I have been playing with this VoIP stuff a lot lately. My wife has worked for our county 911 office for quite some time, so this is a big concern.
There are some ways around this... My Router (Sipura spa-3000) can route calls out to a POTS line if you dial 911. You just gotta have a pots line.. My provider (Qwest) will sell me a measured service line for 9 bucks per month. Incoming calls are free, outgoing calls cost 2 cents for first minute one cent for additional minutes. (They didn't advertize this anywhere, I had to ask)
I also hear that if you disconnect your phone line, it is still likely to remain attached to the phone company so that you can call and order service. If the phone company gets a 911 call on the disconnected line, they will still forward it to your 911 center, likely without any ANI/ALI E911 data.. (Try this at your own risk)
My OS desisions are based soley on bang for the buck. I keep a windows box around because I can devop simple data apps in Microsoft access faster than I can with anything on Linux.
I use linux mostly. Because I can't beat the bang for the buck on most every other application. I love using Quanta plus.
All of the other bonuses are nice. I like the freedom to look and figure out how something works. (or doesn't work)
I like the added security of evading the Worms and Viruses that plague Windows. Most of the plagues are avoided with a small amount of expense and a fair amount of common sense, so those are not a determining factor.
I have found that usually I have to write the software for somebody for free in order to get my foot into the niche. This works out well, for both parties. You have them as a resource to tell you of their business needs, and they get a product that saves makes their business more efficient. Once you have a product that works, you can market it to others within that niche market, and charge a pretty decent price.
I am doing this. The trick is to find a narrow enough niche that nobody else is serving.
The nice part about software is that the value has very little to do with how much time it takes to develop. What matters is how much benefit the end user gets from using it.
There are tons of small businesses out there that need a lot of help. Often their needs are pretty simple, but they know very little about computers, so they are willing to pay to have their needs addressed.
The problem is scale. In order to find enough niches to keep yourself busy, you need to be a good networker, and a good marketer. Often you need to be plain lucky (That is what happened to me) You need to keep track of accounts recievable, shipping, manufacturing, You have to collect and pay taxes. You become the technical support guy for you customers (on your app and others) All of this gets pretty cumbersome for a 1 man operation.
But.... The only person who is only truely going to pay you what you are worth is yourself. If you don't have anything else to do, and you see a need, fill it!
Software needs to be priced based on the business benifit, not the development cost. If you have a simple product that saves a company a ton of money, the price needs to reflect the cost benifit, not the development cost.
If you are not charging the market rate, it deminishes your credibility. How are you going to be around in 5 or 10 years if you are working for peanuts? Businesses do not normally have the expertise to maintain and adapt software to their needs. Usually they have to outsource that. If you are not around to maintain your software, they are likely to need re-invest in a whole new system.
I think it is outragous how much money you can earn selling software in $/development hour. I choose not to worry about that too much, and instead price my software based on the number of man hours that it saves them...
A good DJ is nessesary to keep the entire crowd interested into stinking around. They watch the crowd, and play music that gets the people who are losing interest in the party back into the excitement.
I have seen people try to DJ an entire party in advance, and it rarely works. The crowd shrinks quickly. I have also seen a lot of DJs who do not understand their job do the same thing to a party.
This topic could probably a good artifical inteligence project for somebody!
Mindstorms are very good at moving the Construction Set mentality into Logic and Code.. I think that it is a bummer that they are so expensive that every kid can't get a set.
I am also impressed with Rokenbok. This doesn't include programming and such, but it does combine technologies and push the limit of what is possible in children's minds...
Great toys are the ones that make children comfortable with the emerging technologies. The construction toys that we played with in our younger days are old news. Toys are not nearly as cool when your parents are better at using them than you are.. My favorite memories as a child was building a computer program, and having adults be totally astonded by what I made. Because Adults are more comfortable with current technology, toys are going to have to go somewhere where adults are not comfortable.
Computers really did not come of age until a generation of kids had been able to play with them. I think robotics and the like may come to age after this generation of kids play with Mindstorms and Rokenbok and the like.. I see games like Robowars becoming the new playground for the nerdy kids, and They will be doing things with Embedded software and robotics that blow the adult generation's mind
I have been reading quite a bit about the Theory of Contraints. I think that this arguement is addressed by TOC theory...
The truth is that there are few constraints within an organization, and it is the performance of those constraints that dictates how successful an organization will be.
Money that is spent on the salaries and equipment everywhere else in the organization that is not a constaint will not convert into revenue.
If the virus attacks cause the Security people to become the organization's constaint, then it starts costing a company money. Otherwise, people and resources become busier than they would be, but their time does not impact the bottom line.
I provide tech support for a few different Digital cameras. From a Tech Support veiwpoint, I think that the Mavica cannot be beat. We have about 50 Kodak 260s at work and they are nothing but trouble. The FAT on the pic card gets corrupted all of the time. There is just too many points of failure. The pic card must be seated proplerly in the adapter card, the adapter card must be seated properly in the PCMCIA port. (Which is hard to do.) While installing thier picture card, our users often bump thier network card, and get knocked off of the network. If they try to reboot while the card is installed, Mic$@#$#ft NT will not start.
We also support a few Mavicas that work without fail. Substantially less can go wrong. Plug in the floppy, and load your pictures.
I have registered several domains in the last month or so, and I have been very happy with Dotster.com. The domains that I registered there came online a lot faster than the ones that I registered elswhere. They also offer registration from 15 bucks per year, which I think is a great deal.
Interesting idea though. If this were truly open source than any political party could use the code to create thier web sites etc. The donation of code would be made the benifit of the political process, and not directly to the Al Gore campaign. This could be a very clever way to get around Campaign finance laws...
Which do you think means more to The Al Gore leagal team? The Open source hogwash, or the copyright symbol at the bottom of each page. It is interesting that there is no license attached to the code...
It seems that Jobs is not good at running large oranizations. He is good at inspiring createivity. It would be hard to see him as CEO over The entire Disney Empire. I Think he may be a good asset to re-energize Disney one peice at a time.
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I have been watching my 5 year old play with MIT's "Scratch", and I would disagree.
He doesn't understand everything, but he knows that he can modify certain instructions and get different results.
It takes some time for him to get the whole cause and effect, but he starts to get it over time. And he has a lot of fun tinkering.
Is what my last few Dells have said on the bottom.
I have been playing with this VoIP stuff a lot lately. My wife has worked for our county 911 office for quite some time, so this is a big concern.
There are some ways around this... My Router (Sipura spa-3000) can route calls out to a POTS line if you dial 911. You just gotta have a pots line.. My provider (Qwest) will sell me a measured service line for 9 bucks per month. Incoming calls are free, outgoing calls cost 2 cents for first minute one cent for additional minutes. (They didn't advertize this anywhere, I had to ask)
I also hear that if you disconnect your phone line, it is still likely to remain attached to the phone company so that you can call and order service. If the phone company gets a 911 call on the disconnected line, they will still forward it to your 911 center, likely without any ANI/ALI E911 data.. (Try this at your own risk)
My OS desisions are based soley on bang for the buck. I keep a windows box around because I can devop simple data apps in Microsoft access faster than I can with anything on Linux.
I use linux mostly. Because I can't beat the bang for the buck on most every other application. I love using Quanta plus.
All of the other bonuses are nice. I like the freedom to look and figure out how something works. (or doesn't work)
I like the added security of evading the Worms and Viruses that plague Windows. Most of the plagues are avoided with a small amount of expense and a fair amount of common sense, so those are not a determining factor.
I have found that usually I have to write the software for somebody for free in order to get my foot into the niche. This works out well, for both parties. You have them as a resource to tell you of their business needs, and they get a product that saves makes their business more efficient. Once you have a product that works, you can market it to others within that niche market, and charge a pretty decent price.
I am doing this. The trick is to find a narrow enough niche that nobody else is serving.
The nice part about software is that the value has very little to do with how much time it takes to develop. What matters is how much benefit the end user gets from using it.
There are tons of small businesses out there that need a lot of help. Often their needs are pretty simple, but they know very little about computers, so they are willing to pay to have their needs addressed.
The problem is scale. In order to find enough niches to keep yourself busy, you need to be a good networker, and a good marketer. Often you need to be plain lucky (That is what happened to me) You need to keep track of accounts recievable, shipping, manufacturing, You have to collect and pay taxes. You become the technical support guy for you customers (on your app and others) All of this gets pretty cumbersome for a 1 man operation.
But.... The only person who is only truely going to pay you what you are worth is yourself. If you don't have anything else to do, and you see a need, fill it!
Software needs to be priced based on the business benifit, not the development cost. If you have a simple product that saves a company a ton of money, the price needs to reflect the cost benifit, not the development cost.
If you are not charging the market rate, it deminishes your credibility. How are you going to be around in 5 or 10 years if you are working for peanuts? Businesses do not normally have the expertise to maintain and adapt software to their needs. Usually they have to outsource that. If you are not around to maintain your software, they are likely to need re-invest in a whole new system.
I think it is outragous how much money you can earn selling software in $/development hour. I choose not to worry about that too much, and instead price my software based on the number of man hours that it saves them...
They are happy, and I am very happy.
A good DJ is nessesary to keep the entire crowd interested into stinking around. They watch the crowd, and play music that gets the people who are losing interest in the party back into the excitement.
I have seen people try to DJ an entire party in advance, and it rarely works. The crowd shrinks quickly. I have also seen a lot of DJs who do not understand their job do the same thing to a party.
This topic could probably a good artifical inteligence project for somebody!
Mindstorms are very good at moving the Construction Set mentality into Logic and Code.. I think that it is a bummer that they are so expensive that every kid can't get a set.
I am also impressed with Rokenbok. This doesn't include programming and such, but it does combine technologies and push the limit of what is possible in children's minds...
Great toys are the ones that make children comfortable with the emerging technologies. The construction toys that we played with in our younger days are old news. Toys are not nearly as cool when your parents are better at using them than you are.. My favorite memories as a child was building a computer program, and having adults be totally astonded by what I made. Because Adults are more comfortable with current technology, toys are going to have to go somewhere where adults are not comfortable.
Computers really did not come of age until a generation of kids had been able to play with them. I think robotics and the like may come to age after this generation of kids play with Mindstorms and Rokenbok and the like.. I see games like Robowars becoming the new playground for the nerdy kids, and They will be doing things with Embedded software and robotics that blow the adult generation's mind
I have been reading quite a bit about the Theory of Contraints. I think that this arguement is addressed by TOC theory... The truth is that there are few constraints within an organization, and it is the performance of those constraints that dictates how successful an organization will be. Money that is spent on the salaries and equipment everywhere else in the organization that is not a constaint will not convert into revenue. If the virus attacks cause the Security people to become the organization's constaint, then it starts costing a company money. Otherwise, people and resources become busier than they would be, but their time does not impact the bottom line.
I provide tech support for a few different Digital cameras. From a Tech Support veiwpoint, I think that the Mavica cannot be beat. We have about 50 Kodak 260s at work and they are nothing but trouble. The FAT on the pic card gets corrupted all of the time. There is just too many points of failure. The pic card must be seated proplerly in the adapter card, the adapter card must be seated properly in the PCMCIA port. (Which is hard to do.) While installing thier picture card, our users often bump thier network card, and get knocked off of the network. If they try to reboot while the card is installed, Mic$@#$#ft NT will not start.
We also support a few Mavicas that work without fail. Substantially less can go wrong. Plug in the floppy, and load your pictures.
I have registered several domains in the last month or so, and I have been very happy with Dotster.com. The domains that I registered there came online a lot faster than the ones that I registered elswhere. They also offer registration from 15 bucks per year, which I think is a great deal.
Interesting idea though. If this were truly open source than any political party could use the code to create thier web sites etc. The donation of code would be made the benifit of the political process, and not directly to the Al Gore campaign. This could be a very clever way to get around Campaign finance laws...
Which do you think means more to The Al Gore leagal team? The Open source hogwash, or the copyright symbol at the bottom of each page. It is interesting that there is no license attached to the code...
It seems that Jobs is not good at running large oranizations. He is good at inspiring createivity. It would be hard to see him as CEO over The entire Disney Empire. I Think he may be a good asset to re-energize Disney one peice at a time.