IMO its a different tone. The first says "no. well... maybe..." [I don't want to undercut the value of the property] whereas the other says "yes. well... maybe..." [I don't want to appear unappreciative of the resources of the company that owns mine].
Fair! :) I see how you read it that way; to me perhaps is corporate speak for a noncommittal yes, and eventually is a way of making it even less committal by specifying a long timeline. I mean, anything could happen eventually, it just depends on when you mean.
NYT "journalists" do not care if the drivel they produce even makes sense, they only care to impart a tone.
In this instance, they desired to use this as a setup for a confrontational dynamic between Zuckerberg and the original founders, even though they essentially are saying the same thing.
To echo what others have said, and what worked for me: work at a small agency for a few years. Learn how to write good contracts, handle invoicing, and communicate with clients. Then take a few contracts on the side so you can figure out a rate that works for you, and so you can work on those skills in an environment where you aren't relying on the income. You'll know when the time is right to switch to full time freelancing.
Once you have proven yourself, you won't have to compete on price. Good clients will come to you.
I worked at a small agency for a year and a half and was very isolated from contract writing, invoicing and client communication. I would have gotten more if I stayed, but I think that often managers think their job is to isolate you, the workhorse, from the client craziness so that you stay focused and productive. So your YMMV with this strategy.
I've found that I am a morning person and that I (thankfully) can remain engaged and productive for long hours of programming. I usually work from 6am to 5pm four days a week. This gives me long, relaxing weekends to recharge for the next week.
We use this at the office and it works pretty well. It's not exactly the same as writing on a real whiteboard, but having an entire wall for drawing database diagrams is very useful. Our wall is like most walls, I guess, in that it is not perfectly flat like a whiteboard. The small divots and bumps make it nearly impossible to clean (especially if the writing has been left there for a while).
The cleaning is the biggest thing. I've seen this in a few places and there are always red and blue tints left over from erasing. Old writing tends to be a bit hard to take off without some kind of liquid spray.
I think the big problem is that plaster walls just aren't flat enough to prevent ink hiding in the divots and creases. So you can wipe over the surface but never get the little spots out of those imperfections.
We've painted a whiteboard-sized area of our office with this stuff. There's no border to tell you where the whiteboard paint finishes. As you'd expect, the ink is no longer confined to the bit that's wipe-clean. Otherwise (with the spray proviso above) it's been very useful, and we can always extend it with another pot later.
Another alternative is those statically charged pieces of "whiteboard paper" - Whiteyboard is mentioned below, and there's also http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/ - although they don't stay up tidily for much longer than a couple of weeks. I think they're only really meant to last e.g. a day-long meeting.
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