Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- A company whose employees vie to be the best
- Small companies have slight edge in worker satisfaction
- Proactive management furthers untapped potential
- Sun’s ‘Project Copy Linux’ not a Linux copy

A company whose employees vie to be the best
News Journal – The News Journal – Jul 29, 2007
A combined storage space of about 550,000 square feet houses everything from furniture to extra clothing to boats and cars. “People store everything,” Julian said. “If they’re moving, they store household items. Contractors will often store their materials. Homeowners will outgrow their homes. We get a lot of college kids that store over the summer. “Charlotte Tackett, 66, site manager at a storage facility in north Dover, sells customers locks, boxes, tape, packing material and other moving supplies.

Small companies have slight edge in worker satisfaction
News Journal – The News Journal – Jul 29, 2007
Eighty-seven percent of the hotel’s workers said they are “happy with the balance between home and work life,” the highest score among medium-sized companies in the survey. Ninety-six percent of workers at the Wilmington-based company said they were happy with that aspect of their job. Joe and Jennie Nekola, a husband-and-wife team, have been managing Sentinel’s 855-unit Newark site for about two years. They enjoy the autonomy and flexibility that Sentinel gives them, as well as the good pay, vacation time, performance bonuses and health benefits. “It’s more like family,” Joe Nekola said.

Proactive management furthers untapped potential
News Journal – The News Journal – Jul 29, 2007
Some companies use more tangible rewards to inspire motivated and engaged workers. Restaurants can be notorious for their lack of benefits, but operations such as Harry’s Savoy Grill & Ballroom and Harry’s Seafood Grill even give hourly workers such perks as medical and dental insurance, paid vacations and company-supplemented 401(k)s. At Sentinel Self-Storage, managers supplement their motivational techniques with everything from monthly monetary incentives to free massages. At Compassionate Care — which won a special award for management in this year’s study — the rewards can be psychologically and spiritually beneficial as well, workers say. “I have never worked for a company that has been so positive with the feedback,” Doody said. “They definitely recognize when someone is doing a good job. It’s not overlooked.

Sun’s ‘Project Copy Linux’ not a Linux copy
Register – Jul 29, 2007
“It is not a Linux copy thing,” Murdock said. “It’s a best of both worlds thing. “We’re adopting a model that moves into a two-tier release cycle where one option will be a fast moving, community version of Solaris for the early adopters. It’s meant to make Solaris appeal to a broader audience. Project Indiana will include a revamped package management system, which should prove popular with developers unaccustomed to Solaris. The OS has some clunky, archaic aspects, and Murdock thinks the new package system will modernize Solaris. Sun’s bold decision to open source Solaris and to pursue Solaris x86 with vigor has resulted in a cadre of Solaris bigots outside of Sun corporate…
Sun spent months and months hyping Solaris 10 ahead of its release in 2005. The OS included some ground-breaking features such as DTrace and ZFS that Sun continues to flaunt today. The company has been unusually silent about the tools Solaris 11 will bring, making us wonder if OpenSolaris hasn’t been a distraction from the core OS. You can see some of the discussed Nevada features. What’s that smell?Murdock also refused to talk about Sun’s FISHworks project â billed as a NetApp killer.