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First, yes there is "a small, independent media company founded and run by journalists." The key though is that you need to run it like a businessman, not as a journalist.

I know hundreds of people who want to be freelance writers or journalists. Some of them quite well. But, for every one I know who makes a living at it, I know two dozen who don't.

The secret? Treat it like a business first.

What's your business plan? You describe several tried, true and _lame_ ways of making money from journalism. Online advertising and newsletter subscriptions are the only ones that have a proven track record of working.

How many online publications do you see making living money from the methods you describe? I can't think of any.

Google ads by themselves though, won't cut it. You need someone who spends all their time looking for advertisers.

If you go the newsletter route, you typically have to become the Expert in one area that people with money want insider information on.

Now, that can be pretty broad. Fred Langa does very well with his personal computing newsletter, the Langa List (http://www.langa.com/), but Fred, former editor of chief in Byte in the good old days of print tech. journalism, already had a lot of fans.

OK, so those models can work, but you also have to content people value and want to read.

200K unique readers a month is good, but it's not good enough.

Still, with 200K, and aggressive, non-intrustive advertising, you should be able to generate enough cash to survive on.

But, income is only part of the equation. In a real business, yoy must learn how to manage your money. This isn't a skill that for some reason many writers or journalist have, but learning how to keep costs as low as possible while maximizing revenue is a must.

That sounds simple. It's not. It's a skill your group must master though.

I've made more money in journalism years ago than I am now, but I'm doing much better overall. My secret? I finally learned finance 101.

Finally, you really aren't staffed up enough to "deeper understanding of the wide swath of research discoveries poised to affect the technologies driving day-to-day life and business."

Pick a narrow area of technology, stick with it, and you can probably provide the "deeper understanding," you're striving to cover. Once people learn that your site is The site for nano-engineering, which seems a reasonable goal based on your existing coverage, you can probably make a go of it.

Good luck.

Steven,
Senior Editor, Ziff Davis Internet (http://www.eweek.com/
Editor, Practical Technology (http://www.practical-tech.com/
Chairman, Internet Press Guild (http://www.netpress.org/

This was the file at center of the April 01 2001 daylight savings time snafu. See the links below:

http://www.langa.com/newsletters/1999/jan-18-99.ht m

Microsoft's Unintentional April's Fool's Bug

http://www.cknow.com/articles/62/1/Computer-Knowle dge-Newsletter-Archive---1999/print/62

http://www.rescomp.upenn.edu/docs/hype/old/aprilon e.html

I saw this when it was mentioned on the LangaList a few weeks ago. Very funny, in my opinion, and it's good to see that this company doesn't take itself *too* seriously.

It's probably safe to say I'll remember them, so from a marketing point of view it would be a success.

My best understanding is that Mr. Langa is not technically qualified to judge security vulnerabilities. Any judgement of security vulnerabilities depends on an intimate knowledge of the difficulty of exploiting the vulnerabilities, and the chance that the exploit will seriously compromise a system. I've never seen any indication that Mr. Langa has programming ability.

Microsoft Internet Explorer is the buggiest widely used software I've ever known. In one two-year period, there were 57 serious vulnerabilities in the most recent versions of IE. The link above lists 117 vulnerabilities of all kinds at present.

Langa's free LangaList and the paid version with 20% more content, LangaList Plus can sometimes be useful if you must administer Windows computers.

The $11 per year paid edition is supposed to be free of advertising, but it is perhaps 25% advertising. The paid edition advertises the LangaList extensively, Langa's favorite charities, and his sense of humor. In the most recent edition of the paid version, 4 of the 13 articles are his personal advertising, and not related to Windows computer issues.

Often links in the LangaList lead to articles in magazines for which Mr. Langa is a paid writer. So, part of his advertising is for publications for which he writes.

The LangaList is often somewhat lacking in considered content. Sometimes he just links to Google searches.

The content of the LangaList is partly written by readers. Typically, the letters to Fred that are quoted begin something like this: "Fred, you are my hero. All other newsletters are terrible, yours is wonderful. I have been a paid subscriber for years." So, typically, the first sentence of the letters written by readers is advertising, also.

The result is that Mr. Langa makes his paid subscribers wade through a lot of material not relevant to Windows.

People who are knowledgeable about computers usually have no idea how complicated it is to do marketing, and their lack of knowledge shows in every attempt. Mr. Langa is embarrassingly lacking in marketing insight.

Mr. Langa has a history of finding fault with Linux. Perhaps this is another novice marketing attempt. Perhaps he does not want to lose subscribers because they converted to Linux. I've never seen any indication that he is qualified to judge the quality of operating systems.

The LangaList often passes on recommendations from readers about free software apparently without sufficient testing. As far as I'm aware, there have been no problems with this, but how would someone discover this if Mr. Langa did not write about it? It seems possible that the LangaList could spread problem software to its readers.

I wasn't expecting enlightenment myself - not from Langa anyway - and from my cursory examination of some of the facts employed by Langa, it appears that objectivity is too much to expect as well.

IMO Fred Langa of InformationWeek fame wrote a deliberately misleading article suggesting that those concluding IE is less secure than Firefox are being duped by hype, while unsurprisingly he uses selective facts to paint Firefox / Mozilla in a light it doesn't really deserve to be under.

• Information Week Story:
  http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArt icle.jhtml?articleID=160900911
• Symantech Report Langa quotes:
  http://ses.symantec.com/pdf/ThreatReportVII.pdf
• Langa's site:
  http://langa.com/newsletters/2005/2005-04-18.htm#1
• Responses on Langa's forum:
  http://www.forums.informationweek.com/jive3/thread .jspa?threadID=300055004&tstart=0

My quick observation:
Langa has IMO published one of the more misleading articles in some time suggesting in its tone and opening narrative that Firefox is no more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer. Balance would be nice, but his use of deception to make a point calls into question his objectivitity.

While using selective quotation of the Symantec report, Mr. Langa ignores a parabolic increase in Win32 specific threats from viruses and worms over the past five years even though Windows growth itself is not so parabolic.

Port based attacks, according to Symantec, designed to exploit 445 and 135 (Microsoft file sharing and RPC mechanisms) account for 52% of the top attacked ports, with no other port service - Microsoft or otherwise - accounting for more than 8% of the total.

The issue has been discussed before, so perhaps the spin on this is a discussion over Langa's motivations. Factual representation (evening being fair to both sides) clearly wasn't his objective or met if it was.

Well Mr. Langa seems to have a web site. Here is the link ! And here you have a link to the article on his homepage (in case it gets /.ed on the front page).

Well taking a quick look at what he wrote i think it's the type of guy who actually enjoys starting flame wars so i wouldn't bother too much by him!
I would only like to tell him that I dissagree with him and he is a terrible writer cause he is using too much sarcasm in his writing. take for example this part from his essay:

The last time I mentioned a similar US-CERT finding, by the way, Linux partisans leapt up to tell me that US-CERT didn't know what it was doing. Linux *couldn't* have more security flaws than Windows! Everyone *knows* that Open Source software is so much better than anything from Microsoft--- right?

Also take from example this:

I wrote that article to try to help readers interested in FireFox in particular and Open Source in general to make an informed decision. There are many, many excellent, proven, objective benefits to switching to Open Source software--- but there's also a lot of misinformation, and some very, very *bad* reasons to switch.

I think that he is doing what he is preaching against: Misinformation

Well Mr. Langa seems to have a web site. Here is the link ! And here you have a link to the article on his homepage (in case it gets /.ed on the front page).

Well taking a quick look at what he wrote i think it's the type of guy who actually enjoys starting flame wars so i wouldn't bother too much by him!
I would only like to tell him that I dissagree with him and he is a terrible writer cause he is using too much sarcasm in his writing. take for example this part from his essay:

The last time I mentioned a similar US-CERT finding, by the way, Linux partisans leapt up to tell me that US-CERT didn't know what it was doing. Linux *couldn't* have more security flaws than Windows! Everyone *knows* that Open Source software is so much better than anything from Microsoft--- right?

Also take from example this:

I wrote that article to try to help readers interested in FireFox in particular and Open Source in general to make an informed decision. There are many, many excellent, proven, objective benefits to switching to Open Source software--- but there's also a lot of misinformation, and some very, very *bad* reasons to switch.

I think that he is doing what he is preaching against: Misinformation

CD-RWs are expected to last about 25 years under ideal conditions (i.e. you write it once and then leave it alone). Repeated rewrites will ccelerate
this. In general, CD-RW media isn't recommended for long-term backups or archives of valuable data.

The rest of this section applies to CD-R.

The manufacturers claim 75 years (cyanine dye, used in "green" discs), 100 years (phthalocyanine dye, used in "gold" discs), or even 200 years
("advanced" phthalocyanine dye, used in "platinum" discs) once the disc has been written. The shelf life of an unrecorded disc has been estimated at
between 5 and 10 years. There is no standard agreed-upon way to test discs for lifetime viability. Accelerated aging tests have been done, but they may not provide a meaningful analogue to real-world aging.

Exposing the disc to excessive heat, humidity, or to direct sunlight will greatly reduce the lifetime. In general, CD-Rs are far less tolerant of environmental conditions than pressed CDs, and should be treated with greater care. The easiest way to make a CD-R unusable is to scratch the
top surface. Find a CD-R you don't want anymore, and try to scratch the top (label side) with your fingernail, a ballpoint pen, a paper clip, and
anything else you have handy. The results may surprise you.

Keep them in a cool, dark, dry place, and they will probably live longer than you do (emphasis on "probably"). Some newsgroup reports have complained of discs becoming unreadable in as little as three years, but without knowing how the discs were handled and stored such anecdotes are
useless. Try to keep a little perspective on the situation: a disc that degrades very little over 100 years is useless if it can't be read in your
CD-ROM drive today.

One user reported that very inexpensive CD-Rs deteriorated in a mere six weeks, despite careful storage. Some discs are better than others.

An interesting article by Fred Langa (of http://www.langa.com/) on http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=15800263&pgno=1
describes how to detect bad discs, and discusses whether putting an adhesive label on the disc causes them to fail more quickly.

By some estimates, pressed CD-ROMs may only last for 10 to 25 years, because the aluminum reflective layer starts to corrode after a while.

One user was told by Blaupunkt that CD-R discs shouldn't be left in car CD players, because if it gets too hot in the car the CD-R will emit a gas that can blind the laser optics. However, CD-Rs are constructed much the same way and with mostly the same materials as pressed CDs, and the temperatures required to cause such an emission from the materials that are exposed would
melt much of the car's interior. The dye layer is sealed into the disc, and should not present any danger to drive optics even if overheated.
Even so, leaving a CD-R in a hot car isn't good for the disc, and will probably shorten its useful life.

See also http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/ Longevity.html,
especially http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Industry/news/media-ch ronology.html about some inaccurate reporting in the news media.

See "Do gold CD-R discs have better longevity than green discs?" on http://www.mscience.com/faq53.html.

Bah - You and that Langa guy must be in cahoots. Everyone knows that Linux is perfect and the user community is super friendly.
Why, just last week me, Linus, and RMS installed Linux on an old PDP-11, and it found the sound card! Let's see Windows 95 do that!

Fred Langa, the writer of the letter, is not sophisticated about marketing and is not completely honest about advertising. It's possible that the article is a paid advertisement from Microsoft about the superiority of Microsoft Windows. Or, it's possible that the article is just due to ignorance.

Langa produces a newsletter called the LangaList. Both the free and paid versions are mostly about Microsoft Windows. There is a paid version that supposedly doesn't have advertising. However, it does have considerable advertising for Langa himself.

Langa's newsletter is for people who know little about computers. People send him information by email, and he publishes it, often with apparently little checking. Often the little articles start with something like, "You are so wonderful. I am happy to pay for the paid version of your newsletter." The LangaList sometimes reads like a badly written informercial.

In the most recent issue of the LangaList, he says "The system was based on an utterly mainstream Intel motherboard with an on-board Intel sound system. This is not some weird, off-brand system using unknown components: It's about as mainstream as it gets."

He could easily have named the motherboard. It seems possible that it isn't named because he doesn't want people to know the truth. I remember that we supplied "utterly mainstream" Intel 815EEA motherboard systems with sound systems that NEVER worked perfectly in Windows 98 because they were so proprietary. That was back when Intel was first integrating sound into their motherboards. Intel had bought the sound system from some other company, and they had not yet found all the bugs.

Remember that Intel shut down its consumer division because it was not able to produce products that were successful in the marketplace! Before the shutdown I bought two Intel video camera cards from Fry's for $20 each. I took them back because they were of such poor quality. They weren't even worth $20.

In any case, Fred Langa often writes about problems in Microsoft Windows that are far, far bigger than problems with sound cards. In the most recent version of the LangaList, linked above, one of the articles in the paid version is "Icon Problems In XP, Win98". I know long time Linux users will have a difficult time believing this, but Microsoft Windows sometimes trashes its own desktop icons!!! The article in the LangaList is about how to fix this.

This most recent paid version of the LangaList, which supposedly does not have advertising, has two sections of 13 that are completely advertising, 6) Don't Make Me Beg! :-), and 8) They Just Keep Coming And Coming....

Fred Langa, the writer of the letter, is not sophisticated about marketing and is not completely honest about advertising. It's possible that the article is a paid advertisement from Microsoft about the superiority of Microsoft Windows. Or, it's possible that the article is just due to ignorance.

Langa produces a newsletter called the LangaList. Both the free and paid versions are mostly about Microsoft Windows. There is a paid version that supposedly doesn't have advertising. However, it does have considerable advertising for Langa himself.

Langa's newsletter is for people who know little about computers. People send him information by email, and he publishes it, often with apparently little checking. Often the little articles start with something like, "You are so wonderful. I am happy to pay for the paid version of your newsletter." The LangaList sometimes reads like a badly written informercial.

In the most recent issue of the LangaList, he says "The system was based on an utterly mainstream Intel motherboard with an on-board Intel sound system. This is not some weird, off-brand system using unknown components: It's about as mainstream as it gets."

He could easily have named the motherboard. It seems possible that it isn't named because he doesn't want people to know the truth. I remember that we supplied "utterly mainstream" Intel 815EEA motherboard systems with sound systems that NEVER worked perfectly in Windows 98 because they were so proprietary. That was back when Intel was first integrating sound into their motherboards. Intel had bought the sound system from some other company, and they had not yet found all the bugs.

Remember that Intel shut down its consumer division because it was not able to produce products that were successful in the marketplace! Before the shutdown I bought two Intel video camera cards from Fry's for $20 each. I took them back because they were of such poor quality. They weren't even worth $20.

In any case, Fred Langa often writes about problems in Microsoft Windows that are far, far bigger than problems with sound cards. In the most recent version of the LangaList, linked above, one of the articles in the paid version is "Icon Problems In XP, Win98". I know long time Linux users will have a difficult time believing this, but Microsoft Windows sometimes trashes its own desktop icons!!! The article in the LangaList is about how to fix this.

This most recent paid version of the LangaList, which supposedly does not have advertising, has two sections of 13 that are completely advertising, 6) Don't Make Me Beg! :-), and 8) They Just Keep Coming And Coming....

Fred was editor-in-chief, but I think I have the time period wrong. According to this web page Fred was editor-in-chief from 1988 to 1991. This was after the change from Robert Tinney paintings on the cover to photographs, but still while Steve Ciarcia had his Circuit Cellar column there.

Even better: The scrollbar issue isn't not a bug, it's a feature.

If your company is not extemely abusive and anti-competitive, you have nothing to fear from the DOJ.

You are right, Windows 98 full support will stop in 7 months, not 1 month.

From the Langa Newsletter, Nov. 15, 2001:

"Starting next month and ending next June, the overwhelming majority of current Windows users will find themselves operating OS versions that the vendor --- Microsoft --- either doesn't support, or only partially supports! " [my emphasis]

(The Langa Newsletter is an excellent free emailed newsletter that covers matters of interest to computer users.)


An explanation of how the U.S. got involved in violence: What should be the Response to Violence?

To date, there have been a large number of tools dedicated to the creation and deployment of web services, but relatively little thought has been given to relationship management between services (a subset of which is security). Only a handful of companies (e.g., the deftly-named Grand Central and Flamenco) have started to broach this issue.

I think we can expect to see a large amount of activity in the area of what it takes to connect web services in the real world (i.e., with sensitive data, in business-critical operations, etc.) in the near future. One certainly would not one's web services to be abused/cracked as easily as Microsoft's Passport "technology". It will be interesting to see how this new market evolves.

Some of the things we found about Soviet technology were astonishing: For example, in 1990, most US computer chip leads were spaced 1/10 of an inch apart. The Soviet Ministry in charge of cloning western chips had mandated metric spacing, but one-tenth of an inch works out to be about 2.54 mm.; an odd metric size.

The Soviet solution? A "metric inch" with 2.5 mm spacing. This means that Soviet clone chips could be an exact electrical and functional equivalent of their Western counterparts, and even look exactly the same--- until you tried to plug them into a western socket. The Soviet chips would almost fit--- but not quite.

(yes timothy, I've met you - CTY)

For the meat of this post relevant to the subject, skip the next paragraph and then everything after it. But I hope the rest has some interesting stuff too.

What I really like about Linux, especially with a good distro (Debian anybody?), is that stuff is rediculously easy to install as timothy says, and you get nice default settings and everything works (especially with Debian, where the package configuration mechanism is well-defined and thought out) and you don't have to mess with it, but when you decide to go "power-user", everything is right there, from simple-to-edit text configuration files to the complete sources of most available programs; you can mess around with stuff. And if you royally screw something up, apt-get reinstall <package>.

As far as user-friendliness, X Windows as-is, with GNOME and KDE (pick one...), is about as easy to use as Windows while being much more customizable (heck, throw in a new window manager if you don't like how yours works! then try that in windows...). The only problem is that the user that Eazel etc. tries to cater to has been force-fed M$ Windows GUI all of their (computing) life. Get people started on Linux, and people will be comfortable with it without (much) special catering.

Mac OS X looks darn sweet, though... I have to wonder what Linux's fate will be competing against that. Anybody ported Aqua to Linux yet? ;)

Oh, forget AOL with network drivers. An AOL install will mess with configuration all over a Windows system (why in the world would an ISP adjust power management settings? Well AOL does, from what I've heard, source Fred Langa). You'll generally have a call to tech support to do any kind of network config after installing AOL, because in my experience it often just doesn't work anymore.

Odd that with all the "effort" that Microsoft has been putting into "compatibility" between "releases", stuff still doesn't work right between versions. Linux, on the other hand, has no problem with foreign packages (alien), and if it does, it's a simple matter to know why. But since most every Linux program is free and packaged in the two most common formats, rpm and deb, anyway, there is very often zero problems here.

My bias is of course towards Linux (because it's free, cool, ("enough, Ken" - shut up already, little voices!)), but I still maintain a power-user knowledge of Windows, and to a lesser extent MacOS, because those are what most people presently use. Realistically today, you cannot expect the average Windows user to go out and (gasp!) buy (you mean you actually have to pay money for Linux? Oh, you get it on a CD! Ah, okay.) a Linux distro and have a clue what [s]he is doing with it, but fortunately this is poised to change.

Linux has its faults. But the difference is, with Linux I can easily track down the root of the problem and have at least the chance to fix it if it involves modifying code (but if I don't, someone else can), but even with equal power-user status on Windows, I can still spend hours trying to track down a problem that should be obvious (try networking...).

If you've read this far through my hopefully informative, intersting ("this is your last warning, Ken" shut up already! I mean it! these little voices are really bothering me...) Oh, timothy is a cool guy; you should talk to him. He gave me a Slashdot / Andover dart gun! (oops, was I not supposed to tell anybody? oh well...) But more than that, he knows what he's talking about and he led an interesting discussion this year, first session (remember that, Tim?). No, I'm not trying to suck up :)

Kenneth

http://www.langa.com/newsle tters/1999/nov-4-99.htm#aol1

Here are the original comments sent to Fred Langa (person who wrote the original article).

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