Yes you want a lawyer. As others have said an accountant is more important
to you. Find a good accountant, and they can help you find a lawyer.
So how do you find a good accountant? Go to your neighborhood businesses and ask them
who they use. Don't ask one or two. Talk to many of the businesses
you deal with every week. Not only will you get a few strong recommendations
to start with, you will also hear from these businesses some answers
to your other questions, and quite a number of new questions to ask yourself.
This is a good thing. Starting a dialog with local businesses is also
the best, first marketting step. They will probably be your
first customers after all.
Yes you want to incorporate. People sue at the drop of a hat. While your
insurance will handle most legal cases, you can't take a chance of
losing your personal possessions. Did you you notice insurance
in the previous sentence? Have you explored that whole barrel of
monkeys yet? You will get sued; over stupid things no rational
human would consider. It really sucks not being able to eat your Thanksgiving dinner
because you're so nervous about losing everything to some ass with a lawyer on retainer.(The jury sent
him packing in a humorous and embarrassing manner. I had a good Christmas.)
Based on the tone of your question I assume your thinking of starting
a relatively small business. A sub-s corp is probably what you need(in America). Your
accountant will help with this.
Most importantly: the basic nature of the questions you're asking
means you are not ready to start a business. Do your homework. Jumping into
ownership is big magic, so don't be bad at it. You'll find that ownership
saddles you with a hundred little decisions a day. A friend who recently
started a lan management business just told me he understands what I meant
when I said "The business of my business keeps me from running my business."
I've always described Clarke's books to the uninitiated as not much happens, but there's a lot going on. Sadly Hollywood is guarenteed to choose action over sublety. I think we can look forward to the same treatment Starship Troopers received. I hope we don't get 90 minutes of buff astrostuds battling the very marketable maintenance spiders. OK I admit it, I'd buy one!
I usually try to fool myself into thinking I should avoid screen adaptations of favorite books so as to avoid any lingering taint; of course I see them anyway. However, of all Clarke's books this is perhaps the most easily transferred to screenplay.
Seriously if you want to defend perl that's fine but do it logically and not
emotionally(So? I'm a hypocrite).
I prefer controlled chaos, but ok...
a special perpose language that does a few things *very* well and does everything
else the best that it can.
I'm a sysadmin, not a *software architect*. I have little/no time to put out a fire on 4 disparate OS's. Gimme a tool that can do that. Umm, Perl. And how do you get "special purpose"? Perl has the ability to be the most generalized language available. Are you trolling me you trickster!?
Fucking assembly language is cleaner and easier to read.
Perhaps you don't know asm? Perhaps you gave up learning Perl? It makes sense to me and quite a number of other folks. To be honest I think closer to Perl than any other language.
take a cue from m$ and add some more features then everyone will love perl.
Are you trolling me you trickster? All of the listed possible enhancements for 6 are an extension of what Perl is supposed to be: What Ever You Want It To Be. By extension I mean that Perl will now satisfy even you. You like C but don't want to port your source to the innumerable environments the users may have? Pipe that puppy through the new and improved Perl interpreter! Have offices in 32 different countries? Unicode is now insignificant. Run a large code shop with geeks from every backround? Enforce house coding style regs with your very own corporate "macros". Are these bad things?
Mantra = Perl does what ever I want.
on
Perl 6 Showcase
·
· Score: 3
All these negatives! Perl's particular idiom is that it is the most flexible language around. That list of goodies for Perl 6 is wonderful.
I think a good bit of the flack tossed at Perl is due to the fact that coding it comes in two distinct flavors: Keeper and Throwaway. 80% of Perl I pound out is extinct when the process dies. If I can code closer to the way I think and save a few seconds per line of code, that's more time for my daughters. Are my Keeper scripts readable and maintainable? You bet. If there's a slim chance it might come in handy later the first thing you see is a use strict and a bunch of POD.
I could never trust to be "kept informed" of recent firings, etc. so I just wrote a script that monitored certain aspects of the human resources employee database and diff'ed it. You can be sure of one thing: the first thing Management does upon termination of an employee is to stop any future salary disbursements!
SCO is worst to learn first
on
SCO Education?
·
· Score: 1
While all proprietary unices have *quirks*, SCO is downright evil. The directory structure is a mess of spaghetti. I agree with all above that you would be much better off learning Solaris, Linux, or *BSD first. Once you learn the traditions common among unix variants it becomes easier to learn another distribution.
I can't help you with the quality of SCO or anyone else's training programs. I use manuals, books, blood, and the web.
Your local library system is a start. They'll usually give you a space for seminars/installs, and may even put up a signboard if you prove you're not a one-night-stand. Your newspaper almost always has a local clubs and events section. Try to get into the business insert too. The medium size and up metro areas also have a fair number of "alternative" newspapers. Hit them hard. You get big space for your dollar, and the readership is usually part of your target audience.(Oh my, I'm starting to sound like a marketting droid!) I have no comment on my whereabouts during the following activities...
Go to CompUSA, open notepad on as many boxen as you can, and type appropriate anti-Microsoft-tax-Linux-rules messages.
Put your LUG's phone/contact on the back of all the shrinkwrap OS's.
Crash your NT-loving brother's computers every chance you get so that he won't loan you RAM anymore.
claimed the internet was dead simply because it was now filled with so many commercial and useless websites. After contemplating his remarks I found it hard not to disagree at least to some extent. But on the other hand when something like this comes along it makes me look on the bright side again...
Yes, so that more people can learn to effecively use the the GIMP to create more commercial and useless websites:)
I wonder if a/. shorthand will evolve for an "understood" GPL'ed comment. CmdrTaco will have to insert a link something like:/. comment copyleft definition so we can just include it at the bottom of a post.
I think it can be agreed this is a Good Thing©. I'm curious if the GNU Doc copyleft will be limitted in use to HOW-TOs and such. Will Tim O'Reilly sell copylefted books knowing that the text can/will be available and "free" somewhere. He's done something of the sort with the Samba book IIRC.
On the other hand perhaps this will act to increase mainstream doc pulication. Any publisher can stock the shelves with a complete work without author fees. I admit ignorance as to how heavily that cost weighs against total production.
Oh, by the way:
These comments copyright (c) 2000 Jeff Kustermann. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.0 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES, with the Front-Cover Texts being LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts being LIST. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License"
Let's say I, as a PHB, have chosen Linux distro "x" as my corporate desktop OS. Till now this would all apply to servers. Gnome is all about the desktop and therefor about user interface. To 95% of the computing public the UI is the computer. I have a special need that requires a solution -NOW. I can wait for an Open Source contributer to experience that same need and bang out the code or I can commission it. Regardless of what software architecture I'm using, custom code costs money. The only real difference between Open Source and Commercial models is the post-availability of said code. I want the code to dominate the world in my established field of business; I'm not a software distributer.
Why would someone pay for a CD of Helix? Why would someone pay for a CD of Red Hat?
I think I prefer evolutionary. Open Source/Free Software is Darwinism personified. Microsoft plays the part of social heathcare.
Microsoft represents all those people that should have been weeded out long ago, but for being crutched-up by the best marketting science man has developed have gone on to live a long, annoying life. "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
I'm not quite sure where Gnome fits here, maybe as a speckle-breasted warbler, or something?
Please note I resisted the temptation to bring Keyesian economics into the discussion.:)
I don't mind AOL jumping up the version number at all. Yes, its completely marketting bullshit, but bullshit works sometimes. Frankly I'm behind anything that will get Joe Computeruser to upgrade his browser so that I can stop dumbing-down my HTML and Javascript. I long for the day I can use stylesheets with impunity! Heck, they should version it up to 8 or 9. Your average user sees the news and thinks "Man, I'm in 4.7, is this from the 80's or sumpthin'."
<early morning cynicism>USENET will never die. It will just take its evolutionary niche. I believe the proliferation of information available on the WWW is mostly the cause. When a newbie posts on a newsgroup he is promptly spanked for not researching the answer before cluttering up the newsfeed. FAQ's, HOW-TOs, and knowledge specific websites abound, use them first! So what happens is that the few people that find out how to read a newsgroup are sent away until they get a clue. Is there a reason to return? A newsgroup then becomes a small group of members with not nuch left to discuss.</early morning cynicism>
Get more than one book. Buy/borrow about a half dozen. I've yet to find a combination of only one or two that was gentle enough to a newbie, yet still had comprehensive technical detail. In addition it is not uncommon for me to find five or more mistakes within the first three chapters. Nothing is worse than debugging when you're not yet confident in your own abilities, and it turns out to be an editing error in the book! I now cross reference everything I read.
Remember that these large volume texts are not actually going to teach how to program nearly as well as playing with code. Perl is one mother bear to learn(my opinion). It is a considerable maze, albeit an organized one. You don't learn a maze by reading a map. Start walking.
Find a LUG and pester the piss out of anyone claiming to have written a Perl script longer than 10 lines. After reading every iota of documentation first, of course. Bring them lots of beer. Maybe some sandwiches, too.
Learn shell, sed, awk, C, C++, Pascal, and Python first:)
Don't
believe you will learn in "21 Days" or whatever Sam's Publishing would have you believe. Or maybe I'm just not that smart.
give up. It will hurt. You will be miserable. Life will have no meaning, and Wall is the anticrist. Until you get a slight mental tremor and all of the sudden you know what they all mean by scalar vs list context. Life regains meaning and maybe Wall isn't quite evil. The jury is still out on Christiansen, though:)
and they have raised the option of taking shares instead of salary (or at least a portion of it).
There is difference between shares in lieu of pay and stock options. A big one. Obviously an option is just that, an option. No one is forcing you to buy shares. Depending on the structure of the option you may only be saving transaction commissions. Your mileage may vary.
If you are getting ownership concern as part of your compensation, you're in a different situation. New start-ups will do this to bring in centerpiece talent. If this is so, you probably need to adjust your "I'm not super $$$$ focussed" attitude. The success of the company is now more important to you than it would be to the average salaried employee. That's why corporate BODs structure corporate officers' compensation with lots of stock. The company's share price acts like a commission incentive.
So sysadmin Bob is walking across a bridge when he sees a guy about to jump to his death. Being a good sysadmin he couldn't care less, but he notices the poor soul is wearing a "#!/usr/bin/perl" t-shirt. The jumper protests as Bob approaches, but Bob mentions the t-shirt. "I happen to use perl myself, are you a sysadmin?" "Why, yes I am." says the jumper. "Cool, Unix or Windows?" asks Bob. "Linux." says jumper. "Hey! Me too. Compiled or interpreted?" says Bob. "Compiled." "All right!! Easy or hard to maintain?" says Bob. "Oooo, very hard." says the jumper. "HERETIC!" and Bob pushes him off the bridge.
shell or xterm? vi or emacs? compiled or interpreted? keyboard or mouse? boxers or briefs? IDG or O'Reilly? By the way, Linux For Dummies? I know you want to reach out to the forsaken Windows users, but I think you need to call O'Reilly just to mend your karma! Also you might want to expand the shell programming chapter. My brother is calling me every 15 minutes.
I couldn't agree more, but that's the way it's headed. In PHB thinking why buy a $5000 shrinkwrap solution when you can "pay as you go" with an ASP? You gain infinite flexibility and the market will become perfectly Darwinian. Don't like the service? There's a dozen contenders dying for your cash, and you have no prohibitive set-up costs. How many companies/institutions are running bogus systems just because, well, they're paid for. My local library system is still running VMS for goodness sakes!
We'll always have hacker's OS's because we'll always have hackers. Linux flying in the face of Windows proves that much. And if not, Finland has plenty of grad students:)
...are being touted as the next great evolution of the internet and computing in general. As ASPs are becoming more sophisticated, both home and business boxen will supposedly become little more than an embedded web client. It seems mod_perl on Linux is perfect for the server and Mozilla on Linux will be perfect as the client. If this is in the near future how can/should Linux improve its utilities for this segment of the internet?
You know, simple buying/selling of a stock isn't all that's possible. We know the company is a worthless front, but the VA Linux IPO shows what Joe Investor is capable of doing.
If/when this IPO hits, and the price is jacked up to celestial levels you just short sell shares. I agree that making money by betting someone will lose is a real karma check, but Open Source people will be able get something from the ashes of a misguided project.
It kind of reminds me of the slugbot article. Fund your Open Source project with the decaying carcass of LinuxSlug!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you want a lawyer. As others have said an accountant is more important to you. Find a good accountant, and they can help you find a lawyer. So how do you find a good accountant? Go to your neighborhood businesses and ask them who they use. Don't ask one or two. Talk to many of the businesses you deal with every week. Not only will you get a few strong recommendations to start with, you will also hear from these businesses some answers to your other questions, and quite a number of new questions to ask yourself. This is a good thing. Starting a dialog with local businesses is also the best, first marketting step. They will probably be your first customers after all.
Yes you want to incorporate. People sue at the drop of a hat. While your insurance will handle most legal cases, you can't take a chance of losing your personal possessions. Did you you notice insurance in the previous sentence? Have you explored that whole barrel of monkeys yet? You will get sued; over stupid things no rational human would consider. It really sucks not being able to eat your Thanksgiving dinner because you're so nervous about losing everything to some ass with a lawyer on retainer.(The jury sent him packing in a humorous and embarrassing manner. I had a good Christmas.)
Based on the tone of your question I assume your thinking of starting a relatively small business. A sub-s corp is probably what you need(in America). Your accountant will help with this.
Most importantly: the basic nature of the questions you're asking means you are not ready to start a business. Do your homework. Jumping into ownership is big magic, so don't be bad at it. You'll find that ownership saddles you with a hundred little decisions a day. A friend who recently started a lan management business just told me he understands what I meant when I said "The business of my business keeps me from running my business."
Good luck. Stick with it, its a wild ride.
I've always described Clarke's books to the uninitiated as not much happens, but there's a lot going on. Sadly Hollywood is guarenteed to choose action over sublety. I think we can look forward to the same treatment Starship Troopers received. I hope we don't get 90 minutes of buff astrostuds battling the very marketable maintenance spiders. OK I admit it, I'd buy one!
I usually try to fool myself into thinking I should avoid screen adaptations of favorite books so as to avoid any lingering taint; of course I see them anyway. However, of all Clarke's books this is perhaps the most easily transferred to screenplay.
I prefer controlled chaos, but ok...
a special perpose language that does a few things *very* well and does everything else the best that it can.I'm a sysadmin, not a *software architect*. I have little/no time to put out a fire on 4 disparate OS's. Gimme a tool that can do that. Umm, Perl. And how do you get "special purpose"? Perl has the ability to be the most generalized language available. Are you trolling me you trickster!?
Fucking assembly language is cleaner and easier to read.Perhaps you don't know asm? Perhaps you gave up learning Perl? It makes sense to me and quite a number of other folks. To be honest I think closer to Perl than any other language.
take a cue from m$ and add some more features then everyone will love perl.Are you trolling me you trickster? All of the listed possible enhancements for 6 are an extension of what Perl is supposed to be: What Ever You Want It To Be. By extension I mean that Perl will now satisfy even you. You like C but don't want to port your source to the innumerable environments the users may have? Pipe that puppy through the new and improved Perl interpreter! Have offices in 32 different countries? Unicode is now insignificant. Run a large code shop with geeks from every backround? Enforce house coding style regs with your very own corporate "macros". Are these bad things?
All these negatives! Perl's particular idiom is that it is the most flexible language around. That list of goodies for Perl 6 is wonderful.
I think a good bit of the flack tossed at Perl is due to the fact that coding it comes in two distinct flavors: Keeper and Throwaway. 80% of Perl I pound out is extinct when the process dies. If I can code closer to the way I think and save a few seconds per line of code, that's more time for my daughters. Are my Keeper scripts readable and maintainable? You bet. If there's a slim chance it might come in handy later the first thing you see is a use strict and a bunch of POD.
Every Item on that list made me tingle!
I could never trust to be "kept informed" of recent firings, etc. so I just wrote a script that monitored certain aspects of the human resources employee database and diff'ed it. You can be sure of one thing: the first thing Management does upon termination of an employee is to stop any future salary disbursements!
I can't help you with the quality of SCO or anyone else's training programs. I use manuals, books, blood, and the web.
Your newspaper almost always has a local clubs and events section. Try to get into the business insert too. The medium size and up metro areas also have a fair number of "alternative" newspapers. Hit them hard. You get big space for your dollar, and the readership is usually part of your target audience.(Oh my, I'm starting to sound like a marketting droid!)
I have no comment on my whereabouts during the following activities...
can I have your old boxen:)
Yes, so that more people can learn to effecively use the the GIMP to create more commercial and useless websites:)
Touche'
I wonder if a /. shorthand will evolve for an "understood" GPL'ed comment. CmdrTaco will have to insert a link something like: /. comment copyleft definition so we can just include it at the bottom of a post.
I think it can be agreed this is a Good Thing©. I'm curious if the GNU Doc copyleft will be limitted in use to HOW-TOs and such. Will Tim O'Reilly sell copylefted books knowing that the text can/will be available and "free" somewhere. He's done something of the sort with the Samba book IIRC.
On the other hand perhaps this will act to increase mainstream doc pulication. Any publisher can stock the shelves with a complete work without author fees. I admit ignorance as to how heavily that cost weighs against total production.
Oh, by the way:
These comments copyright (c) 2000 Jeff Kustermann. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.0 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES, with the Front-Cover Texts being LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts being LIST. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License"Let's say I, as a PHB, have chosen Linux distro "x" as my corporate desktop OS. Till now this would all apply to servers. Gnome is all about the desktop and therefor about user interface. To 95% of the computing public the UI is the computer. I have a special need that requires a solution -NOW. I can wait for an Open Source contributer to experience that same need and bang out the code or I can commission it. Regardless of what software architecture I'm using, custom code costs money. The only real difference between Open Source and Commercial models is the post-availability of said code. I want the code to dominate the world in my established field of business; I'm not a software distributer.
Why would someone pay for a CD of Helix? Why would someone pay for a CD of Red Hat?
Openssh.com could grab it and arrange for an exchange of hostages.
I think I prefer evolutionary. Open Source/Free Software is Darwinism personified. Microsoft plays the part of social heathcare.
Microsoft represents all those people that should have been weeded out long ago, but for being crutched-up by the best marketting science man has developed have gone on to live a long, annoying life. "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
I'm not quite sure where Gnome fits here, maybe as a speckle-breasted warbler, or something?
Please note I resisted the temptation to bring Keyesian economics into the discussion.:)
I don't mind AOL jumping up the version number at all. Yes, its completely marketting bullshit, but bullshit works sometimes. Frankly I'm behind anything that will get Joe Computeruser to upgrade his browser so that I can stop dumbing-down my HTML and Javascript. I long for the day I can use stylesheets with impunity! Heck, they should version it up to 8 or 9. Your average user sees the news and thinks "Man, I'm in 4.7, is this from the 80's or sumpthin'."
<early morning cynicism>USENET will never die. It will just take its evolutionary niche. I believe the proliferation of information available on the WWW is mostly the cause. When a newbie posts on a newsgroup he is promptly spanked for not researching the answer before cluttering up the newsfeed. FAQ's, HOW-TOs, and knowledge specific websites abound, use them first! So what happens is that the few people that find out how to read a newsgroup are sent away until they get a clue. Is there a reason to return? A newsgroup then becomes a small group of members with not nuch left to discuss.</early morning cynicism>
- Get more than one book. Buy/borrow about a half dozen. I've yet to find a combination of only one or two that was gentle enough to a newbie, yet still had comprehensive technical detail. In addition it is not uncommon for me to find five or more mistakes within the first three chapters. Nothing is worse than debugging when you're not yet confident in your own abilities, and it turns out to be an editing error in the book! I now cross reference everything I read.
- Remember that these large volume texts are not actually going to teach how to program nearly as well as playing with code. Perl is one mother bear to learn(my opinion). It is a considerable maze, albeit an organized one. You don't learn a maze by reading a map. Start walking.
- Find a LUG and pester the piss out of anyone claiming to have written a Perl script longer than 10 lines. After reading every iota of documentation first, of course. Bring them lots of beer. Maybe some sandwiches, too.
- Learn shell, sed, awk, C, C++, Pascal, and Python first
:)
Don'tMilord, we have found a witch!
May we burn her?
There is difference between shares in lieu of pay and stock options. A big one. Obviously an option is just that, an option. No one is forcing you to buy shares. Depending on the structure of the option you may only be saving transaction commissions. Your mileage may vary.
If you are getting ownership concern as part of your compensation, you're in a different situation. New start-ups will do this to bring in centerpiece talent. If this is so, you probably need to adjust your "I'm not super $$$$ focussed" attitude. The success of the company is now more important to you than it would be to the average salaried employee. That's why corporate BODs structure corporate officers' compensation with lots of stock. The company's share price acts like a commission incentive.
So sysadmin Bob is walking across a bridge when he sees a guy about to jump to his death. Being a good sysadmin he couldn't care less, but he notices the poor soul is wearing a "#!/usr/bin/perl" t-shirt. The jumper protests as Bob approaches, but Bob mentions the t-shirt.
"I happen to use perl myself, are you a sysadmin?"
"Why, yes I am." says the jumper.
"Cool, Unix or Windows?" asks Bob.
"Linux." says jumper.
"Hey! Me too. Compiled or interpreted?" says Bob.
"Compiled."
"All right!! Easy or hard to maintain?" says Bob.
"Oooo, very hard." says the jumper.
"HERETIC!" and Bob pushes him off the bridge.
Stolen from Emo Phillips.
If so, will I have to wear a hooded robe and chant alot?
shell or xterm?
vi or emacs?
compiled or interpreted?
keyboard or mouse?
boxers or briefs?
IDG or O'Reilly?
By the way, Linux For Dummies? I know you want to reach out to the forsaken Windows users, but I think you need to call O'Reilly just to mend your karma! Also you might want to expand the shell programming chapter. My brother is calling me every 15 minutes.
I couldn't agree more, but that's the way it's headed. In PHB thinking why buy a $5000 shrinkwrap solution when you can "pay as you go" with an ASP? You gain infinite flexibility and the market will become perfectly Darwinian. Don't like the service? There's a dozen contenders dying for your cash, and you have no prohibitive set-up costs. How many companies/institutions are running bogus systems just because, well, they're paid for. My local library system is still running VMS for goodness sakes!
We'll always have hacker's OS's because we'll always have hackers. Linux flying in the face of Windows proves that much. And if not, Finland has plenty of grad students :)
...are being touted as the next great evolution of the internet and computing in general. As ASPs are becoming more sophisticated, both home and business boxen will supposedly become little more than an embedded web client. It seems mod_perl on Linux is perfect for the server and Mozilla on Linux will be perfect as the client. If this is in the near future how can/should Linux improve its utilities for this segment of the internet?
You know, simple buying/selling of a stock isn't all that's possible. We know the company is a worthless front, but the VA Linux IPO shows what Joe Investor is capable of doing.
If/when this IPO hits, and the price is jacked up to celestial levels you just short sell shares. I agree that making money by betting someone will lose is a real karma check, but Open Source people will be able get something from the ashes of a misguided project.
It kind of reminds me of the slugbot article. Fund your Open Source project with the decaying carcass of LinuxSlug!