FWIW, I'm consistently quoted in real life print trade magazines. I can only find one article on the web (from 2002). Just do a search for my name (ADAM DADA) in the article for a little quote by me and a confirmation of my status as an IT specialist.
I generally don't defend my life, but the 2 e-mails I just received were violent enough that I felt a public post was necessary.
Judging by the fact that their stock is 423 bucks right now, there are at least a few people out there who believe Google is doing something right.
This is off topic a bit, but the reason Google is selling for US$423 is because the Federal Reserve central bank printed a massive amount of new (I'd call it counterfeit) currency before and during the dotcom boom. This money went everywhere, and eventually it all fell apart. Easy money (low interest rate and newly printed) gives people lowered risk when investing, so the stock market soaked it all up -- high supply of money caused a high demand in a low supply of stocks, forcing the price up.
After the dotbomb, all that money had to go somewhere -- it didn't just disappear. Google was a profitable company showing promise, so the money was chased into Google, forcing the stock price up. You can thank Greenspan's idiotic currency inflation policies for Google's price and housing prices, not people having faith necessarily.
You pay your employees $5.15/hr.? Could you give ma a general idea of how big your "large" bonus is?
My books are open to my employees -- they can see what the company takes in, what it pays out and what it writes off.
Most projects pay between 50% and 66% of the profits out as bonuses. About 25-30% of the project goes to overhead (salary and bills). The rest goes into my pocket. I've made bonuses of more than 30% of some projects, and in other projects I'll make 2%.
I believe we pay $6.15 per hour but I could be wrong. Minimum wage restricts all my employees of better income, though. If we could nuke minimum wage altogether, I'd likely pay up to 75-80% of project profits out as bonuses, and I'd be able to hire much younger employees who are hungry to learn and hungry to earn.
Yes. I pay myself minimum wage every month (I think I make about US$600 take home salary a month). I bonus myself a dividend at year's end and maybe at the half year as well. My employees all work exactly the same way, although I pay the bonuses at project end, not year's end.
You're right, you wouldn't hire me, because I wouldn't work for minimum wage.
So you'd rather say "I am worth US$80,000 per year" and be done with it. That's fine. My employees want more. They want to learn about business (all my accounting books are completely open to even the newest employee). They want to learn about collections and input costs. They want to learn how to manage crises. They want to get a piece of the action based on the profitability of their project (we're talking up to 66% profit sharing, not 3%). They want to work hard, knowing in a few years they could own their own business -- that I helped them finance.
I hate the term employees. I love the term future competition.
It is obvious from reading your post, and a quick look through your blog, that you have not worked in the IT field, and thus -- do not know what you're talking about.
Really? I started my first IT business almost 17 years ago. It has been in business all that time, grown every year, and has performed work on some of the largest commercial ventures in the Chicagoland area. I'm tired and have no desire to stay in the business more than another 3 years. Blogging is a new direction for me (I wrote paper newsletters for years that were successes and failures). Considering my company refused to go dotcom and continued to grow duing the dotbomb, I think I do know what I am talking about.
Me working for peanuts is not good for me, and I can't imagine how a low-wage earner of any career is good for the economy (except for banks).
Really? My employees that earn peanuts for a salary make a ton of money in bonuses. Some projects bonus out over 66% of the profit of the project. One of my top employees only works about 15 hours a week and he owns his condo, car and all his assets without loans. He's not even close to 30 years old.
Also, I've noticed that when I reduce my rate, people not hire me, even if I'm starving. Crank the rate back up, and I find myself consistantly employed.
This is VERY true. When I said I lowered my rate, I didn't mean going from $160 per hour to $40, I meant going from $160 per hour to $145 or so. Consider it a discount for past contracts, but it helped 75% of the time I presented it.
I don't like being treated like a slave laborer, either.
Only someone not willing to increase their abilities and offer their customers profits would be a slave. If you have value, you'll never be a slave, except to the State.
Do you think general business awareness is a skill in itself?
Absolutely. It is not learned in school, either. I am constantly amazed at how many massively profitable businesses bring on "business experts" who have huge paper backing without any real life experience. In the past 10 years, I've watched almost 5 big customers of mine go in the gutter over the advice of a guy with letters after his last name. America is quickly learning that MBA is not the key to running a good business: profitability, efficiency, and marketplace wanting your product/service is. It isn't so hard to understand.
I also think it can be taught/learned in the same way as good management.
I'm not sure. From my experience, the best managers are the people who understand both the needs of the employee from a human standpoint and the needs of the company from a profitability standpoint. For the majority of employees without management potential, this is a constant area of debate. For management, they see how effective it is to constantly balance the needs. In my experience, the best managers don't come out of college, and some of them barely finished high school. I did meet a fantastic manager with a Master's Degree, but he admitted that it was 'in his blood.'
Do you really think the supply of good quality IT workers is going up?
Absolutely not. In this country, the supply of quality workers is going down. My firm belief is that young men and women should get work experience as early as possible in life -- instead we focus on higher education in high school and college. I learned everything I needed to know about business between the ages of 13 to 15 by studying other businesses and trying things. I meet 20 year olds now who won't take a risk and start a business because "college experience is more important." I think there are far bigger risks to take when you are young, and this can lead to a higher quality work force.
The worst part of the workers in this country is the demands they make and our government backing those demands up. I don't want to get to that part of the debate because it always starts flame/troll wars, but let us just say that I feel the employee/employer trade shouldn't be regulated or restricted.:)
most of the guys coming in now are all hot on this certificate or that buzzword, but even those from an allegedly academic background often don't understand basic principles as much as everyone used to when the market was smaller and newer.
It isn't the market's oldness that is the problem, it is the fact that companies are losing ground VERY fast, and they're not sure what the problem is. People think it is the lack of "training" or being in the wrong business, but that is not the case. For the past 3 decades we've sown terrible policies (politically, educationally and in the workplace) and these policies are catching up with us. A very good friend has a son who is just starting out on his own business (the kid is 16) that I helped him start. He works cheaply, efficiently and in the first 3 months he has more opportunities than he could every handle. Why? Because he's willing to let the market set his price and his product instead of the other way around. Opening yourself to the realities of the marketplace is much more important since you'll be more willing to see where you are needed and for how much rather than say "This is how much I demand I get paid and this is how many hours I will work."
Nevermind the fact that all your employees are probably frustrated that you are busy trying see how much work you can squeeze out of them for how little money. You don't sound like the kind of person I would work very hard for.
I wouldn't hire someone with that attitude anyway. My goal with each and every person I hire is to see them competing with me in 5-10 years. Not a single employee of mine better stay an employee for the rest of their lives. I have a few ex-employees (one guy in his 50s) who are now subcontractors for me and not only work with me on projects, but against me on some.
A boss/owner has to always review how much the input costs are compared to how much their customers are willing to pay. This is part of the free market: a constantly changing demand and a constantly changing supply. If you think you're worth more than you are worth, your job will likely disappear and not be replaceable. Some bosses are twits: they will lose everything they've built over years (or generations) in order to save some overpaid employees. These employees lose their jobs when the business goes under, and they wonder why they can't get another job earning the same amount, even though they should have been canned years earlier.
I know of one IT guy who is earning a very strong 6 figures (his title is CTO) who knows very little of what is going on in the market. The company doesn't want to "have the talk" and offer him some training to catch up, and I know that he's preventing them from becoming the force they could be.
Life is about constantly refining your value by becoming MORE valuable. If what you're good at is on the verge of becoming antiquated, GET OUT OF THAT BUSINESS. Gas lamp lighters are gone, horse shoers too. Some IT jobs are useless and belong in third world countries.
I think it's a myth that IT jobs are declining -- I have more need for quality workers than I have ever had in 15 years of business. I believe I will have a 200-300% growth in 10 years if I wasn't on the verge of retiring from this market.
The reality, though, is that I constantly have to re-evaluate if my top paid employees are worth the money they're getting paid. I don't have as much trouble as do MOST IT employers -- my employees make minimum wage plus a large per-project bonus. I would pay less than minimum wage if I could (and more of a bonus), because it forces workers to become more efficient, and we all benefit from this.
Here's the kicker: as I see more decent workers come into the workforce, I see less reason to pay as much as I have in the past. Every dollar I save in wages and bonuses is almost $1.50 I can save my customers. I sell my business to my customers by guaranteeing a profit for them on every dollar they pay me. If I can save them that $1.50, I can show them more of a profit, for less expense. It is a win-win situation for the customer and myself, but it causes IT employees to cry foul.
This is a very strong part of the free market -- supply and demand. As the supply of quality IT workers goes up, demand has to go up equally for the price to stay constant. The demand HAS gone up, but I believe the supply is heading upwards at a much higher rate, hence a lower base pay. The second part of the free market that angers the average worker is that as the base pay gets lower, salaried workers have more reason to go off on their own (to earn that $1.50 instead of the $1.00), which increases competition, lowering prices even more.
This is GOOD for the economy and good for the world -- the less that companies pay for IT, the more money they have for other costs and investments, such as R&D or more efficient machinery. I personally have made more money in the years that I lowered my billing rate, as I found more customers willing to extend projects they didn't want to in previous years.
To stay on the topic, the hottest tech skills are less important (to me and my customers) than the ability to understand what IT does for a business: it should raise efficiency, it should allow multiple tasks to be performed by the same person, and it shouldn't interfere with the employees' abilities without increasing their abilities in some other area. IT should be profitable for a company, not an expense without gain.
If you want to be a valuable IT employee or consultant, figure out how you can make your customer (or employer) more money, so that you truly have value for the work you perform. If you are just an expense, you're not doing your job. This is true of ANY employee in ANY business, but most people ignore the realities of business and the market.
As someone who has been on the good and bad side of government letters, I think I know how the U.S. will take advantage of SMS notices.
First, they'll create a US$40 billion law that will help the IRS notify taxpayers of refunds they haven't received. Of course, the majority of this money will be lost and forgotten and taxpayers who sign up will get little more than a notification SMS -- if even that.
Second, ten years later, they'll bring back the system but this time they'll use it to notify taxpayers of deliquency -- after spending another US$100 billion to "fix" the system.
Third, they'll repeat the SMS message at least 20 times more than necessary, due to a bug, and when the taxpayer comes to pay their bill, they'll find out that they owe 20 times the original amount because the IRS is sure they would never send 20 notices of the exact same bill due to the same person unless that person actually owed the entire amount.
How did she end up with a loser such as yourself? Are you rich?
She wishes:) Actually, I wrote a book about 10 years ago (soon to be freely available on a blog I'm setting up in January) that gives geeks details on how to land hot chicks (for pleasure or for long term romance). I'm constantly surprised how many dorky guys end up with good looking women based on a few simple rules I concocted at the end of High School (up to which point I was a total failure with the ladies).
Any guy -- poor, fat, and bald even -- can date and even marry a very attractive female, if they know how to play their cards. The down side about hot women (not mine, in this case) is that a majority of them are completely crazy bipolar shells with no substance that will make your life miserable. My newest version of my (free) book will have a great deal of insight into how to deal with these freak jobs.
I probably shouldn't admit this. In my 1999 Subaru RS (now long sold, unfortunately, it was my favorite car) I had a Pioneer flip-out LCD screen (about 7" widescreen format). I modified a Sega Dreamcast to run off 12V DC (no inverter), and I made a Dreamcast controller port above the steering column.
I never played while driving, err, never much, that is. It wasn't hard to avoid the "no screen while driving" safety feature. My girlfriend (who later I married) forced me to rip it out, as I had always tempted fate. Hey, I was only 25 years old!
To get to the topic, I'm not sure how much I trust any safety features they might embed in the car to prevent someone from finding a really wide open piece of tarmac and actually playing while driving. In fact, I don't even trust MYSELF to try it. How much is the car, again?
By the way, it was really awesome driving an RS while playing as an older WRX on the mini screen. I never caused an accident, but I did get a lot of honked horns. And they say men are safer drivers over once they hit 25?
You're right -- but most common people differentiate between a website and a blog even though a blog IS a website and many personal/commentary websites ARE blogs.
The difference, I guess, is that popular blogs offer consistent updates, consistent viewpoints and consistent quality (whether good or bad). I know the people who come to my gold blog regularly are the ones who want to hear my opinion of gold for the day. The fact that return user numbers are growing (even though my blog is barely a month old) means there are those who like my views or the way I write them. I've had requests from some regular readers to make a podcast so they could listen to my views -- and I may take them up on it if time allows.
The great thing about vidcasts is that the technology IS getting better, and vidcasts can be easily distributed that are just a minute long. Attention spans are down, but we could easily acquire maybe 10 or 20 60 second vidcasts to watch on a train ride in or while we drink our coffee. These 10 or 20 would be from different people, possibly, with different topics. Instead of watching 30 minutes of very canned footage from your morning news broadcast, you could gain some knowledge, find insight in an opinion or even learn a new word from the variety of vidcasts that hit the scene.
My wife and I are starting a blog (mostly for family and friends) that is just a daily 60 seconds on a random topic. We always read up on some crazy topic for ourselves every morning, and our days are filled with people asking us what nutty thing we read about. We figured we'd spend the 5 minutes on this podcast, and see who is interested in it. I can easily see dozens of people having an interest in a snippet of audio, and a snippet of video is no different.
I've been speaking with numerous freedom writers about creating a daily podcast (and possibly a weekly vidcast even). I've come up with a simple way to overcome the "is this podcast download-worthy?" question -- just post transcripts. I've been working on a way to make my blogs both readable AND speakable so that people who don't have the desire to read them can also listen to them. One can take a 200 word blog post and make it a decent 10 minute OpEd podcast that extends on the ideas in the blog.
I'm looking forward to the first vidcasts. Knowing what the bottom looks like will give me a good view of what the possibilities are.
The truth is that what will be the biggest problems for video content from the web are Ugly people (its a cruel fact but most of us are not TV pretty), and poor production values.
You're telling me? I have a radio face (but my wife is hot, so I guess she could vidcast for me).
Basically what I am saying could be summed up in a piece of advice I was given upon entering the office world (which I have found to be true) "If you want people to think that you're smart stay in shape, get your teeth fixed, dress nicely, get a good haircut and stay well groomed."
This is very true for most people. I, on the other hand, have terrible teeth, dress inappropriately most of the time and have a shag of hair, and I still work with many big companies. Talent allows people to look beyond the basics, I guess. I definitely am not the right guy for vidcasting, but I could write good content for an actor who IS good at being in front of a camera.
Do you really need to tell the world how much you hate copyright law in every post you make?
I make a lot of posts. My view on copyright is a RARE opinion, but the only way to make an opinion heard is to be consistent. On another note, slashdot has millions of unique visitors monthly, so who knows who has heard me before and who hasn't. And on top of all that, I love to hear the debates which do help me formulate better opinions and theories. As long as copyright is part of the discussion, it isn't wrong for me to say why I hate copyright and I feel it hurts all of us.
Add me to your foe list and moderate foes down -5. Easy solution, right?
I find this position slightly disturbing. Well, more than slightly.
Most people do, which is why I am working so hard to work out my ability to debate why I feel that I am "right."
Has copyright law gotten out of hand?
Every law has gotten out of hand. Copyright especially so. It seems that every thing we allow to be regulated ends up only being controlled by cartels. This isn't how it should be, freedom is for the individual, not the elite.
If you write a book or compose a symphony, you SHOULD have the exclusive copyright on that work.
I disagree. I believe in complete physical property rights -- you make a book, you control the physical book. I will never agree with controlling the thoughts and actions of others (as long as they don't hurt anyone else's PHYSICAL property). I write, but I give my writings away in hopes that I will be hired to speak to people interested in what I write. I've helped bands do the same with their music.
I find it crazy that someone thinks copyright is good because it enables maybe 10 writers a year to make millions, and forces millions of writers a year to make nothing. Copyright creates cartels like the RIAA, the MPAA and the book publishing cartels. No one profits from copyright by those who control the rights to copying en masse. No thanks.
However, as long as there are enough visible attitudes like yours, DRM development will continue at the expense of Fair Use.
I don't believe in Fair Use, either. If I have something in my hand, I should be able to use it as I please, as long as it hurts no one else's property or body directly. If you don't want an idea copied, don't put it in writing or in physical form at all. That is a basic premise in life. Copyright is using a group of thugs with guns to force how another person acts. That is wrong.
There's no need to prove what is already out there. I'm not trying to become nationally or internationally renown, and I do just fine with what I have. The dozens or so slashdotters on here who have met me personally is all I need, and proving to you what my life is or isn't won't gain me any profit. If you don't believe me, come to the Midwest and I'll be happy to have you over at my place for coffee and decent debate. I'm always meeting people I've met through web forums. Amazing how nice some of my biggest enemies can be!
It is completely wrong to go out and say something like this without looking at the realities of any given creative market: the more people producing content, the more likely we are to find a few diamonds in the rough.
If 100,000 teens make vidblogs, they'll probably be terrible. Many will publish one, maybe 3 vidcasts and then stop. Yet I still believe that 1 out of 100,000 could make something worth viewing, and once we find it, we'll let others know.
I've been working with video since my Junior High School days. I started a video/film production house when I was 20 and sold it when I was 23: video was not ready for prime time then, because distribution was in the hands of the cartels, as it still is today.
BitTorrent and blogs have changed everything. I can seed a torrent and post it to my blog. RSS encapsulating these two devices will really make distribution easier for the layman.
The video editing capabilities of most new PCs surpasses what I had just 10 years ago! The easier it is to make, the more garbage we'll see, but the more likely it is that good content will be created by some rare creator.
I don't see vidcasting as a talking head-only style broadcast. I see documentary-style vidblogs (with a cameraman) and even numerous theatre-group concoctions to get recognition for their talent. I can even see the possibility of decent stories being videocast by student actors and geeks with free time. Give it time and the content will get better. Hell, most blogs are terrible, but if a writer wants to get better, we now have dozens of good "how to blog" blogs that ARE making a difference. Why would videocasting be any different?
The step from blogging to podcasting is big and takes time and talent to do properly. The step from podcasting to vidcasting is even bigger and takes even more time and more talent, but you can't dismiss it just because you're afraid that 1 million kids with videophones will clutter up your browser. They won't. You don't like it, you don't access it. There are millions of blogs I don't read, but the 10 or 15 that are well produced I read daily. I listen to 2 or 3 podcasts with regularity (that get better every day). I'll watch vidcasts as well, and the more people that are willing to try it, the more likely we are to see quality productions.
Since you've never lived in a society without copyright, how are you so sure you're going to enjoy it?
I look at the fact that I've earned a VERY good living the past 18 years by providing all my "creative" productions for free, and have never asked anyone to give me a dime or even give me recognition. My company wrote a very popular (in our market area) POP3/SMTP server over a decade ago that we gave away freely, and it made us a ton of cash in service. I write a few newsletters that I freely mail out (costing me thousands annually) that makes me decent money on speaking engagements. I've written 2 books that I've handed out person to person that nets me about $20 per reader (I request the money at the end of the book and I've received more than I've paid to get the books out). I've produced a few indie bands that have made more money giving away their music and not binding the listeners to copyright -- they make their money producing live music for their fans.
I see no need for copyright, and I've made good money without it. The only people I see making money WITH copyright are the publishing cartels, never the artists (except in extremely rare cases).
If you're a publisher, artist, musician or writer, don't look at copyright to make you rich. Hard work and getting out to see your fans makes you wealthier than protecting you work from unlimited copying.
These protocols need one or more centralized server(s) to function properly.
That isn't true at all. P2P is finding ways to de-centralize more and more every day.
The idea of a third party intermediary is not unheard of -- in fact, there are numerous BitTorrent replacement protocols being developed right now that take advantage of another user on a network to mask the sender and receiver from one-another. You can go out and get the latest "pirate" MP3, but you have no idea who you're getting it from and they have no idea who they're sending it to. I find that this is a better way to keep over-regulation of the Internet down, and uphold the right to free expression.
Another idiotic idea. Why the hell would I want to spend my time LOOKING for the website I want, instead of just plain visiting it? Yes, this WOULD require me to look for the website. Also, security (Login information, et cetera) is practically impossible in such situations.
I'm an anarchocapitalist, and I hate knowing that DNS will likely be the control system our governments user to censor the information out there. I'm constantly trying to find theories in how we could use the Internet without central regulation (such as DNS), and I feel that networks are becoming more and more transparent to domain names as time goes on. Yes, google and other search engines rely on domain names but this is merely to keep things simple. Over time I believe we'll see search engines develop that completely ignore domain names -- although how we'd link to one another is another problem, but that is being worked on as well.
This is interesting but I don't think that BitTorrent-style is the right way to go about it. The browser will definitely be the new "feel the pulse of society" provision, but what is going to be the best way to get that feel?
There are other protocols that, in my opinion, are better that BT. I've seen a few that use other (third party) users to mask both the sender and receiver from one-another. I believe this is going to be important especially when it comes to government regulation and censorship. I'm anti-copyright, so I couldn't care less about who owns what.
I believe the next step beyond the protocol will be the need to find a way to properly packet-ize information better. I guess ZIP or RAR is fine, but it isn't enough. A sender of any media (website, file, e-mail, etc) would need to implement the data into a packet and set that packet as public or private. Public packets could be dropped into the "Sharing" folder, which replaces the temporary internet files folder completely. Users would instantly share the webpage packets, the image packets and even the music or programs they download.
Popular files would be much easier to get, and the shortcomings of BitTorrent in terms of censorship would be greatly reduced. I could even see a future where we could do away with DNS in the long term as we could access webpages or other information through this network of shared temporary file folders. No need to host your own information on a server, just drop it into your share/temp folder and let others find it via whatever search engine or "torrent host" they use.
I like your comments, but I don't really agree with the last part:
Now, more than ever, we need the society building power of professional journalism.
I disagree. The journalists are part of the reason of the failure of the media in recent years. The news seems to just be regurgitating whatever is written by Reuters or the other newswire agencies. I can flip to 5 different news networks on TV and get the same news that will be in tomorrow's newspaper. Yay.
Journalists, to me, are people who keep journals of their opinions and of the news of the day -- and I like to see DIFFERENT reports, not the same damn things. I don't care one bit about national news, why should anyone? I want to know what is happening locally and in specific markets, I don't care that some baby was murdered 500 miles away, or that some new corporation was caught ripping off shareholders.
The next generation loves real time custom news. Bandwidth-everywhere will give them what they want. I don't really think well written news is as important as it was for our generation (I gave up the newspaper when I was 15, about 16 years ago!) and I don't think the radio and the TV are that important either. Podcasts will go from being updated in the morning to being updated wirelessly soon enough. Vidcasts will gain strength, and you'll see RSS readers built into phones and iPods, too.
The media is screwed if they continue on the path they're on. I like it, actually. Less advertising dollars spent mean cheaper products so I can afford more. Those who want to advertise will have millions of websites to target directly or with AdWords, but the targeting will be more accurate rather than trying to hi 100,000,000 viewers or 1,000,000 listeners with generic messages.
Online sites in generally haven't gotten it right. If you can't read it on the porcelein throne, it isn't perfect.
That being said, look at what online publishers have to deal with: non-uniformity. HTML is very powerful, but we still can't guarantee that an article will look as nice on everyone else's monitor as it does on the publisher's. Digital fonts still have a VERY long way to go versus paper printed ones -- kerning and other newspaper processes are not as easy to perform in HTML.
PDF is a solution, but not a good one. HTML is far faster on every connection than PDF ever will be (try getting PDFs to look good on your mobile device).
AJAX won't help here because we're mostly talking about static data, and you run up against the different resolutions, screen sizes and operating system problems again.
I've seen some sites that use preset pixel-sizes tables and frames, and that keeps the site more consistent in look-and-feel, but still doesn't look the same system to system and browser to browser. If you have a huge monitor or a tiny one, these pages are a pain to browse.
Raster? Too big and too restrictive.
Flash? Does anyone actually use flash for content anymore?
I can't figure it out -- and I do believe that whoever DOES figure it out will have a pretty penny hitting them from the dead tree publishers.
I've been working on that problem for nearly 15 years. It bugged me back in my BBS running days. My only "solutions" I've come up with is to dump the browser entirely and offer "newspaper skins" for another type of Internet program: something that grabs raw articles from RSS or other feeds, displays them in the format YOU want to read them in, and even print them out newspaper-style. It isn't a great solution since it would require another app on devices that already are being app-downsized. RSS is key in this situation, but I don't think the RSS reader is the best way to display the information.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, I'm consistently quoted in real life print trade magazines. I can only find one article on the web (from 2002). Just do a search for my name (ADAM DADA) in the article for a little quote by me and a confirmation of my status as an IT specialist.
I generally don't defend my life, but the 2 e-mails I just received were violent enough that I felt a public post was necessary.
Judging by the fact that their stock is 423 bucks right now, there are at least a few people out there who believe Google is doing something right.
This is off topic a bit, but the reason Google is selling for US$423 is because the Federal Reserve central bank printed a massive amount of new (I'd call it counterfeit) currency before and during the dotcom boom. This money went everywhere, and eventually it all fell apart. Easy money (low interest rate and newly printed) gives people lowered risk when investing, so the stock market soaked it all up -- high supply of money caused a high demand in a low supply of stocks, forcing the price up.
After the dotbomb, all that money had to go somewhere -- it didn't just disappear. Google was a profitable company showing promise, so the money was chased into Google, forcing the stock price up. You can thank Greenspan's idiotic currency inflation policies for Google's price and housing prices, not people having faith necessarily.
You pay your employees $5.15/hr.? Could you give ma a general idea of how big your "large" bonus is?
My books are open to my employees -- they can see what the company takes in, what it pays out and what it writes off.
Most projects pay between 50% and 66% of the profits out as bonuses. About 25-30% of the project goes to overhead (salary and bills). The rest goes into my pocket. I've made bonuses of more than 30% of some projects, and in other projects I'll make 2%.
I believe we pay $6.15 per hour but I could be wrong. Minimum wage restricts all my employees of better income, though. If we could nuke minimum wage altogether, I'd likely pay up to 75-80% of project profits out as bonuses, and I'd be able to hire much younger employees who are hungry to learn and hungry to earn.
Do YOU work for minimum wage?
Yes. I pay myself minimum wage every month (I think I make about US$600 take home salary a month). I bonus myself a dividend at year's end and maybe at the half year as well. My employees all work exactly the same way, although I pay the bonuses at project end, not year's end.
You're right, you wouldn't hire me, because I wouldn't work for minimum wage.
So you'd rather say "I am worth US$80,000 per year" and be done with it. That's fine. My employees want more. They want to learn about business (all my accounting books are completely open to even the newest employee). They want to learn about collections and input costs. They want to learn how to manage crises. They want to get a piece of the action based on the profitability of their project (we're talking up to 66% profit sharing, not 3%). They want to work hard, knowing in a few years they could own their own business -- that I helped them finance.
I hate the term employees. I love the term future competition.
It is obvious from reading your post, and a quick look through your blog, that you have not worked in the IT field, and thus -- do not know what you're talking about.
Really? I started my first IT business almost 17 years ago. It has been in business all that time, grown every year, and has performed work on some of the largest commercial ventures in the Chicagoland area. I'm tired and have no desire to stay in the business more than another 3 years. Blogging is a new direction for me (I wrote paper newsletters for years that were successes and failures). Considering my company refused to go dotcom and continued to grow duing the dotbomb, I think I do know what I am talking about.
Me working for peanuts is not good for me, and I can't imagine how a low-wage earner of any career is good for the economy (except for banks).
Really? My employees that earn peanuts for a salary make a ton of money in bonuses. Some projects bonus out over 66% of the profit of the project. One of my top employees only works about 15 hours a week and he owns his condo, car and all his assets without loans. He's not even close to 30 years old.
Also, I've noticed that when I reduce my rate, people not hire me, even if I'm starving. Crank the rate back up, and I find myself consistantly employed.
This is VERY true. When I said I lowered my rate, I didn't mean going from $160 per hour to $40, I meant going from $160 per hour to $145 or so. Consider it a discount for past contracts, but it helped 75% of the time I presented it.
I don't like being treated like a slave laborer, either.
Only someone not willing to increase their abilities and offer their customers profits would be a slave. If you have value, you'll never be a slave, except to the State.
Do you think general business awareness is a skill in itself?
:)
Absolutely. It is not learned in school, either. I am constantly amazed at how many massively profitable businesses bring on "business experts" who have huge paper backing without any real life experience. In the past 10 years, I've watched almost 5 big customers of mine go in the gutter over the advice of a guy with letters after his last name. America is quickly learning that MBA is not the key to running a good business: profitability, efficiency, and marketplace wanting your product/service is. It isn't so hard to understand.
I also think it can be taught/learned in the same way as good management.
I'm not sure. From my experience, the best managers are the people who understand both the needs of the employee from a human standpoint and the needs of the company from a profitability standpoint. For the majority of employees without management potential, this is a constant area of debate. For management, they see how effective it is to constantly balance the needs. In my experience, the best managers don't come out of college, and some of them barely finished high school. I did meet a fantastic manager with a Master's Degree, but he admitted that it was 'in his blood.'
Do you really think the supply of good quality IT workers is going up?
Absolutely not. In this country, the supply of quality workers is going down. My firm belief is that young men and women should get work experience as early as possible in life -- instead we focus on higher education in high school and college. I learned everything I needed to know about business between the ages of 13 to 15 by studying other businesses and trying things. I meet 20 year olds now who won't take a risk and start a business because "college experience is more important." I think there are far bigger risks to take when you are young, and this can lead to a higher quality work force.
The worst part of the workers in this country is the demands they make and our government backing those demands up. I don't want to get to that part of the debate because it always starts flame/troll wars, but let us just say that I feel the employee/employer trade shouldn't be regulated or restricted.
most of the guys coming in now are all hot on this certificate or that buzzword, but even those from an allegedly academic background often don't understand basic principles as much as everyone used to when the market was smaller and newer.
It isn't the market's oldness that is the problem, it is the fact that companies are losing ground VERY fast, and they're not sure what the problem is. People think it is the lack of "training" or being in the wrong business, but that is not the case. For the past 3 decades we've sown terrible policies (politically, educationally and in the workplace) and these policies are catching up with us. A very good friend has a son who is just starting out on his own business (the kid is 16) that I helped him start. He works cheaply, efficiently and in the first 3 months he has more opportunities than he could every handle. Why? Because he's willing to let the market set his price and his product instead of the other way around. Opening yourself to the realities of the marketplace is much more important since you'll be more willing to see where you are needed and for how much rather than say "This is how much I demand I get paid and this is how many hours I will work."
Nevermind the fact that all your employees are probably frustrated that you are busy trying see how much work you can squeeze out of them for how little money. You don't sound like the kind of person I would work very hard for.
I wouldn't hire someone with that attitude anyway. My goal with each and every person I hire is to see them competing with me in 5-10 years. Not a single employee of mine better stay an employee for the rest of their lives. I have a few ex-employees (one guy in his 50s) who are now subcontractors for me and not only work with me on projects, but against me on some.
A boss/owner has to always review how much the input costs are compared to how much their customers are willing to pay. This is part of the free market: a constantly changing demand and a constantly changing supply. If you think you're worth more than you are worth, your job will likely disappear and not be replaceable. Some bosses are twits: they will lose everything they've built over years (or generations) in order to save some overpaid employees. These employees lose their jobs when the business goes under, and they wonder why they can't get another job earning the same amount, even though they should have been canned years earlier.
I know of one IT guy who is earning a very strong 6 figures (his title is CTO) who knows very little of what is going on in the market. The company doesn't want to "have the talk" and offer him some training to catch up, and I know that he's preventing them from becoming the force they could be.
Life is about constantly refining your value by becoming MORE valuable. If what you're good at is on the verge of becoming antiquated, GET OUT OF THAT BUSINESS. Gas lamp lighters are gone, horse shoers too. Some IT jobs are useless and belong in third world countries.
I think it's a myth that IT jobs are declining -- I have more need for quality workers than I have ever had in 15 years of business. I believe I will have a 200-300% growth in 10 years if I wasn't on the verge of retiring from this market.
The reality, though, is that I constantly have to re-evaluate if my top paid employees are worth the money they're getting paid. I don't have as much trouble as do MOST IT employers -- my employees make minimum wage plus a large per-project bonus. I would pay less than minimum wage if I could (and more of a bonus), because it forces workers to become more efficient, and we all benefit from this.
Here's the kicker: as I see more decent workers come into the workforce, I see less reason to pay as much as I have in the past. Every dollar I save in wages and bonuses is almost $1.50 I can save my customers. I sell my business to my customers by guaranteeing a profit for them on every dollar they pay me. If I can save them that $1.50, I can show them more of a profit, for less expense. It is a win-win situation for the customer and myself, but it causes IT employees to cry foul.
This is a very strong part of the free market -- supply and demand. As the supply of quality IT workers goes up, demand has to go up equally for the price to stay constant. The demand HAS gone up, but I believe the supply is heading upwards at a much higher rate, hence a lower base pay. The second part of the free market that angers the average worker is that as the base pay gets lower, salaried workers have more reason to go off on their own (to earn that $1.50 instead of the $1.00), which increases competition, lowering prices even more.
This is GOOD for the economy and good for the world -- the less that companies pay for IT, the more money they have for other costs and investments, such as R&D or more efficient machinery. I personally have made more money in the years that I lowered my billing rate, as I found more customers willing to extend projects they didn't want to in previous years.
To stay on the topic, the hottest tech skills are less important (to me and my customers) than the ability to understand what IT does for a business: it should raise efficiency, it should allow multiple tasks to be performed by the same person, and it shouldn't interfere with the employees' abilities without increasing their abilities in some other area. IT should be profitable for a company, not an expense without gain.
If you want to be a valuable IT employee or consultant, figure out how you can make your customer (or employer) more money, so that you truly have value for the work you perform. If you are just an expense, you're not doing your job. This is true of ANY employee in ANY business, but most people ignore the realities of business and the market.
As someone who has been on the good and bad side of government letters, I think I know how the U.S. will take advantage of SMS notices.
First, they'll create a US$40 billion law that will help the IRS notify taxpayers of refunds they haven't received. Of course, the majority of this money will be lost and forgotten and taxpayers who sign up will get little more than a notification SMS -- if even that.
Second, ten years later, they'll bring back the system but this time they'll use it to notify taxpayers of deliquency -- after spending another US$100 billion to "fix" the system.
Third, they'll repeat the SMS message at least 20 times more than necessary, due to a bug, and when the taxpayer comes to pay their bill, they'll find out that they owe 20 times the original amount because the IRS is sure they would never send 20 notices of the exact same bill due to the same person unless that person actually owed the entire amount.
Computers don't make mistakes, right?
How did she end up with a loser such as yourself? Are you rich?
:) Actually, I wrote a book about 10 years ago (soon to be freely available on a blog I'm setting up in January) that gives geeks details on how to land hot chicks (for pleasure or for long term romance). I'm constantly surprised how many dorky guys end up with good looking women based on a few simple rules I concocted at the end of High School (up to which point I was a total failure with the ladies).
She wishes
Any guy -- poor, fat, and bald even -- can date and even marry a very attractive female, if they know how to play their cards. The down side about hot women (not mine, in this case) is that a majority of them are completely crazy bipolar shells with no substance that will make your life miserable. My newest version of my (free) book will have a great deal of insight into how to deal with these freak jobs.
I'd play you but I spilled some Hot Coffee in my lap going through the drive thru.
I probably shouldn't admit this. In my 1999 Subaru RS (now long sold, unfortunately, it was my favorite car) I had a Pioneer flip-out LCD screen (about 7" widescreen format). I modified a Sega Dreamcast to run off 12V DC (no inverter), and I made a Dreamcast controller port above the steering column.
I never played while driving, err, never much, that is. It wasn't hard to avoid the "no screen while driving" safety feature. My girlfriend (who later I married) forced me to rip it out, as I had always tempted fate. Hey, I was only 25 years old!
To get to the topic, I'm not sure how much I trust any safety features they might embed in the car to prevent someone from finding a really wide open piece of tarmac and actually playing while driving. In fact, I don't even trust MYSELF to try it. How much is the car, again?
By the way, it was really awesome driving an RS while playing as an older WRX on the mini screen. I never caused an accident, but I did get a lot of honked horns. And they say men are safer drivers over once they hit 25?
You're right -- but most common people differentiate between a website and a blog even though a blog IS a website and many personal/commentary websites ARE blogs.
The difference, I guess, is that popular blogs offer consistent updates, consistent viewpoints and consistent quality (whether good or bad). I know the people who come to my gold blog regularly are the ones who want to hear my opinion of gold for the day. The fact that return user numbers are growing (even though my blog is barely a month old) means there are those who like my views or the way I write them. I've had requests from some regular readers to make a podcast so they could listen to my views -- and I may take them up on it if time allows.
The great thing about vidcasts is that the technology IS getting better, and vidcasts can be easily distributed that are just a minute long. Attention spans are down, but we could easily acquire maybe 10 or 20 60 second vidcasts to watch on a train ride in or while we drink our coffee. These 10 or 20 would be from different people, possibly, with different topics. Instead of watching 30 minutes of very canned footage from your morning news broadcast, you could gain some knowledge, find insight in an opinion or even learn a new word from the variety of vidcasts that hit the scene.
My wife and I are starting a blog (mostly for family and friends) that is just a daily 60 seconds on a random topic. We always read up on some crazy topic for ourselves every morning, and our days are filled with people asking us what nutty thing we read about. We figured we'd spend the 5 minutes on this podcast, and see who is interested in it. I can easily see dozens of people having an interest in a snippet of audio, and a snippet of video is no different.
Good points.
I've been speaking with numerous freedom writers about creating a daily podcast (and possibly a weekly vidcast even). I've come up with a simple way to overcome the "is this podcast download-worthy?" question -- just post transcripts. I've been working on a way to make my blogs both readable AND speakable so that people who don't have the desire to read them can also listen to them. One can take a 200 word blog post and make it a decent 10 minute OpEd podcast that extends on the ideas in the blog.
I'm looking forward to the first vidcasts. Knowing what the bottom looks like will give me a good view of what the possibilities are.
The truth is that what will be the biggest problems for video content from the web are Ugly people (its a cruel fact but most of us are not TV pretty), and poor production values.
You're telling me? I have a radio face (but my wife is hot, so I guess she could vidcast for me).
Basically what I am saying could be summed up in a piece of advice I was given upon entering the office world (which I have found to be true) "If you want people to think that you're smart stay in shape, get your teeth fixed, dress nicely, get a good haircut and stay well groomed."
This is very true for most people. I, on the other hand, have terrible teeth, dress inappropriately most of the time and have a shag of hair, and I still work with many big companies. Talent allows people to look beyond the basics, I guess. I definitely am not the right guy for vidcasting, but I could write good content for an actor who IS good at being in front of a camera.
Do you really need to tell the world how much you hate copyright law in every post you make?
I make a lot of posts. My view on copyright is a RARE opinion, but the only way to make an opinion heard is to be consistent. On another note, slashdot has millions of unique visitors monthly, so who knows who has heard me before and who hasn't. And on top of all that, I love to hear the debates which do help me formulate better opinions and theories. As long as copyright is part of the discussion, it isn't wrong for me to say why I hate copyright and I feel it hurts all of us.
Add me to your foe list and moderate foes down -5. Easy solution, right?
I find this position slightly disturbing. Well, more than slightly.
Most people do, which is why I am working so hard to work out my ability to debate why I feel that I am "right."
Has copyright law gotten out of hand?
Every law has gotten out of hand. Copyright especially so. It seems that every thing we allow to be regulated ends up only being controlled by cartels. This isn't how it should be, freedom is for the individual, not the elite.
If you write a book or compose a symphony, you SHOULD have the exclusive copyright on that work.
I disagree. I believe in complete physical property rights -- you make a book, you control the physical book. I will never agree with controlling the thoughts and actions of others (as long as they don't hurt anyone else's PHYSICAL property). I write, but I give my writings away in hopes that I will be hired to speak to people interested in what I write. I've helped bands do the same with their music.
I find it crazy that someone thinks copyright is good because it enables maybe 10 writers a year to make millions, and forces millions of writers a year to make nothing. Copyright creates cartels like the RIAA, the MPAA and the book publishing cartels. No one profits from copyright by those who control the rights to copying en masse. No thanks.
However, as long as there are enough visible attitudes like yours, DRM development will continue at the expense of Fair Use.
I don't believe in Fair Use, either. If I have something in my hand, I should be able to use it as I please, as long as it hurts no one else's property or body directly. If you don't want an idea copied, don't put it in writing or in physical form at all. That is a basic premise in life. Copyright is using a group of thugs with guns to force how another person acts. That is wrong.
There's no need to prove what is already out there. I'm not trying to become nationally or internationally renown, and I do just fine with what I have. The dozens or so slashdotters on here who have met me personally is all I need, and proving to you what my life is or isn't won't gain me any profit. If you don't believe me, come to the Midwest and I'll be happy to have you over at my place for coffee and decent debate. I'm always meeting people I've met through web forums. Amazing how nice some of my biggest enemies can be!
It is completely wrong to go out and say something like this without looking at the realities of any given creative market: the more people producing content, the more likely we are to find a few diamonds in the rough.
If 100,000 teens make vidblogs, they'll probably be terrible. Many will publish one, maybe 3 vidcasts and then stop. Yet I still believe that 1 out of 100,000 could make something worth viewing, and once we find it, we'll let others know.
I've been working with video since my Junior High School days. I started a video/film production house when I was 20 and sold it when I was 23: video was not ready for prime time then, because distribution was in the hands of the cartels, as it still is today.
BitTorrent and blogs have changed everything. I can seed a torrent and post it to my blog. RSS encapsulating these two devices will really make distribution easier for the layman.
The video editing capabilities of most new PCs surpasses what I had just 10 years ago! The easier it is to make, the more garbage we'll see, but the more likely it is that good content will be created by some rare creator.
I don't see vidcasting as a talking head-only style broadcast. I see documentary-style vidblogs (with a cameraman) and even numerous theatre-group concoctions to get recognition for their talent. I can even see the possibility of decent stories being videocast by student actors and geeks with free time. Give it time and the content will get better. Hell, most blogs are terrible, but if a writer wants to get better, we now have dozens of good "how to blog" blogs that ARE making a difference. Why would videocasting be any different?
The step from blogging to podcasting is big and takes time and talent to do properly. The step from podcasting to vidcasting is even bigger and takes even more time and more talent, but you can't dismiss it just because you're afraid that 1 million kids with videophones will clutter up your browser. They won't. You don't like it, you don't access it. There are millions of blogs I don't read, but the 10 or 15 that are well produced I read daily. I listen to 2 or 3 podcasts with regularity (that get better every day). I'll watch vidcasts as well, and the more people that are willing to try it, the more likely we are to see quality productions.
Since you've never lived in a society without copyright, how are you so sure you're going to enjoy it?
I look at the fact that I've earned a VERY good living the past 18 years by providing all my "creative" productions for free, and have never asked anyone to give me a dime or even give me recognition. My company wrote a very popular (in our market area) POP3/SMTP server over a decade ago that we gave away freely, and it made us a ton of cash in service. I write a few newsletters that I freely mail out (costing me thousands annually) that makes me decent money on speaking engagements. I've written 2 books that I've handed out person to person that nets me about $20 per reader (I request the money at the end of the book and I've received more than I've paid to get the books out). I've produced a few indie bands that have made more money giving away their music and not binding the listeners to copyright -- they make their money producing live music for their fans.
I see no need for copyright, and I've made good money without it. The only people I see making money WITH copyright are the publishing cartels, never the artists (except in extremely rare cases).
If you're a publisher, artist, musician or writer, don't look at copyright to make you rich. Hard work and getting out to see your fans makes you wealthier than protecting you work from unlimited copying.
These protocols need one or more centralized server(s) to function properly.
That isn't true at all. P2P is finding ways to de-centralize more and more every day.
The idea of a third party intermediary is not unheard of -- in fact, there are numerous BitTorrent replacement protocols being developed right now that take advantage of another user on a network to mask the sender and receiver from one-another. You can go out and get the latest "pirate" MP3, but you have no idea who you're getting it from and they have no idea who they're sending it to. I find that this is a better way to keep over-regulation of the Internet down, and uphold the right to free expression.
Another idiotic idea. Why the hell would I want to spend my time LOOKING for the website I want, instead of just plain visiting it? Yes, this WOULD require me to look for the website. Also, security (Login information, et cetera) is practically impossible in such situations.
I'm an anarchocapitalist, and I hate knowing that DNS will likely be the control system our governments user to censor the information out there. I'm constantly trying to find theories in how we could use the Internet without central regulation (such as DNS), and I feel that networks are becoming more and more transparent to domain names as time goes on. Yes, google and other search engines rely on domain names but this is merely to keep things simple. Over time I believe we'll see search engines develop that completely ignore domain names -- although how we'd link to one another is another problem, but that is being worked on as well.
This is interesting but I don't think that BitTorrent-style is the right way to go about it. The browser will definitely be the new "feel the pulse of society" provision, but what is going to be the best way to get that feel?
There are other protocols that, in my opinion, are better that BT. I've seen a few that use other (third party) users to mask both the sender and receiver from one-another. I believe this is going to be important especially when it comes to government regulation and censorship. I'm anti-copyright, so I couldn't care less about who owns what.
I believe the next step beyond the protocol will be the need to find a way to properly packet-ize information better. I guess ZIP or RAR is fine, but it isn't enough. A sender of any media (website, file, e-mail, etc) would need to implement the data into a packet and set that packet as public or private. Public packets could be dropped into the "Sharing" folder, which replaces the temporary internet files folder completely. Users would instantly share the webpage packets, the image packets and even the music or programs they download.
Popular files would be much easier to get, and the shortcomings of BitTorrent in terms of censorship would be greatly reduced. I could even see a future where we could do away with DNS in the long term as we could access webpages or other information through this network of shared temporary file folders. No need to host your own information on a server, just drop it into your share/temp folder and let others find it via whatever search engine or "torrent host" they use.
I like your comments, but I don't really agree with the last part:
Now, more than ever, we need the society building power of professional journalism.
I disagree. The journalists are part of the reason of the failure of the media in recent years. The news seems to just be regurgitating whatever is written by Reuters or the other newswire agencies. I can flip to 5 different news networks on TV and get the same news that will be in tomorrow's newspaper. Yay.
Journalists, to me, are people who keep journals of their opinions and of the news of the day -- and I like to see DIFFERENT reports, not the same damn things. I don't care one bit about national news, why should anyone? I want to know what is happening locally and in specific markets, I don't care that some baby was murdered 500 miles away, or that some new corporation was caught ripping off shareholders.
The next generation loves real time custom news. Bandwidth-everywhere will give them what they want. I don't really think well written news is as important as it was for our generation (I gave up the newspaper when I was 15, about 16 years ago!) and I don't think the radio and the TV are that important either. Podcasts will go from being updated in the morning to being updated wirelessly soon enough. Vidcasts will gain strength, and you'll see RSS readers built into phones and iPods, too.
The media is screwed if they continue on the path they're on. I like it, actually. Less advertising dollars spent mean cheaper products so I can afford more. Those who want to advertise will have millions of websites to target directly or with AdWords, but the targeting will be more accurate rather than trying to hi 100,000,000 viewers or 1,000,000 listeners with generic messages.
I've posted from the can (and the tub) from my PDA. It works fine, but it's no newspaper.
You can't really solve both simultaneously.
Not yet. Whoever finds the solution to that problem gets the billion dollar prize, IMHO.
Online sites in generally haven't gotten it right. If you can't read it on the porcelein throne, it isn't perfect.
That being said, look at what online publishers have to deal with: non-uniformity. HTML is very powerful, but we still can't guarantee that an article will look as nice on everyone else's monitor as it does on the publisher's. Digital fonts still have a VERY long way to go versus paper printed ones -- kerning and other newspaper processes are not as easy to perform in HTML.
PDF is a solution, but not a good one. HTML is far faster on every connection than PDF ever will be (try getting PDFs to look good on your mobile device).
AJAX won't help here because we're mostly talking about static data, and you run up against the different resolutions, screen sizes and operating system problems again.
I've seen some sites that use preset pixel-sizes tables and frames, and that keeps the site more consistent in look-and-feel, but still doesn't look the same system to system and browser to browser. If you have a huge monitor or a tiny one, these pages are a pain to browse.
Raster? Too big and too restrictive.
Flash? Does anyone actually use flash for content anymore?
I can't figure it out -- and I do believe that whoever DOES figure it out will have a pretty penny hitting them from the dead tree publishers.
I've been working on that problem for nearly 15 years. It bugged me back in my BBS running days. My only "solutions" I've come up with is to dump the browser entirely and offer "newspaper skins" for another type of Internet program: something that grabs raw articles from RSS or other feeds, displays them in the format YOU want to read them in, and even print them out newspaper-style. It isn't a great solution since it would require another app on devices that already are being app-downsized. RSS is key in this situation, but I don't think the RSS reader is the best way to display the information.