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I've built my own computers for 15 years. Built them for my parents and friends as well.

At one point last year, when I realized I had four broken machines to fix using my own money, using my own time, I decided to give it up and devote that time and money to my Beetle and assorted website projects.

To be honest, I quite liked the machines I build, they were extensions of myself. But it was not worth the hours and HOURS of time wasted making them work. I went mac last year and haven't regretted it...Apple's support is nothing short of amazing. They actually believe you when you say something broken.

I still build all my own servers for Webslum, with help from my super' Ryan. But that's more about economy and redundancy. I buy whatever hardware I can get two of for a good price, and install those. Many of the prebuilders just put in the cheapest stuff they can find.

Ok. Here's what I've got and it is SO awesome in that I don't have to do hardly any WORK (and I still am too lazy to do it in a timely fashion):

1) Input photos with iPhoto. It is the best, simply for the ease of making albums, searching based on time, etc. The albums it maintains are symlinks in directories...which means you can just upload the albums if you like.

2) Resize and index the photos in my iPhoto Library/Albums directory using a tool called Jalbum. Since I have FAR too many photos for a .MAC account to be useful, I need to use a third party app. JAlbum resizes photos, generates pretty graphics based on programmable templates, and will even upload them all for me. It rocks. And no matter what you may think of Java and its batch processing abilities, it's more than fast enough on my G3-600. It can process 3200 3 meg photos (making html pages, 800x600 "slides," and thumbnails) in about an hour...and I can upload them from within Jalbum WHILE it's working!

Oh, and all of this takes a lot of webspace. You need a provider who has the speed and the size and won't hassle you too much. I couldn't find one, so I made my own. (Cheap plugs are the best kind).

Finding financing is NOT HARD. Finding venture capital is, but you don't need it. Venture capitalists expect the possibility of a major return on their investment (20%+). Banks, on the other hand, just want you to pay back what they loaned you. To get a bank to give you a business loan doesn't take much...prove there's a market, prove you can deliver to it, and you've got upwards of a few hundred grand. My boss does it twice a year -- our industry segment moves in cycles, he finance two quarters with loans and pays them off with money gained during the other two quarters, pumping the excess into growth. It's even easier if you're willing to work off credit...shit, webslum is a lazy project that doesn't really try to make any money, and we've been offered credit lines in the five digits. Think of all the hardware you could finance with that...and all the months of dedicated lines you could swipe, borrowing off future gains.

However, the problem is one of social networking and markettability. Since the 'bust' that put people out of work, I have been offered three jobs. Offered. Which says to me that the problem isn't the availability of work, but the ability of the currently unemployed people to find it and properly market their skills. And if you can't sell yourself, there's no way you'll be able to sell software. That's the first step!

Then there's the issue of drive. A lot of my friends who are out of work in the tech field don't WANT to work in the tech field. They just want to make a lot of money doing something "easy," and now that they can't they want to whine about it. After all, they slid through the CS program at some fancy pants college, shouldn't they be guaranteed a job? Newsflash folks: without the passion to learn how to write software, how to manage your own company, and to research what a market needs, you'll never be able to make it anywhere. A lot of people just want to find themselves in a job where they can get major paid to tap away for 8 hours and never really put any energy into anything. These people will never make it in the industry.

That said, I dare any of you to prove me wrong. Owning your own business is exciting and fun and can be a LOT more worthwhile than working for somebody else.

Net avoiders are:

20% moochers who make friends and family use the net for them. Reminds me of my friend's jewish roommate who made us open the door for him on Yom Kippur.

17% idiots who gave up on complicated concepts like "back arrows" and "typing." Also people who balked at the expense of fixing computers and dealing with ISP bullshit (heh they should have gone webslum)

24% true luddites, or people who have better stuff to do, depending on how you look at it.

It also says that the majority of these folks (56%) don't plan on going online, that they don't have the social or technical skills to do so, and so I say good riddance. Doesn't look like our community is missing out on anything.

One thing that bothers me is their "special look" at disabled users. They never define "diabled," and I think they are defining a disabled person on the internet as somebody whose disability directly effects internet use (basically, the blind and those with difficulty using the mouse). Therefore, it's kind of self fulfilling...if it's hard and expensive to do something, you're not going to do it. I think if you look at the numbers of people with learning diabilities, physical impairments and debilitating illnesses who go online, you might discover the exact opposite -- that the buffering effect of online chat makes it easier to communicate, that the ability to move at one's own pace makes it easier to concentrate and comprehend. Shit, my first CS teacher was wheelchair bound with Lou Gherig's disease. Computers turned a crippling illness into a chance for him to make good money and a real impact on kids.

This is a complete load of shite. A completely useless program, though of course it makes smart business sense - what's the most effective way to make people buy a product? Make their children want it. Microsoft wants to get into yet another market, and they're doing it by introducing a completely useless product. What's next, a little image of a paperclip that displays error messages in little speech bubbles and searches through help files? Oh, wait.

"...creates a peer-to-peer social group in which people can chat, share photos, listen to music and meet friends"

Most of my friends don't have 'net access at all, but I also know a bunch of people who I've only ever spoken with over the internet. In fact, there's only one person who I see on a regular basis and chat with over IM. But even if all my friends were geeks, I can do all those things already. I run an OpenBSD system, and a combination of Gaim, FTP, gtk-gnutella, and some webspace courtesy of Webslum, I can share music, share photographs, talk to people and meet other people. With my other friends, I share music via the ancient technique of "CD burning" and chat via "spoken word" and occasionally "telephone".

"The ability to form personal, ad hoc communities and perform shared tasks means this product will have a lot of appeal in the 13- to-24-year-old market"

I can do that already. It's called my "contact list".

"Another feature, known as Winks, lets one customer send animation to everyone in the group. "Winks is an activity where they can basically 'wink' at someone across the room, but (you) do it virtually--flirt with them," Savage said."

What the fuck? I can't even begin to make sense of this passage. Why on earth would I want to send something to every person I know at once? Especially not some kind of "animation". I have no desire to "flirt" to a bunch of people I can't see.

"Group members also can share photos and, more importantly, listen to music available in a common playlist."

Me too! I have several CD's copied off my friends, and they have more of mine. I've also put together a bunch of compilations from MP3's I've got off the internet (usually bands that are scared of releasing stuff in England or where there's just no hope of buying it out here in the countryside, and have been recomended to me by friends in other countries, or that I've recorded off late-night radio shows, or whatever). Friends of mine have copies of them. We listen to them in school, which would be kind of difficult if they were on my computer at home.

Over the internet, I don't need some special program to tell me what they're listening to - they can use an instant messanger to say to me "Today I am listening to Half Man Half Biscuit" and I can say "That's funny, so am I! Fred Titmus!", or whatever.

I could go on. This is essentially a completely useless program - especially to me, a person who lives in the middle of nowhere on a
There seem to be a bunch of pointless arbitrary limits. Why 10 people? While I can imagine it useful as a tool for bullying ("sorry, we'd love to speak to you, but we're up to our limit of ten people! Isn't life a bitch?"), is there a rational reason I can't have, say, 11 friends?

Why a playlist of 60 songs? I have three compilation CDR's with more than that on, and that's just scraping the surface of my music collection (and of course, ignoring the hundreds of pounds-worth of music I've paid for legally and my friends have also paid for legally).

You'd think I was some grumbling old man who remembers when music sharing was done by gathering around the gramophone, but I'm a 16-year old who uses the internet for many social purposes. And I, one of the so-called "NetGen" (okay, so probably the average "NetGen" person doesn't spend most of their free time coding computer games, but it's their definition, not mine) can recognise this for the pointless bullshit it is.

Weblsum.net is a hosting service for geeks, by geeks. $10/mo. running on UNIX from the great state of... Virginia. Hosting service with all the fixin's. Mojo likes it.

And that's one of the problems with modern capitalism...in the odd case that you don't claim to know nothing and be irresponsible, you're inviting people to sue you. How many times have I heard in the same breath "X Co, Inc, is a huge, evil, corrupt institution with no care for its customers" and "let's sue them so we can have money?"

I run a very small (read: profits are almost half my car payment) web hosting service under the flag of openness and freedom of content. I started it because I got upset that every single host I went with wanted to corral me into a year contract, tell me what I couldn't do or say and take credit and the ability to edit my personal thoughts and ideas. Originally, it was a co-op, and I began to take on extra users who wanted the same thing -- ownership of their work and a fair charge for the low bandwidth they were moving.

In the past three months we've grown a dozen times larger -- so big that I no longer know every site op by name. Now, I don't want to have to force the new people to sign a TOS or a EULA. I think that posting the rules on the frontpage should be good enough for everybody. But I'm afraid. We've had a couple users ask if they could serve porn, and when I said no a few signed up anyway. I trust them (and check my logs), but if I go away on vacation and one of them starts serving nude shots of Frankie Muniz, I'm the one who gets in trouble. I'm the one who's got his name on the tax forms, and I don't intend to incorporate the business.

So I'm stuck. I want to let users do their own thing, own their own shit, but I'm the one who's ass is on the line. If one site slips up, they all go down. Everybody loses their stuff and all the good I've tried to do, all the bright young folks I've formed relationships with are scrambling for a new host. Someday soon I'll need to call my lawyer (okay, I don't have a lawyer to call my own, I'll have to pick a name out of the phone book) and have him draw me up a plan for a TOS. It'll probably be pretty brutal. Legally, I'll have to claim responsibility or ownership over users and content so I'll have the ability to pull it if I have to. And I'll have to do the same stupid shit, bowing to C&Ds and dropping user info and so forth.

It won't make me as a host and as a person any more of an asshole. I won't trade email addresses for cigarettes or claim rights to rkm's work. But I'll look just as corporate and uncaring as the rest.

Just think about it, baby, before you hate the legalese. You can't avoid being screwed without screwing somebody on paper. At the end of the day, it all comes down to who you trust, and after these long years with Slashdot, OSDN and SourceForge, I guess I trust VA. I have to, they designed my new server!

Shameless plug: webslum.net. Say you read this post and I'll give you a free shell :)