624 karma · joined February 28, 2008
This is also particularly irksome on sites which implement full-background ads. The only "non-hot-zones" end up being small parcels of the titlebar or footer.
I recall this concept of "dead/neutral" space mentioned in one Don Norman's books (http://jnd.org).
It's actually rude to show up excessively early for ANY sort of social engagement and, despite the business context and objectives involved, an in-person interview IS a social engagement.
Despite the professional context, you are still considered a "guest" and the employer is considered the "host". In most cultures, the host is expected to provide some sort of accomodations for the guest--if only acknowledgment of arrival and a simple waiting area considered a non-public space. By showing up excessively early, you're placing an "excess of obligation" upon the "host".
If you find that, by happenstance, you'll arrive "excessively early" for your interview. The default behavior is bide your time in some fashion that does not involve any obligation on the part of your "host" until just shortly prior to the appointed time.
Depending on the circumstances of your arrival, one can try calling ahead to ask the other party "If they would prefer, it's unexpectedly become possible to move up your meeting". I generally don't recommend this as it can greatly over-complicate previously agreed upon schedules and, if not handled delicately, can convey the impression that one or both parties don't place enough value on each other's time, attention, and prior commitments.
I can say on good authority, as I paid lawyers good money for the legislation ( http://tinyurl.com/3xwvf5a ) and pertinent case-law research, that (commercially) emails with e-sigs in VA are just as good, in some cases, MUCH better than faxes due to the header meta-information.
What constitutes an "e-sig" under the Commercial Code of Virginia can also be very simple (nothing more than a "/s/ <full name> <title> <date>" line in documents) provided that both parties agree apriori that "sufficient notice" can be given over email.
Given the pace of business these days, to a first-order approximation, we simply won't do any kind of volume work with a client, vendor, or partner that doesn't support electronic document authorization. Faxes really are dinosaurs. We still maintain a dedicated fax line, but to my knowledge, it's not be utilized for over 4 years.
I ALWAYS opt for the pat-down and, regretfully, can no longer fly into the UK. If the trends continue, I'll simply stop flying general aviation in the U.S. outside of exigent circumstances. Luckily, both the northeast and the pacific northwest have train service.
Aside from the legal, privacy, and baseline human dignity issues, there's the very unknowable health risks.
I have a degree in electromagnetics (technically EE) and we know FAR TOO LITTLE about BOTH the short-term and long-term cellular effects of this specific kind of radiation exposure.
It's not JUST the raw radiated isentropic power (which IS very low), it's the specific sets of wavelengths involved, the orientation of the tissues with respect to the incoming radiation, and the frequency of exposure.
I pity 'da fool.
In the current market, Drobo has managed to price themselves OUT of that space while simultaneously NOT keeping up with performance on the higher end.
Drobo is now in the uncanny-valley of proprietary RAID systems.
As I've stated previously here, I'm no fan of Mr. Calacanis, but there may be a whole host of legitimate business reasons why he wishes to no longer have this employee on-site.
Whatever the full context, it's VERY unprofessional (also likely violating his MCA or NDA) of this employee to post what is clearly proprietary HR-related information to the public Web.
I'd say these bridges aren't just burned, but well and surely nuked.
In criminal cases, people's lives are on the line. In class-action civil lawsuits, billions of dollars are at stake.
This wheel most-definitely does not need re-inventing.
Flagging this article for it's total lack of content.
Who's going to pay the Drobo premium when equivalent or better performance can be had, with more a bog-standard (e.g. reliable) hardware and filesystems, for less?
I guess those customers who care about the visual aesthetics of their NAS device.
Unfortunately, there are many enterprises (drug research, agriculture, smelting, office construction, theme parks, waste processing, private space exploration, etc.) which are fundamentally dependent on large amounts of capital both during the start-up phase as well as to ensure daily continuity of operations.
Most of these capital intensive business also demand a reasonably large staff to support these daily workflows.
With a larger staff comes the increasing probability that one bad apple will be hired. Just one bad apple can bring an entire enterprise down without a reasonable set of security and trust-limiting thresholds on capital expenditures and workflow control. The Union Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal and the Barings bank collapse come immediately to mind.
A prominent COO once told me that for every 100 hires, he expected to pick-up 1 bad apple every 2 years. In his context a "bad apple" was someone whom, over time, would repeatedly and deliberately attempt to criminally defraud, sabotage, or publicly discredit the company.
With those odds, basic human nature, and capital-intensive business economics, it's not hard to see why these enterprise's mores on debt and individual trust run counter to 37Signals' philosophy.
Everyone has their moods and passions. Any non-trivial project will almost inevitabley take a few unplanned paths and hit a few bumps in the road. Mr. Murphy never takes a day off.
Alas, when performance demands keep reliably falling well outside the boundaries of the available (budget,staff,time) work-potential triangle, it's time to move on.
Life is too short. It's simply not worth the wear-and-tear on one's health, staff, family, and the company's bottom line, to deal with consistently unreasonable people on a continuing basis.
- Executable registry entries
- Baking-In IE into the O.S. w/o any native ability (pre hypervisors) to concurrently run multiple versions for testing purposes
- Re-Authorization/Re-Licensing for trivial hardware changes (the whole WGA bullshit)
Having lived in the Schaumburg area for several months also doubly-reinforces your argument.
Well-Played. Estuary indeed.
I suspect Joey Roth ( http://joeyroth.com ), as a one-person design shop, might also have some real, hard-earned, and even more current, insights into this space.
I simply can't trust the opinion of a billionaire journalist (through marriage) who's never tried to earn a living using these strategies to bring a real product to market.
One of the interesting results is that women are better at short-range vergence skills (e.g. obscured fast facial recognition & foreground-background discrimination) while men are better overall and absolutely excel at long range pathing prediction.
In small, cohesive groups communication IS simultaneously MORE efficient and MORE intimate.
As the group size grows, the differing mixtures of shared properties amongst its participants grows. There are more total possible channels for signal-based bonding, but also more noise. With choice comes confusion, ambivalence, and even rejection.
In the extreme case, the original cohesive set of properties in the "core culture" can be bifurcated or disappear altogether.
It's no different than what happened on the original Fidonet, The Well, or the infamous AOL-invasion of the academic Internet.
SXSW has simply gotten too big for the original cultural center to hold.
Considering I can contract out multiple iterations of a bespoke, cross-media, hand-dithered (e.g. newsprint, 4-color, b&w, web, etc.) logo for $1-$2k from full-service design/marketing firms HOW is this a competitive solution?
What project or firm who even tangentially cares about their brand identity would go down this path? Logos typically last the lifetime of the brand (years) and those sunk costs can be easily justified by that lengthy amortization.
Honestly, this seems like a service without a market; at least in the United States.
Those same environments with higher density of vipers also play host to the widest variety of plant life. In many fruits and leaves, the differences between positive identification and edible vs. inedible have more to do with color and texture than scent.
Additionally, in a canopy environment fraught with the hazards and complexity of 3 dimensional navigation, and lack of a constant "ground scent-base", food source identification via sight would seem to be a more caloric-efficient approach. That's the strategy employed by most tropical birds and they have an even greater freedom of movement amongst the branches. It's also worth pointing out that exclusively ground-dwelling tropical birds such as Kiwi, Kakapo, Cassowary, and the Ocellated turkey all forage by scent and all have undergone reverse evolutionary trade-offs in visual acuity.
Most (all?) animal senses have evolved firstly for finding and obtaining food.
From antelopes to bees, the spectral and polarization sensitivity (if any) of the eyes is perfectly matched to discriminate their primary food source against the background of their visual environment.
Predators evolved binocular vision (for distance estimation), and vergence tracking to estimate future prey pathing movement. In fact, amongst humans, the extremely wide margin in vergence tracking performance between the sexes is indicative of a very early specialization for hunting by men and gathering by women.
Evolving defensively against such an extremely rare event (no known extinct or extant species of snake even actively preyed against humans) would seem counter to the daily duty cycle demands of the human sensorium.
It's hard NOT to like virtually guaranteed access to the power of regular expressions at any command line.