With this amount of noise in the signal, it's hard to tell good hackers when you meet them. I can't tell, even now. You also can't tell from their resumes. It seems like the only way to judge a hacker is to work with him on something.And this is the reason that high-tech areas only happen around universities. The active ingredient here is not so much the professors as the students. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on the same projects. The smart ones learn who the other smart ones are, and together they cook up new projects of their own.
One of the somewhat hidden treasures of the First Coast is FCCJ, known nationally for its technological programs. In the long run, I think, the school is important because it can bring together creative people and get them working together on projects that will have long-term impact.
]]>Ever wonder why Yahoo! is called Yahoo!, or why SAAB is written all in caps? Or just curious about who, exactly, McDonald's and Kawasaki were named after? Well, wonder no more.
The Wikipedia -- a free, user-created encyclopedia -- includes a list of company name etymologies, running the gamut from ABN AMRO to Zeus. (Well, technically from 3M, since they start with numbers, but that doesn't sound as good.)
]]>For all modern society's promises of leisure, liberty and doing what you want, most of us are still slaves to a schedule we did not choose. Why have things come to such a pass? Well, the forces of the anti-idle have been at work since the fall of man.]]>
The numbers the lottery drew in Thursday's midday Pick 3 game were 4-5-2 in the regular drawing and 1-4-4 in a bonus drawing that Seidel says guaranteed him a 20 percent return on the $23,000 of chances he and his friends bought, at $1 a pop.That was an easy $4,600 in profit that they cashed in on Thursday afternoon and Friday.
"It was just a business transaction," Seidel said of the plan Friday, after reaping the bulk of his winnings from a Dierbergs store, where a manager ushered him and his friends in a back room to dole out several thousand dollars.
In an in-depth interview with Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast (Jacksonville's cable operatore). we find out how the company is looking at the future, and why the Disney deal was so important to the company:
Like a card player who has tipped his hand, Mr. Roberts acknowledged with the bid that Comcast needed more exclusive programming to complement its national cable network. The combination would have transformed Comcast from an ordinary cable operator - of the type that are increasingly being treated by Wall Street like reliable but slow-growing utilities - into a media company with the clout to battle Time Warner, Viacom and the News Corporation.]]>
SMC has thrown the kitchen sink into its traveler’s access point, a street price $99 device that has the full complement of Wi-Fi options]]>
The conversation started with the author explaining how he used his AX to bridge a wired connection to his laptop. The real value, though, might be in the comments readers have added:
We've done something similiar to what Colin Smith described above. We had three people that needed to work together in the hotel room, so one of us connected to the hotel LAN network, charged the $10 to their room and then created a wireless network using their powerbook. Then the two other people connected to that powerbook wirelessly.]]>
Hard work was supposed to bring wealth and satisfaction. Instead, argues Bunting, with an abundance of statistics and anecdotes to back her up, it has brought worry, illness, poverty and debt. Why do so many of us voluntarily submit ourselves to low, low wages, long, long hours and high stress? Why do we willingly enslave ourselves?]]>
In his blog, Hurst is now talking about why advertising isn't the key to keeping customers:
The most effective companies realize that they can't succeed on advertising alone; the customer matters. For those companies operating online, customer experience isn't a list of "website usability guidelines." Instead, customer experience requires a transformation of the company's strategy, backed up by the organization, investing with a reasonable budget.]]>
Jeff Maurone writes:
In ten minutes there was a donut or toroid of geekdom surrounding Bill that was three or four people deep, but after a few minutes I had worked my way to the front and got to spend about two hours standing with him, talking to him, and mostly listening to his responses to other people's questions.
(On a sidenote, and perhaps just because of my own geekery, I love the preciseness of "toroid" in that description.)
]]>Now, to help the industry survive there -- and to cut down on employee turnover, which can top 100 percent -- the outsourcing call centers are trying to help Indians seem more American.
Reports the Los Angeles Times:
The Indians responded according to their own deepest natures: They were silent when they didn't understand, and they often committed to more than their employers could deliver. They would tell the Americans that someone would get back to them tomorrow to check on their problems, and no one would.Customer satisfaction plummeted. The U.S. clients grew alarmed. Some even returned their business to U.S. call centers.
Realizing that a new multibillion-dollar industry with 150,000 employees was at risk, Indian call centers have recently embarked on much more comprehensive training. New hires are taught how to express empathy, strategies to successfully open and close conversations, and above all how to be assertive, however unnatural it might feel.
]]>
With the number of options and technological changes in television sets, simply buying something to zone out in front of in the evenings has become ever more complicated. To that end, Technology360 offers a primer on how to buy a television.
TV buying is much more complicated than it used to be.In the past 50 years, there haven't been many features to pick from, and once optional things like UHF tuners, remote controls, color, stereo and cable channel tuning have all become standard. The main constant over the years was a choice of picture size.
Now, there are SIX different decisions to make and the choices within decisions keep changing. This confounds even the experts. So don't feel alone in your quest!
I find it somewhat ironic that the big box electronics retailers have all moved to non-commissioned -- which often means not as well trained -- sales staff at a time when the products they sell have gotten more complicated.
Valenti, of course, has been a staunch opponent of various forms of technology that do not include digitial rights managment schemes, while Lessig is one of the foremost proponents of freedom of ideas, acclaimed for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."
The best Valenti quote, I think, is his statement arguing against the VCR, which has created a hugely profitable distribution channel for the film industry. When the device was introduced, though, the movie lobbyist said:
"[Some say] that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had. I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."]]>
FindYourSpot is a website that will help narrow down where you'd be happy living (Jacksonville, happily, scored high on my list.)
The quiz goes through size of cities, cost of living, type of climate and other intangibles that you might not think of while considering your options. If nothing else, it's not a bad way to kill a few minutes.
]]>No matter how the Games go off, the events will provide plenty of fodder for executives looking ahead to the next Olympics -- and, we might suggest, to the organizers of Super Bowl XXXVIII.
Already, Wharton Business School has taken a look at the problems facing the Olympics and what they mean from a marketing standpoint:
“At the end of the day, a lack of ticket sales hurts Athens far more than the International Organizing Committee” for the Olympics, says Rosner, who is co-author of a book titled, The Business of Sports. And this may be appropriate. “The lack of organization, whether real or perceived, by the Athens organizing committee has made people wonder whether these games will be a disaster,” Rosner notes.]]>