Thanks for your comment--and the joke. You have an excellent point: this isn't just an issue for Oracle, but an issue for the state of California as well.
The part of the story that just screams at me is the number of licenses involved: 277,000. Numbers that big have to elicit the question, "how many employees do we have?" And the follow-up: "how many of the employees we do have are going to use Oracle?" Inevitably that question was going to come up--somebody, somewhere, was going to question the numbers. Inevitably somebody at the state of California would ask that question. It makes zero sense--for the state of California. But it may well make sense for Oracle--in a bind to "make the numbers."
It would be very interesting to know what kind of projections Oracle made to securities analysts, and whether they projected the number of seat licenses as a key performance indicator. (In the same way that telecom companies project lines "in service" and "on switch." There's no correlation between a line in service and a given amount of revenue, but it is a metric of market growth and market penetration.) If Oracle had to sell seat licenses--and needed the number of seats more than they needed the revenue--they might have made the state a deal You Cannot Refuse [tm]: "you need 27,000 licenses--and we'll sell them to you for X; but we need to sell 250,000 licenses--we'll sell you the 27,000 you want, plus another 250,000 "virtual licenses" for X, but structure the deal as though you're buying all the licenses. In effect you get seat licenses to Oracle products in perpetuity--which is a good deal--and we get the number of seats we need to make the quarter."
That's conjecture on my part: it seems like a reasonable explanation to me. The problem with end-of-quarter gimmicks like this is that you can make your numbers this quarter--but you're emptying the pipeline of your sales at the start of next quarter. Each quarter you have to do more, and more, and more--and you end up doing stuff like this. Eventually you just can't find another rabbit in the hat--and you don't make your numbers.
Bonus question:
Who else might be frantically doing deals to make the quarter's numbers?
More details on the emerging Oracle scandal, including a chronology of events for those just hearing about the story, can be found in George Skelton's Capitol Journal column, which ran in today's LA Times under the title "No Defense Tactic Can Hide This Ugly Scandal."
Skelton's column is definitely worth the read--this is more than just a colossal sales job, and more than just a $25,000 campaign contribution to the governor oh-so-coincidentally two weeks after the deal. There are state legislators with family ties to this, and a startling lack of California employees (or departments) with any interest in using it.
Given the jitters many people have about the securities business today, the most ominous comment might well be a brief mention at the bottom of Skelton's column:
Oracle insisted this was a now-or-never deal--a onetime offer that would disappear the next day because it needed to impress Wall Street right then with a huge contract.
CA was famous for years for doing all sorts of stuff to "make the numbers" at the end of each quarter. You can only do it for so long--once everybody figures out that Sears is always running sales, nobody is willing to buy at anything other than the sale price. Writ large, the same thing happens to companies that are motivated by this quarter's presentation to the securities analysts: eventually customers learn to wait for the last week of the quarter, when you can name your price.
Oracle, in the go-go 90s, made money by the barrel--at one point a colleague observed that their margins were probably higher than the Medellin Cartel. If they have to resort to this kind of shenanigans to make the quarter's numbers, Oracle has bigger problems than a $25,000 payoff to the governor of California.
Your post mentions your concern about keyboard feel and sensitivity. I have exactly the same concern, and I've been looking at Sager. (A longtime friend, recently assimilated into the MS Borg, is a big Sager fan.)
How's the keyboard? I like a clicky-tactile keyboard--I hate the light mushy ones.
If you'd told a scholar in 1880 that we would build millions of wells around the world to extract a subterranean liquid, and ship it halfway around the world in giant ships, he would think it was a ridiculous, insupportable project. When people suggest using wind farms or solar plants to replace fossil fuels, these also require huge land areas (like this idea, hundreds of square miles).
That's rather my point: if anybody had set out in 1880 to build millions of wells to retrieve a subterranean liquid, and ship it halfway around the world, he would have been locked up in an asylum. What did happen was that in 1859 a guy named Edwin Drake figured out that the oil sheen on a local stream named Oil Creek must be coming from underground. If he could extract large quantities of it, he could sell it as a substitute for whale oil (which was becoming scarce). Oil City, Pennsylvania (see an unofficial local web site here) boomed.
"We" didn't drill for oil. "Society" didn't expend "it's" resources. Nobody got a government grant, or funding from a government laboratory.
And while petroleum boomed, it was a long time before demand for petroleum led to exploration happening around the world. It was more than a hundred years after Drake drilled for oil that we got to supertankers and deep-water drilling. "We" didn't create the infrastructure at all; and the infrastructure was not created overnight. And during that time a whole market full of consumers demonstrated the financial viability of the scheme. Which is a lot different that saying, "hey--let's build this gargantuan project at Lord knows what kind of bucks, and we'll scrub the atmosphere clean."
[Mounting soapbox...]
General principle:
Massive, and expensive, schemes funded by people who are investing their own money may be good, may be bad--but are probably a lot of fun to watch being built. Massive and expensive schemes funded by people voting to spend your money should be viewed with deep suspicion. Some turn out to be worthwhile (the Interstate Highway System, for instance), others (insert name of local taxpayer-financed football stadium here) are not.
A typical extraction facility that could extract all current carbon dioxide emissions would require only an area of one square yard per person in the developed world. A facility of sufficient size could be located in arid regions, since discharged air that is deficient in carbon dioxide could have consequences on nearby plant life.
Okay--one square yard equals 9 square feet. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1 acre worth of quicklime would recapture CO2 for 4,840 people. There are, as of April 1, 2000, 281,421,906 people in the United States. So we'd need 58,145 acres of quicklime to process CO2 for just the United States.
Quiz: How big is Rhode Island?
Let's just skip the obligatory comparison to the size of the state of Rhode Island--and concede that we're talking about a lot of land. And, oh yeah--we're also talking about a huge amount of quicklime. Which will, of course, need to be replenished all over those tens of thousands of acres. And building a collection system to capture the calcium carbonate from all those tens of thousands of acres wouldn't be child's play, either. And then it has to be processed, and so forth.
This is the kind of government proposal that used to give the Keynesian macro-economics professors a head rush. Just think of the economic multipliers--think of all the jobs created finding and surveying and buying some 60,000 acres of land. Think of all the money spent on massive construction equipment necessary to find, dig, and move 60,000 acres worth of quicklime. Think of all the steel involved in building the equipment necessary to collect all that calcium carbonate. Think of all the steel, electricity, and machinery that will be required to do all this processing. Think of the tens of thousands of jobs we're talking about. Whoopie!
And, oh yeah! Think about the amount of CO2 generated by the electricity used to produce all that steel; and all the CO2 generated by all those cars driven by all those employees, and all those earth-movers scraping depleted quicklime out, and pushing new quicklime back in.
Still with me? Now consider this: there aren't a lot of vacant 60,000 acre tracts of land available in the Washington, D.C. metro area. So a project of this magnitude would require moving all those tens of thousands of people to wherever this (by definition) arid wasteland would be.
This isn't simple, and almost certainly not feasible
Okay, I'm just a simple programmer and part-time college professor. What could I possibly know? It seems pretty clear to me that this announcement wasn't peer-reviewed, or if it was, the peer-review processing happened at a really good office party. The chemistry might be "simple," but the project would not be.
Don't try to understand sales people....
on
Managing Einsteins
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Now, I can understand the mannerisms and habits of Einsteins can be a little unpleasant at times, but it begs the question, why would a manager take one of these people out to a client dinner in the first place? If the client needs to meet the tech people to be convinced that a company can do the job, why not at the place of work?
That statement makes sense. Which proves something:
You will never make it in sales.
Sales people are full of, well, effluvium. And there is always a point at which your sales guys rise to the level in the organization where they need to make deals with other sales guys at that level in another organization. Both sets of uber-sales guys know that they're all sales guys--and thus full of effluvium. In consequence, the other guys recognize that your sales guys' presentation on your hot new technology is, well, effluvium.
No effluvium, really...
Faced with a customer who knows you are full of effluvium, what can you do? You bring the tech folks along. You don't sponsor a meeting where our techs meet with your techs (or even better, a Quake death match LAN party where our clan cruelly destroys your avatars and every morsel of self-respect you may have fooled yourself into...well, maybe that's not such a great idea). The idea is that your techs impress the daylights out of their uber-sales guys--who, being full of effluvium, are easily impressed.
That's how I ended up playing golf, once...
Being a 4-H leader, I view the game of golf as a waste of good pasture land. I was at a client's, installing a new application on their servers, when the company president dragged me into his office, picked out a golf shirt, and told me we were going to Pensacola, Florida to "do a little bidness." Right then.
I ended up doing an off-the-cuff presentation on the new product, with commentary on some of the features of the database schema and our techniques for automatically updating pricing. Based on the blank stares from the audience I doubt they understood one word in twenty. "But thass all raht," said the client, "in fact, that was kinda the point." To thank me for this, he subjected me to 18 holes of golf at some allegedly-exclusive golf course with all the sales types I'd been lecturing. Who, of course, knew how to play golf. The fact that I clearly did not seemed to further establish my technical credentials.
Learn from this, young Jedi...
Don't try to understand sales people. They are clannish, socially disfunctional, and have a tribal suspicion of outsiders.
You mentioned in your reply to me that you'd like to have GPS/cellular tracking in your car. As it happens, there's a company that does precisely this (they're a client of mine):
The vehicle position is tracked anywhere in the U.S., giving you vehicle location (including reverse-geocoding, so you get the street, town, and state) at stated intervals. You can also "pulse" the vehicle (akin to sending a page) to ask it to report at other times. Most users use the "bread crumbs" feature to see where a vehicle has been over a given period of time. We've used the system to retrieve a couple of stolen cars so far, and it's also being used to track tractor-trailers, garbage trucks, and (in Sarasota, FL) school buses. It's a very cool project.
And--knowing as much about the technology as I do, its all the more frustrating that I can't hang a unit on Annie. I have--literally--the entire MapQuest database and mapping engine sitting here in my office, and I can't use it.
Okay--let's get all the usual comments out of the way. This is a bad idea, it is the embodiment of Big Brother, it shows how silly and paranoid parents are, it is a crutch to let bad parents ignore their children, yadda yadda yadda....
I've been waiting for something like this for years.
Daughter #3 is 10 years old--and she has Down syndrome. There are a lot of features about Down syndrome--two of them are stubbornness and a complete absence of fear. Which frequently means that Downs kids will wander off. Or, if they're stopped, they'll very carefully sneak off. And we live adjacent to an 1100-acre state park.
Yup--I should keep an eye on Daughter #3. And yes, technology is no substitute for an alert parent. Yes--we have a fence, and yes--we work hard to make sure she stays in the yard. And she does stay in the yard. Most of the time.
Except the time last year when she turned up in a neighbor's swimming pool. And the time the summer before when she turned up in a different neighbor's bathtub. If she's good and faithful and safe 99.3% of the time, that still means she wanders off 1 day per year. And if she wanders into the park, we'll have to call out the National Guard.
Literally
In fact, Annie is featured prominently in the park's emergency plan. There's a search-and-rescue group that trains in the park, and they routinely exercise their plans for finding a mentally-retarded child in dense woods. A GPS tracking device could (and let me emphasize could) be enormously helpful.
BUT...
There are a few problems. First, and probably hardest, you have to have the device on the child when he or she decides to wander off. "Locking" it on a wrist strikes me as a surefire way to pick a fight--or make a fortune selling replacements. All Annie has to do is wear that GPS unit into the bathtub--or her wading pool outside. Or she can find out if it works better with peanut butter (which she's stuffed into 2 CD-ROM drives) or popcorn. Then there is the problem of location: GPS is meant for open air use. Any GPS chipset includes logic to store the last "locked" position (when the unit had 4 or more satellites in view)--so finding her inside a house won't be an issue. But how to report it?
There are two competing telemetry providers using the cellular telephone spectrum, Aeris and Cellemetry. Both depend upon radio units having enough signal strength to set up a call (Cellemetry doesn't actually set up the call--it just validates a ficticious phone number). Despite all the cell tower construction, there are still lots of places in the U.S., to say nothing of elsewhere, that do not have coverage. If you're looking for a truck (which is what Aeris and Cellemetry are used for) you can wait for the unit to report in a few minutes when it finds coverage. But a system to track a child has to have a substantially higher level of reliability.
A doctor in South Carolina (can't find the link anymore--the company may have gone bust) tried to market this kind of concept before. He hid the GPS unit and the radio in a pair of sneakers--and he had a remarkable success with a buy with autism who was rescued while walking on railroad tracks in Chicago. Hiding a unit like this in sneakers is brilliant--but getting and keeping GPS lock was an issue, as was connecting to the back end over the cell system.
I wish this would work
But this is probably yet another almost, sorta, kinda, almost....
I'd love to write more--but Daughter #3 has appeared in her coat, with six cents in her hand and a page of coupons from Domino's Pizza. I think she wants supper....
I teach in the MBA program at DeSales University in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I teach the introductory concentration course for E-Commerce majors in the program--I'm a software developer by trade, and I'm an adjunct lecturer.
"Adjunct" is an adjective derived from the Latin word for "doesn't rate a faculty parking sticker"--and in a lot of institutions the adjuncts are regarded as lower than dirt. Our program is a bit different: practically all of the MBA faculty are adjuncts--we're (mostly) teaching at night what we do during the day. The balding guy teaching FN503--Financial Accounting for Decision Makers? He's the Director of Corporate Financial Services for the largest corporation in the area. The guy teaching the E-Business Models class? He's the CEO of a venture capital group in suburban Philadelphia. The nut job standing on the chair shouting at his EC506 class about the importance of XML and distributed processing as a means to eliminate friction in business? (Uh...that would be me.)
We're not here for the money
The money is essentially a joke. I get a few bucks each month--most of my check I simply have withheld to pay my quarterly estimated tax payments (I'm self-employed). Sure--there are a couple of benefits: the biggest being faculty discounts on everything from software to my subscription to the Wall St. Journal. But the reason I teach for 3-1/2 hours every Wednesday night is because it is a lot of fun to preach technology to a group of business managers over the course of a term. There is a kind of jazz that comes when a sales manager takes ownership of a particular area: for example, a young woman who is just starting graduate school with a background in Finance. She works for a consumer products company, she's advancing rapidly in the corporation, and she fits much of the "tall, good looking, with really good hair" stereotype of the MBA. (Well--she's short. But she's pretty, and she has terrific hair.)
She had to write a paper on DNS that was due three weeks ago, and defend her paper in online discussion with the rest of the class. She's just turned in a paper on VOIP--how it works, who the players are, and the prospects for the technology--night before last. She nailed both subjects--drilled them. Zippo tech background when she walked into my classroom, and now she's scaring the daylights out of her employer's IT staff because she understands how DNS works. Sure--I'll take the bucks, I'll appreciate the U. paying most of my taxes, and I'll cheerfully come to the faculty dinners. But seeing the lightbulb come on over Barb's head is why I teach.
What makes our program work
In two words, "Mohamed Latib." He's the dean of the program, and all of the faculty regard him as a personal friend. We're all deeply enthusiastic about the guy--and we have all bought his vision of what an MBA program ought to be. He's fully aware that the stipend is chump change to each of us--and he constantly demonstrates his appreciation for what we bring to the program. He works, hard, for our personal loyalty. That's a lot different from the typical teacher's situation. (Quick quiz: does your community college president know any professor's preference in beer? Has he ever called a new faculty member to ask if he or she has a preference for a particular brand of Scotch, in order to be sure its on the bar at the cocktail reception?) He describes the MBA faculty as a family, and he means it. He works at cultivating personal and business relationships among us.
The key to Mohamed's success is that he's interested in finding people who have something to say--experts in their fields who want to talk about what they do. Yup--there's a textbook. But for each of us, there is a wealth of practical experience that we bring to the class.
Find the enthusiasts, and hire 'em
Imitate Mohamed's success: don't look for academics who understand technology. They're all trying to get jobs at better-paying (or more prestigious) schools. Look for geeks who can teach. Find the consultant, find the reseller, find the IT guy at a local corporation. Find somebody who can express enthusiasm about the subject--find somebody who does programming for a living, who understands why source code control matters, who understands why documentation is important. Offer the guy an adjunct role, pay him a couple of bucks, and show him that he's appreciated. Give him a soapbox to stand on, and let him rant away--he may well be the best teacher your students ever have.
"I don't use an FDIC-insured bank. I use a credit union. They pay me better interest, I am insured...." [Emphasis mine]
You're correct--perhaps a bit too precisely correct--when you write that you're not insured by the FDIC. That's because credit unions are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--credit union deposits are insured by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA). I don't know which three "seperate" [sic] insurance companies you're referring to, but deposits in any federally-insured CU in the U.S. are insured to $100,000. That insurance is backed by the NCUA Insurance Fund, which in turn is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.
There are some CUs that are not federally-insured. States vary on how they regulate financial institutions--there are very sophisticated, completely sound institutions that only have state charters. There are also "institutions" that are little more than investors clubs with extra paperwork to file at the end of the year. There isn't any annual cost of federal deposit insurance--the deposit insurance funds are based on "lifetime" deposits (as opposed to premium-paid insurance). Yes--there are costs associated with banking regulation: regulations that ensure, among other things, that the bank actually has cash necessary to fund its continuing obligations.
Since you mention that your deposits are insured by three different international investors, it might well be that you are not a depositor in a federally-insured CU. In that case, you're wasting money. Federally-insured CUs do not pay deposit insurance: CUs deposited 1% of their assets in 1970 to form the NCUA Insurance Fund, and with one exception there has never been a need to assess member institutions any fees for insurance since. If your deposits are privately insured, your institution is paying deposit insurance--which costs you money.
Should the U.S. government be building water projects in districts of politically influential congressmen? Nope. Should the government promote commerce by ensuring a sound currency? Absolutely. Deposit insurance is a big part of that--and unquestionably a very good thing.
(Disclosure: I'm the president of a small software company. We have developed software for credit unions, both federally-insured and state-chartered. If you have a car loan from your CU there's a good chance it was processed with our software. We like the CU movement a bunch.)
Thanks for your response. I think perhaps I may have confused you with my comments about working while I'm at a horse show.
The T1 circuit: there isn't a plan B. I'm pretty plugged-in to the local technology scene (I've been active in economic development organizations, etc.) and I'm certain that there isn't a public Internet presence (cafe, etc.) for at least 40 miles. We don't have any risk of a direct hit by lightning--we're adjacent to a high-tension line, so any lightning is going to hit the tower in the park, not us. I see your point: we could smoke a Smart Card, replace it, and see the new one smoked a few minutes later. We don't see a one-to-one correlation between electrical storms and smoking Smart Cards--we usually don't see a problem. So I view the possibility of smoking two cards within a few hours as a relatively low risk.
Horse shows: I'd never even think about trying to VPN into a client from a horse show. If I'm working that remotely, I'm doing development work. If I need to talk to a client, I'll call to ask a question. And if there's an opportunity, I'll mention that I'm at a horse show--in effect, saying "don't you wish you had my job?" What I'm doing is marketing the "Murdoch from the woods" image--it works with the clientele.
Your idea of having pre-identified fallback points is a good one. I'm not the only geek out here in the woods--a pal a few miles away develops imaging software (http://www.badertech.com). We've talked off and on about doing different stuff to make ourselves more secure--swapping tapes (which we do now and again), emergency recovery, etc. But all we've really done is talk--I'm seeing him later today for coffee, and it might be a good idea to bring it up. Thanks!
I'm in the 5th largest city. Population about 50,000 or so in the "Greater" area. As an ISP We service people in what we call rural areas which don't even have phone service (we do a lot of wireless) because how far out they are. We're discussing expanding into areas with population of under a thousand in the local dialing area.
The problem is that I don't think that some people get it... It cost a LOT to drag bandwidth out here. Especially when you're dragging a DS3 equivalent a hundred miles to service 1000 people assuming if you get everyone in town.
Suggestion for you? Look into your ILEC's tariff structure. You may find the same kind of thing that my ISP discovered--that pricing may be available with a "local loop charge" that doesn't limit how big that local loop can be. Or you may discover that there's some other way to colo your CPE in the local CO and share bandwidth with the ILEC back to the larger community.
This is rural Pennsylvania. There are parts that do not have local telephone service (and a guy who used to work for me got his phone bill written by hand). But we're not nearly as rural as you are.
It's all very nice that you got a bunch of poles and a line strung through the park, and I'm sure that.99999% uptime lets you sleep better at night (though if you need to keep a spare card you're clearly not getting what you're paying for)
Permit me to elaborate: T1 circuits are sensitive to electrical storms. A T1 circuit terminates at a "Smart Card" in a box at the demarc point in your building. If your circuit goes down because of a power surge in the phone line, its the Smart Card that gets clobbered.
One night the Smart Card got clobbered. The alarms went off (we have a testing program that keeps track of our Internet connection) and I called for help. The data circuit techs are in Bethlehem--about 25 miles away--and they couldn't get to me till early the next morning. It was a problem. The best solution to the problem was for the techs to walk me through a little bit of debugging and leave me with a Smart Card. If that circuit goes down now, I'm back up within a minute or two. The techs still have to come from Bethlehem--but they now know that it is not a rush, and they can expect coffee and doughnuts when they arrive.
Am I getting the service I'm paying for? I think I am. As I wrote in my earlier reply, there are different aspects to life in rural America. Bitching at the techs when they appear just isn't done--they've come a long way, they have a lot of people to look after, and they have implemented a solution with me that guarantees less than 4 minutes of downtime per year. (We've been up continuously since August 8, BTW.) I'm paying for five 9s of reliability, and I'm getting it--I'm just getting it in a slightly different way than I would if I lived on Long Island. It's not polite to demand "what I paid for"--it's a lot smarter, and a lot more effective, to remember that the one tech that usually comes likes his coffee black, and his brother has Quarter Horses. And to repeat my offer that if his brother ever wants to ride the trails in the state park he can park his rig here and hack down the road.
Seem crazy? There's method to this madness...
A long time ago a friend and sometime colleague hired me as a consultant for a project at a big insurance company on Wall Street. Charlie (who is active on SlashDot) made sure that everybody knew that I lived near the Appalachian Trail--to hear Charlie tell it, we only wore clothes when we dressed up to go to town. Charlie and his co-workers lived their days amidst an endless sea of pea green 8' by 8' cubicles--hoping for the day when they'd get promoted one grade and move to a pea green 8' by 10' cubicle with arms on the chairs. The image of the wild man consultant living in the woods--chop a little wood, write a little code--really resonated with those people. It is an image that I have learned to cultivate--new clients learn early on that I'm a 4-H leader, and I'm not the slightest bit shy about blocking off days in the summer to take a trailer load of kids to a horse show. And if I do work there (I put up a canopy and work on my notebook, plugged into the AC adapter in the truck) I often as not will call the client on the cell phone. It makes a statement to the client that absolutely guarantees that I stand out in their minds.
The original poster was complaining about POTS. Y'know, voice, over copper, the old stuff. Now work-from-home folks who post to/. can also be reasonably assumed to require network access but five 9's @ $180/month?
For that $2160 (plus hardware) a year they can get a darn good laptop and a cellphone with plan to plug into it. Or camp out at Kinko's while drinking champagne. Or check into a nice hotel room with that laptop while their home connectivity is down and get to use the pool and room-service.
Unless someone actually needs always-on super-fast connectivity you're talking about MASSIVE overkill and one that would put the kibosh on lots of employer-sponsored telecommuting, or
waste a lot of someone's hard earned money.
With respect, I disagree. I am spending that kind of money, for that kind of bandwidth. For a couple of reasons:
Distance: I wrote "rural," I meant "rural." There isn't DSL service out here. The options are dialup modem, frame relay, and T1 circuits:
Dialup modem: simply not in the cards for any telecommuter who wants to be taken seriously in New York.
Frame relay: a dying service. Vendors are turning frame relay circuits off--I just picked up a bit of recurring change from a friend who was getting frame relay (~$500/month) from Verio. Verio told him to get lost, they were shutting down the service. He's co-lo'ing his server here.
T1: key point to understand: bandwidth prices are decreasing. A circuit that used to cost $1000 per month is now under $400. Next year it will be under $200. I was chatting with the CEO of a local CLEC Thursday evening, and he was loudly insisting that we will shortly be wiring houses for T1 and simply splitting off voice and data, if we don't just use VOIP instead.
Reliability: you have to be taken seriously. The "backup" plans that people have mentioned here are guaranteed to get you written off--run to Kinko's? Where? I just checked--there's a Kinko's in New Jersey that seems reasonably close: I could probably be there in two hours. If I'm driving all over the countryside looking for a Kinko's while the meeting continues without me, that's a lousy backup plan. If I'm conferencing in on an AMPS cell connection (we don't get PCS or GSM out here) that's a lousy backup plan. I have to have absolute reliability.
I'm an independent consultant. I use VPN to connect to clients, and I use VPN to let associates connect to me. I choose to live in a rural area along the Appalachian Trail--but I work for clients in urban areas like New York, Philadelphia, and Allentown. I'm not a telecommuter per se--but I face the same challenge: being taken seriously.
If they don't take you seriously, you're toast:
The original poster has decided to leave the big city and move to the Midwest. But he's still working for the company office in Manhattan. He has just been through the telecommuter's worst nightmare: he couldn't get stuff done because he couldn't connect. He fulfilled the predictions of the nay-sayers at work: he wasn't able to get something done. That has hurt his standing with his peers and with his management--it has hurt his credibility.
Going after the local phone company for compensation is a waste of time. What he has to do is ensure it never happens again--which means that he has to identify a super-reliable technology, and assume personal responsibility for the problem. In management buzz-speak, he has to own the problem. Bitching about the lousy phone company is not "owning the problem"--doing something about it is. Spending $250 per month for a 256k circuit means taking ownership of the problem--if he has five 9s of reliability (which equates to 4 minutes of downtime per year) there's a pretty good likelihood that he's going to have better reliability than the office in Manhattan. When he has better uptime than they do, he looks a lot more serious, a lot more credible, than somebody frantically driving halfway to Chicago to find a Kinko's where he can use a web browser. (Tip from us hicks: Kinko's are not everywhere. And if you need a web browser, its a lot easier to go to a public library. They're all wired.)
There is another dimension to this:
He's telecommuting to an office in New York. Office workers in New York look down their noses at anybody else--somebody who announces that he's leaving the NY Metro area for Indiana is beneath contempt. He is not to be taken seriously. But--he definitely moves to the "did you hear about Bob?" list when he announces that he has a T1 circuit. (That's its only fractional is immaterial: in fact, he's got a full-bore T1 to the CO. But Bob doesn't need to share all the details.) And when Bob demonstrates better uptime than the office LAN, and hosts a presentation on his own web server, and then mentions that he's paying $400 per month for his mortgage payment...a lot of people might just wish that they were Bob.
You can live and work in rural America. There are savings (my house costs less, my insurance costs less), there are lifestyle benefits (I'm a 4-H leader, and we have 4 horses), but there are costs too (the T1 circuit, the money we spend on gas to go anyplace). There are downsides to the lifestyle (it's a long way to a restaurant that doesn't have laminated menus or a drive-thru). But to be successful out here, over the long term, you absolutely must demonstrate consistency and reliability.
A friend of mine, a long time ago, said that "you're only as good as your tools." He was talking about electrical equipment--but its just as true with computer equipment. If you're doing email from home at night and you live in a commuter suburb--hey, get a DSL line. If you're connecting to the corporate network full-time from an office in your home, don't bet your career on that DSL circuit. And if you're going completely remote--moving 800 miles away from the office like the original poster has done--you have to provide absolute reliability. You need every single one of those five 9s.
And don't forget...
If you have rock-solid bandwidth, you can easily implement VOIP. Which, for our friend from Indiana, makes him a technology leader....
If we're going to be bantering around a term, let's at least define it. What is 'rural' to you? Location, city density, nearest larger city (10,000+). Some schmoe tried to tell me that Mankato, Minn. was rural. So I have to ask.
How about 4 miles outside of Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, adjacent to a state park? We don't live in a city--we're in a Class III township in eastern Pennsylvania. The northern boundary of the township is the Appalachian Trail.
The explosive growth of DSL has created an interesting regulatory loophole that you might be able to take advantage of. In order to provide xDSL service, providers have to co-locate equipment in your local CO. Which is to say, they have to establish a point of presence (POP) there.
T1 circuits can be expensive--but check into how the circuits are priced. Verizon, for instance, prices the "local loop" (from you to the CO) at a flat $120 per month. If your ISP already has a POP in the local CO, you can actually get a T1 circuit to that POP for $120 per month, plus the ISP's markup. (In my case, using ChoiceOne Communications I pay $180/month.) You then pay the ISP's fee for bandwidth and Internet connection.
Doing it this way costs a bit more than a DSL connection. (Okay--quite a bit more: roughly $275/month for a 256k connection, slightly less than $400/month for a 512k connection.) But there are several substantial advantages:
Reliability: The legendary "five 9s" of reliability are yours. These circuits get nailed up and stay up.
Distance: Your distance from the CO is no longer a problem. I'm 26,000 feet from my CO--literally the last line in this area code for Verizon. They run a line of poles through a state park to get to us, and the Verizon techs view us as easily their most remote T1 customer.
Bandwidth: you're paying for a specified bandwidth--but that's enforced at the ISP's router at the POP/CO; typically they'll just open the entire T1 bandwidth from you to the CO. And the ISP will usually configure the router to guarantee that service level, but give you more if it is available. In my experience there is always more available.
Life is not perfect: T1 circuits are sensitive to electrical storms, and we do see circuit problems when there is heavy lightning. But we've made sure that there is a fresh pot of coffee when the Verizon techs come, and that sort of thing, so they've left a spare Smart Card (the client-side device for the T1 circuit) here--when the electrical storm fries the Smart Card I just swap in a new one, place a service call, and send somebody into town to buy doughnuts. The techs will be by presently.
There are a lot of benefits to living in rural America--but there are tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is that you will probably have to pay a bit more to connect, and you'll have to assume more responsibility for connecting. When that frustrates you, remember: you're no longer in New Jersey.
Nope -- by default, everything you just described costs you nothing.
Your default configuration leaves ads on comments.pl pages (reading and writing) which is a minor annoyance but doesn't use up any of the pages you've paid for. And the messages.pl click is free too (as well as adless).
See, we've thought of these things:)
Hi Jamie!
With respect--perhaps you haven't thought quite hard enough. You have clearly done enough evaluation of who your "subscribers" are to know that less than 3% of your members post comments. And, as the system stands at present, those people are the ones who would pay the most. But--those are the people who are contributing the content that SlashDot is selling to the other 97%.
Some CompuServe forums had trolls (RELIGION was notorious, and POLITICS wasn't far behind). But vendor forums (I was a VENTURA, COREL, and MSBASIC sysop) were generally very professional, and subject forums (DTPFORUM, CONSULT) had an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio as well. Two reasons why were a) we were paying money (who'd pay money to be a troll?); and b) there was no anonymity--you posted under your real name, not using a handle. (Any experienced CompuServe user could even tell what local POP you used to connect to the network.)
There's another dimension to this:
It is relatively easy to explain a flat rate pricing scheme to a bank. We're charging $N per month, or $(10 * N) per year. It is substantially more difficult to explain a pricing scheme of $P per thousand page hits. It will a customer service nightmare to bill people per thousand page hits. If you use a positive option system (where you send the subscriber an email or redirect to a web page saying, "sorry! you must re-up for another five clams to see this page") you're going to get into protracted fights with a bunch of subscribers who do read their machine logs. And sure as shootin' somebody is going to start yelling that you're hitting him for another five bucks when he's only had 950 page hits, and he's going to repudiate the charge, and he's going to do this and that and you're ugly and a censor and probably a registered Democrat to boot. It's a customer service fight you don't want to pick.
On the other hand, if you use a negative option subscription system (we keep charging your credit card five bucks until you tell us to stop) you are going to face real problems getting a bank to take you on. Visa and MasterCard both are telling merchants with a repudiation rate higher than 2% that they have a short time to clean up their acts or they lose merchant privileges. They do not like negative option subscriptions. Customers do not like them either. Especially when the customer has no way to predict when he will be charged.
Occam's Razor, right?
The simplest solution is most likely the best one: Charge a flat monthly fee. Say $4.95. Charge 10 times that for an annual subscription: $49.50.
Given the stats of Salon, the Motley Fool, and others, roughly 20% of your members will sign up--at best. With 300,000 members, that means 60,000 will sign up. 3% of those post comments--that's 1800 users. You'll find that 30% of those (or about 1% of your total subscriber base) post 80%-90% of your comments. Every quarter, produce a list of the roughly 500 people who fit that profile. Look at their comments, look at their moderation points, and make some choices. Flamers and trolls automatically don't make the list. People who write (and spell) like adults do. Bonus points for insight--negative points for me-too karma whores. You'll end up with 200 or 300 names of people who consistently generate a lot of the signal strength on SlashDot. They're your contributors--they're the people who provide the product that you're selling to everybody else.
Don't just "free flag" them.
When I was a sysop on the VENTURA forum on CompuServe, disaster struck. Xerox sold Ventura Publisher--and our forum contract--to Corel. And Corel made it plain that they intended to fold the VENTURA forum into COREL, and they had no place for the (all-volunteer) VENTURA forum sysop staff on COREL. Some wise (and wizened) people managed to persuade Corel that the VENTURA forum staff was a serious asset--perhaps the best asset that the software package had. Corel did something funny: they not only kept the forum alive (although we had an alias of CORELB, which we hated)--they also decided to pay attention to us in a way that Xerox never had. I have Corel Draw! rugby shirts and Corel Draw! backpacks and Corel Draw! clip art CDs and all sorts of Corel doodads and knicknacks--six years later my kids still haven't destroyed them all. When other vendors approached Corel to test for inoperability with their products, they automatically signed us up as beta testers--so I was on the Adobe Acrobat beta, the Exchange beta, and the Distiller beta. I made a lot of contacts with potential clients for imagesetter control software through Corel. They worked hard to keep the volunteers happy, and feel a part of the team, because they viewed our contribution as being particularly significant.
And our contribution was significant. The Ventura Publisher code base had all kinds of trouble, and the customer base was disintegrating as we watched. But we helped maintain the user base for several years as Corel tried desperately to salvage the product--and several members of that forum staff are still active on Corel's newsgroup site. We had a reputation for being excrutiatingly correct in our spelling, and ruthless in our punctuation (hey--we were a bunch of typesetters) but we were the place to come for help.
You should do the same thing. Identify your core contributors, and woo them. Free flag them on the site. Send 'em "I Got Root at SlashDot" t-shirts each quarter--and change the colors each quarter to develop a little bit of incentive to keep contributing. Invite them to a "Free as in Beer" private party at Linux World. Send 'em an email once a month with heads-up information on what's happening inside the ivy-covered walls of the OSDN campus. Make 'em feel like part of the team. (Roblimo's been around--he knows how this works.)
Can you do this? Yup. Can you afford it? Sure--you can pay for the entire program with the money you save from canning Jon Katz. 8-)
The rates are currently set at $5 per 1000 pages. To put this into perspective, $20 (typical magazine subscription) will be enough pages for 82% of our readers to view Slashdot without ads for a year. Another 15% will need to spend $5 a month to accomplish the same thing. 3% of our readers would need to spend more than $5 a month- but they could choose to see ads on comments and in almost every case, still pay around $5 a month. (As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than half of all comment posters fall into this 3%) {Emphasis mine]
Other people have faced this problem
Before the advent of the World Wide Web, everybody who was anybody in the computer world was on CompuServe. And each CompuServe forum competed for members (and the connection time revenue that the member paid) based on the help, support, community, files, or messaging that it provided. It was--explicitly--pay-for-content. It was precisely the business model that you guys want to adopt.
Savvy forum operators knew the statistics: only 5% of forum members ever posted a comment. And roughly 1% of forum members posted 90% of the comments. The more commments (particularly the more substantive comments), the more forum members there were--95% of whom were "read-only" lurkers. Thus, it paid to encourage people to post comments.
This policy discourages people from posting comments
Think of what you have to do to post a comment:
Link to the "Post Comment" page (1 hit)
Click on the Preview button to check formatting (1 hit)
Submit the page (1 hit)
Are you done? Nope. You'd better hope your comment doesn't get mod'd up--because you'll get "messages" telling you that. Link to that page? (1 hit). You'd better hope you haven't contributed something provocative that produces replies--because you'll have to read each reply (1 hit apiece), and possibly post a response (3 hits per response, see above).
In short, contributing to SlashDot, writing interesting comments, getting mod'd up, and responding to replies now will cost you money. That is, all the things that you (SlashDot) want people to do (desperately need people to do) you are going to charge money for. You're creating disincentives to provide you with content--and that content is what you're trying to sell to subscribers.
What smart forum operators did was to issue "free flags". Each forum contractor got a certain amount of free forum time to award to forum users who helped out in one way or another. There were sysop accounts for people who did administrative things--but there were a lot more free flags for regular forum members who just participated in a lot of conversations. It would make a *lot* of sense for you to do the same thing.
In the ultimate geek world you'd be able to automate a process to identify people making significant contributions. That's what moderation is, after all. But automated processes can be manipulated (i.e. karma whoring)--this probably requires some individual discretion. Identify significant contributors (you can start with high-karma users, but I'm sure you can identify other factors to consider) and grant them free access. You want them posting comments all the time--those are the people whose peers have voted to indicate that their voices should be heard. The very last thing you want to do is get those people contributing less, because each contribution now costs them at least 3 page hits.
Oh, yeah--Paypal?
Be serious. If OSDN and VA Software is on such shaky ground that you can't get a merchant account through CyberCash or someone else, you have serious problems.
Re:Optionally publish valid mail servers for domai
on
Spam Slows AT&T Email
·
· Score: 2
Hi!
When an email comes in, you check if there's a verification server for the source domain of the email, and if so try connect to it, and then submit the email address for verification. Depending on whether it says yay or nay, you accept or reject the mail. If they're not running a verification service, you just failsafe. I know SMTP vrfy exists, but sites often turn it off, or it doesn't do anything useful as the external server is just forwarding mail, etc etc.
This would be a problem for notebook users. If you're running a POP3 server in a corporate environment, one of the problems you have to contend with is traveling users (sales people, etc.) who want access to mail, and want to be able to send mail at the same time. One solution (for Windows NT users) is to implement the SMTP server that's built into NT. Have the road warrior send from his local SMTP server, but retrieve his mail from the corporate POP3 server.
One could, I suppose, simply add all those road-warrior notebooks to the list of authorized MTAs. But in a large-ish corporation it might be a record-keeping nightmare.
The AP wire article that Excite quotes was written by a reporter in Philadelphia, presumably after reading this story which ran in the Allentown Morning Call five days earlier. The AP writer makes a couple of mistakes, and misses a significant point--a point that is made well in the Morning Call piece.
Proetto (the perp) is not in danger of going to prison over this. He has already been convicted, and is nearing the end of a six-months probation sentence.
Proetto is bringing this action to avoid getting labeled as a "sex offender"--because sex-offender rules in most states have all kinds of onerous restrictions.
Proetto lives in Whitehall Township, which is in Lehigh County, but works (or worked--whether he's still employed as a policeman appears to be in question) for the Colonial Regional police force in Nazareth--which is in Northampton County.
Note, I don't have access to the article at the moment, so am not sure of the case specifics. If there was something more sinister in the defendents actions (i.e. stalking, attempted abductions, etc) then that's something different. But I have seen nothing in the comments posted thus far that indicate that way.
Excite must have picked up the story off the news wire--this story in the Allentown Morning Call ran on Feb. 15. The plaintiff, Proetto, wasn't just a creep making lewd suggestions. He was a police officer. The Morning Call article also notes that Proetto didn't go to any prison--he got six months of probation, and will "probably" ("probably"????) lose his job. He is bringing this lawsuit to avoid getting labelled as a "sex offender", and thus subject to all kinds of reporting requirements and harassment. (In most states sex offenders are required to register with the local police when they move into an area, and the police are required to notify neighbors, schools, and local associations. Who--as you might expect--sometimes have been known to take matters into their own hands.)
Okay--we need to hear from/. readers who actually ARE lawyers. In particular, we need to hear from geek lawyers who are familiar with federal regulations, how they are formulated, and what is the precise legal meaning of "ruling."
This letter from Nintendo is a threat. Find a small business, threaten them with the wrath of God, watch them roll over. But--the threat has to be credible. The premise of the threat from Nintendo is contained in the second paragraph of the letter:
Nintendo of America Inc. (NOA) is providing this letter of notification pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, USC 17 1201(b) (DMCA)
and the US Customs ruling dated December 20, 2001, regarding the import, distribution and sale of the Flash Advance Linker. US Customs confirmed the Flash Advance Linker violates the DMCA and is subject to confiscation. (Emphasis mine)
The key question here is, what ruling was made by the U.S. Customs Service on December 20, 2001? Was this a ruling in a judicial proceeding? If so, does the U.S. Customs Service have the ability to conduct judicial proceedings that are binding on other jurisdictions? (I seem to recall that Admiralty courts in the U.S. are conducted by the U.S. Customs Service. But the DMCA and its application to a game cartridge emulator would seem to be outside the purview of an Admiralty court.)
Or was the "ruling" akin to the "private letter rulings" issued by the Internal Revenue Service, which are used to advise tax professionals of the IRS's view of the legality of a given strategy or vehicle. In other words, did Nintendo of America go to a U.S. Customs Service office, present some documentation asserting that the Flash Advance Linker could be used to illegally copy Gameboy cartridges, and thus (they argued) it violates the DMCA. If it is the latter, I would think the threat from Nintendo carries a lot less force--they got somebody to agree with their view of the situation. That's not the same thing as having as precendent a settled issue of law. (For contrast: if you get a letter from the local Temperance Union insisting that you cease and desist from the manufacture, transportation, distribution, and/or sale of beer--because you're in a "dry" county--you're in a different fight. Temperance rules may seem silly, but they're a settled legal issue.)
If the DMCA is to be challenged, these guys need help
A common legal tactic is to establish a court precendent someplace, and then extend that precendent across the country. I learned this the hard way, early in my career, when the Internal Revenue Service decided to make an example of my employer at the time (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 743 F.2d 148 (3rd Cir. 1984).). We won--but only because of substantial financial and legal support from other (larger) publishing houses that stood to be hurt down the road. Almost twenty years ago I was hustling contributions to a legal defense fund of more than $50K--today it would require much, much more than that.
There is an alternative...
You generally cannot intervene in a private lawsuit. And Nintendo is almost certainly assuming that this store isn't going to go all the way to court over this. But you can ask your Congressman to "look into this" and report back to you on the merit of foreign software corporations using the DMCA to prevent U.S. software developers from writing software for a popular computing platform. With enough publicity, and enough questions from Congress, Nintendo might be persuaded to back off.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi!
Thanks for your comment--and the joke. You have an excellent point: this isn't just an issue for Oracle, but an issue for the state of California as well.
The part of the story that just screams at me is the number of licenses involved: 277,000. Numbers that big have to elicit the question, "how many employees do we have?" And the follow-up: "how many of the employees we do have are going to use Oracle?" Inevitably that question was going to come up--somebody, somewhere, was going to question the numbers. Inevitably somebody at the state of California would ask that question. It makes zero sense--for the state of California. But it may well make sense for Oracle--in a bind to "make the numbers."
It would be very interesting to know what kind of projections Oracle made to securities analysts, and whether they projected the number of seat licenses as a key performance indicator. (In the same way that telecom companies project lines "in service" and "on switch." There's no correlation between a line in service and a given amount of revenue, but it is a metric of market growth and market penetration.) If Oracle had to sell seat licenses--and needed the number of seats more than they needed the revenue--they might have made the state a deal You Cannot Refuse [tm]: "you need 27,000 licenses--and we'll sell them to you for X; but we need to sell 250,000 licenses--we'll sell you the 27,000 you want, plus another 250,000 "virtual licenses" for X, but structure the deal as though you're buying all the licenses. In effect you get seat licenses to Oracle products in perpetuity--which is a good deal--and we get the number of seats we need to make the quarter."
That's conjecture on my part: it seems like a reasonable explanation to me. The problem with end-of-quarter gimmicks like this is that you can make your numbers this quarter--but you're emptying the pipeline of your sales at the start of next quarter. Each quarter you have to do more, and more, and more--and you end up doing stuff like this. Eventually you just can't find another rabbit in the hat--and you don't make your numbers.
Bonus question:
Who else might be frantically doing deals to make the quarter's numbers?
More details on the emerging Oracle scandal, including a chronology of events for those just hearing about the story, can be found in George Skelton's Capitol Journal column, which ran in today's LA Times under the title "No Defense Tactic Can Hide This Ugly Scandal."
Skelton's column is definitely worth the read--this is more than just a colossal sales job, and more than just a $25,000 campaign contribution to the governor oh-so-coincidentally two weeks after the deal. There are state legislators with family ties to this, and a startling lack of California employees (or departments) with any interest in using it.
Given the jitters many people have about the securities business today, the most ominous comment might well be a brief mention at the bottom of Skelton's column:
CA was famous for years for doing all sorts of stuff to "make the numbers" at the end of each quarter. You can only do it for so long--once everybody figures out that Sears is always running sales, nobody is willing to buy at anything other than the sale price. Writ large, the same thing happens to companies that are motivated by this quarter's presentation to the securities analysts: eventually customers learn to wait for the last week of the quarter, when you can name your price.
Oracle, in the go-go 90s, made money by the barrel--at one point a colleague observed that their margins were probably higher than the Medellin Cartel. If they have to resort to this kind of shenanigans to make the quarter's numbers, Oracle has bigger problems than a $25,000 payoff to the governor of California.
Hi Rob!
Your post mentions your concern about keyboard feel and sensitivity. I have exactly the same concern, and I've been looking at Sager. (A longtime friend, recently assimilated into the MS Borg, is a big Sager fan.)
How's the keyboard? I like a clicky-tactile keyboard--I hate the light mushy ones.
Thanks!
Rant on, man. I'm typing slowly because I'm wiping the tears from my eyes from laughing so hard.
Thanks for making my afternoon....
That's rather my point: if anybody had set out in 1880 to build millions of wells to retrieve a subterranean liquid, and ship it halfway around the world, he would have been locked up in an asylum. What did happen was that in 1859 a guy named Edwin Drake figured out that the oil sheen on a local stream named Oil Creek must be coming from underground. If he could extract large quantities of it, he could sell it as a substitute for whale oil (which was becoming scarce). Oil City, Pennsylvania (see an unofficial local web site here) boomed.
"We" didn't drill for oil. "Society" didn't expend "it's" resources. Nobody got a government grant, or funding from a government laboratory.
And while petroleum boomed, it was a long time before demand for petroleum led to exploration happening around the world. It was more than a hundred years after Drake drilled for oil that we got to supertankers and deep-water drilling. "We" didn't create the infrastructure at all; and the infrastructure was not created overnight. And during that time a whole market full of consumers demonstrated the financial viability of the scheme. Which is a lot different that saying, "hey--let's build this gargantuan project at Lord knows what kind of bucks, and we'll scrub the atmosphere clean."
[Mounting soapbox...]
General principle:
Massive, and expensive, schemes funded by people who are investing their own money may be good, may be bad--but are probably a lot of fun to watch being built. Massive and expensive schemes funded by people voting to spend your money should be viewed with deep suspicion. Some turn out to be worthwhile (the Interstate Highway System, for instance), others (insert name of local taxpayer-financed football stadium here) are not.
[Climbing down from soapbox....]
Hi!
Okay--one square yard equals 9 square feet. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1 acre worth of quicklime would recapture CO2 for 4,840 people. There are, as of April 1, 2000, 281,421,906 people in the United States. So we'd need 58,145 acres of quicklime to process CO2 for just the United States.
Quiz: How big is Rhode Island?
Let's just skip the obligatory comparison to the size of the state of Rhode Island--and concede that we're talking about a lot of land. And, oh yeah--we're also talking about a huge amount of quicklime. Which will, of course, need to be replenished all over those tens of thousands of acres. And building a collection system to capture the calcium carbonate from all those tens of thousands of acres wouldn't be child's play, either. And then it has to be processed, and so forth.
This is the kind of government proposal that used to give the Keynesian macro-economics professors a head rush. Just think of the economic multipliers--think of all the jobs created finding and surveying and buying some 60,000 acres of land. Think of all the money spent on massive construction equipment necessary to find, dig, and move 60,000 acres worth of quicklime. Think of all the steel involved in building the equipment necessary to collect all that calcium carbonate. Think of all the steel, electricity, and machinery that will be required to do all this processing. Think of the tens of thousands of jobs we're talking about. Whoopie!
And, oh yeah! Think about the amount of CO2 generated by the electricity used to produce all that steel; and all the CO2 generated by all those cars driven by all those employees, and all those earth-movers scraping depleted quicklime out, and pushing new quicklime back in.
Still with me? Now consider this: there aren't a lot of vacant 60,000 acre tracts of land available in the Washington, D.C. metro area. So a project of this magnitude would require moving all those tens of thousands of people to wherever this (by definition) arid wasteland would be.
This isn't simple, and almost certainly not feasible
Okay, I'm just a simple programmer and part-time college professor. What could I possibly know? It seems pretty clear to me that this announcement wasn't peer-reviewed, or if it was, the peer-review processing happened at a really good office party. The chemistry might be "simple," but the project would not be.
That statement makes sense. Which proves something:
Sales people are full of, well, effluvium. And there is always a point at which your sales guys rise to the level in the organization where they need to make deals with other sales guys at that level in another organization. Both sets of uber-sales guys know that they're all sales guys--and thus full of effluvium. In consequence, the other guys recognize that your sales guys' presentation on your hot new technology is, well, effluvium.
No effluvium, really...
Faced with a customer who knows you are full of effluvium, what can you do? You bring the tech folks along. You don't sponsor a meeting where our techs meet with your techs (or even better, a Quake death match LAN party where our clan cruelly destroys your avatars and every morsel of self-respect you may have fooled yourself into...well, maybe that's not such a great idea). The idea is that your techs impress the daylights out of their uber-sales guys--who, being full of effluvium, are easily impressed.
That's how I ended up playing golf, once...
Being a 4-H leader, I view the game of golf as a waste of good pasture land. I was at a client's, installing a new application on their servers, when the company president dragged me into his office, picked out a golf shirt, and told me we were going to Pensacola, Florida to "do a little bidness." Right then.
I ended up doing an off-the-cuff presentation on the new product, with commentary on some of the features of the database schema and our techniques for automatically updating pricing. Based on the blank stares from the audience I doubt they understood one word in twenty. "But thass all raht," said the client, "in fact, that was kinda the point." To thank me for this, he subjected me to 18 holes of golf at some allegedly-exclusive golf course with all the sales types I'd been lecturing. Who, of course, knew how to play golf. The fact that I clearly did not seemed to further establish my technical credentials.
Learn from this, young Jedi...
Don't try to understand sales people. They are clannish, socially disfunctional, and have a tribal suspicion of outsiders.
Hi!
You mentioned in your reply to me that you'd like to have GPS/cellular tracking in your car. As it happens, there's a company that does precisely this (they're a client of mine):
The vehicle position is tracked anywhere in the U.S., giving you vehicle location (including reverse-geocoding, so you get the street, town, and state) at stated intervals. You can also "pulse" the vehicle (akin to sending a page) to ask it to report at other times. Most users use the "bread crumbs" feature to see where a vehicle has been over a given period of time. We've used the system to retrieve a couple of stolen cars so far, and it's also being used to track tractor-trailers, garbage trucks, and (in Sarasota, FL) school buses. It's a very cool project.
And--knowing as much about the technology as I do, its all the more frustrating that I can't hang a unit on Annie. I have--literally--the entire MapQuest database and mapping engine sitting here in my office, and I can't use it.
Okay--let's get all the usual comments out of the way. This is a bad idea, it is the embodiment of Big Brother, it shows how silly and paranoid parents are, it is a crutch to let bad parents ignore their children, yadda yadda yadda....
I've been waiting for something like this for years.
Daughter #3 is 10 years old--and she has Down syndrome. There are a lot of features about Down syndrome--two of them are stubbornness and a complete absence of fear. Which frequently means that Downs kids will wander off. Or, if they're stopped, they'll very carefully sneak off. And we live adjacent to an 1100-acre state park.
Yup--I should keep an eye on Daughter #3. And yes, technology is no substitute for an alert parent. Yes--we have a fence, and yes--we work hard to make sure she stays in the yard. And she does stay in the yard. Most of the time.
Except the time last year when she turned up in a neighbor's swimming pool. And the time the summer before when she turned up in a different neighbor's bathtub. If she's good and faithful and safe 99.3% of the time, that still means she wanders off 1 day per year. And if she wanders into the park, we'll have to call out the National Guard.
Literally
In fact, Annie is featured prominently in the park's emergency plan. There's a search-and-rescue group that trains in the park, and they routinely exercise their plans for finding a mentally-retarded child in dense woods. A GPS tracking device could (and let me emphasize could) be enormously helpful.
BUT...
There are a few problems. First, and probably hardest, you have to have the device on the child when he or she decides to wander off. "Locking" it on a wrist strikes me as a surefire way to pick a fight--or make a fortune selling replacements. All Annie has to do is wear that GPS unit into the bathtub--or her wading pool outside. Or she can find out if it works better with peanut butter (which she's stuffed into 2 CD-ROM drives) or popcorn. Then there is the problem of location: GPS is meant for open air use. Any GPS chipset includes logic to store the last "locked" position (when the unit had 4 or more satellites in view)--so finding her inside a house won't be an issue. But how to report it?
There are two competing telemetry providers using the cellular telephone spectrum, Aeris and Cellemetry. Both depend upon radio units having enough signal strength to set up a call (Cellemetry doesn't actually set up the call--it just validates a ficticious phone number). Despite all the cell tower construction, there are still lots of places in the U.S., to say nothing of elsewhere, that do not have coverage. If you're looking for a truck (which is what Aeris and Cellemetry are used for) you can wait for the unit to report in a few minutes when it finds coverage. But a system to track a child has to have a substantially higher level of reliability.
A doctor in South Carolina (can't find the link anymore--the company may have gone bust) tried to market this kind of concept before. He hid the GPS unit and the radio in a pair of sneakers--and he had a remarkable success with a buy with autism who was rescued while walking on railroad tracks in Chicago. Hiding a unit like this in sneakers is brilliant--but getting and keeping GPS lock was an issue, as was connecting to the back end over the cell system.
I wish this would work
But this is probably yet another almost, sorta, kinda, almost....
I'd love to write more--but Daughter #3 has appeared in her coat, with six cents in her hand and a page of coupons from Domino's Pizza. I think she wants supper....
I teach in the MBA program at DeSales University in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I teach the introductory concentration course for E-Commerce majors in the program--I'm a software developer by trade, and I'm an adjunct lecturer.
"Adjunct" is an adjective derived from the Latin word for "doesn't rate a faculty parking sticker"--and in a lot of institutions the adjuncts are regarded as lower than dirt. Our program is a bit different: practically all of the MBA faculty are adjuncts--we're (mostly) teaching at night what we do during the day. The balding guy teaching FN503--Financial Accounting for Decision Makers? He's the Director of Corporate Financial Services for the largest corporation in the area. The guy teaching the E-Business Models class? He's the CEO of a venture capital group in suburban Philadelphia. The nut job standing on the chair shouting at his EC506 class about the importance of XML and distributed processing as a means to eliminate friction in business? (Uh...that would be me.)
We're not here for the money
The money is essentially a joke. I get a few bucks each month--most of my check I simply have withheld to pay my quarterly estimated tax payments (I'm self-employed). Sure--there are a couple of benefits: the biggest being faculty discounts on everything from software to my subscription to the Wall St. Journal. But the reason I teach for 3-1/2 hours every Wednesday night is because it is a lot of fun to preach technology to a group of business managers over the course of a term. There is a kind of jazz that comes when a sales manager takes ownership of a particular area: for example, a young woman who is just starting graduate school with a background in Finance. She works for a consumer products company, she's advancing rapidly in the corporation, and she fits much of the "tall, good looking, with really good hair" stereotype of the MBA. (Well--she's short. But she's pretty, and she has terrific hair.)
She had to write a paper on DNS that was due three weeks ago, and defend her paper in online discussion with the rest of the class. She's just turned in a paper on VOIP--how it works, who the players are, and the prospects for the technology--night before last. She nailed both subjects--drilled them. Zippo tech background when she walked into my classroom, and now she's scaring the daylights out of her employer's IT staff because she understands how DNS works. Sure--I'll take the bucks, I'll appreciate the U. paying most of my taxes, and I'll cheerfully come to the faculty dinners. But seeing the lightbulb come on over Barb's head is why I teach.
What makes our program work
In two words, "Mohamed Latib." He's the dean of the program, and all of the faculty regard him as a personal friend. We're all deeply enthusiastic about the guy--and we have all bought his vision of what an MBA program ought to be. He's fully aware that the stipend is chump change to each of us--and he constantly demonstrates his appreciation for what we bring to the program. He works, hard, for our personal loyalty. That's a lot different from the typical teacher's situation. (Quick quiz: does your community college president know any professor's preference in beer? Has he ever called a new faculty member to ask if he or she has a preference for a particular brand of Scotch, in order to be sure its on the bar at the cocktail reception?) He describes the MBA faculty as a family, and he means it. He works at cultivating personal and business relationships among us.
The key to Mohamed's success is that he's interested in finding people who have something to say--experts in their fields who want to talk about what they do. Yup--there's a textbook. But for each of us, there is a wealth of practical experience that we bring to the class.
Find the enthusiasts, and hire 'em
Imitate Mohamed's success: don't look for academics who understand technology. They're all trying to get jobs at better-paying (or more prestigious) schools. Look for geeks who can teach. Find the consultant, find the reseller, find the IT guy at a local corporation. Find somebody who can express enthusiasm about the subject--find somebody who does programming for a living, who understands why source code control matters, who understands why documentation is important. Offer the guy an adjunct role, pay him a couple of bucks, and show him that he's appreciated. Give him a soapbox to stand on, and let him rant away--he may well be the best teacher your students ever have.
You're correct--perhaps a bit too precisely correct--when you write that you're not insured by the FDIC. That's because credit unions are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--credit union deposits are insured by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA). I don't know which three "seperate" [sic] insurance companies you're referring to, but deposits in any federally-insured CU in the U.S. are insured to $100,000. That insurance is backed by the NCUA Insurance Fund, which in turn is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.
There are some CUs that are not federally-insured. States vary on how they regulate financial institutions--there are very sophisticated, completely sound institutions that only have state charters. There are also "institutions" that are little more than investors clubs with extra paperwork to file at the end of the year. There isn't any annual cost of federal deposit insurance--the deposit insurance funds are based on "lifetime" deposits (as opposed to premium-paid insurance). Yes--there are costs associated with banking regulation: regulations that ensure, among other things, that the bank actually has cash necessary to fund its continuing obligations.
Since you mention that your deposits are insured by three different international investors, it might well be that you are not a depositor in a federally-insured CU. In that case, you're wasting money. Federally-insured CUs do not pay deposit insurance: CUs deposited 1% of their assets in 1970 to form the NCUA Insurance Fund, and with one exception there has never been a need to assess member institutions any fees for insurance since. If your deposits are privately insured, your institution is paying deposit insurance--which costs you money.
Should the U.S. government be building water projects in districts of politically influential congressmen? Nope. Should the government promote commerce by ensuring a sound currency? Absolutely. Deposit insurance is a big part of that--and unquestionably a very good thing.
(Disclosure: I'm the president of a small software company. We have developed software for credit unions, both federally-insured and state-chartered. If you have a car loan from your CU there's a good chance it was processed with our software. We like the CU movement a bunch.)Hi!
Thanks for your response. I think perhaps I may have confused you with my comments about working while I'm at a horse show.
The T1 circuit: there isn't a plan B. I'm pretty plugged-in to the local technology scene (I've been active in economic development organizations, etc.) and I'm certain that there isn't a public Internet presence (cafe, etc.) for at least 40 miles. We don't have any risk of a direct hit by lightning--we're adjacent to a high-tension line, so any lightning is going to hit the tower in the park, not us. I see your point: we could smoke a Smart Card, replace it, and see the new one smoked a few minutes later. We don't see a one-to-one correlation between electrical storms and smoking Smart Cards--we usually don't see a problem. So I view the possibility of smoking two cards within a few hours as a relatively low risk.
Horse shows: I'd never even think about trying to VPN into a client from a horse show. If I'm working that remotely, I'm doing development work. If I need to talk to a client, I'll call to ask a question. And if there's an opportunity, I'll mention that I'm at a horse show--in effect, saying "don't you wish you had my job?" What I'm doing is marketing the "Murdoch from the woods" image--it works with the clientele.
Your idea of having pre-identified fallback points is a good one. I'm not the only geek out here in the woods--a pal a few miles away develops imaging software (http://www.badertech.com). We've talked off and on about doing different stuff to make ourselves more secure--swapping tapes (which we do now and again), emergency recovery, etc. But all we've really done is talk--I'm seeing him later today for coffee, and it might be a good idea to bring it up. Thanks!
Suggestion for you? Look into your ILEC's tariff structure. You may find the same kind of thing that my ISP discovered--that pricing may be available with a "local loop charge" that doesn't limit how big that local loop can be. Or you may discover that there's some other way to colo your CPE in the local CO and share bandwidth with the ILEC back to the larger community.
This is rural Pennsylvania. There are parts that do not have local telephone service (and a guy who used to work for me got his phone bill written by hand). But we're not nearly as rural as you are.
Permit me to elaborate: T1 circuits are sensitive to electrical storms. A T1 circuit terminates at a "Smart Card" in a box at the demarc point in your building. If your circuit goes down because of a power surge in the phone line, its the Smart Card that gets clobbered.
One night the Smart Card got clobbered. The alarms went off (we have a testing program that keeps track of our Internet connection) and I called for help. The data circuit techs are in Bethlehem--about 25 miles away--and they couldn't get to me till early the next morning. It was a problem. The best solution to the problem was for the techs to walk me through a little bit of debugging and leave me with a Smart Card. If that circuit goes down now, I'm back up within a minute or two. The techs still have to come from Bethlehem--but they now know that it is not a rush, and they can expect coffee and doughnuts when they arrive.
Am I getting the service I'm paying for? I think I am. As I wrote in my earlier reply, there are different aspects to life in rural America. Bitching at the techs when they appear just isn't done--they've come a long way, they have a lot of people to look after, and they have implemented a solution with me that guarantees less than 4 minutes of downtime per year. (We've been up continuously since August 8, BTW.) I'm paying for five 9s of reliability, and I'm getting it--I'm just getting it in a slightly different way than I would if I lived on Long Island. It's not polite to demand "what I paid for"--it's a lot smarter, and a lot more effective, to remember that the one tech that usually comes likes his coffee black, and his brother has Quarter Horses. And to repeat my offer that if his brother ever wants to ride the trails in the state park he can park his rig here and hack down the road.
Seem crazy? There's method to this madness...
A long time ago a friend and sometime colleague hired me as a consultant for a project at a big insurance company on Wall Street. Charlie (who is active on SlashDot) made sure that everybody knew that I lived near the Appalachian Trail--to hear Charlie tell it, we only wore clothes when we dressed up to go to town. Charlie and his co-workers lived their days amidst an endless sea of pea green 8' by 8' cubicles--hoping for the day when they'd get promoted one grade and move to a pea green 8' by 10' cubicle with arms on the chairs. The image of the wild man consultant living in the woods--chop a little wood, write a little code--really resonated with those people. It is an image that I have learned to cultivate--new clients learn early on that I'm a 4-H leader, and I'm not the slightest bit shy about blocking off days in the summer to take a trailer load of kids to a horse show. And if I do work there (I put up a canopy and work on my notebook, plugged into the AC adapter in the truck) I often as not will call the client on the cell phone. It makes a statement to the client that absolutely guarantees that I stand out in their minds.
With respect, I disagree. I am spending that kind of money, for that kind of bandwidth. For a couple of reasons:
I'm an independent consultant. I use VPN to connect to clients, and I use VPN to let associates connect to me. I choose to live in a rural area along the Appalachian Trail--but I work for clients in urban areas like New York, Philadelphia, and Allentown. I'm not a telecommuter per se--but I face the same challenge: being taken seriously.
If they don't take you seriously, you're toast:
The original poster has decided to leave the big city and move to the Midwest. But he's still working for the company office in Manhattan. He has just been through the telecommuter's worst nightmare: he couldn't get stuff done because he couldn't connect. He fulfilled the predictions of the nay-sayers at work: he wasn't able to get something done. That has hurt his standing with his peers and with his management--it has hurt his credibility.
Going after the local phone company for compensation is a waste of time. What he has to do is ensure it never happens again--which means that he has to identify a super-reliable technology, and assume personal responsibility for the problem. In management buzz-speak, he has to own the problem. Bitching about the lousy phone company is not "owning the problem"--doing something about it is. Spending $250 per month for a 256k circuit means taking ownership of the problem--if he has five 9s of reliability (which equates to 4 minutes of downtime per year) there's a pretty good likelihood that he's going to have better reliability than the office in Manhattan. When he has better uptime than they do, he looks a lot more serious, a lot more credible, than somebody frantically driving halfway to Chicago to find a Kinko's where he can use a web browser. (Tip from us hicks: Kinko's are not everywhere. And if you need a web browser, its a lot easier to go to a public library. They're all wired.)
There is another dimension to this:
He's telecommuting to an office in New York. Office workers in New York look down their noses at anybody else--somebody who announces that he's leaving the NY Metro area for Indiana is beneath contempt. He is not to be taken seriously. But--he definitely moves to the "did you hear about Bob?" list when he announces that he has a T1 circuit. (That's its only fractional is immaterial: in fact, he's got a full-bore T1 to the CO. But Bob doesn't need to share all the details.) And when Bob demonstrates better uptime than the office LAN, and hosts a presentation on his own web server, and then mentions that he's paying $400 per month for his mortgage payment...a lot of people might just wish that they were Bob.
You can live and work in rural America. There are savings (my house costs less, my insurance costs less), there are lifestyle benefits (I'm a 4-H leader, and we have 4 horses), but there are costs too (the T1 circuit, the money we spend on gas to go anyplace). There are downsides to the lifestyle (it's a long way to a restaurant that doesn't have laminated menus or a drive-thru). But to be successful out here, over the long term, you absolutely must demonstrate consistency and reliability.
A friend of mine, a long time ago, said that "you're only as good as your tools." He was talking about electrical equipment--but its just as true with computer equipment. If you're doing email from home at night and you live in a commuter suburb--hey, get a DSL line. If you're connecting to the corporate network full-time from an office in your home, don't bet your career on that DSL circuit. And if you're going completely remote--moving 800 miles away from the office like the original poster has done--you have to provide absolute reliability. You need every single one of those five 9s.
And don't forget...
If you have rock-solid bandwidth, you can easily implement VOIP. Which, for our friend from Indiana, makes him a technology leader....
How about 4 miles outside of Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, adjacent to a state park? We don't live in a city--we're in a Class III township in eastern Pennsylvania. The northern boundary of the township is the Appalachian Trail.
The explosive growth of DSL has created an interesting regulatory loophole that you might be able to take advantage of. In order to provide xDSL service, providers have to co-locate equipment in your local CO. Which is to say, they have to establish a point of presence (POP) there.
T1 circuits can be expensive--but check into how the circuits are priced. Verizon, for instance, prices the "local loop" (from you to the CO) at a flat $120 per month. If your ISP already has a POP in the local CO, you can actually get a T1 circuit to that POP for $120 per month, plus the ISP's markup. (In my case, using ChoiceOne Communications I pay $180/month.) You then pay the ISP's fee for bandwidth and Internet connection.
Doing it this way costs a bit more than a DSL connection. (Okay--quite a bit more: roughly $275/month for a 256k connection, slightly less than $400/month for a 512k connection.) But there are several substantial advantages:
Life is not perfect: T1 circuits are sensitive to electrical storms, and we do see circuit problems when there is heavy lightning. But we've made sure that there is a fresh pot of coffee when the Verizon techs come, and that sort of thing, so they've left a spare Smart Card (the client-side device for the T1 circuit) here--when the electrical storm fries the Smart Card I just swap in a new one, place a service call, and send somebody into town to buy doughnuts. The techs will be by presently.
There are a lot of benefits to living in rural America--but there are tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is that you will probably have to pay a bit more to connect, and you'll have to assume more responsibility for connecting. When that frustrates you, remember: you're no longer in New Jersey.
John Murdoch
Hi Jamie!
With respect--perhaps you haven't thought quite hard enough. You have clearly done enough evaluation of who your "subscribers" are to know that less than 3% of your members post comments. And, as the system stands at present, those people are the ones who would pay the most. But--those are the people who are contributing the content that SlashDot is selling to the other 97%.
Some CompuServe forums had trolls (RELIGION was notorious, and POLITICS wasn't far behind). But vendor forums (I was a VENTURA, COREL, and MSBASIC sysop) were generally very professional, and subject forums (DTPFORUM, CONSULT) had an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio as well. Two reasons why were a) we were paying money (who'd pay money to be a troll?); and b) there was no anonymity--you posted under your real name, not using a handle. (Any experienced CompuServe user could even tell what local POP you used to connect to the network.)
There's another dimension to this:
It is relatively easy to explain a flat rate pricing scheme to a bank. We're charging $N per month, or $(10 * N) per year. It is substantially more difficult to explain a pricing scheme of $P per thousand page hits. It will a customer service nightmare to bill people per thousand page hits. If you use a positive option system (where you send the subscriber an email or redirect to a web page saying, "sorry! you must re-up for another five clams to see this page") you're going to get into protracted fights with a bunch of subscribers who do read their machine logs. And sure as shootin' somebody is going to start yelling that you're hitting him for another five bucks when he's only had 950 page hits, and he's going to repudiate the charge, and he's going to do this and that and you're ugly and a censor and probably a registered Democrat to boot. It's a customer service fight you don't want to pick.
On the other hand, if you use a negative option subscription system (we keep charging your credit card five bucks until you tell us to stop) you are going to face real problems getting a bank to take you on. Visa and MasterCard both are telling merchants with a repudiation rate higher than 2% that they have a short time to clean up their acts or they lose merchant privileges. They do not like negative option subscriptions. Customers do not like them either. Especially when the customer has no way to predict when he will be charged.
Occam's Razor, right?
The simplest solution is most likely the best one: Charge a flat monthly fee. Say $4.95. Charge 10 times that for an annual subscription: $49.50.
Given the stats of Salon, the Motley Fool, and others, roughly 20% of your members will sign up--at best. With 300,000 members, that means 60,000 will sign up. 3% of those post comments--that's 1800 users. You'll find that 30% of those (or about 1% of your total subscriber base) post 80%-90% of your comments. Every quarter, produce a list of the roughly 500 people who fit that profile. Look at their comments, look at their moderation points, and make some choices. Flamers and trolls automatically don't make the list. People who write (and spell) like adults do. Bonus points for insight--negative points for me-too karma whores. You'll end up with 200 or 300 names of people who consistently generate a lot of the signal strength on SlashDot. They're your contributors--they're the people who provide the product that you're selling to everybody else.
Don't just "free flag" them.
When I was a sysop on the VENTURA forum on CompuServe, disaster struck. Xerox sold Ventura Publisher--and our forum contract--to Corel. And Corel made it plain that they intended to fold the VENTURA forum into COREL, and they had no place for the (all-volunteer) VENTURA forum sysop staff on COREL. Some wise (and wizened) people managed to persuade Corel that the VENTURA forum staff was a serious asset--perhaps the best asset that the software package had. Corel did something funny: they not only kept the forum alive (although we had an alias of CORELB, which we hated)--they also decided to pay attention to us in a way that Xerox never had. I have Corel Draw! rugby shirts and Corel Draw! backpacks and Corel Draw! clip art CDs and all sorts of Corel doodads and knicknacks--six years later my kids still haven't destroyed them all. When other vendors approached Corel to test for inoperability with their products, they automatically signed us up as beta testers--so I was on the Adobe Acrobat beta, the Exchange beta, and the Distiller beta. I made a lot of contacts with potential clients for imagesetter control software through Corel. They worked hard to keep the volunteers happy, and feel a part of the team, because they viewed our contribution as being particularly significant.
And our contribution was significant. The Ventura Publisher code base had all kinds of trouble, and the customer base was disintegrating as we watched. But we helped maintain the user base for several years as Corel tried desperately to salvage the product--and several members of that forum staff are still active on Corel's newsgroup site. We had a reputation for being excrutiatingly correct in our spelling, and ruthless in our punctuation (hey--we were a bunch of typesetters) but we were the place to come for help.
You should do the same thing. Identify your core contributors, and woo them. Free flag them on the site. Send 'em "I Got Root at SlashDot" t-shirts each quarter--and change the colors each quarter to develop a little bit of incentive to keep contributing. Invite them to a "Free as in Beer" private party at Linux World. Send 'em an email once a month with heads-up information on what's happening inside the ivy-covered walls of the OSDN campus. Make 'em feel like part of the team. (Roblimo's been around--he knows how this works.)
Can you do this? Yup. Can you afford it? Sure--you can pay for the entire program with the money you save from canning Jon Katz. 8-)
Other people have faced this problem
Before the advent of the World Wide Web, everybody who was anybody in the computer world was on CompuServe. And each CompuServe forum competed for members (and the connection time revenue that the member paid) based on the help, support, community, files, or messaging that it provided. It was--explicitly--pay-for-content. It was precisely the business model that you guys want to adopt.
Savvy forum operators knew the statistics: only 5% of forum members ever posted a comment. And roughly 1% of forum members posted 90% of the comments. The more commments (particularly the more substantive comments), the more forum members there were--95% of whom were "read-only" lurkers. Thus, it paid to encourage people to post comments.
This policy discourages people from posting comments
Think of what you have to do to post a comment:
Are you done? Nope. You'd better hope your comment doesn't get mod'd up--because you'll get "messages" telling you that. Link to that page? (1 hit). You'd better hope you haven't contributed something provocative that produces replies--because you'll have to read each reply (1 hit apiece), and possibly post a response (3 hits per response, see above).
In short, contributing to SlashDot, writing interesting comments, getting mod'd up, and responding to replies now will cost you money. That is, all the things that you (SlashDot) want people to do (desperately need people to do) you are going to charge money for. You're creating disincentives to provide you with content--and that content is what you're trying to sell to subscribers.
What smart forum operators did was to issue "free flags". Each forum contractor got a certain amount of free forum time to award to forum users who helped out in one way or another. There were sysop accounts for people who did administrative things--but there were a lot more free flags for regular forum members who just participated in a lot of conversations. It would make a *lot* of sense for you to do the same thing.
In the ultimate geek world you'd be able to automate a process to identify people making significant contributions. That's what moderation is, after all. But automated processes can be manipulated (i.e. karma whoring)--this probably requires some individual discretion. Identify significant contributors (you can start with high-karma users, but I'm sure you can identify other factors to consider) and grant them free access. You want them posting comments all the time--those are the people whose peers have voted to indicate that their voices should be heard. The very last thing you want to do is get those people contributing less, because each contribution now costs them at least 3 page hits.
Oh, yeah--Paypal?
Be serious. If OSDN and VA Software is on such shaky ground that you can't get a merchant account through CyberCash or someone else, you have serious problems.
Hi!
This would be a problem for notebook users. If you're running a POP3 server in a corporate environment, one of the problems you have to contend with is traveling users (sales people, etc.) who want access to mail, and want to be able to send mail at the same time. One solution (for Windows NT users) is to implement the SMTP server that's built into NT. Have the road warrior send from his local SMTP server, but retrieve his mail from the corporate POP3 server.
One could, I suppose, simply add all those road-warrior notebooks to the list of authorized MTAs. But in a large-ish corporation it might be a record-keeping nightmare.
Hi!
The AP wire article that Excite quotes was written by a reporter in Philadelphia, presumably after reading this story which ran in the Allentown Morning Call five days earlier. The AP writer makes a couple of mistakes, and misses a significant point--a point that is made well in the Morning Call piece.
Hi!
Excite must have picked up the story off the news wire--this story in the Allentown Morning Call ran on Feb. 15. The plaintiff, Proetto, wasn't just a creep making lewd suggestions. He was a police officer. The Morning Call article also notes that Proetto didn't go to any prison--he got six months of probation, and will "probably" ("probably"????) lose his job. He is bringing this lawsuit to avoid getting labelled as a "sex offender", and thus subject to all kinds of reporting requirements and harassment. (In most states sex offenders are required to register with the local police when they move into an area, and the police are required to notify neighbors, schools, and local associations. Who--as you might expect--sometimes have been known to take matters into their own hands.)
Okay--we need to hear from /. readers who actually ARE lawyers. In particular, we need to hear from geek lawyers who are familiar with federal regulations, how they are formulated, and what is the precise legal meaning of "ruling."
This letter from Nintendo is a threat. Find a small business, threaten them with the wrath of God, watch them roll over. But--the threat has to be credible. The premise of the threat from Nintendo is contained in the second paragraph of the letter:
The key question here is, what ruling was made by the U.S. Customs Service on December 20, 2001? Was this a ruling in a judicial proceeding? If so, does the U.S. Customs Service have the ability to conduct judicial proceedings that are binding on other jurisdictions? (I seem to recall that Admiralty courts in the U.S. are conducted by the U.S. Customs Service. But the DMCA and its application to a game cartridge emulator would seem to be outside the purview of an Admiralty court.)
Or was the "ruling" akin to the "private letter rulings" issued by the Internal Revenue Service, which are used to advise tax professionals of the IRS's view of the legality of a given strategy or vehicle. In other words, did Nintendo of America go to a U.S. Customs Service office, present some documentation asserting that the Flash Advance Linker could be used to illegally copy Gameboy cartridges, and thus (they argued) it violates the DMCA. If it is the latter, I would think the threat from Nintendo carries a lot less force--they got somebody to agree with their view of the situation. That's not the same thing as having as precendent a settled issue of law. (For contrast: if you get a letter from the local Temperance Union insisting that you cease and desist from the manufacture, transportation, distribution, and/or sale of beer--because you're in a "dry" county--you're in a different fight. Temperance rules may seem silly, but they're a settled legal issue.)
If the DMCA is to be challenged, these guys need help
A common legal tactic is to establish a court precendent someplace, and then extend that precendent across the country. I learned this the hard way, early in my career, when the Internal Revenue Service decided to make an example of my employer at the time (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 743 F.2d 148 (3rd Cir. 1984).). We won--but only because of substantial financial and legal support from other (larger) publishing houses that stood to be hurt down the road. Almost twenty years ago I was hustling contributions to a legal defense fund of more than $50K--today it would require much, much more than that.
There is an alternative...
You generally cannot intervene in a private lawsuit. And Nintendo is almost certainly assuming that this store isn't going to go all the way to court over this. But you can ask your Congressman to "look into this" and report back to you on the merit of foreign software corporations using the DMCA to prevent U.S. software developers from writing software for a popular computing platform. With enough publicity, and enough questions from Congress, Nintendo might be persuaded to back off.
My wife is majorly into gardening. My most successful Valentine's Day present ever was a dump trailer for her garden tractor.
Her most successful present ever, for me, was a weekend rental of a New Holland front-end loader.
There's romance in that there back yard, I tell ya....
Like, say, dot-com stock certificate wallpaper.