the TCO is often higher than an owned app, and it can make future migration more difficult.
I'd side with the GP on this one. We ask every candidate their desired salary at the interview, and we do use the response to rule out many candidates. Sometimes, it is our loss, but in general we do it because we can afford to pay $X assuming the person will help us to generate $3X in additional revenue. In the end, the whole package forms the costs, but knowing where someone's mindset is helps a great deal. We hired someone at 30% over their asking salary to make sure he knew just how important he was to us as a strategic hire. Inexperienced people (especially right now) we often low-ball to keep our flexibility.
It really comes down to if you are dealing with a dick that only cares about "winning" a negotiation, or someone with a legitimate business issue to resolve.
Maybe a better way to phrase it would be "Through the current financial crisis, what has been the biggest struggle for your company-- bringing in new work, project cycle delays, accounts receivable, cash flow, or credit concerns?" You can follow that up with "How do you see that changing over the next year?"
The "Who are your competitors" question is one of the most important to ask and understand, ideally in a phone interview so you can do research for an in-person interview. To that, I would add for the final interview:
What differentiates you from your competitors?
How has your growth been over the past x years compared to your competitors?
What areas do you see your organization trying to become more like your competitors?
What do your customers like about working with your organization?
Who are your biggest customers?
Based on the resumes coming across my desk, my biggest concern with potential candidates is short tenure at previous jobs. People on two-year cycles are damaging to a company that tries to promote long-term employees. People that get fired after two years because they can't hide their incompetence any longer become a money-pit.
I know it is hard on job seekers in this market to go to every interview optimistic and not formulaic, but at least for me with a small company I want to meet people that want to work with me.
If you are talking to a company that does a lot of work scattered about from a single or couple offices, ask about travel opportunities and expectations. Be sure to phrase it in a way that shows your knowledge about the company, not in a way that sounds like either all you want to do is travel, or you don't want to travel at all.
Ask about the typical career path for someone at the company.
For the older generation, one strong selling point for an engineer we just hired was that he was willing to work full-time, but really just wanted to work three days a week. That immediately took pressure off us of "what if he can't perform?" New grads, if you are having trouble finding something, then offer yourself up as part-time (24 hours a week), "if that works better for you right now."
Small companies that are looking to grow still have a cautious outlook; people that can fill a strategic role long-term but also support business concerns on a short-term become extremely attractive.
Sorry, but it isn't about being a good citizen. When you invest $600MM-1B in any facility, sales tax becomes a huge cost, and at a different scale than consumer sales tax.
It used to be that sales tax just ht the final transaction, now it is every step in the process. This doesn't help buld the economy, the schools, or roads in an equitable relationship between payees and users. (Taxation without representation?)
For a project in California, the state actually takes in more cash from a major construction project than the contractor's profit margin.
But if it's drowned, dropped, or ripped apart, Apple is under no obligation to pay for user carelessness. Period.
The challenge is that Dell does fix it. Stupid things happen, even to smart people. When you are talking about a laptop, they need to take abuse and the cost is (was) such that a manufacturer should make repairs.
I'm a big Apple fan, but you can tell they breathe a sign of relief when something hits the end of the AppleCare window. $300 to replace an iBook keyboard! Four quick screws and a tug, $60 keyboard module... and they try to make it more attractive to just buy a new one.
Everything in balance, but you do get the whole slippery slope issue going quickly on this one.
But back to the scorched earth concept-- can he destroy revenue for his competitors to limit free online competition.
I'd say it is a question Taco would be better off giving insight on-- how the checkbox for eliminating ads is working out.
The challenge good will and adblock have are that once you block, you block for all sites, even the ones that don't over-advertise. The only time I minded/. ads was when I was connecting with my iPhone and it caused an excessive delay in page loading. It is a great example of a scorched earth example; the work-around is embedding the content into flash ads... which will quickly make me just go ahead and invent news myself.
I think Murdoch should take a closer look at what happened to the music industry to see where things are going for him. Lack of value translates to lack of revenue. Milking (or bilking) the stone only goes so far...
Used to subscribe to WSJ because I thought the quality was hard to beat. Canceled after far too many articles that were far too self-serving to Murdoch. Then there is Fox News... and...
Far too out of touch. News Corp is completely lost.
I actually prefer the US version of double-billing for phone calls to the European one, as each person shoulders their expenses. The SMS thing is a complete joke though; may they die a quick and painful death!
I wonder how much clout it would really take to do a multi-technology MVNO that opportunistically selects the cheapest carrier or the one with the best signal, and stops trying to be a "phone company." EVDO, 3G GSM, WiMax, WiFi... all in one handset?
You should never run power cables under carpet; easiest way to start a fire!
The three keys are:
Make sure the connections to fixed infrastructure are in the right place. Pay someone or do it yourself, but get an outlet where you need it to avoid stretched cords and tripping hazards.
Keep cables off the desk. Get them over the back or drill holes in the top with a grommet close to point of use.
Have a place for extra cable to go.
My solution is to mount a hard-wired plugstrip to the wall at the side of my desk, 4-6" above work surface level, with a small wall-bracket shelf above it. I keep my desk 4" off the wall, so the power bricks are screened by the shelf, and cords can drape down between the side of my desk and the wall.
I have a blotter on the desk as well, so anything that has to go to the opposite side of the computer is kind of held in place by the storage compartment at the back of the blotter.
An improvement would be to have either two plugstrips or several outlets that are switched as well as unswitched. I could also add brushes for both sides of the gap so stuff doesn't fall down there...
Can someone just tell me how to deal with the freaking mountains of paper on my desk? Say scan it, and I will find you...
Conservation is an important part of the equation, but unfortunately GDP Growth correlates pretty closely to energy consumption growth. There is always low-hanging fruit, but that really doesn't represent the majority of energy consumption by any means.
For an old industrial facility that was built in the 60's and never upgraded, we can do a few things to drop demand and total energy consumption by 25-30%, but those are fairly rare. Most of the time, you are lucky to find a system that you can improve by more than 10% without major process changes.
Additional generation capacity is needed, and one of the easiest ways to recover it is by taking advantage of the time lag between the coasts on peak demand. If nothing else, it helps improve spinning reserve for the overall grid.
Look at the number of sites that switched from Google Maps to BingEarth or whatever the hell it is called over the last month. MS will buy market share if it needs to. If the product is at least on-par, it isn't hard to take a significant portion.
Well, the challenge from a business prospect is that the only way Google is successful is selling ads. They don't sell software and make a profit. If you believe that ad-supported websites are going to have to move to a different business model as ad-blocking increases, upstream content providers charge (more) money, and advertisers tighten ad budgets, then Google is doomed! Doomed!
Many companies fear letting a company host their data when the specific objective is to search it in order to be able to offer targeted ads to users. When Google comes up with a successful model for pricing software as a service with no advertising "strings" attached, then the picture changes.
Viable competition is useful to everybody, so I wish Google success... but I do hope they can make it work without just ads to support it...
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine the intent is to say green-field data center, or a new facility built from the ground up without legacy issues...
They aren't talking about mandatory 60wpm in order to graduate, but at least push the class on people. I praise Buddha that I didn't learn my dad's way of touch typing, with his "home row" being AWEF JIO;.
It is extremely useful for separating the mechanical task of documenting your thoughts. Most people (seem to) need reinforcement of looking at their words to continue processing thoughts. Dictation requires repetition to be effective.
What you describe is slang, not a (formal) language that can be called English. From a communication perspective, what percentage of people would fully understand your sample sentence? My wife and I routinely mix English, Thai, Swedish, Spanish, and maybe even a tiny bit of Mandarin in conversation, but I'll guarantee you someone fluent in all five languages will still have trouble understanding what the heck we *mean* or how to construct a response using diction in each language that we would understand.
It is simply a slang of shared experiences.
Nitrous Oxide is N2O
Nitrogen Oxide is NOx
Not the same thing.
Very good analogy on the back-pressure.
The "blocking of exits" isn't what architects are curious about, it is the focus on funneling exits rather than just having a certain width offer a constant carrying capacity. Fire codes are tricky, in that they try to balance safety with general application practicality. For the most part (excluding A(ssembly) occupancies), distance separation of exits is focused more on ensuring that a problem in one area doesn't keep all occupants stranded. It works in many applications, but a mob exit isn't really what codes are designed around, for many reasons.
Kind of; the goal is to allow people to accelerate through the constrained opening; the pole moves restricts flow in advance of the opening so optimal flow can happen through the door.
People panic to get to the door, so the pole helps to restore some order to traffic flow.
The building codes try to increase exit width to handle higher traffic flow. The reality, at least as suggested by the research, is similar to what landscape architects have known for generations: people walk faster on a narrow sidewalk than a broad one.
In an emergency, you hit the maximum carrying capacity of any pathway. The key to evacuating a densely occupied space is to convince people to spread out to multiple different exit points, which is confusing in an emergency situation.
I don't think anything is perfect, but when people approach a single door from a number of different angles optimum traffic flow doesn't happen.
Boeing's core compentency is composite airframes?! From an engineering perspective, sub-contracting out parts of the plane was the only chance they had of making it possible. I've been in some of the big autoclaves used for major parts, and it is a bit simplistic to think that Boeing could have done all the manufacturing in-house.
But, their supposed core competency, integration, seems to be more lacking.
Ultimately, when these things first crash it is going to be an interesting case of finger pointing.
Comcast has roughly $1B in cash, and $30B in debt. Disney has a market cap of ~$45B, and Viacom $15B, Time Warner is at ~$30B. Comcast's total market cap is $45B.
While they would love to own a "must have" content provider, so would I. I think we are both roughly in the same position for being able to pull it off. I have a $5 bill handy...
It usually isn't a problem with having bad credit; no company in their right mind would hire someone based on their FICO score. You do get a little concerned if they have 100% of their annual salary in rotating debt, or show patterns of being irresponsible and exercising poor judgment.
If someone has been laid off, looking for work for six months, and maxing out their credit cards... you tend to focus much more on why they were laid off in the first place and speculating as to why they are having trouble finding a job. That's the real prejudice you have to get over.
I used to be high-and-mighty on this one too. Now that I own a business it is a little different.
For us, the issue is that many of our clients require background checks in order to get people on-site. The credit report doesn't tell you too much, but having it pulled at least makes you comfortable that they aren't going to be rejected elsewhere.
Usually the information you look for is stuff that shows patterns, not isolated incidents. It might be a bigger issue for large companies where it can prevent you from being interviewed, but for us it is just one small document that we can check off for compliance reasons.
The interesting one for us is criminal background checks. We recently had an applicant that showed a pretty disturbing pattern of either stupidity or bad judgment. It would have been flagged as well.
The /. crowd wants control, but the average user just wants things to work. They don't want to hassle with backups or the pains of migrating to a new machine. My only gripe against hosted apps is that the TCO is often higher than an owned app, and it can make future migration more difficult.
Well, Revit might as well be hosted in the cloud when you are sharing data between companies or locations.
I'd side with the GP on this one. We ask every candidate their desired salary at the interview, and we do use the response to rule out many candidates. Sometimes, it is our loss, but in general we do it because we can afford to pay $X assuming the person will help us to generate $3X in additional revenue. In the end, the whole package forms the costs, but knowing where someone's mindset is helps a great deal. We hired someone at 30% over their asking salary to make sure he knew just how important he was to us as a strategic hire. Inexperienced people (especially right now) we often low-ball to keep our flexibility.
It really comes down to if you are dealing with a dick that only cares about "winning" a negotiation, or someone with a legitimate business issue to resolve.
Maybe a better way to phrase it would be "Through the current financial crisis, what has been the biggest struggle for your company-- bringing in new work, project cycle delays, accounts receivable, cash flow, or credit concerns?" You can follow that up with "How do you see that changing over the next year?"
The "Who are your competitors" question is one of the most important to ask and understand, ideally in a phone interview so you can do research for an in-person interview. To that, I would add for the final interview:
Based on the resumes coming across my desk, my biggest concern with potential candidates is short tenure at previous jobs. People on two-year cycles are damaging to a company that tries to promote long-term employees. People that get fired after two years because they can't hide their incompetence any longer become a money-pit.
I know it is hard on job seekers in this market to go to every interview optimistic and not formulaic, but at least for me with a small company I want to meet people that want to work with me.
If you are talking to a company that does a lot of work scattered about from a single or couple offices, ask about travel opportunities and expectations. Be sure to phrase it in a way that shows your knowledge about the company, not in a way that sounds like either all you want to do is travel, or you don't want to travel at all.
Ask about the typical career path for someone at the company.
For the older generation, one strong selling point for an engineer we just hired was that he was willing to work full-time, but really just wanted to work three days a week. That immediately took pressure off us of "what if he can't perform?" New grads, if you are having trouble finding something, then offer yourself up as part-time (24 hours a week), "if that works better for you right now."
Small companies that are looking to grow still have a cautious outlook; people that can fill a strategic role long-term but also support business concerns on a short-term become extremely attractive.
Sorry, but it isn't about being a good citizen. When you invest $600MM-1B in any facility, sales tax becomes a huge cost, and at a different scale than consumer sales tax.
It used to be that sales tax just ht the final transaction, now it is every step in the process. This doesn't help buld the economy, the schools, or roads in an equitable relationship between payees and users. (Taxation without representation?)
For a project in California, the state actually takes in more cash from a major construction project than the contractor's profit margin.
A better solution needs to be found.
The challenge is that Dell does fix it. Stupid things happen, even to smart people. When you are talking about a laptop, they need to take abuse and the cost is (was) such that a manufacturer should make repairs.
I'm a big Apple fan, but you can tell they breathe a sign of relief when something hits the end of the AppleCare window. $300 to replace an iBook keyboard! Four quick screws and a tug, $60 keyboard module... and they try to make it more attractive to just buy a new one.
Everything in balance, but you do get the whole slippery slope issue going quickly on this one.
But back to the scorched earth concept-- can he destroy revenue for his competitors to limit free online competition.
I'd say it is a question Taco would be better off giving insight on-- how the checkbox for eliminating ads is working out.
The challenge good will and adblock have are that once you block, you block for all sites, even the ones that don't over-advertise. The only time I minded /. ads was when I was connecting with my iPhone and it caused an excessive delay in page loading. It is a great example of a scorched earth example; the work-around is embedding the content into flash ads... which will quickly make me just go ahead and invent news myself.
I think Murdoch should take a closer look at what happened to the music industry to see where things are going for him. Lack of value translates to lack of revenue. Milking (or bilking) the stone only goes so far...
Used to subscribe to WSJ because I thought the quality was hard to beat. Canceled after far too many articles that were far too self-serving to Murdoch. Then there is Fox News... and...
Far too out of touch. News Corp is completely lost.
I actually prefer the US version of double-billing for phone calls to the European one, as each person shoulders their expenses. The SMS thing is a complete joke though; may they die a quick and painful death!
I wonder how much clout it would really take to do a multi-technology MVNO that opportunistically selects the cheapest carrier or the one with the best signal, and stops trying to be a "phone company." EVDO, 3G GSM, WiMax, WiFi... all in one handset?
You should never run power cables under carpet; easiest way to start a fire!
The three keys are:
My solution is to mount a hard-wired plugstrip to the wall at the side of my desk, 4-6" above work surface level, with a small wall-bracket shelf above it. I keep my desk 4" off the wall, so the power bricks are screened by the shelf, and cords can drape down between the side of my desk and the wall.
I have a blotter on the desk as well, so anything that has to go to the opposite side of the computer is kind of held in place by the storage compartment at the back of the blotter.
An improvement would be to have either two plugstrips or several outlets that are switched as well as unswitched. I could also add brushes for both sides of the gap so stuff doesn't fall down there...
Can someone just tell me how to deal with the freaking mountains of paper on my desk? Say scan it, and I will find you...
Conservation is an important part of the equation, but unfortunately GDP Growth correlates pretty closely to energy consumption growth. There is always low-hanging fruit, but that really doesn't represent the majority of energy consumption by any means.
For an old industrial facility that was built in the 60's and never upgraded, we can do a few things to drop demand and total energy consumption by 25-30%, but those are fairly rare. Most of the time, you are lucky to find a system that you can improve by more than 10% without major process changes.
Additional generation capacity is needed, and one of the easiest ways to recover it is by taking advantage of the time lag between the coasts on peak demand. If nothing else, it helps improve spinning reserve for the overall grid.
Look at the number of sites that switched from Google Maps to BingEarth or whatever the hell it is called over the last month. MS will buy market share if it needs to. If the product is at least on-par, it isn't hard to take a significant portion.
Well, the challenge from a business prospect is that the only way Google is successful is selling ads. They don't sell software and make a profit. If you believe that ad-supported websites are going to have to move to a different business model as ad-blocking increases, upstream content providers charge (more) money, and advertisers tighten ad budgets, then Google is doomed! Doomed!
Many companies fear letting a company host their data when the specific objective is to search it in order to be able to offer targeted ads to users. When Google comes up with a successful model for pricing software as a service with no advertising "strings" attached, then the picture changes.
Viable competition is useful to everybody, so I wish Google success... but I do hope they can make it work without just ads to support it...