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Skip to comments.Jesse Lee Peterson Radio Show Live Thread, September 2nd! OBAMA WATCH 1ST HOUR
Posted on 09/01/2009 9:21:55 PM PDT by abigail2
BOND Action, Inc...Educating, Motivating and Rallying Americans! The Jesse Lee Peterson Radio Show
Streamed live online from 6-9 a.m. PST / 9-12 a.m. EST.
Call in the same times usually.
For Live Questions or Comments Call 1-888-77-JESSE(5-3773)
You can email comments and questions to email@example.com
For more information on getting The Jesse Lee Peterson Show picked up on a station in your local area call Ermias Alemayehu at 1-877-WE ACT77 (932-2877)
Hour 2: DYLAN AVERY, Writer, Director of Loose Change Documentary. The film tries to make the case that 9/11 was an inside job.
Hour 3: Open Lines
First Hour is OBAMA WATCH...tune in and call in...888 775-3773.
Get up early west coast people...this show is worth it.
Wake up William...it's time to wake up...Wallace...
What does that mean? A call for A William Wallace?
Jesse is talking now about Ted Kennedy's funeral, all about politics...democrats have no shame. Plays a clip of his grandson making an unabashed plug for Obamacare...a child! and it was a prayer...these are the types of people taht are runnning our government.
Jesse is talking now about Ted Kennedy's funeral, all about politics...democrats have no shame. Plays a clip of his grandson making an unabashed plug for Obamacare...a child! and it was a prayer...these are the types of people that are runnning our government.
Fred Lucas is on now. Obama is taking and archiving comments and names of those who post on white house web site and other social site.They don't know what comments they are looking at. The law says that the messages that are sent by the white house must be saved, but not the incoming messages I believe. They are looking for someone to do this.
He believes the 9/11 was inside job. They are discussing it.
Dylan actually is nutty, but he is a good foe. i like the way he argues, he stands up for himself ok. Jesse asks him why does he hate America. Dylan says he is not a liberal. But he is. A great caller calls in who claims and sounds like he is knowledgeble about the high risers. This is a good argument...
Jesse is talking about since God changed him 20 years ago, he couldn't tell the truth from the lie. The gentleman earlier set this off, since he was so angry. He didn't see that he was in no position to know the truth about 9/11. But he couldn't see that. Jesse is saying when he was young, he listened to Louis Farrahkan, Jessie Jackson. He thought they were telling the truth. He says there is another way of seeing things.
Jesse is right again!
Next week BOND gets some cash from FlashBack!!!
I just seen that! Posted the link on my FB Tw pages!
It's something that comes to mind for me and I like to write because we all need it...the part in Braveheart when he was sleeping and had a vision of his wife who was murdered and she came to him in spirit and told him it is time to awaken. It is time for all of us to awaken...we are under assault here by millions of taken over do gooder souls. I love the fight now because I do pray for me enemies...they are taken over by the darkness and it is scary.I hope that they would awaken too.
Yes, he is and nice of you to drop by!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.


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Henry Cavill & Gina Carano - BAFTAs 2013 Red Carpet
Henry Cavill and his girlfriend Gina Carano walk the red carpet at the 2013 EE British Academy Film Awards on Sunday (February 10) at the Royal Opera House in London, England.
The 29-year-old Man of Steel actor, who suited up in Tom Ford for the evening, is set to hit the stage to present an award during the show!
PHOTOS: Check out the latest pics of Henry Cavill
The night before, Henry was one of the many celebrities who stepped out for the Charles Finch & Chanel's Pre-BAFTA Dinner.

subset: commoncrawl


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Individuals looking forward to spending their higher education years studying abroad may wish to do so in the Dominica. Studying overseas can be an exciting opportunity, especially in a diverse country like Dominica. This island country is located in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea. The small island is only 290 square miles, but it is home to about 72,300 people. First settled by the Spanish, then a colony of France and later England, the country has a diverse background and many cultures present. This can make for an exciting opportunity.
There are many exciting things to know about the Dominica. For example, much of it is covered in rainforests. It is also home to the second largest hot spring. There are many rivers and waterfalls throughout it and sandy beaches to the north. That's why it is a popular tourist area especially for scuba divers. The Morne Trois Pitons National park is a World Heritage Site.
Living in Dominica
With a hot and humid climate and a modern, but still very religious culture, there is no doubt that students will find much to look forward to when attending college in Dominica. The country is affordable to live in and student visas are readily available to those with a clean criminal background and an accredited educational background.
For those students who wish to do so, it may be possible to remain in the country after receiving a degree from the Dominica. To do so, you would need to find employment with a company in the field of your degree. Medical and environmental engineering degrees and qualified individuals are very much in demand here as the country continues to flourish with modern technology. Students will need a work permit to remain. Keep in mind that a degree from Dominica is one that's desirable around the world. Finding opportunities outside of the country is possible.
Capital: Roseau
Official Languages: English
Government: Unitary parliamentary republic
Population: 72,337
Gross Domestic Product: $1.002 billion
Currency: East Caribbean dollar (XCD)
Time zone: (UTC-4)


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Why? Because you can! And pickle, and jam, or otherwise celebrate the resurgence of the domestic arts our forebears held so dear. Put on your best apron and step into our kitchen, won't you?
A continuation of my series about foraging at the farm and what I've done with my bounty. Up today: home made spiced apple rings from our own apples - a holiday favorite for me!


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|Pearland, Texas
|High School:
|House Affiliation:
Senior • 2010
Received All-Ivy League honorable mention … Recorded a double and two RBI in a game against Bucknell March 16 … Went 4 for 6 from the plate with a double and an RBI in a doubleheader against Princeton Apr. 2 … Went 2 for 3 with an RBI and a run scored in game one of a doubleheader against Penn Apr. 10 … Was 2 for 3 against Boston College Apr. 15 and against Brown Apr. 19 … Had a season-high six assists against the Bears … Picked up a pair of hits and a walk in a win over Yale Apr. 24 … Recorded a season-high 12 putouts against the Bulldogs … Had a hit in each game of the regular-season ending doubleheader against Dartmouth May 2 … Went 1 for 3 from the plate in all three games of the Ivy League Championship series against Cornell.
Junior • 2009
Started 42 games, splitting time between designated hitter and catcher … Had a .279 batting average and .364 on base percentage … Named to the Ivy League Honor Roll March 10 … Recorded 11 putouts as catcher in 7-2 win over Toledo March 21 in the Highlander Classic … Went 2 for 3 with one RBI in 10-5 win over UNC Greensboro March 24 … Went 2 for 3 in 10-3 win over Rhode Island April 2 … Compiled a nine game hitting streak from April 9-19.
Sophomore • 2008
Started 13 games at catcher and five at DP and appeared in 42 total games ... Had a .972 fielding percentage and threw out two runners from behind the plate ... Batted .307 with 23 hits, 13 RBI, three runs scored and a .350 on-base percentage ... Batted .318 (14 for 44) with runners on base, .353 (12 for 34) with runners in scoring position and .300 (12 for 40) with two outs ... One of two players to record four hits in a game when she went 4 for 4 with two runs and two RBI in a 17-2 win over Arkansas-Pine Bluff March 21 ... Was 2 for 4 with two RBI at Princeton March 30 ... Recorded a pinch-hit, two-run single against Boston College April 17.
Freshman • 2007
Played in 31 games, starting 16 at catcher, as a rookie ... Did not commit an error while recording 71 putouts, notching eight assists and throwing out two would-be base-stealers ... Knocked in go-ahead run with pinch-hit in 12-9, comeback win at Boston College (April 26) ... Went 1 for 2 with two runs scored and one driven in against Holy Cross (April 10) ... Recorded first career hit with pinch-hit RBI single against St. Joseph's (March 4) ... Made Harvard debut with start against Michigan State in second game of season (March 3).
Before Harvard
A four-year starter for the Pearland High School softball team ... all-state academic award recipient, NFCA All-American Scholar Athlete, team captain and team's Offensive Player of the Year as a senior ... Earned selection to TGCA All-Star Team and all-district and all-county first teams that season ... Also made the all-district first team in 2003 and 2005 ... Earned all-district honorable mention in 2004 and all-county honorable mention in 2004 and 2005 ... Member of the National Society of High School Scholars ... HOBY nominee ... Involved in extensive community service work, including work at a hospital, hurricane and tsunami relief, volunteer softball coaching and preparing items for troops, nursing home residents and the homeless.
Hobbies include painting and long-distance running ... Concentrating in either Sociology, Economics or both ... Involved with Pets as Therapy and Harvard Women in Business.


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Thank you. I'm really just a nerd in reality, haha.
Well, I'm doing okay I guess. Someone has been trolling with pearl jam in my guess the lyric Nirvana thread and I'm a bit pissed about that. If you like Nirvana, I'd appreciate it if you could help me by being a serious participant.
How are things going with you?
Senior Member


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Graduate Program Comprehensive Exams
The graduate comprehensive exam assesses mastery of core theoretical concepts, research methodologies, scholarly traditions, and key literature common to the field of communication studies. Held over three class meetings, the exam consists of one question on communication theory, one question on research methods, and one question on the student's elected course work in an area of specialization. Exam questions will ask students to do the following:
1. Identify, explain, and critique the major paradigms and theories that have shaped the field of communication, including their historical development and current trends;
2. Demonstrate an awareness of the ethical implications of any given theory or practice of communication;
3. Interpret and critique research methods used in published communication research studies;
4. Explain how to design and conduct scholarly research using one or more methods of inquiry;
5. Demonstrate knowledge of the ethical considerations inherent in conducting research in communication;
6. Identify, engage, and critique key literature in an elected area of specialization;
7. Demonstrate knowledge of how to relate and apply that literature to the study of communicative practices.
Exam Details
Students can enroll in COMM 297 to take the exam as early as the second semester in the program. Theory and method questions cover core curriculum and refer to common readings (see our exam reading list available on our Canvas site). The content for questions on elected course work will be based primarily on course syllabi. Exams will evaluated by the COMM 297 instructor and two other members of the graduate faculty. Students should coordinate with the instructor to determine who will write and assess the question for the student's chosen area of specialization.
This is a closed book exam. Exam responses must be typed. The department will provide students with computers on which to work. The department will also provide any accommodations needed due to a disability. Presidential Directive 97-03 requires that students with disabilities requesting accommodations must register with the DRC (Disability Resource Center) to establish a record of their disability.
Grading Policy
Students must pass all three sections of the exam. A committee consisting of the COMM 297 instructor and one other member of the graduate faculty will evaluate the theory and method portions of the exam. The faculty member responsible for writing a student's elective question will evaluate that portion of the exam. Students who fail one or more areas of the exam must make arrangements to re-take those portions of the exam the following semester. Students may re-take the exam one time. In other words, students have two opportunities to get passing marks on all three parts of the exam. For students who wish to undertake a project or thesis, they can begin the process prior to taking the exam but must first complete the exam before enrolling in project or thesis hours.
Exam Preparation
A list of recommended core readings on communication theories and research methods is available on our dedicated Canvas site. We encourage students to make use of this list when preparing for the exam.
Looking for the old exam?
Information about the old exam format (Plan B1) is available on our forms page.


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Heading into the summer, Ryan Huska wasn't looking for a change of pace or scenery.
Huska primed for challenge with baby Flames
Heading into the summer, Ryan Huska wasn't looking for a change of pace or scenery.
But if someone was looking …
"We were listening," the new Calgary Flames' American Hockey League boss said the other day, following his first National Hockey League rookie camp where he put some of his future charges through the paces. "My family knew that sooner or later if we wanted to make this a career, we'd have to make a move.
"And when this opportunity came to be, it was something we really didn't have to think that hard over."
Who could blame him for entertaining the offer?
The new gig is a step up the ladder from the Kelowna Rockets, where he'd been stationed for the last 12 seasons in the Western Hockey League, to the AHL's newest affiliate in Glens Falls, N.Y.
And, frankly, there wasn't much more left for the Cranbrook native to accomplish at the WHL and junior level.
Spending the last seven seasons as head coach, Huska had spent the five previous as an assistant. He'd been to the Memorial Cup three times and won the 2009 WHL championship (losing in the Memorial Cup finals that year with then-future Flames forward Mikael Backlund). He has also spent time on the world junior coaching staff.
"It's time for me, coaching-wise … it's time for me to learn some new things," said Huska who, as a 1993 third-round draft pick of the Chicago Blackhawks, had a few stops at Adirondack while dabbling in the minors. "It's time to work with men now and try to get them to be contributors to this organization."
He's also been around long enough to know the business, especially the correlation between the AHL level and the NHL — players are shuttled back and forth on a regular basis.
"Things have to be seamless between Adirondack and Calgary," Huska said. "I have to get myself familiar with how the team plays, some of the language that is used with the players so we can make it a smooth transition when guys do get called up."
And there are slight differences between junior-aged players (16 to 21) and AHL players. Yes, there is the odd teenager to manage and develop (and, occasionally, teach them how to grocery shop). But, then, there is also the AHL veteran over 30.
"A lot of these guys have never lived on their own before and they need some guidance," said the 38-year-old. "It's up to us to become professionals as soon as possible … I'm honest with them, I try to be fair with them, and try to let them know what's expected. Then, it's our coaching staff's responsibility to keep them accountable to the way we want them to play.
"I would say I'm in the middle between a players' coach and a coaches' coach."
Taking over for Troy Ward, who had been with the Abbotsford Heat and was recently hired with the WHL's Vancouver Giants, Huska understands the situation with the rebuilding Flames.
A huge chunk of their AHL team in 2014-15 will likely be comprised of high draft picks who don't crack the 2014-15 roster and will need strong professional guidance through their first professional season.
Huska admitted that aspect was intriguing.
"And part of it was how (Flames GM) Brad Treliving painted the picture on what he wanted the organization to be, the family feeling he wants it to have," he said. "A lot of the things he was saying were very similar to what I came from in Kelowna.
"That was a big reason why I left because, jeez, it felt really good."
Follow on Twitter/KristenOdlandCH


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Pontoon Cruises & Guided Hikes
Hop aboard one of Fontana's pontoon boats for a scenic cruise on Fontana Lake in the beautiful Eagle and Hazel Creek waterways. You'll get a view of the trails, forests, and mountains near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that few people get to experience.
Join us for a breathtaking sunset on the water where you get to watch the world fade away behind the mountains. You'll see why our visitors come back year after year just for the Sunset and Afternoon Lake Cruises at our Fontana Village Resort & Marina.
The Marina is offering absolutely stunning cruises at sunset with some of the most beautiful vistas imaginable. Call 828.498.2129 for seasonal cruise schedules and to make reservations for your next North Carolina mountain vacation.


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Baker, Alison. In Voices of Resistance: Oral Histories of Moroccan Women. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.
This is an indispensable source for understanding the roles played by women from different social classes in the anticolonial movement in Morocco. The author interviewed a wide array of Moroccan women who participated in various ways in the nationalist struggle.
Charrad, Mounira. States and Womens Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
This is a comparative historical and sociological analysis of the current differences in the legal statuses of women in the three former French colonies. The author locates present-day variations in the legal status of women in the pre-colonial and particularly the colonial periods.
Clancy-Smith, Julia. Colonialism: 18th to Early 20th Century. In Methodologies, Paradigms and Sources, vol. 1 of Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Suad Joseph. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003.
This article surveys the impact that European imperialism exerted upon knowledge about Muslim women and Islamic cultures. It focuses upon the two major colonial powersGreat Britain and Francealthough other European nations are considered for comparative purposes. The essays historical parameters run from 1750 until the eve of the Great War.
Clancy-Smith, Julia and Frances Gouda, eds. Domesticating the Empire: Gender, Race, & Family Life in the Dutch and French Empires. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
This multi-author volume has a number of essays devoted to women and gender in the French Empire; three chapters deal specifically with 19th- and 20th-century Algeria.
Lazreg, Marnia. The Eloguence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge Press, 1994.
This historical survey analyzes Algerian womens condition from the precolonial through the postcolonial periods. Lazreg takes to task not only France and French imperialism for the fact that Algerian women lack many basic civil and legal rights even today, but also male nationalist leaders who refused to recognize womens contributions to the nationalist struggle after independence was won in 1962.


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One more thing…
It's been awhile since we launched a whole new product at Fog Creek Software (the last one was Trello, and that's doing pretty well). Today we're announcing the public beta of HyperDev, a developer playground for building full-stack web-apps fast.
HyperDev is going to be the fastest way to bang out code and get it running on the internet. We want to eliminate 100% of the complicated administrative details around getting code up and running on a website. The best way to explain that is with a little tour.
Step one. You go to hyperdev.com.
Boom. Your new website is already running. You have your own private virtual machine (well, really it's a container but you don't have to care about that or know what that means) running on the internet at its own, custom URL which you can already give people and they can already go to it and see the simple code we started you out with.
All that happened just because you went to hyperdev.com.
Notice what you DIDN'T do.
You just went to hyperdev.com. Try it now!
What do you see in your browser?
Well, you're seeing a basic IDE. There's a little button that says SHOW and when you click on that, another browser window opens up showing you your website as it appears to the world. Notice that we invented a unique name for you.
Over there in the IDE, in the bottom left, you see some client side files. One of them is called index.html. You know what to do, right? Click on index.html and make a couple of changes to the text.
Now here's something that is already a little bit magic… As you type changes into the IDE, without saving, those changes are deploying to your new web server and we're refreshing the web browser for you, so those changes are appearing almost instantly, both in your browser and for anyone else on the internet visiting your URL.
Again, notice what you DIDN'T do:
You just typed some changes and BOOM they appeared.
OK, so far so good. That's a little bit like jsFiddle or Stack Overflow snippets, right? NBD.
But let's look around the IDE some more. In the top left, you see some server side files. These are actual code that actually runs on the actual (virtual) server that we're running for you. It's running node. If you go into the server.js file you see a bunch of JavaScript. Now change something there, and watch your window over on the right.
Literally every change you make is instantly saved, uploaded to the server, the server is restarted with the new code, and your browser is refreshed, all within half a second. So now your server-side code changes are instantly deployed, and once again, notice that you didn't:
You just changed the code and it was already reflected on the live server.
Now you're starting to get the idea of HyperDev. It's just a SUPER FAST way to get running code up on the internet without dealing with any administrative headaches that are not related to your code.
Ok, now I think I know the next question you're going to ask me.
"Wait a minute," you're going to ask. "If I'm not using Git, is this a single-developer solution?"
No. There's an Invite button in the top left. You can use that to get a link that you give your friends. When they go to that link, they'll be editing, live, with you, in the same documents. It's a magical kind of team programming where everything shows up instantly, like Trello, or Google Docs. It is a magical thing to collaborate with a team of two or three or four people banging away on different parts of the code at the same time without a source control system. It's remarkably productive; you can dive in and help each other or you can each work on different parts of the code.
"This doesn't make sense. How is the code not permanently broken? You can't just sync all our changes continuously!"
You'd be surprised just how well it does work, for most small teams and most simple programming projects. Listen, this is not the future of all software development. Professional software development teams will continue to use professional, robust tools like Git and that's great. But it's surprising how just having continuous merging and reliable Undo solves the "version control" problem for all kinds of simple coding problems. And it really does create an insanely addictive form of collaboration that supercharges your team productivity.
"What if I literally type 'DELETE * FROM USERS' on my way to typing 'WHERE id=9283', do I lose all my user data?"
Erm… yes. Don't do that. This doesn't come up that often, to be honest, and we're going to add the world's simplest "branch" feature so that optionally you can have a "dev" and "live" branch, but for now, yeah, you'd be surprised at how well this works in practice even though in theory it sounds terrifying.
"Does it have to be JavaScript?"
Right now the server we gave you is running Node so today it has to be JavaScript. We'll add other languages soon.
"What can I do with my server?"
Anything you can do in Node. You can add any package you want just by editing package.json. So literally any working JavaScript you want to cut and paste from Stack Overflow is going to work fine.
"Is my server always up?"
If you don't use it for a while, we'll put your server to sleep, but it will never take more than a few seconds to restart. But yes for all intents and purposes, you can treat it like a reasonably reliably, 24/7 web server. This is still a beta so don't ask me how many 9's. You can have all the 8's you want.
"Why would I trust my website to you? What if you go out of business?"
There's nothing special about the container we gave you; it's a generic VM running Node. There's nothing special about the way we told you to write code; we do not give you special frameworks or libraries that will lock you in. Download your source code and host it anywhere and you're back in business.
"How are you going to make money off of this?"
Aaaaaah! why do you care!
But seriously, the current plan is to have a free version for public / open source code you don't mind sharing with the world. If you want private code, much like private repos, there will eventually be paid plans, and we'll have corporate and enterprise versions. For now it's all just a beta so don't worry too much about that!
"What is the point of this Joel?"
As developers we have fantastic sets of amazing tools for building, creating, managing, testing, and deploying our source code. They're powerful and can do anything you might need. But they're usually too complex and too complicated for very simple projects. Useful little bits of code never get written because you dread the administration of setting up a new dev environment, source code repo, and server. New programmers and students are overwhelmed by the complexity of distributed version control when they're still learning to write a while loop. Apps that might solve real problems never get written because of the friction of getting started.
Our theory here is that HyperDev can remove all the barriers to getting started and building useful things, and more great things will get built.
"What now?"
Really? Just go to HyperDev and start playing!
Today Stack Exchange is pleased to announce that we have raised $40 million, mostly from Andreessen Horowitz.
Everybody wants to know what we're going to do with all that money. First of all, of course we're going to gold-plate the Aeron chairs in the office. Then we're going to upgrade the game room, and we're already sending lox platters to our highest-rep users.
But I'll get into that in a minute. First, let me catch everyone up on what's happening at Stack Exchange.
In 2008, Jeff Atwood and I set out to fix a problem for programmers. At the time, getting answers to programming questions online was super annoying. The answers that we needed were hidden behind paywalls, or buried in thousands of pages of stale forums.
So we built Stack Overflow with a single-minded, compulsive, fanatical obsession with serving programmers with a better Q&A site.
Everything about how Stack Overflow works today was designed to make programmers' jobs easier. We let members vote up answers, so we can show you the best answer first. We don't allow opinionated questions, because they descend into flame wars that don't help people who need an answer right now. We have scrupulously avoided any commercialization of our editorial content, because we want to have a site that programmers can trust.
Heck, we don't even allow animated ads, even though they are totally standard on every other site on the Internet, because it would be disrespectful to programmers to strain their delicate eyes with a dancing monkey, and we can't serve them 100% if we are distracting them with a monkey. That would only be serving them 98%. And we're OBSESSED, so 98% is like, we might as well close this all down and go drive taxis in Las Vegas.
Anyway, it worked! Entirely thanks to you. An insane number of developers stepped up to pass on their knowledge and help others. Stack Overflow quickly grew into the largest, most trusted repository of programming knowledge in the world.
Quickly, Jeff and I discovered that serving programmers required more than just code-related questions, so we built Server Fault and Super User. And when that still didn't satisfy your needs, we set up Stack Exchange so the community could create sites on new topics. Now when a programmer has to set up a server, or a PC, or a database, or Ubuntu, or an iPhone, they have a place to go to ask those questions that are full of the people who can actually help them do it.
But you know how programmers are. They "have babies." Or "take pictures of babies." So our users started building Stack Exchange sites on unrelated topics, like parenting and photography, because the programmers we were serving expected—nay, demanded!—a place as awesome as Stack Overflow to ask about baby feeding schedules and f-stops and whatnot.
And we did such a good job of serving programmers that a few smart non-programmers looked at us and said, "Behold! I want that!" and we thought, hey! What works for developers should work for a lot of other people, too, as long as they're willing to think like developers, which is the best way to think. So, we decided that anybody who wants to get with the program is welcome to join in our plan. And these sites serve their own communities of, you know, bicycle mechanics, or what have you, and make the world safer for the Programmer Way Of Thinking and thus serve programmers by serving bicycle mechanics.
In the five years since then, our users have built 133 communities. Stack Overflow is still the biggest. It reminds me of those medieval maps of the ancient world. The kind that shows a big bustling city (Jerusalem) smack dab in the middle, with a few smaller settlements around the periphery. (Please imagine Gregorian chamber music).
Stack Overflow is the big city in the middle. Because the programmer-city worked so well, people wanted to ask questions about other subjects, so we let them build other Q&A villages in the catchment area of the programmer-city. Some of these Q&A villages became cities of their own. The math cities barely even have any programmers and they speak their own weird language. They are math-Jerusalem. They makes us very proud. Even though they don't directly serve programmers, we love them and they bring a little tear to our eyes, like the other little villages, and they're certainly making the Internet—and the world—better, so we're devoted to them.
One of these days some of those villages will be big cities, so we're committed to keeping them clean, and pulling the weeds, and helping them grow.
But let's go back to programmer Jerusalem, which—as you might expect—is full of devs milling about, building the ENTIRE FUTURE of the HUMAN RACE, because, after all, software is eating the world and writing software is just writing a script for how the future will play out.
So given the importance of software and programmers, you might think they all had wonderful, satisfying jobs that they love.
But sadly, we saw that was not universal. Programmers often have crappy jobs, and their bosses often poke them with sharp sticks. They are underpaid, and they aren't learning things, and they are sometimes overqualified, and sometimes underqualified. So we decided we could actually make all the programmers happier if we could move them into better jobs.
That's why we built Stack Overflow Careers. This was the first site that was built for developers, not recruiters. We banned the scourge of contingency recruiters (even if they have big bank accounts and are just LINING UP at the Zion Gate trying to get into our city to feed on programmer meat, but, to hell with them). We are SERVING PROGRAMMERS, not spammers. Bye Felicia.
Which brings us to 2015.
The sites are still growing like crazy. By our measurements, the Stack Exchange network is already in the top 50 of all US websites, ranked by number of unique visitors, with traffic still growing at 25% annually. The company itself has passed 200 employees worldwide, with big plush offices in Denver, New York, and London, and dozens of amazing people who work from the comfort of their own homes. (By the way, if 200 people seems like a lot, keep in mind that more than half of them are working on Stack Overflow Careers).
We could just slow down our insane hiring pace and get profitable right now, but it would mean foregoing some of the investments that let us help more developers. To be honest, we literally can't keep up with the features we want to build for our users. The code is not done yet—we're dedicating a lot of resources to the core Q&A engine. This year we'll work on improving the experience for both new users and highly experienced users.
And let's not forget Stack Overflow Careers. I believe it is, bar-none, the single best job board for developer candidates, which should automatically make it the best place for employers to find developer talent. There's a LOT more to be done to serve developers here and we're just getting warmed up.
So that's why we took this new investment of $40m.
We're ecstatic to have Andreessen Horowitz on board. The partners there believe in our idea of programmers taking over (it was Marc Andreessen who coined the phrase "Software is eating the world"). Chris Dixon has been a personal investor in the company since the beginning and has always known we'd be the obvious winner in the Q&A category, and will be joining our board of directors as an observer.
This is not the first time we've raised money; we're proud to have previously taken investments from Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. We only take outside money when we are 100% confident that the investors share our philosophy completely and after our lawyers have done a ruthless (sorry, investors) job of maintaining control so that it is literally impossible for anyone to mess up our vision of fanatically serving the people who use our site, and continuing to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.
For those of you who have been with us since the early days of Our Incredible Journey, thank you. For those of you who are new, welcome. And if you want to learn more, check out our hott new "about" page. Or ask!
Hello? is this thing on?
I'm not sure if I even know how to operate this "blog" device any more. It's been a year since my last post. I'm retired from blogging, remember?
Want to hear something funny? The only way I can post blog posts is by remote-desktopping into a carefully preserved Windows 7 machine which we keep in a server closet running a bizarrely messed-up old copy of CityDesk which I somehow hacked together and which only runs on that particular machine. The shame!
I do need to fill you in on some exciting Trello News, though. As you no doubt know, Trello is the amazing visual project management system we developed at Fog Creek.
Let me catch you up. As legend has it, back in yonder days, early twenty-oh-eleven, we launched a modest little initiative at Fog Creek to try to come up with new product ideas. We peeled off eight developers. The idea was that they would break into four teams. Two people each. Each team would work for a few months building a prototype or MVP for some product idea. Hopefully, at least one of those ideas would turn into something people wanted.
One of those teams started working on the concept that became Trello. The idea seemed so good that we doubled that team to four developers. The more we played around with it, the better we liked it. Within nine months, it was starting to look good enough to go public with, so we launched Trello at TechCrunch Disrupt to great acclaim and immediately got our first batch of users.
Over the next three years, Trello showed some real traction. The team grew to about 18 people, almost all in engineering. We did iPhone, iPad, Android, and Web versions. And Kindle. Oh and Android Wear. The user base grew steadily to 4.6 million people.
Here are some things that surprised me:
We launched something called Trello Business Class, which, for a small fee, provides all kinds of advanced administration features so that the larger organizations using Trello can manage it better, and Hey Presto, Trello was making money!
In the meantime, we started getting calls from investors. "Can we invest in Trello?" they asked. They were starting to notice that whenever they looked around their portfolio companies all they saw was Trello boards everywhere.
We didn't really need the money; Fog Creek is profitable and could afford to fund Trello development to profitability. And when we told the investors that they could take a minority, non-controlling stake in Fog Creek, we had to start explaining about our culture and our developer tools and our profit sharing plans and our free lunches and private offices and whatnot, and they got confused and said, "hmm, why don't you keep all that, we just want to invest in Trello."
Now, we didn't need the money, but we certainly like money. We had a bunch of ideas for ways we could make Trello grow faster and do all kinds of astonishing new features and hire sales and marketing teams to work on Trello Business Class. We would have gotten around to all that eventually, but not as quickly as we could with a bit of folding money.
Which lead to this fairly complicated plan. We spun out Trello into its own company, Trello Inc., and allowed outside investors to buy a minority stake in that. So now, Trello and Fog Creek are officially separate companies. Trello has a bunch of money in the bank to operate independently. Fog Creek will continue to build FogBugz and Kiln and continue to develop new products every once in a while. Michael Pryor, who co-founded Fog Creek with me in 2000, will be CEO of Trello.
So, yeah. This is the point at which old-time readers of this blog point out that the interest of VCs is not always aligned with the interest of founders, and VCs often screw up the companies they invest in.
That's mostly true, but not universal. There are smart, founder-friendly VCs out there. And with Trello (and Stack Overflow, for that matter), we didn't take any outside investment until we already had traction and revenue, so we could choose the investors that we thought were the most entrepreneur-friendly, and we kept control of the company.
In the case of Trello, we had so much interest from investors that we were even able to limit ourselves to investors who were already investors in Stack Exchange and still get the price and terms we wanted. The advantage of this is that we know them, they know us, and they're aligned enough not to fret about any conflicts of interest which might arise between Stack Exchange and Trello because they have big stakes in both.
Both Index Ventures and Spark Capital will co-lead the investment in Trello, with Bijan Sabet from Spark joining our board. Bijan was an early investor in Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare which says a lot about the size of our ambitions for Trello. The other two members of the board are Michael and me.
Even though Fog Creek, Trello, and Stack Exchange are now three separate companies, they are all running basically the same operating system, based on the original microprocessor architecture known as "making a company where the best developers want to work," or, in simpler terms, treating people well.
This operating system applies both to the physical layer (beautiful daylit private offices, allowing remote work, catered lunches, height-adjustable desks and Aeron chairs, and top-tier coffee), the application layer (health insurance where everything is paid for, liberal vacations, family-friendly policies, reasonable work hours), the presentation layer (clean and pragmatic programming practices, pushing decisions down to the team, hiring smart people and letting them get things done, and a commitment to inclusion and professional development), and mostly, the human layer, where no matter what we do, it's guided first and foremost by obsession over being fair, humane, kind, and treating each other like family. (Did I tell you I got married?)
So, yeah, there are three companies here, with different products, but every company has a La Marzocco Linea espresso machine in every office, and every company gives you $500 when you or your partner has a baby to get food delivered, and when we're trying to figure out how to manage people, our number one consideration is how to do so fairly and compassionately.
That architecture is all the stuff I spent ten years ranting on this blog about, but y'all don't listen, so I'm just going to have to build company after company that runs my own wacky operating system, and eventually you'll catch on. It's OK to put people first. You don't have to be a psychopath or work people to death or create heaps of messy code or work in noisy open offices.
Anyway, that's the news from our neck of the woods. If the mission of Trello sounds exciting we'll be hiring a bunch of people soon so please apply!
There are a lot of people complaining about lousy software patents these days. I say, stop complaining, and start killing them. It took me about fifteen minutes to stop a crappy Microsoft patent from being approved. Got fifteen minutes? You can do it too.
In a minute, I'll tell you that story. But first, a little background.
Software developers don't actually invent very much. The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.
The other 40,000-odd software patents issued every year are mostly garbage that any working programmer could "invent" three times before breakfast. Most issued software patents aren't "inventions" as most people understand that word. They're just things that any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework assignment in two hours.
Nevertheless, a lot of companies large and small have figured out that patents are worth money, so they try to file as many as they possibly can. They figure they can generate a big pile of patents as an inexpensive byproduct of the R&D work they're doing anyway, just by sending some lawyers around the halls to ask programmers what they're working on, and then attempting to patent everything. Almost everything they find is either obvious or has been done before, so it shouldn't be patentable, but they use some sneaky tricks to get these things through the patent office.
The first technique is to try to make the language of the patent as confusing and obfuscated as possible. That actually makes it harder for a patent examiner to identify prior art or evaluate if the invention is obvious.
A bonus side effect of writing an incomprehensible patent is that it works better as an infringement trap. Many patent owners, especially the troll types, don't really want you to avoid their patent. Often they actually want you to infringe their patent, and then build a big business that relies on that infringement, and only then do they want you to find out about the patent, so you are in the worst possible legal position and can be extorted successfully. The harder the patent is to read, the more likely it will be inadvertently infringed.
The second technique to getting bad software patents issued is to use a thesaurus. Often, software patent applicants make up new terms to describe things with perfectly good, existing names. A lot of examiners will search for prior art using, well, search tools. They have to; no single patent examiner can possibly be aware of more than (rounding to nearest whole number) 0% of the prior art which might have invalidated the application.
Since patent examiners rely so much on keyword searches, when you submit your application, if you can change some of the keywords in your patent to be different than the words used everywhere else, you might get your patent through even when there's blatant prior art, because by using weird, made-up words for things, you've made that prior art harder to find.
Now on to the third technique. Have you ever seen a patent application that appears ridiculously broad? ("Good lord, they're trying to patent CARS!"). Here's why. The applicant is deliberately overreaching, that is, striving to get the broadest possible patent knowing that the worst thing that can happen is that the patent examiner whittles their claims down to what they were entitled to patent anyway.
Let me illustrate that as simply as I can. At the heart of a patent is a list of claims: the things you allege to have invented that you will get a monopoly on if your patent is accepted.
An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims:
1. A method of transportation
2. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine connected to wheels
3. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on water
Notice that claim 2 mentions claim 1, and narrows it... in other words, it claims a strict subset of things from claim 1.
Now, suppose you invented the water-powered car. When you submit your patent, you might submit it this way even knowing that there's prior art for "methods of transportation" and you can't really claim all of them as your invention. The theory is that (a) hey, you might get lucky! and (b) even if you don't get lucky and the first claim is rejected, the narrower claims will still stand.
What you're seeing is just a long shot lottery ticket, and you have to look deep into the narrower claims to see what they really expect to get. And you never know, the patent office might be asleep at the wheel and BOOM you get to extort everyone who makes, sells, buys, or rides transportation.
So anyway, a lot of crappy software patents get issued and the more that get issued, the worse it is for software developers.
The patent office got a little bit of heat about this. The America Invents Act changed the law to allow the public to submit examples of prior art while a patent application is being examined. And that's why the USPTO asked us to set up Ask Patents, a Stack Exchange site where software developers like you can submit examples of prior art to stop crappy software patents even before they're issued.
Sounds hard, right?
At first I honestly thought it was going to be hard. Would we even be able to find vulnerable applications? The funny thing is that when I looked at a bunch of software patent applications at random I came to realize that they were all bad, which makes our job much easier.
Take patent application US 20130063492 A1, submitted by Microsoft. An Ask Patent user submitted this call for prior art on March 26th.
I tried to find prior art for this just to see how hard it was. First I read the application. Well, to be honest, I kind of glanced at the application. In fact I skipped the abstract and the description and went straight to the claims. Dan Shapiro has great blog post called How to Read a Patent in 60 Seconds which taught me how to do this.
This patent was, typically, obfuscated, and it used terms like "pixel density" for something that every other programmer in the world would call "resolution," either accidentally (because Microsoft's lawyers were not programmers), or, more likely, because the obfuscation makes it that much harder to search.
Without reading too deeply, I realized that this patent is basically trying to say "Sometimes you have a picture that you want to scale to different resolutions. When this happens, you might want to have multiple versions of the image available at different resolutions, so you can pick the one that's closest and scale that."
This didn't seem novel to me. I was pretty sure that the Win32 API already had a feature to do something like that. I remembered that it was common to provide multiple icons at different resolutions and in fact I was pretty sure that the operating system could pick one based on the resolution of the display. So I spent about a minute with Google and eventually (bing!) found this interesting document entitled Writing DPI-Aware Win32 Applications [PDF] written by Ryan Haveson and Ken Sykes at, what a coincidence, Microsoft.
And it was written in 2008, while Microsoft's new patent application was trying to claim that this "invention" was "invented" in 2011. Boom. Prior art found, and deployed.
Total time elapsed, maybe 10 minutes. One of the participants on Ask Patents pointed out that the patent application referred to something called "scaling sets." I wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean but I found a specific part of the older Microsoft document that demonstrated this "invention" without using the same word, so I edited my answer a bit to point it out. Here's my complete answer on AskPatents.
Mysteriously, whoever it was that posted the request for prior art checked the Accepted button on Stack Exchange. We thought this might be the patent examiner, but it was posted with a generic username.
At that point I promptly forgot about it, until May 21 (two months later), when I got this email from Micah Siegel (Micah is our full-time patent expert):
The USPTO rejected Microsoft's Resizing Imaging Patent!
The examiner referred specifically to Prior Art cited in Joel's answer ("Haveson et al").
Here is the actual document rejecting the patent. It is a clean sweep starting on page 4 and throughout, basically citing rejecting the application as obvious in view of Haveson.
Micah showed me a document from the USPTO confirming that they had rejected the patent application, and the rejection relied very heavily on the document I found. This was, in fact, the first "confirmed kill" of Ask Patents, and it was really surprisingly easy. I didn't have to do the hard work of studying everything in the patent application and carefully proving that it was all prior art: the examiner did that for me. (It's a pleasure to read him demolish the patent in question, all twenty claims, if that kind of schadenfreude amuses you).
(If you want to see the rejection, go to Public Pair and search for publication number US 20130063492 A1. Click on Image File Wrapper, and look at the non-final rejection of 4-11-2013. Microsoft is, needless to say, appealing the decision, so this crappy patent may re-surface.) Update October 2013: the patent received a FINAL REJECTION from the USPTO!
There is, though, an interesting lesson here. Software patent applications are of uniformly poor quality. They are remarkably easy to find prior art for. Ask Patents can be used to block them with very little work. And this kind of individual destruction of one software patent application at a time might start to make a dent in the mountain of bad patents getting granted.
My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin' easy it is to block a patent application, they'll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors' applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. Wouldn't that be something!
Got 15 minutes? Go to Ask Patents right now, and see if one of these RFPAs covers a topic you know something about, and post any examples you can find. They're hidden in plain view; most of the prior art you need for software patents can be found on Google. Happy hunting!
Trello has been out for less than two years and it's been growing like wildfire. We recently hit 1.5 million members, of whom about 1/3 perform some action every month, and our MongoDB database now contains more than 70 million cards on 3.7 million boards.
So the obvious question I get all the time is, "How exactly are you supposed to make money with that?"
You may have noticed that Trello is free. Not "free trial," not "freemium," but just plain old free. Some people have justifiably wondered if it really makes sense to pay a dozen people, nestled in fancy offices with free lunch and espresso, to develop software that we have to pay Amazon cash money to host, while not actually charging for said software. Some have commented that this business model might actually be just a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
What we really wanted to do was make a free product that helps millions of people, and then find some way to get paid by the 1% of those people who get the most value out of it. The 1% are delighted to pay. They actually email us asking if there is some way they can pay us. A fortune-cookie factory was so pleased with Trello they sent us a crate of tasty fortune cookies. Custom, Trello-color fortune cookies, with Trello fortunes inside. (Don't tell the IRS, because that's basically all we've made off of Trello to date, and I don't think we declared it.)
How do you identify the users who get the most value out of Trello? We thought any medium-to-large organization with lots of different Trello boards and many active Trello users must qualify. So then we tried to think of what kind of value-added stuff we could build and sell (for money) to organizations with lots of active users. Besides cookie dough.
The most obvious things were features around security (permissions, backups, etc). Big organizations have people coming and going all the time, so they might benefit from tools that make it easy to add people to Trello en-masse, and tools to make sure that when people leave the organization, they're removed from any boards they should be removed from. The kind of stuff that's helpful when tens or thousands of people inside an organization are all using Trello every day.
We also added a feature called "observers," which lets you add people to a board who might have permission to watch, vote, and comment, but who can't add cards or move cards around. This is meant to give professional landscapers, developers, web designers, consultants, and fortune-cookie factories a way to let their paying customers peek in on the progress of their project without messing it up. It's a classic example of a feature that is only useful when you're in that class of Trello users who get the most value out of it, so paying should be a no-brainer.
We bundled these features up and called them Trello Business Class. It's available today for $25 a month (per organization), or $200/year if you'd like to pay in advance. Of course, Trello itself is, and will remain, free, but starting today, we hope to actually make a little bit of walking-around money, too.
In the future we'll continue to add free features to Trello (there is a lot of exciting stuff in the hopper)—anything that is a common feature, useful to anyone, will be free. We'll also continue to develop new Business Class features that help large organizations manage Trello, and we may come up with other things to sell to people who are getting a lot of value out of Trello. In the meantime, we sure appreciate the cookies!
The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have more than tripled since 1999.
It's a great business model.
Step one: buy a software patent. There are millions of them, and they're all quite vague and impossible to understand.
Step two: FedEx a carefully crafted letter to a few thousand small software companies, iPhone app developers, and Internet startups. This is where it gets a tiny bit tricky, because the recipients of the letter need to think that it's a threat to sue if they don't pay up, but in court, the letter has to look like an invitation to license some exciting new technology. In other words it has to be just on this side of extortion.
Step three: wait patiently while a few thousand small software companies call their lawyers, and learn that it's probably better just to pay off the troll, because even beginning to fight the thing using the legal system is going to cost a million dollars.
Step four: Profit!
What does this sound like? Yes, it's a textbook case of a protection racket. It is organized crime, plain and simple. It is an abuse of the legal system, an abuse of the patent system, and a moral affront.
In the face of organized crime, civilized people don't pay up. When you pay up, you're funding the criminals, which makes you complicit in their next attacks. I know, you're just trying to write a little app for the iPhone with in-app purchases, and you didn't ask for this fight to be yours, but if you pay the trolls, giving them money and comfort to go after the next round of indie developers, you're not just being "pragmatic," you have actually gone over to the dark side. Sorry. Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.
Civilized people don't pay up. They band together, and fight, and eliminate the problem. The EFF is launching a major initiative to reform the patent system. At Stack Exchange, we're trying to help with Ask Patents, which will hopefully block a few bad patents before they get issued.
The Application Developers Alliance (of which I am currently serving as the chairman of the board) is also getting involved with a series of Developer Patent Summits, a nationwide tour of 15 cities, which will kick off a long term program to band together to fight patent trolls. Come to the summit in your city—I'll be at the San Francisco event on April 9th—and find out what you can do to help.
The team at Fog Creek is releasing a major new version of Kiln today. Kiln is a distributed version control system.
One of the biggest new features is Kiln Harmony, which lets you operate on Kiln repositories using either Git or Mercurial. So you can push changes to a Kiln repo using Git and then pull them using Mercurial. This means that you never have to decide whether you want to use Git or Mercurial. Religious war: averted.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself!
For those of you that have been living under a rock, the single biggest change in developers' lives in the last decade (besides Stack Overflow, natch) is Distributed Version Control. DVCS is such an important improvement over the previous generation of centralized version control (Subversion, CVS, etc.) that it's a required upgrade, even though it's honestly a bit harder to use.
The popular DVCS options are Git and Mercurial. Both are open source. They are very, very similar in capabilities and operation; in fact, they are so similar that Kiln Harmony hides all the differences, so you can use any Git or Mercurial tool to work with any Kiln repository.
If Git and Mercurial are open source, why are people making money selling them?
The short answer is that the open source tools are kind of raw. They're dune buggies. Powerful, yes, and sufficient for a college project, but as it turns out, people buy Cadillacs, not dune buggies, to drive around in, because they like to have windshield wipers, 14-way power adjustable seats, and a way to start the engine from twenty feet away. Just in case you live in a Hollywood movie and the ignition has been hooked up to a bomb.
Fog Creek (and others, notably GitHub) are making money selling version control by providing a whole bunch of features that make the overall code management experience easier and more useful. For example, we both provide professional, secure hosting, a web management and administration interface, and somebody you can call for help.
Where we differ is that Kiln is more focused on the corporate market, while GitHub was designed for open source projects. I think of Kiln as the corporate Lincoln Town Car, while GitHub is kind of a VW Minibus. Both are eminently better choices than using raw Git.
So, specifically, Kiln gives you corporate things like:
GitHub gives you things that match the sociology of open source projects:
Since internal corporate projects have a very different sociology than open source projects, Kiln is very different than GitHub. On internal projects, almost all code that is developed is eventually used, although it needs to be reviewed, so Kiln kind of assumes that everything you do is most likely going to end up in the main code base, and we have a slick code review system.
On open source projects, contributions can come from volunteers all over the Internet, many of whom are happy to fork the code for their own needs. So GitHub provides a social network, emphasizes the ease of forking someone else's code (something you're unlikely to do in a closed corporate environment), and has a thing called a pull request that matches the way people tend to collaborate on open source projects without advance coordination.
ANYWAY, back to the new version of Kiln.
When Tyler and Ben built Kiln 1.0, they built it on Mercurial. Why? Well, Mercurial had pretty much all the same concepts as Git, but Git was historically unfriendly to Windows which is used by many of our corporate clients. We also thought that the Mercurial command line (hg) was a bit closer to Subversion (svn) which a lot of programmers were already used to.
So, long story short, we decided Mercurial was about 1% better than Git and that's the way we went. We didn't want to start a holy war, and we liked Git, but we just had a feeling that all else being equal, Mercurial was marginally better than Git.
We still think that, but in the years since Kiln first shipped, GitHub has taken the world by storm, creating an ecosystem around Git that more than makes up for its minor failings. Today Git is without a doubt more popular. So we knew we needed to add Git to Kiln.
We could have done it the lazy way: support both kinds of repositories and make you choose which one to use. Maybe add some nice conversion tools.
But we are not lazy. We decided to do it the awesome way.
We decided that the awesome way would be to make Kiln fully bilingual. It stores every repo in both formats. It automatically converts everything back and forth, always. The translation is 1:1, reversible, and round-trippable. Whatever you do to a Kiln repository using Git will be immediately visible to Mercurial users and vice versa.
Every user of every Kiln repo can choose either Mercurial or Git, and everything always works.
You can push in Git, and pull in Mercurial. Or vice versa. Or both.
A team that uses Mercurial internally (and barely understands Git) can push their code to GitHub and interact with the GitHub community.
If your team likes Git but you prefer Mercurial yourself, you can use a different version control system than everybody else on your team and, honestly, they don't even have to know.
If your team is using Mercurial today but you want to switch to Git, you can move over -- one person at a time. If Joe in Accounting refuses to move, it doesn't matter. He can keep using Mercurial.
Everything maps. Everything round-trips.
There are some other big improvements in the version of Kiln available today. Super-fast code search. SSH and IP-whitelisting for security. Project READMEs. A bunch of other improvements throughout the interface that will be a huge upgrade for anyone already using Kiln. If you're interested, you can start a free trial online.
Imagine, for a moment, that you came upon a bread factory for the first time. At first it just looks like a jumble of incomprehensible machinery with a few people buzzing around. As your eyes adjust you start to see little piles of things that you do understand. Buckets of sesame seeds. Big vats of dough. Little balls of dough. Baked loaves of bread.
Those things are inventory. Inventory tends to pile up between machines. Next to the machine where sesame seeds are applied to hamburger buns, there's a big vat of...sesame seeds. At the very end of the assembly line, there are boxes and boxes of bread, waiting for trucks to drive them off to customers.
Keeping inventory costs money. Suppose your bakery has six 50-ton silos to store flour. Whenever they empty out, you fill them up. That means on the average day you have 150 metric tons of wheat flour in stock. At today's prices, you've tied up $73,000. Forever.
Inventory may have other costs too, like spoilage. Flour lasts for months, but the minute bread comes out of the oven it starts dropping in value; after 24 hours it's nearly worthless.
Why keep inventory at all? Because there are costs associated with running out of things, too. If sesame seeds take two days to order, and you run out of sesame seeds, you are out of the hamburger bun business for two days. Inventory provides a buffer that prevents any part of the process from stalling. There are modern algorithms to optimize how much buffer you need at every point (read up on Toyota's lean production system and the Theory of Constraints to get started).
Why do I care about any of this? The software production process has several major "inventory" accumulation points, itself. Stuff accumulates at those points and ends up wasting a lot of time and money.
"What? How is software like a factory?" you ask.
Think of product ideas as the raw material. Depending on your process, product ideas may go through several assembly line points before they are delivered as finished features to the customer:
(PS No, this is not "waterfall." No it isn't. Is not. Shut up.)
In between each of these stages, inventory can pile up. For example, when a programmer finishes implementing their code (stage 3) they give it to a tester to check (stage 4). At any given time, there is a certain amount of code waiting to be tested. That code is inventory.
The "cost" of code inventory is huge. It might add up to six or twelve months of work that is stuck in the assembly line and not yet in customers' hands. This could be the difference between having a cutting-edge product (iPhone) or constantly playing catchup (Windows Phone). It's nearly impossible to get people to buy Windows Phones, even if the iPhone is only six months better. A lot of markets have network effects, and being first has winner-take-all implications. So getting rid of inventory in the development process can make or break a product.
Let's go over the three places most inventory accumulates.
Feature backlogs. Every product attracts new feature ideas, and you can't implement ideas as fast as you can think them up, so you write them down, and this list is called the feature backlog. A lot of the ideas on the backlog are bad ideas, and you merely wrote them down to avoid hurting the feelings of the people who thought them up. Backlogs make everyone feel good.
The trouble is that 90% of the things in the feature backlog will never get implemented, ever. So every minute you spent writing down, designing, thinking about, or discussing features that are never going to get implemented is just time wasted. When I hear about product teams that regularly have "backlog grooming" sessions, in which they carefully waste a tiny amount of time and mental energy every day or every week thinking about every single feature which will never be implemented, I want to poke my eyes out.
The bug database is obviously a great thing to have. Bug reports should be complete, accurate, and actionable. But I have noticed that in many real-world companies, the desire never to miss any bug report leads to bug bankrupcy, where you wake up one day and discover that there are 3000 open bugs in the database, some of which are so old they may not apply any more, some of which can never be reproduced, and most of which are not even worth fixing because they're so tiny. When you look closely you realize that months or years of work has gone into preparing those bug reports, and you ask yourself, how could we have 3000 bugs in the database while our product is delightful and customers love it and use it every day? At some point you realize that you've put too much work into the bug database and not quite enough work into the product.
Undeployed features. There are still a lot of teams doing quarterly or annual releases, usually because their deployment process is expensive. Operating systems, or anything where software has to be installed by every user, is usually batched up.
This is one of the most expensive forms of inventory: unshipped feature inventory. It could be earning you money, but it's sitting on the shipping dock of your factory, while the guy down the street already has a product that does that exact same thing.
Sometimes, perniciously, you don't even feel the pain, because everyone on your team has been dogfooding the new version for months. I'm sure everyone at Microsoft has been happily using Windows 8 for a year now, so they don't really feel, on a day to day basis, the pain of OEMs trying to sell Windows 7 in a Mac OS X Lion world.
So, where am I going with this? We've had all three kinds of inventory at Fog Creek: crazy long backlogs, overambitious bug databases, and features which got stuck for a year waiting for the next release to go out. All of these snuck up on us. I realized that we needed a system to constrain inventory so it doesn't build up.
My original idea was to make a product called Five Things. It was going to be a project manager where everybody was allowed to have five things assigned to them: two things they were actively doing, one thing that was "up next", and a couple more that they were planning. That exact design idea didn't go anywhere (but if you want to build it, go for it), but it did evolve into Trello.
Trello works great for a reasonable amount of inventory, but it intentionally starts to get klunky if you have too many cards in one list. And that's exactly the point: it makes inventory visible so that you know when it's starting to pile up. (Click on the image at the right to see the Trello team's own development board).
Every day you look at your Trello board and see that there are seventeen completed features that are totally ready to ship but which haven't shipped for some reason, and you go find the bottleneck and eliminate it.
Every time somebody suggests a crazy feature idea, you look at the Feature Backlog and realize it's just too long, so you don't waste any time documenting or designing that crazy idea.
And hopefully, you'll spend less effort working on things that never see the light of day. "Backlog grooming." Sheeeesh.
The folks over at UserVoice are using Trello quite extensively throughout their development process.
Founder Richard White describes it all in detail.
My friend Noam Wasserman at Harvard Business School has spent years researching startups. His work is great, because he actually does real, quantitative research on the kinds of things that everybody has opinions about. Should you raise more money or maintain more control? Should you have a cofounder? Should your friends and relatives be cofounders? When and if should a founder be replaced by a "professional" manager? There are certainly a lot of blog posts about this stuff but not a lot of data... until now. Wasserman has finally put it all together in a great book called The Founder's Dilemmas, which I highly recommend if you're starting a company.
(By the way, Wasserman will also be speaking at the Business of Software conference this fall in Boston.)
Over the last 16 years I've written 1114 articles on this site about software development, management, business, and the Internet. To make it easy to find the best ones, here are some reading lists, sorted by topic.
There's a software company in New York City dedicated to doing things the right way and proving that it can be done profitably and successfully. Fog Creek Software. Here's the story:
I'm your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. More about me.
Need a better career? We're bringing together the best software developers with the best companies on the Joel on Software / Stack Overflow Job Board. You can search job listings or even file a CV and let employers find you.
Want to hire a smart programmer who gets things done? The best ones are at Stack Overflow Careers. Info for employers.
For my day job, I'm the CEO of Stack Exchange, where you can get expert answers to programming questions very quickly. Stack Exchange is a network of sites where you can get expert answers to questions on all kinds of topics, from cooking to computer games. If you have an idea for a new Stack Exchange site, propose it on Area 51.
I founded Fog Creek Software, a bootstrapped software company in New York, NY.
We make FogBugz, a bug tracking system that actually works and can be used to manage everything your development team does, from bug tracking to customer email to feature management to project scheduling and more. Try FogBugz now.
We also make Kiln, a Git and Mercurial project hosting and code review system tightly integrated with FogBugz. Try Kiln now. Wondering about DVCS? I wrote a Mercurial tutorial.
Fog Creek is also famous for creating Trello, a visual project management system with lists and cards that's taking the world by storm. Trello is now its own company.
If you're in college, we have the best paid internships in the business. If you're not, check out our job openings.
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text:
|Danville, Calif.
|High School:
|Monte Vista
Scored a goal in season opener against NYAC (Feb. 14) ... Netted two goals against Villanova (Feb. 21) ... Had a tally against George Washington (Feb. 22) ... Scored four times against Bucknell and twice against Maryland (Feb. 28) ... Had a hat trick against NYAC (March 14) ... Netted two goals in Harvard's 8-7 win at Sonoma State (March 22) ... Had a goal and a steal in victory over UC Santa Cruz and tallied a goal later in the day against UC Davis (March 26) ... Scored a hat trick at Cal State Monterey Bay (March 27) ... Netted a score against Connecticut College (April 5) ... Tallied two goals against Brown at Northern Division Championship (April 18) ... Scored twice against Connecticut College and Utica at Northern Division Championship (April 19) ... Netted a goal against Indiana at Eastern Championship (April 25) ... Tallied a score in win over Bucknell at Easterns (April 26).
High School:
Attended Monte Vista High and earned three letters in water polo and two in swimming ... Captained both teams as senior ... Two-time All-East Bay Athletic League selection for water polo and swimming ... Water Polo Rookie of the Year in 2006 ... Recognized as All-America in swimming in 2007 ... Named team's Most Improved Varsity Swimmer ... Water polo squad won back-to-back North Coast Section championships ... Team won three consecutive All-East Bay Athletic League titles ... Water Polo Academic All-America member ... AP Scholar with distinction ... National Honor Society member ... Named to California Scholarship Federation with highest honors ... Recipient of Lucia Venos Memorial Award for outstanding performance in water polo and swimming.
Father, William, was an All-America water polo player at California, helping the Bears win the 1974 and 1975 NCAA titles ... Uncle, Jim, was also an All-America water polo player at California, winning the NCAA championship in 1976 and 1977 ... Brother, John, was an All-America water polo player at UC Santa Barbara ... Sister, Colleen, plays soccer at California ... Aunt, Maureen O'Toole, captured the silver medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics in water polo.


text:
Monday, December 09, 2013
Day trip to Rennes
31 comments:
- Veronica6:15 AM
I chuckled reading your Brittany post. LastReplyDelete
time I brought butter home from St Malo. OMG!! It's soooo delicious. Am sure it'll always be on the bring home list. i was told the best is Marie Morin or something like that. Not available in Paris. My local grocer in St Servan (now part of St Malo) called his distributer to inquire. I bought it there, kept it in my hotel's freezer during my Paris stay and brought it on the plane home. Fabulous!
Isn't Brittany amazing?? But you'll have to visit a lot more than
Rennes. Cheers, VeronicaReplies
I think Charlotte was looking for the little no-name producteurs, not known brands.Delete
We got an address to visit of a small farm for instance.
What a wonderful day you both had. So much deliciousness as always. I've never understood it when cheese plates come with butter. Do the French really eat their cheese with butter on the baguette? Not that I don't like French butter, or cheese, I love them both, but have never tried them together.ReplyDeleteReplies
Ah ha! I tested it out this morning since I have all the right ingredients.Delete
And since I too thought it was insane.
In fact it's trés delish!
I'm thinking the butter adds a salty note to the cheese perhaps.
Charlotte would know best...
A moulerie! I would have died and gone to heaven! This post includes so many of my favorite things - moules, fromage, beurre, crepes,and cidre! Last trip to France included 6 days in Brittany. We were able to visit Cancale and sample the oysters there - my husband was thrilled. Glad you got to visit - more trips are in order for sure.ReplyDelete
Yum! Everything looks wonderful!ReplyDelete
D___! I thought I had gotten there first with the creme fraiche…..but now, I have to admit I have never had artisanal creme fraiche….only the industrial, very industrial big name brands. Rats! Another thing on my to-do list. :-)ReplyDelete
That looked like a great learning trip for you, lots of things to saveur . I'm sure you'll definitely go back there. Artisan butter is a sure winner, it's true the difference it makes to what you're eating or cooking. Great interesting post.,.ReplyDelete
Oh my! I enjoy all your adventures, but this is one of my favourites. Mussels, crepes, cheese, butter. And, oh that architecture! I could spend the entire day taking photographs. If I could drag myself away from the food, that is!ReplyDelete
- Sibel5:08 PM
How was yr toast with 3 kinds of butter??ReplyDelete
Take me to Rennes for your next visit:-)Replies
I cut the toast into little squares but I can't yet tell the difference other than to find them all so yummy. Formerly one stick of US butter stayed in the freezer for months. Here it's a different story.Delete
I just learned to make crème fraîche and now you tell me I need further research? And then I thought Normandy was the place for butter, more research?ReplyDeleteReplies
Normandy, Brittany and the Charante are all neck and neck when it comes to butter.Delete
France is filled to the gills with excellent ingredients...why we need Charlotte's guidebook.
I swear I could smell the fragrances wafting from the market stalls while walking alongside you (I didn't? You sure?)! Thank you for these exquisite meanderings among France's finest foods.ReplyDelete
Loved the 'p'tit plateau' of 4 cheeses - I noticed they are shrink-wrapped, but without separation amongst them. I suppose you have to let them sit out on the countertop, separated, for a while, and they'll forget they were intermingling in such close quarters.Replies
No not shrink-wrapped at all.Delete
Just heavey duty plastic packing over all.
They never shrink wrap a cheese
They wrap it in white paper only!
Carol, What a wonderful day at the market. I hope you will get back to Brittany soon. New email subscriber.ReplyDelete
oh god - i came late to this one. did not need the yummy distractions! that creme fraiche - the shellfish! butter is so lousy tasting in the states these days! (sorry, had to say it!)ReplyDelete
bonnes fetes!Replies
Oh Why didn't I get more oysters!Delete
I just saw 6 Breton huitres for 14,50€
I know we paid .50 centimes each and they were fresher


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Senate to vote Thursday on advancing Hagel
Feb. 14, 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the Senate will vote Thursday on whether advance Chuck Hagel's nomination as secretary of defense.
It's unclear whether Reid has the 60 votes required to proceed to an up-or-down vote.
Reid's decision to seek a procedural vote comes a day earlier than expected, as Democrats seek to push President Barack Obama's nominee through a contentious confirmation process.
Republicans have been blocking the nomination of their former colleague and twice-wounded Vietnam combat veteran.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the leading opponents of Hagel's nomination, says he will not oppose Thursday's procedural vote.


text:
Professor Elizabeth G. Haley, Dean
Texas Tech human sciences programs at the baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral levels are innovative in focus, are relevant to the needs of a rapidly changing society, and are designed to prepare professionalsboth men and womenfor employment in broad career options.
The college focus is on people, the development of human potential, and the reciprocal relationships between individuals and their environments. Graduates contribute to the functioning of individuals and families and the quality of goods and services available within the diverse global community.
The College of Human Sciences is a professional college, requiring the highest expectations for its graduates. College programs are accredited by the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences and seven other national accrediting agencies. Additionally, the college offers courses of significance to the general and professional education of students majoring in other colleges and provides continuing education for professionals in human sciences related fields. Most undergraduate degree programs lead to the Bachelor of Science degree. Majors are offered in family financial planning and in clothing, textiles, and merchandising with specializations in fashion design and merchandising; food and nutrition with specialization in general dietetics; human development and family studies with specializations in human development, early childhood, and family studies; and family and consumer sciences. The college also offers the Bachelor of Science degree in Restaurant, Hotel, and Institutional Management and the Bachelor of Interior Design degree. For additional information about undergraduate degree programs in the various departments, see the following pages and contact Academic Advising Services.
The College of Human Sciences at Texas Tech offers a dynamic curriculum, a well-qualified faculty, outstanding facilities, and a commitment to excellence. In addition to undergraduate majors, the college offers the Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees with majors in all departments. Specific information regarding graduate degrees may be found in the Graduate Catalog.
Graduation Requirements. The Bachelor of Science degree will be awarded to all students who fulfill the following minimum requirements:
1.Satisfactory completion of General Education Requirements, human sciences core, major courses, support courses, and electives to earn at least 54 semester hours of upper-level courses (3000- and 4000-level) and to reach minimum total hours of 120-139.
2.A minimum cumulative 2.00 GPA in all courses attempted at Texas Tech.
3.A minimum cumulative 2.00 GPA in all courses in the student's respective major in the College of Human Sciences attempted at Texas Tech.
4.Application for "Intention to Graduate" must be filed one year prior to the graduation semester.
Admission of Transfer Students. Students planning to take their first two years of work at a junior or community college should follow our lower division degree requirements. Up to 66 hours required in the degree program can be accepted from a junior or community college. All hours transfer to the College of Human Sciences for classification purposes, but may not necessarily meet degree plan requirements. Only grades earned while enrolled at Texas Tech are used in calculating the grade-point average for meeting graduation requirements.
General Standards and Requirements. The College of Human Sciences expects the student to assume responsibility for knowing the rules, regulations, and policies of the University and the requirements pertaining to his or her degree program and to consult the Undergraduate Catalog, Directory of Classes, Registration Guidlines, and degree plans for the major.
Financial Aid to Students. A number of student scholarships and assistantships providing financial assistance, as well as valuable experience to capable students, are available in human sciences. Write to the Dean of the College of Human Sciences, Box 41162, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas 79409-1162. The scholarship application deadline is February 1. Emphasis will be on leadership, service, high school and transfer grade-point averages, test scores, and need.
Catalog Selection. Students will use the catalog issued for the year in which they were first officially admitted to the College of Human Sciences or a more recent catalog. However, if they later transfer to another institution or another college at Texas Tech, they will use the catalog in effect when they are readmitted to the College of Human Sciences. For these purposes, a catalog expires after seven years.
Academic Advising Services. The purpose of Academic Advising Services is to provide quality service to the faculty and students in the college. Students should visit with an academic advisor each semester prior to advance registration to update their degree plan and plan the next semester's courses. The Student Schedule Request Form should be turned in to Academic Advising Services prior to advance registration. One day prior to the registration date, students can pick up their signed registration card. Students needing assistance can stop by Human Sciences 134 or call 742-1180.
Graduation. Graduation is attained by fulfilling the requirements for a baccalaureate degree using an acceptable catalog edition. It is the student's responsibility to fulfill all catalog requirements. A degree candidate should file a Personnel Data Form with the Career Planning and Placement Service. At least one year prior to the graduation semester, students should file a Statement of Intention to Graduate form with Academic Advising Services. After submission of the form, the Coordinator of Undergraduate Programs will complete a degree audit and a Progress Report for Graduating Seniors (list of courses lacking towards completing the degree) will be mailed to the student. Thereafter, students will follow the audited list of remaining courses. Substitutions and minor forms must be filed prior to or at the same time as the Statement of Intention to Graduate. The Progress Report for Graduating Seniors will be reviewed prior to the last semester and students will be notified of any discrepancies which may prevent graduation. The last 30 hours are to be taken at Texas Tech unless permission has been granted by the Coordinator of Undergraduate Programs. This includes correspondence and off-campus courses. Any change in graduation date must be communicated to the Coordinator of Undergraduate Programs.
Correspondence Courses. All correspondence courses must be approved in writing by the Coordinator of Undergraduate Programs.
Credit by Examination. A matriculated student may attempt credit by examination (described elsewhere in this catalog) by obtaining written approval from the Coordinator of Undergraduate Programs.
Course Load. The normal course load for a semester is 15 to 18 hours. The maximum load for a semester is 19 hours (7 hours for a summer term). A maximum of 12 hours is recommended for students on probation. A minimum of 12 hours is required for full-time status.
Course Prerequisites. Prerequisites are governed by the catalog in effect when the course is taken.
Ineligible Registration. The College of Human Sciences reserves the right to drop any ineligibly registered student from a course for reasons such as lower division-upper division rule infractions, lack of prerequisites, GPA requirements, and failure to attend the first week of class in H D 3311 and 3313. Courses taken ineligibly are not used in the degree program.
Minor. The student should consult with the academic department of the intended minor and have a minor approval form signed. Declared minors are filed with the intent to graduate or before. Grades of C or better are required in each course. Specific minors are listed in the departmental areas.
Pass-Fail. A maximum of 13 hours may be taken pass-fail. The pass-fail option may be used for free elective courses. If an ineligible course is taken pass-fail, it must be replaced by the next higher course. Pass-fail hours are excluded in determining eligibility for the Dean's Honor or President's List. No student on probation is allowed the pass-fail option.
Selection of a Major. Freshman-level human sciences courses will be helpful in clarifying career goals. See an academic advisor for additional information.
Substance Abuse Studies. The colleges of Human Sciences and Arts and Sciences jointly offer an interdisciplinary minor in substance abuse studies (SAS). This minor is designed for students with professional, academic, or personal interest in addictive disorders. It will provide students with an understanding of the physiological, psychological, societal, and familial factors contributing to addiction and the recovery from addiction. It is recommended that the 18 hours of course work be taken in this order:
I. Take this class first: FS 3325, Family Dynamics of Addiction.
II. Take this class last: FS 4325, Treatment of Addictive Disorders.
III. Take two or three of these classes in any order: HLTH 3325, Health and Chemical Dependency; SOC 3383, Alcohol, Drugs, and Society; PSY 4325, Drugs, Alcohol, and Behavior.
IV. Take remaining classes in any order: FCSE 3325, Educational Programming: Addiction Issues; F S 3329, Addictive Relationships; FFP 3325, Counseling the Financially Addicted.
V. One of these classes may be substituted for Group IV: F S 3321, Human Sexuality; F S 3326, Families in Crisis; H D 3317, Problems of Adolescence; SOC 4327, Juvenile Delinquency; SOC 4325, Criminology.
The Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse and the Texas Certification Board of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors both accept completion of this minor as fulfillment of all required academic hours of training for licensure and certification.
Additional information may be obtained from the Program Director, Dr. Carl Andersen, Center for the Study of Addiction, Human Sciences Building Room 172.
Courses in Human Sciences. (HUSC)
1100. Academic Strategies (1:1:0). Overview of college and university resources to increase success of freshman students. Topics include study skills, resource management, leadership enhancement, career goals. Required first semester.
2000. Special Studies (VI-6). A course for lower-level human sciences majors for individual study or special problems.
3214. Human Sciences Seminar (2:2:0). Prerequisite: Human Sciences majors only, junior or senior standing. Integrative approach and professional orientation to societal issues, including public policy, ethics, cultural diversity, and global interdependence.
Page Administrator: Gale Richardson


text:
Netflix Loves Planting Arrested Development Easter Eggs
Tobias Fünke was here.
Go to Netflix. Search anything involving the word blue — "Blue Velvet," "Blue Valentine," "red, white, and blue." Discover the azure paint-drips and handprints of Tobias Fünke on the right hand side. Click 'em and get treated to the appropriate Arrested Development scene in season two's "The One Where Michael Leaves." It's been about a month since Netflix added a host of fake Arrested-oriented shows and movies, so might we hope for one or two mini-surprises before the series returns?


text: The second pair (this and that to you, this and that to me) seems to me to be the right one. I am afraid I got a bit confused about what you mean about no finitive verb etc. There's no need to repeat the verb since it is easy to understand what it is by context (DOIEN)


text: ePRNews Roselyne PayenSeltech and Knowles strengthen their collaboration in North America Mark 0 Aug 02, 2017 1 Press Release (ePRNews.com) - RALEIGH, N.C. - Aug 02, 2017 - SELTECH is pleased to announce that we have expanded our distribution partnership in North America with Knowles Corporation.SELTECH, a global value-add distributor of acoustic components, is beginning a strategic role in the Knowles technical and sales support network in North America. SELTECH will grow its presence in the electronics market in North America for devices that utilize products from the Knowles portfolio: balanced armature drivers, electret microphones, and boom microphones. Based on more than five years of close cooperation with the Knowles team in Itasca, IL and around the world, SELTECH is poised to continue the success that Knowles has developed in key market segments.Knowles' balanced armature drivers provide unrivaled sound quality in music earphones, in-ear communications headsets for military and civilian applications, and hearing health devices. Knowles' electret and boom microphones set the performance standard in demanding applications such as first responder and military communications, light-weight microphones for entertainers and public speakers, and hearing health devices.Giulio Di Capua, General Manager of SELTECH, commented, "We are excited by the expansion of our collaboration with Knowles in North America as we will be able to use our acoustic expertise, deep market and product knowledge on this component family throughout the territory."Rick Zanardo, Director of Sales at Knowles– Central said, "SELTECH is a trusted and capable distribution partner with whom we have had many years of success, especially in Europe. We are looking forward to expanding our relationship with SELTECH in North America to elevate commercial and technical support, customer service and order fulfillment. I am highly confident our customers will benefit from our expanded distribution partnership with SELTECH."About SELTECH:With nearly 30 years of experience in acoustics, SELTECH is a specialized international distributor with a wide portfolio of acoustic products. With offices in France, China and the United States, SELTECH provides best-in-class acoustic support from design to production, helping its customers reduce time to market and overall costs. For more information, visit www.seltech-international.comAbout Knowles:Knowles Corporation is a market leader and global supplier of advanced micro-acoustic, audio processing, and precision device solutions, serving the mobile consumer electronics, communications, medical, military, aerospace, and industrial markets. Knowles uses its leading position in MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) microphones and strong capabilities in audio processing technologies to optimize audio systems and improve the user experience in smartphones, tablets, and wearables. Knowles is also the leader in acoustics components used in hearing aids and has a strong position in high-end oscillators (timing devices) and capacitors. Knowles' focus on the customer, combined with unique technology, proprietary manufacturing techniques, rigorous testing and global scale, enables it to deliver innovative solutions that optimize the user experience. Founded in 1946 and headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, Knowles has employees in 12 countries around the world. For more information, visit www.knowles.comAll trademarks and trade names mentioned in this article are the property of their respective holders. Source : SeltechBusiness Info : SeltechYou may also like this CATEGORIES : Electronics Tags : Acoustics hearables hearing aids partnerships DISCLAIMER : If you have any concerns regarding this press release, please contact the Author / Media Contact / Business of this press release. ePRNews is not resposible for the accuracy of the news posted and do not endorse, support any product/services/business mentioned and hereby disclaims any content contained in this press release. Report Fake News Roselyne Payen Related Posts Particle Measuring Systems (PMS) and Novatek International Form Strategic Partnership to Bring a Unique, Integrated, Contamination Control Solution to the Life Sciences Industry NorthTree Associates Announces New OWON XDM Series Benchtop Digital Multimeters IQD Frequency Products Selects Artec Lantec as Distributor in Israel Please login to leave comment


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