Month: August 2010

Gentoo is Rice

Watching shit scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight!

Welcome, this page is dedicated to the Linux Community’s greatest ambassadors, Gentoo users. Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 2m tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball bats to those fucking ricer bastards.

Please note, these quotes are real. I didn’t bother to link to the original quotes because it’s too much work and this page is mostly an amalgamation of different things that I’ve found on the web. Besides, we all know people like this, if you spent 6 hours compiling X, you’d like to think it was for something useful right?

Trader Joe’s

Customers accept that Trader Joe’s has only 2 kinds of pudding or 1 kind of polenta because they trust that those few items will be very good. “If they’re going to get behind only 1 jar of Greek olives, then they’re sure as heck going to make sure it’s the most fabulous jar of Greek olives they can find for the price,” explains a former employee. To ferret out those wow items, Trader Joe’s has 4 top buyers, called product developers, do some serious globetrotting. Trader Joe’s biggest R&D expense is travel for those product-finding missions. Trade shows that feature the flavor of the moment “are for rookies”. Trader Joe’s doesn’t pick up on trends — it sets them.

This makes me want to check them out again. I dismissed them years ago because I was underwhelmed.

To do what they do, you can’t just hire the same people they hire. You have to emulate the private-label strategy. The real-estate strategy. The pricing. The quirky culture. And it’s often the soft things. Not just the kind of people you hire, but the way you train them and the culture you create. I mean, we can build a store that looks like a Trader Joe’s. But when we have people walk in, can they have the same experience? Well, that’s very hard to replicate.

Anonymity is good for creativity

Consider, Poole explains, how the fixed identities in other online communities can stifle creativity: where usernames are required (whether real or pseudonymous), a new user who posts a few failed attempts at humor will soon find other users associating that name with failure. “Even if you’re posting gold by day 8, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, this guy sucks.’ ” Names, in other words, make failure costly, thus discouraging even the attempt to succeed.