Posts by Bart Janssen
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to
It used to be rule of thumb and then! rulers
Oh sure, the eye is the ultimate arbiter of success after all, and so using the eye to decide shape is critical. But I love the design phase as well and often my thoughts about what is possible need to be tested with some math first.
As for rulers, they have their place but one lesson I learnt was using a story stick, it doesn't matter if all the legs are 2 mm shorter than you intended but it does matter that they are all the same - a story stick does that when a ruler doesn't.
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to
I like how you said “when” rather than “if”
That was the point I actually started to enjoy woodwork as a hobby, when I discovered everyone stuffed up and good woodworkers had all these tricks for fixing their mistakes.
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Holmes couldn’t see it.
That pretty much defines Holmes for me. There is no doubt he worked like a dog and no doubt he had talent. He used that talent and work ethic to gain a deserved powerful position and then used that position to do some real good.
But like any human he made mistakes and he had a tendancy (at least in his public persona) to be blind to those mistakes. That for me was always the thing about him (or his public persona) that made me uncomfortable.
As for tolerating “edge personalities”. Bollocks to that. If you can’t do the job without being a bully or an arse then you shouldn’t be doing the job. That’s less of a criticism of Holmes that of some of those who followed him. I think it’s a massive copout of the managers if they allow staff to behave that way – it may be hard to find someone who can do that job without behaving badly, but the managers aren’t paid to do what is easy.
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to
Have you ever really used trig in your joinery
I have! And algebra! I also delve into things from art like golden rectangles and proportions.
Of course knowing how to pull apart and rebuild when all that goes wrong is mportant too.
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to
Bakshi’s behaviour was embarrassing his party
Snort, we are talking about a political party being ... embarrassed??????
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to
My partner basically apologised to him on behalf of the universe for having to listen to all that bollocks.
Much as I loathe politicians in general they really do have to put up with some awful crap.
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Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero, in reply to
written by pixies
Are you calling Russell a pixie?
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Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero, in reply to
That’s why I like patronage as a model.
You’d still need some mechanism for matching donors with recipients.
But the internet is really good for that. The problem with patronage used to be that the time spent getting the donations meant the donations had to be large to be worth bothering with. Now it should be easy to make any size donation at any time.
I'm not sure I see a problem with matching donors with recipients if you can make the donation on the page - but I'm guessing there is a problem with simply having donors click a button and nominate an amount - otherwise why don't we have it already.
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Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero, in reply to
the crux of the problem is everyone wants to get paid….
No. It’s that creators of content want to feed their children and buy them Christmas presents and go out to dinner and pay for school uniforms and …
Consumers of content, particularly on the internet, often forget that there is a real person spending time and energy on content. If somehow that time is not rewarded then the creator must get the money for doctors visits somewhere else and spend less time creating.
As someone less able to create I am only too willing to see my earnings support the creators of content.
BUT I am very unwilling to see my earnings support advertising executives lunches instead of the creator of the content I enjoy. Same applies to Kim Dotcom who creates nothing for me hence I don’t want my earnings to be tracked to him.
That’s why I like patronage as a model. Subscriptions are exclusive by nature, but patronage enables the creator without limiting the number of people who benefit.
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What I find most disturbing about Megabox and I guess to a similar degree Google et al., is that the discussion is all about the rights of the advertisers and perhaps sometimes to a limited extent about the rights of the viewers.
For me, I can turn off the ads if I want to - I don't because I understand that Russell makes some money out of them. I also actually make a point of clicking through if I'm actually interested, because again I understand Russell makes some money if I do. The point here is I want Russell to be able to continue creating content. I don't need the ads and if they piss me off enough I really will block them.
This discussion focusses on the ads too much. The real issue is how to content providers get rewarded. And we still have not sorted that out in this internet age.
Dotcom and Google would love us all to pay content providers via them, they'd take a cut of course. And being good businessfolk they will get rich while the content creators get almost just enough to keep providing. And don't doubt for a second that Kim Dotcom is anything other than a very good (successful) businessman.
Whether Megabox's ads are "classy" or not is irelevant. The question is, will diverting ad revenue to megabox make any difference to content creators ability to earn from their content? I can't see any way that can be true so I'm inclined to say it's a bad thing.