In the previous century, I had a bunch of Quantum brand hard drives fail due to "sticktion." The lubricant became a "glue" over time. The data recovery tech used a tape measure to drop the drive from a certain height, held at a certain angle, to "unstick" the heads. He'd plug the drives back in, and recover the data.
Man, oh man. You'll laugh when you read this!
In the days when 486/sx vs 486/dx was a going concern, when the AMD 386/40 was considered the best-kept-secret in the industry, I maintained a server. It was a 286/20, running Banyan Vines Network O/S. (Think Novell Netware)
And it had stiction problems. Bad. It had a full height, 5.25" HDD. (I don't remember how big it was, but it was certainly less than 100 MB)
It was loud. It was important that it continue to function. And, it had stiction problems. Operating instructions were: never let it spin down.
If it did, you had to, with power on, lift the computer, and twist it sharply so that the HDD spun back up, and then set the computer back down - GENTLY - and then use the reset button to start the O/S.
The funny part? It worked fine. As long as it was on, and the drive never spun down, it worked beatifully. (and somewhat noisily)
I owned a computer store for a number of years, and used my knowledge of stiction to recover data quite a number of times.
With the smaller 3.5" drives, they don't have anywhere near the radial inertia of that huge, 5.25", full-height drive, so you pretty much have to remove the drive from the computer, have it plugged in with just the cables (IE: the drive is in your hand) and give it a sharp twist "flat ways" like you were spinning a frisbee with the power on (or just before).
It sounds a little scary, and perhaps dangerous - but if the drive is dead already, what's to lose? I've never had a stiction drive that I couldn't get going using the above...
I know you're not a Comcast customer because you're online instead of suffering with their randomm DNS outages/rant of a fustrated Comcast customer.
Back in 1998, when I got my home DSL line from Pacific Bell (now SBC), it had a fixed IP address, and required no software to install. I still have the same line, same fixed IP address.
I had constant problems with Pac Bell's DNS, and Email relaying was intermittent and usually slow.
So, I got a cheezo (and I mean CHEEZO!) old pentium, Red Hat 6.x, and set up my own Email/DNS/NAT gateway. I worked at it, until I felt familiar with the *nix command line while doing all this. That computer, hardware upgraded a few times, and now running RedHat 7.2 with progeny updates for security patches, runs today, and is routing the packets this post is submitted on.
I was new to Linux. Time went by, and my skillset steadily improved with frequent hits to here, Root Prompt, Linux Today, the local Barnes and Noble for a big, fat book every few months, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
Now, years later, I get paid quite well by several companies to provide these exact services - Email, DNS, etc. as well as various Database and Web-based softwares.
Take your frustrations, and turn them to your advantage. It's a path. Walk it, work to be the best, and it'll pay nicely. Oh, and I never have problems with SBC's DNS or SMTP relays, since I haven't used either since 1998!
I've been using Moz since 0.5x on Linux. I've gotten very used to it.
I started using Firefox once 1.0 was released. I used it heavily, and for a while, it was my preferred browser. (Mainly because the bright orange icon was easier to find than the bluecurve icon on my FC3 laptop)
But, finally, I had to go back. Moz is just simply better. Having separate address and search bars is a stupid waste of space. The find being down at the bottom of the screen was... funky.
But the one that did it? Refresh on view source!
I develop web apps, and the ability to see raw output in HTML, do a tweak on the file on the server, and then hit reload while viewing source, and see the source update, was the straw that broke the Camel's back. In FF, I have to close the "view source" window, hit refresh, then View Source again.
Ugh.
I haven't uninstalled FF, but the icon is no longer on my desktop, and I really don't use it anymore.
Funny, how the STUPIDEST features can make the biggest differences, no?
What happens to wiretap laws when the gubmint is your ISP?
If I have a contract with, say, my excellent local service providers North Valley.net or the venerable Sunset.net , I do so with the understanding that
A) I'm contracting with a private entity, whose existence is perpetuated by the charges I pay, and
B) that the company has every legal right to examine my traffic for any purpose whatsoever, though generally it's going to be only to diagnose performance problems.
Because of "A", I know that they don't have any particular interest in examining my traffic and/or violating my trust and privacy beyond "keeping me happy". If word gets out that the admin at either of these companies is reading customer email, and maybe even silently forwarding private messages to other staff, there'd be hell to pay in the court of public opinion, and in the company's bottom line.
But, if the "gubmint" does it, why, it's simply called a "security matter". Rattle off a few department names (FBI, CIA, City Police, State Troopers, whatever) and everybody turns their head silently.
In this case, I think I'm on the side of the companies, even though I dislike their reasons for doing so.
I do not want my Internet service provided by an entity with a vested interest in violating my privacy, whether that interest is in the name of law enforcement, anti-terrorism, or just shits and giggles.
For offsite backups, rsync is your friend. I wrote a nifty wrapper for rsync (in PHP) to manage backups of multiple systems and accounts with options so that unchanged copies of a file only hardlink to a single file.
I manage about 500 GB of data in backups over a 1.5 Mb line with this tool. I can "rollback"
files on the servers to any of a number of points in the past several months, since this tool does versioning. It works very, very well, and I have a complete, updated, off-site image of all the servers I manage every 24 hours!
Already about thirty years ago I observed people who ran obviously faulty pieces of code a second time hoping for a different outcome; my guess is that humans love voodo but that it ususally does not work. So I do not believe that there is another "Generation X" (whatever).
Dude, that's just human nature.
How many times have you stood in an elevator lobby, and watched somebody push the LIT UP arrow button?
Ask anybody, and they'll tell you that the fact that the light is lit means that somebody's already pushed the button, and that the elevator is on the way.
EROS is dead. I guess it's important to do Operating System research, to determine what new features might be needed, but the *nix model has been going for 30 years now without any essential changes...
Based on what I've see, EROS was put together by some ambitious, new programmers, who got hit in the teeth by the real world. Are there good ideas in there? Yeah, I'll bet - but how practical are they? At this point there's not even a baseline kernel going!
I remain hopeful, but pointing to this as anything near a pragmatic solution to any real-world problem is naive, at best.
I did a little research, and took the time to Email the guy "in charge", and got this response: (email addresses munged to protect the innocent)
Re: EROS? From: "Jonathan S. Shapiro" --- AT eros-os.org> To: ---- AT ---orks.net Date: 2005-02-08 07:49
Ben:
Our work on EROS has ceased, because we came to realize that there was important stuff we had missed. The first steps towards a successor, Coyotos, can be found at http://www.coyotos.org. My hope is that some early version of Coyotos will be running quickly, as we aren't trying to do much fundamental research on the kernel architecture per se, but it's been slow going so far
I've found that with a combination of a few DNS Blacklists and greylisting, my previous SPAM count of several hundred to a thousand per day dropped to a few dozen.
Yes, that's *alot* of SPAM, and that's because I have quite a number of addresses for me in my different capacities. I have my fingers in a couple of businesses, and also work for a number of other companies as a consultant and/or sysadmin.
The combination of DNS blacklists and greylisting has dropped probably 95-98% or more of the SPAM I was getting. I almost *never* have a false positive, and it's basically invisible to me. My mail server's load average that used to average.85-2.0 processing all the SPAM with SpamAssassin and MailScanner has dropped to about 0.05.
Once I started greylisting, I got rid of SpamAssassin altogether - the SPAM load was so light that all SA really did for me was to annoyingly mark a false positive from time to time.
If you wanted to actually use the O/S security mechanisms to bear in a meaningful way you would have to configure the Web server to respond to data access requests by spawning off a new process and locking it down with the appropriate system privs each time a privileged access was performed. This is technically possible in both Unix and Windows but it will grind the machine down if you try it with any appreciable load.
So what's the best way to capture your desktop as compressed video?
Take a look at a Qarbon viewlet - it turns part of your screen into a flash movie in just seconds!
Works on Windows, Mac, Linux... We have it, and use it for training videos for our software product - it's as easy as anything could be, and cross-platform to boot!
What is more interesting here is the derrivative. The perception of Windows is improving rapidly, the perception of Linux is pretty static.
Eh, you're kidding... right?
I've not seen that AT ALL. Windows security is an oxymoron, and people complain about it BITTERLY to me. I've been delivering Linux-only services for years, and it's all I can do to keep up with all the projects on my plate.
One of my clients is on the verge of switching about 50% of their desktop systems in use by their staff to Linux. They're evaluating it now. Issues I know of are: MS-Word (Hello Crossover Office!) and printing.
What "security action" should be going on in the Linux world that isn't? I have a modest number of servers on the 'net. The only one with security issues is one with a bazillion, ancient CGI scripts on it. (that for various reasons, I can't just have removed - ugh)
But, just in case, do you remember SELinux? Or perhaps LIDS?
"closed source has no real advantage on open source." -->Except for that little thing called "Developers getting paid"...
Since when does being "closed-source" mean "getting paid"? Yes, many companies base their model on closed source. Many others base their model on open source, and makeplentyofmoney.
So wake up and smell the coffee! Times change, and your FUD-like statements are just so provably wrong.
..but it must be able to support my PC games. Why can't the community get togeather and create an open API like Microsofts Direct-X? Why not call the Linux version "Open-X" and start writing/porting games for this. Hell, if it becomes popular enough, then all W32 users have to do is download and install said "Open X".
You have an itch, why don't you scratch it? Yes, that's the "default answer" and I know it may be unpopular among the "consumers", but if you want to create an Open-X, nobody's stopping you. Otherwise, STFU.
With F/OSS, "they" really is another way of saying "you", where "why don't they do NNN" is instantly translated to "why don't I do NNN?"...
It's not like anybody's asking you to learn to code or anything. If your idea has enough merit, and is agreed upon by those who code, either because of your idea or your funding, it'll happen.
Otherwise, this is just so much tripe in a/. thread...
If you can get a company going for five figures, you have my respect. I am trying to get a startup going and after doing alot of analysis, the cheapest I think I can do it is for just over 7.
Then maybe:
1) You have a sucky idea. The best ideas are actually little more than a logical culmination of pre-existing forces, and really don't require the loss of a kidney to bring to fruition.
2) You have lousy marketing. You should be able to cover much of your initial cost in the first sale or two. If you can't, you might see #1 above, or maybe #5 below.
3) You lost the idea of a "partnership". Typically, you have at least two guys: a guy with the marketing skills, and a guy with the tech delivery skills. There may be a third/fourth partner depending on the situation. These people get together and get paid with a percentage of the company. It's typical to moonlight to provide food money during the startup phase. If you're lucky, your "day job" complements your new business.
5) Lastly, maybe your idea is too big in scope. Start with something a bit smaller, or maybe just part of your idea, and get it working and profitable before biting the whole banana.
I've started a number of businesses - some I've run quite well, some have run straight into the ground. Be cheap, work hard, and focus on turning a profit ASAP. If it takes very long to get to profitability, from where I stand, you're walking the wrong road.
The expensive or difficult thing, item #0 is the IDEA, the thing that makes the startup actually worth something...
Phaw. Ideas are cheap. There are a million of them, and a good, healthy percentage of them can be quite profitable.
It's the combination of idea, product delivery, legal stability, financial competence, and (most especially) marketing that makes a startup fly.
I remember reading a while back about the "card table" test. The idea goes something like this:
When looking at a startup to invest in, visit their main offices. If they have nice, leather seats and elaborate furniture, take your investment capital elsewhere. They aren't prioritizing their investments on delivery.
On the other hand, if they are using cheap, Costco furniture and/or card tables, they are putting their money where it matters, and are much more likely to succeed.
Today, the preferred system is 3Ghz, 64bit, with at least 2 gigs of RAM. Why? What's the point of such a powerful system? Speed! That's the point. Speed is important. Code efficiency is important. But, as programmers continue to deny this and produce poorly written and bloated/slow apps or use inefficient languages, the time will come when a 6Ghz processor is not enough. Doesn't that sound stupid?
Sure it does. But let's take a look at it:
1) It might cost the company an extra $25,000 to go through the performance tweaking to get it "right". Yes, a small team of coders, and a calendar month.
2) Let's say that they improve performance by 100%.
3) Assume that the software is server-based.
4) Cost to get software running "right" - $25,000. Cost to upgrade the server to a dual proc - $1,500. Which are YOU going to do?
People, given the choice of better performance or better features will almost always choose the latter, because they can "do more". So, what's the economic incentive to hand-craft everything in assembler?
"c" is a compromise solution - I remember when it was considered a HIGH level language! The price/performance curve is always reshaping itself towards higher and higher level languages. Get used to it!
Back in the mid 1990s I registered two domains. Spam wasn't the problem it is now at the time, and I used a permanent E-mail address. A few years after that I started getting spammed constantly, mostly trying to push other domains or other domain registars at me, along with the weak phishing-type scams trying to make me think my domain had expired. Since then, even though the domains no longer exist, the amount of spam at that address has risen drastically. It gets hundreds a day now, and most of them can be attributed back to registering two domain names.
Bzzzzzt! I call bullshit.
I have about 50 domains that I control. My first and oldest, is "benjamindsmith.com". (Gee, what's my name?)
I've used the same registration address on it for years. Go ahead. Check the whois. See that email address? Hasn't been changed in f-ing years. I get maybe 1 spam/week on that address, protected only by greylisting and a few RBLs, no SPAM filters in place.
Also, how do you know that your address receiving the spam was obtained by the black hats via your domain registration? Perhaps it was one of those porn sites you visited while the wife was out of town?
In-N-Out Buger's menu consists of *nothing* but burgers, fries, and shakes, all of the highest quality...
Boy, if you think In-n-Out Buger [sic] is a good burger, you have been one deprived soul.
Here in Chico, CA there are two burger joints (Nobby's and Burger Hut, if you're curious) that blow the socks off anything ever made at that grease-pit-with-limp-fries called In-n-Out... Neither do anything particularly fancy, but just deliver a good burger, and are always packed around mealtimes.
I find your misspelling somewhat appropriate. In-n-Out has flashy lights, and a cool hip/retro "all-American" image, and that's why it sells. It sure as ---- isn't the food. It's that cool image that McDonalds has been copying recently.
Or is the rule just "if we want your money, we can take it"?
This guy isn't an independent contractor. He's an employee of a NY company, with no presense in the state he telecommutes from.
Doing it any other way would present a number of problems:
1) Increased administrative overhead on the part of the employing company due to dual tax rates and paperwork requirements.
2) Liability - if employee, working in Jersey, gets injured, his he going to sue under Jersey law, or NY law? For that matter, could it be considered fair to the NY company to require them to hire legal counsel for Jersey?
3) Numerous others: Employee benefits? Medical care?
New York is right here, folks. This guy is an *employee* of a NY company. Nothing here prevents you from starting your own company, and contracting out of state...
Slashdot Mirror
In the previous century, I had a bunch of Quantum brand hard drives fail due to "sticktion." The lubricant became a "glue" over time. The data recovery tech used a tape measure to drop the drive from a certain height, held at a certain angle, to "unstick" the heads. He'd plug the drives back in, and recover the data.
Man, oh man. You'll laugh when you read this!
In the days when 486/sx vs 486/dx was a going concern, when the AMD 386/40 was considered the best-kept-secret in the industry, I maintained a server. It was a 286/20, running Banyan Vines Network O/S. (Think Novell Netware)
And it had stiction problems. Bad. It had a full height, 5.25" HDD. (I don't remember how big it was, but it was certainly less than 100 MB)
It was loud. It was important that it continue to function. And, it had stiction problems. Operating instructions were: never let it spin down.
If it did, you had to, with power on, lift the computer, and twist it sharply so that the HDD spun back up, and then set the computer back down - GENTLY - and then use the reset button to start the O/S.
The funny part? It worked fine. As long as it was on, and the drive never spun down, it worked beatifully. (and somewhat noisily)
I owned a computer store for a number of years, and used my knowledge of stiction to recover data quite a number of times.
With the smaller 3.5" drives, they don't have anywhere near the radial inertia of that huge, 5.25", full-height drive, so you pretty much have to remove the drive from the computer, have it plugged in with just the cables (IE: the drive is in your hand) and give it a sharp twist "flat ways" like you were spinning a frisbee with the power on (or just before).
It sounds a little scary, and perhaps dangerous - but if the drive is dead already, what's to lose? I've never had a stiction drive that I couldn't get going using the above...
Or, I could just use Moz (which has MORE features, and seems about as fast as FF to me) and do it all with Ctl+R.
Hmm...
I know you're not a Comcast customer because you're online instead of suffering with their randomm DNS outages /rant of a fustrated Comcast customer.
Back in 1998, when I got my home DSL line from Pacific Bell (now SBC), it had a fixed IP address, and required no software to install. I still have the same line, same fixed IP address.
I had constant problems with Pac Bell's DNS, and Email relaying was intermittent and usually slow.
So, I got a cheezo (and I mean CHEEZO!) old pentium, Red Hat 6.x, and set up my own Email/DNS/NAT gateway. I worked at it, until I felt familiar with the *nix command line while doing all this. That computer, hardware upgraded a few times, and now running RedHat 7.2 with progeny updates for security patches, runs today, and is routing the packets this post is submitted on.
I was new to Linux. Time went by, and my skillset steadily improved with frequent hits to here, Root Prompt, Linux Today, the local Barnes and Noble for a big, fat book every few months, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
Now, years later, I get paid quite well by several companies to provide these exact services - Email, DNS, etc. as well as various Database and Web-based softwares.
Take your frustrations, and turn them to your advantage. It's a path. Walk it, work to be the best, and it'll pay nicely. Oh, and I never have problems with SBC's DNS or SMTP relays, since I haven't used either since 1998!
I've been using Moz since 0.5x on Linux. I've gotten very used to it.
I started using Firefox once 1.0 was released. I used it heavily, and for a while, it was my preferred browser. (Mainly because the bright orange icon was easier to find than the bluecurve icon on my FC3 laptop)
But, finally, I had to go back. Moz is just simply better. Having separate address and search bars is a stupid waste of space. The find being down at the bottom of the screen was... funky.
But the one that did it? Refresh on view source!
I develop web apps, and the ability to see raw output in HTML, do a tweak on the file on the server, and then hit reload while viewing source, and see the source update, was the straw that broke the Camel's back. In FF, I have to close the "view source" window, hit refresh, then View Source again.
Ugh.
I haven't uninstalled FF, but the icon is no longer on my desktop, and I really don't use it anymore.
Funny, how the STUPIDEST features can make the biggest differences, no?
What happens to wiretap laws when the gubmint is your ISP?
If I have a contract with, say, my excellent local service providers North Valley.net or the venerable Sunset.net , I do so with the understanding that
A) I'm contracting with a private entity, whose existence is perpetuated by the charges I pay, and
B) that the company has every legal right to examine my traffic for any purpose whatsoever, though generally it's going to be only to diagnose performance problems.
Because of "A", I know that they don't have any particular interest in examining my traffic and/or violating my trust and privacy beyond "keeping me happy". If word gets out that the admin at either of these companies is reading customer email, and maybe even silently forwarding private messages to other staff, there'd be hell to pay in the court of public opinion, and in the company's bottom line.
But, if the "gubmint" does it, why, it's simply called a "security matter". Rattle off a few department names (FBI, CIA, City Police, State Troopers, whatever) and everybody turns their head silently.
In this case, I think I'm on the side of the companies, even though I dislike their reasons for doing so.
I do not want my Internet service provided by an entity with a vested interest in violating my privacy, whether that interest is in the name of law enforcement, anti-terrorism, or just shits and giggles.
Apple is dying, Tivo is dying, BSD is dying, netflix is dying etc etc etc... /me is tired of hearing this kind of nonsense.
Don't forget the biggest fiction of all around here - Microsoft is DYING... (?)
For offsite backups, rsync is your friend. I wrote a nifty wrapper for rsync (in PHP) to manage backups of multiple systems and accounts with options so that unchanged copies of a file only hardlink to a single file.
I manage about 500 GB of data in backups over a 1.5 Mb line with this tool. I can "rollback"
files on the servers to any of a number of points in the past several months, since this tool does versioning. It works very, very well, and I have a complete, updated, off-site image of all the servers I manage every 24 hours!
If I ran a serious business starting today, <snip>
Except that you aren't. Come back when you've done it. Then, I'd honestly be interested in what you have to say.
Until then, you're just wishing, and I'm wasting my time if I listen...
Already about thirty years ago I observed people who ran obviously faulty pieces of code a second time hoping for a different outcome; my guess is that humans love voodo but that it ususally does not work. So I do not believe that there is another "Generation X" (whatever).
Dude, that's just human nature.
How many times have you stood in an elevator lobby, and watched somebody push the LIT UP arrow button?
Ask anybody, and they'll tell you that the fact that the light is lit means that somebody's already pushed the button, and that the elevator is on the way.
So... why do they push it, anyway? For that matter, it's been revealed that the crosswalk buttons in New York have been disconnected for a long time - yet people still push them, despite there being NO EVIDENCE that they do anything at all!
This not only predates the Intarweb, it predates western civilization, since people haven't really evolved much in the last 100,000 years.
Based on what I've see, EROS was put together by some ambitious, new programmers, who got hit in the teeth by the real world. Are there good ideas in there? Yeah, I'll bet - but how practical are they? At this point there's not even a baseline kernel going!
I remain hopeful, but pointing to this as anything near a pragmatic solution to any real-world problem is naive, at best.
I did a little research, and took the time to Email the guy "in charge", and got this response: (email addresses munged to protect the innocent)
You MUST be a 'softie'. You mixed apples and oranges, carefully gaming MSN to get the right answer...
Try giving MSN the same question Google was set to answer:
Try it. Not much better, is it?
I hope they pay you well...
I've found that with a combination of a few DNS Blacklists and greylisting, my previous SPAM count of several hundred to a thousand per day dropped to a few dozen.
.85-2.0 processing all the SPAM with SpamAssassin and MailScanner has dropped to about 0.05.
Yes, that's *alot* of SPAM, and that's because I have quite a number of addresses for me in my different capacities. I have my fingers in a couple of businesses, and also work for a number of other companies as a consultant and/or sysadmin.
The combination of DNS blacklists and greylisting has dropped probably 95-98% or more of the SPAM I was getting. I almost *never* have a false positive, and it's basically invisible to me. My mail server's load average that used to average
Once I started greylisting, I got rid of SpamAssassin altogether - the SPAM load was so light that all SA really did for me was to annoyingly mark a false positive from time to time.
If you wanted to actually use the O/S security mechanisms to bear in a meaningful way you would have to configure the Web server to respond to data access requests by spawning off a new process and locking it down with the appropriate system privs each time a privileged access was performed. This is technically possible in both Unix and Windows but it will grind the machine down if you try it with any appreciable load.
I don't know. But, this is the *ONLY* feature of Apache 2.x that I'd consider dropping 1.3.x for!
See this for some details on current activity
So what's the best way to capture your desktop as compressed video?
Take a look at a Qarbon viewlet - it turns part of your screen into a flash movie in just seconds!
Works on Windows, Mac, Linux... We have it, and use it for training videos for our software product - it's as easy as anything could be, and cross-platform to boot!
What is more interesting here is the derrivative. The perception of Windows is improving rapidly, the perception of Linux is pretty static.
Eh, you're kidding... right?
I've not seen that AT ALL. Windows security is an oxymoron, and people complain about it BITTERLY to me. I've been delivering Linux-only services for years, and it's all I can do to keep up with all the projects on my plate.
One of my clients is on the verge of switching about 50% of their desktop systems in use by their staff to Linux. They're evaluating it now. Issues I know of are: MS-Word (Hello Crossover Office!) and printing.
What "security action" should be going on in the Linux world that isn't? I have a modest number of servers on the 'net. The only one with security issues is one with a bazillion, ancient CGI scripts on it. (that for various reasons, I can't just have removed - ugh)
But, just in case, do you remember SELinux? Or perhaps LIDS?
Heck googling for "Linux Security" produced a few interesting results, right on the home page!
Next time, listen BEFORE you speak...
"closed source has no real advantage on open source." -->Except for that little thing called "Developers getting paid"...
Since when does being "closed-source" mean "getting paid"? Yes, many companies base their model on closed source. Many others base their model on open source, and make plenty of money.
So wake up and smell the coffee! Times change, and your FUD-like statements are just so provably wrong.
Didn't you see the article yesterday on how open source drives down the cost of startup?
Don't imply F/OSS isn't good for business. It's just not good for your limited understanding of business.
..but it must be able to support my PC games. Why can't the community get togeather and create an open API like Microsofts Direct-X? Why not call the Linux version "Open-X" and start writing/porting games for this. Hell, if it becomes popular enough, then all W32 users have to do is download and install said "Open X".
/. thread...
You have an itch, why don't you scratch it? Yes, that's the "default answer" and I know it may be unpopular among the "consumers", but if you want to create an Open-X, nobody's stopping you. Otherwise, STFU.
With F/OSS, "they" really is another way of saying "you", where "why don't they do NNN" is instantly translated to "why don't I do NNN?"...
It's not like anybody's asking you to learn to code or anything. If your idea has enough merit, and is agreed upon by those who code, either because of your idea or your funding, it'll happen.
Otherwise, this is just so much tripe in a
If you can get a company going for five figures, you have my respect. I am trying to get a startup going and after doing alot of analysis, the cheapest I think I can do it is for just over 7.
Then maybe:
1) You have a sucky idea. The best ideas are actually little more than a logical culmination of pre-existing forces, and really don't require the loss of a kidney to bring to fruition.
2) You have lousy marketing. You should be able to cover much of your initial cost in the first sale or two. If you can't, you might see #1 above, or maybe #5 below.
3) You lost the idea of a "partnership". Typically, you have at least two guys: a guy with the marketing skills, and a guy with the tech delivery skills. There may be a third/fourth partner depending on the situation. These people get together and get paid with a percentage of the company. It's typical to moonlight to provide food money during the startup phase. If you're lucky, your "day job" complements your new business.
4) You are fatally unrealistic in your cost analysis, see my earlier post about card tables. I just commented on managing costs a few minutes ago...
5) Lastly, maybe your idea is too big in scope. Start with something a bit smaller, or maybe just part of your idea, and get it working and profitable before biting the whole banana.
I've started a number of businesses - some I've run quite well, some have run straight into the ground. Be cheap, work hard, and focus on turning a profit ASAP. If it takes very long to get to profitability, from where I stand, you're walking the wrong road.
The expensive or difficult thing, item #0 is the IDEA, the thing that makes the startup actually worth something...
Phaw. Ideas are cheap. There are a million of them, and a good, healthy percentage of them can be quite profitable.
It's the combination of idea, product delivery, legal stability, financial competence, and (most especially) marketing that makes a startup fly.
I remember reading a while back about the "card table" test. The idea goes something like this:
When looking at a startup to invest in, visit their main offices. If they have nice, leather seats and elaborate furniture, take your investment capital elsewhere. They aren't prioritizing their investments on delivery.
On the other hand, if they are using cheap, Costco furniture and/or card tables, they are putting their money where it matters, and are much more likely to succeed.
How exactly would you suggest that they improve their software to prevent spam and phishing?
Perhaps you missed the fact that 80% of spam comes from zombied Windows computers?
Nope. Microsoft can't do ANYTHING about this, can they?
1) Programmer willing to work for percentage.
2) Midrange server on Ebay - $2000.
3) Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL - free
4) Electricity - Damn cheap...
5) Promotion expenses - $XX,000
Yep. I'd agree that startups now can be mighty cheap!
Today, the preferred system is 3Ghz, 64bit, with at least 2 gigs of RAM. Why? What's the point of such a powerful system? Speed! That's the point. Speed is important. Code efficiency is important. But, as programmers continue to deny this and produce poorly written and bloated/slow apps or use inefficient languages, the time will come when a 6Ghz processor is not enough. Doesn't that sound stupid?
Sure it does. But let's take a look at it:
1) It might cost the company an extra $25,000 to go through the performance tweaking to get it "right". Yes, a small team of coders, and a calendar month.
2) Let's say that they improve performance by 100%.
3) Assume that the software is server-based.
4) Cost to get software running "right" - $25,000. Cost to upgrade the server to a dual proc - $1,500. Which are YOU going to do?
I'd suggest that you read a bit more on the realities of software "BLOAT" before you go judging.
It's not what you think it is.
People, given the choice of better performance or better features will almost always choose the latter, because they can "do more". So, what's the economic incentive to hand-craft everything in assembler?
"c" is a compromise solution - I remember when it was considered a HIGH level language! The price/performance curve is always reshaping itself towards higher and higher level languages. Get used to it!
Back in the mid 1990s I registered two domains. Spam wasn't the problem it is now at the time, and I used a permanent E-mail address. A few years after that I started getting spammed constantly, mostly trying to push other domains or other domain registars at me, along with the weak phishing-type scams trying to make me think my domain had expired. Since then, even though the domains no longer exist, the amount of spam at that address has risen drastically. It gets hundreds a day now, and most of them can be attributed back to registering two domain names.
Bzzzzzt! I call bullshit.
I have about 50 domains that I control. My first and oldest, is "benjamindsmith.com". (Gee, what's my name?)
I've used the same registration address on it for years. Go ahead. Check the whois. See that email address? Hasn't been changed in f-ing years. I get maybe 1 spam/week on that address, protected only by greylisting and a few RBLs, no SPAM filters in place.
Also, how do you know that your address receiving the spam was obtained by the black hats via your domain registration? Perhaps it was one of those porn sites you visited while the wife was out of town?
In-N-Out Buger's menu consists of *nothing* but burgers, fries, and shakes, all of the highest quality...
Boy, if you think In-n-Out Buger [sic] is a good burger, you have been one deprived soul.
Here in Chico, CA there are two burger joints (Nobby's and Burger Hut, if you're curious) that blow the socks off anything ever made at that grease-pit-with-limp-fries called In-n-Out... Neither do anything particularly fancy, but just deliver a good burger, and are always packed around mealtimes.
I find your misspelling somewhat appropriate. In-n-Out has flashy lights, and a cool hip/retro "all-American" image, and that's why it sells. It sure as ---- isn't the food. It's that cool image that McDonalds has been copying recently.
Or is the rule just "if we want your money, we can take it"?
This guy isn't an independent contractor. He's an employee of a NY company, with no presense in the state he telecommutes from.
Doing it any other way would present a number of problems:
1) Increased administrative overhead on the part of the employing company due to dual tax rates and paperwork requirements.
2) Liability - if employee, working in Jersey, gets injured, his he going to sue under Jersey law, or NY law? For that matter, could it be considered fair to the NY company to require them to hire legal counsel for Jersey?
3) Numerous others: Employee benefits? Medical care?
New York is right here, folks. This guy is an *employee* of a NY company. Nothing here prevents you from starting your own company, and contracting out of state...