I've seen a similar scenario up close, except that it was her husband and her brother that she accused of sexual abuse of the children. She had been going to a "religious" group for years and basically had been inducted into a cult; apparently when the husband started objecting to how she was siphoning money to these crooks they told her to make these false accusations in retaliation.
The men wisely chose to fight the charges, and both the brother and the husband ultimately were completely exonerated. The husband won custody of the children, and the accuser has lost all credibility. Before he was cleared, the brother, who had just finished eight years of grueling 120-hour weeks to build his medical career, spent about six months wondering if the next knock on the door was going to be the police come to lock him up and destroy his life in the blink of an eye.
Playing the pedophilia card has become a weapon for vicious and cynical people; it's easy to horrify juries with graphic descriptions of pedophilia, and children can be coached to say almost anything. Lives have been ruined, careers destroyed, and children traumatized almost as much as if true pedophilia had occurred.
This is not to say that there aren't plenty of pedophiles out there who need to be incarcerated to protect society, but it's such a travesty of justice that someone could easily wind up in jail or on a sex offenders list for the rest of his life as the result of a false accusation.
If the accusee is innocent, plea bargaining is never a wise move, no matter what one's lawyer advises. Lawyers are out to help themselves, not their clients. Fight them, take lie detector tests, show them your home PC, whatever it takes to establish your innocence. This Russian guy was tragically mislead by a crook with a law degree; I hope he can somehow clear his name but he's into it pretty deeply now.
I'm glad you're here, and I'm sorry you're so disappointed in the U.S. In your spare time, take an American history course and you will be surprised at some things. The U.S. has *always* been full of people that questioned and defied and even rebelled against the elites. It's part of our national character, and for better or worse it means there is a substantial chunk of anti-intellectualism here. Europe, east Asia, and India are places with relatively ancient cultures where learning is cherished and respected. Not so the U.S.
However, what the U.S. really has to offer is openmindedness. You can come here with a wacky idea, and you're guaranteed to find someone who will back your idea. It's what made the economy so successful.
Nice, orderly, disciplined schools are a foreign concept bolted onto the American culture with mixed results. Here in Boston, there used to be outstanding public schools such as Boston Latin, and today the teachers don't even bother to assign homework because the kids simply won't do it. On the other hand, African-Americans and Jews and lots of others were not allowed into certain schools and universities and clubs and parks and jobs, and now they (increasingly) are.
Two world wars brought about a kind of heirarchical discipline in American society that has now broken down; however we do have more freedom, Patriot Act notwithstanding. The U.S. is in a chaotic time in its history but the odds are that it will gather its wits and make a comeback yet again.
If they charge for this super-wine or david or whatever it's going to be called, the cost will be hard to justify because the real thing will just be incrementally more expensive.
Wine or something similar represents a huge threat to Microsoft's business model. Wine + Linux + MS Office 97 would wipe out a significant chunk of their revenue. New computers would come outfitted with cheap or free copies of Linux + wine to eliminate the $50-$90 licensing fee for Windows, and businesses could continue to use their old Office licenses. If I were IBM, I'd be salivating right now; it's such a nice opportunity to annoy MS.
Actually, I wish IBM would pour a few million bucks into the Wine project or Codeweavers.com and give them the funding they need to make all those current apps out there work in Linux. Yeah, yeah, wine's already pretty good, but I'm just impatient!
Unfortunately, Corel seems to have called it wrong several times in the past. They bought Wordperfect from Novell, a questionable move to begin with, and proceeded to sit on it and not market it aggressively.
They then half-heartedly began their Java/Linux initiative, came up with a very promising user-friendly Linux distro, and then dropped it.
More recently, I attempted to obtain the original Wordperfect for Linux from their website because I had a wordperfect document to convert--it's simply not available. When you consider the breadth and depth of the original Wordperfect Corp.'s offerings, where they had a powerful and universally respected product running on several platforms and the original CEO said he'd rather see it running everywhere even as pirated copies, this current stewardship of the Wordperfect line is just pathetic.
To top things off, Corel accepted a huge investment from Microsoft--the ultimate humiliation. Microsoft obviously just did it to fend off accusations of monopolistic practices (and to neutralize Corel in the PC office software and desktop OS space).
Now we're expected to trust Corel on this new initiative. Meh. I'll believe it when I see it. Corel once upon a time was an innovative company with its cool graphics software, but they've lost their edge. Too bad.
Re:Bush isn't serious anyway
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The Wrong Stuff
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Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Had Bush said nothing about space, he would have been attacked for lack of leadership. Now, people criticize him because he did say something, and something pretty bold at that. As for the money, if Americans really want it to happen they can allocate the money. It's not his money, it's our money.
This Weinberg article is right for the wrong reasons. Sure, we can continue to send robots to explore the planets, and of course it will cost less than sending people. However, this isn't about saving money, it's about exploration, colonization, exploitation of offworld resources. It's also about firing the imaginations of a new generation of young people to pursue careers in science and technology, as happened in the Sixties.
As I like to say in these discussions: the superpowers and the dominant nationstates of the late 21st century will be those countries that go into space and stay there. The tremendous mineral resources to be found in asteroids will enable space colonies to become self-sustaining; solar power will keep their lights on and help them recycle, advances in material science will keep them safe from radiation, and new launch and landing technologies like the space elevator will drastically lower cost of doing business. Just imagine the industrial advances that can be made in an environment of limitless energy, limitless materials, zero pollution problems, and zero gravity.
If the United States accepts the thinking of cynics like Weinberg, that we can sit back safely here on Earth and let robots scrape around up there, then eventually others will surpass us in manned space exploration. Someday, sure, we'll all be able to fly into space, but it will be as steerage passengers on Chinese space boats--assuming we can afford it after the complete collapse of America's one-time leadership in science and technology.
You've gotten lots of advice already so I'll just stick to the questions no one else has answered so far. You asked what kind of people to go to. There are hundreds of web design companies around the country (I assume you're US-based) and probably thousands of individual web designers. They charge money to set up sites, so it might be worthwhile to get two or three quotes and see what kind of bucks you'll need to lay out. You can just cold-call some people who advertise in your local newspaper, or you can go to one of the various tech networking events around town; just stand up and announce you're looking for a web designer and they will flock to you like flies to honey. I agree with those who recommend open source, apache/mysql/php based solutions that you can easily modify and admin without paying someone.
If you're really looking to save bucks and start small, put up an ad at the local community college or university in the computer or web design office and get a student. They're eager to add more sites to their portfolio and will probably work for either free or minimal bucks. Many students have grown up with computers and are pretty adept, but make sure you interview them thoroughly and check out some of their existing work. If you find a rising star, it's a win-win situation.
There are lots of sub-$10 a month hosting companies out there and you should choose one with a wide range of bandwidths and colocation options, in case you grow quickly (a nice problem to have). Don't start with a tiny ISP that can't handle your growing pains.
As others in this forum have mentioned, you should focus on the business plan (whether or not this is a for-profit operation) and make sure you have a way to spread the word and draw people to your site. I disagree with those who think there's no more room for new online communities; if you have a great idea, go for it and ignore the naysayers. Their ancestors also said the world was flat and men would never fly. Good luck!
Yes, I'm a Finale-turned-abc user; most of the typesetting I do is simple lead sheets, and abc on Linux is just superb for this application. I create and modify tunes using Emacs and abc-mode, compile to PostScript using abc2ps (create a keyboard macro that puts abc2ps with desired parameters into the compile command, bind compile to F10 or something and you can quickly recompile your music with one keystroke), and view it with GhostView (set gv to auto redisplay). It is almost as fast and simple as a WYSIWYG music editor such as Finale, WinABC, etc., and in some ways it's better. With these tools I get almost instant visual feedback on my changes but retain the efficiency of simple text entry. The postscript output can easily be ps2pdf'ed for posting or emailing, printouts look superb, and it takes up miniscule amounts of disk space.
After 12 years of Finale typesetting, I've finally found something better and more suitable to my needs. ABC's not for everyone, of course, but the price is right and it's a great fit for people who are comfortable with command lines and just need simple lead sheets.
Great advice except for the no taxes part. That's against the law. You are required to report your income whether it's cash or check. Actually, some of your clients will probably prefer to write you a check anyway so you will have a paper trail.
Furthermore, if you want to account for your time in order to impress a potential employer in the future, you had better have your ducks in a row; there are ways of finding out. Otherwise, you will have to lie and say you spent the summer doing nothing. That might be dodgy given the fact that 30-40 people around your neighborhood will testify that they hired you, and hundreds more saw your flyer.
Maybe you are OK with working under the table like the thousands of carpenters and the like who try to get paid in cash, but if you ever want to do work for the federal government either as an employee or contractor, they will probably want to know every job you had for the past 10 years, so you then have the choice of perjuring yourself or admitting that you owe back taxes, neither of which is particularly great news to the employer.
Finally, you should consider that finances are a vital part of running a business; the accounting and tax work you will do will be useful experience for later on when you start the next great software company or whatever you end up in.
NZheretic, some of your post is copied from David Mohring's post on Linuxworld.com. I didn't bother to check the rest but it sounds like you're good at cutting and pasting, if not thinking. You really should credit your sources when piecing together this kind of mega-cut'n'paste karma-honeypot post.
We should be moving toward more open sharing of information, not the opposite. All we'll end up with is a dearth of new knowledge. It will be like pouring hot salt water into the gears; eventually it will rust up and grind to a halt.
As usual, everyone should write to their congress critters and register their opinions.
I think the OP's point was that Linux users (not necessarily your mother but people who consciously want to adopt Linux despite the lack of some software availability) now have one more useful tool that runs natively and one less reason to have to run Windows. The fact that Audacity is cross-platform is only good news; it can get adopted more widely this way. Spreading the roots makes the tree stronger.
I think CoolEdit and its successor Adobe Audition are slicker, more mature products, but Audacity does a lot of the same basic audio editing stuff natively in Linux, and it's only getting more powerful. I've been using 1.2rc1 for several months and I love the new effects that have been implemented. For example, it's great to be able to highlight a section of a track and change the pitch. Now I have to believe you can do that in CoolEdit 2000 but it's not obvious to me how.
As for installing Linux, you should have your mom check out recent versions of Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc., which come with slick, user-friendly installers that anyone can operate. Debian is more geared toward the hobbyist/techie/professional class of users.
Weird. I've been annoyed by the lack of a SQRT button in Kcalc, too, and the 3.2 release didn't fix it. Furthermore, X^Y is available in all modes, whether Show All or Hide All. Are you really using the Kcalc from the KDE project?
Your point is well taken regarding competition. However, if someone is the technology leader, and you want to bypass them to gain more upstream revenue, you had better have something better up your sleeve. Thus far Yahoo's search does not seem even as good as Google's, so there's no compelling reason for everyone to switch from "googling" to "yahooing" now.
Consider this analogy. Redhat, one of the market leaders in Linux distributions (or at least they were until they dropped the retail version), decides to drop market leader KDE in favor of their own, homebrew windowing desktop environment. (Just assume for the moment that KDE's the technology leader, though of course that's debatable.) RH comes out with a mediocre, "me-too" window environment that's not quite as good as KDE but promises at some unspecified time in the future to equal if not surpass it. Is this a wise business decision? Is this a good use of their core strengths and resources? Of course, YHOO already purchased Inktomi so perhaps they need to leverage its technology to justify the purchase, though it does make me wonder what their long term plan is.
As a Yahoo stockholder, I do hope they do well; despite what that guy said about "pimping for google", I'm simply interested in creating some dialogue. However, the market so far does not seem too impressed (although to be fair, YHOO is up 300% from a year ago, so the market has probably already factored in this new feature).
Most people use Google as their default search tool, even a lot of those unsophisticated Windows users whose IE still comes up with the default MSN page. It's entered the vernacular as a common verb.
How does Yahoo! improve its service by switching away from Google? Unless they have developed an equivalent if not better search engine, which up until now no one has done, all they are doing is downgrading the quality of their service.
Thumbs down, Yahoo. Use the best tool for the job.
I love my T|T, too. But, would love it even more if it
1) didn't occasionally crash, or fails to turn on, requiring a soft reset (about every month or two, usually when I'm showing it off to a non-Palm user)
2) didn't allow apps like Documents To Go to crash the system when editing huge documents, requiring a FACTORY RESET (yes, that means reinstall everything).
3) didn't have the gimmicky slider. I would be happy with the T|E form factor but with the T|3's feature set. I don't care if it sticks an extra inch out of my pocket.
4) worked great with Linux. I mean come on, guys, give people another excuse to dump Windows, dammit. Microsoft's your competition, you know. JPilot is a pretty good substitute, despite a few UI limitations (grumble).
5) had longer battery life. The effective life of the T|T in heavy use is about 3 hours, I've found, using a keyboard and minimal backlighting. Make it a bigger battery or whatever it takes. Making the battery replaceable would be nice, too. For that matter, make the indicator light show when the thing's finished charging (fixed in T|3?).
In the story "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty", Stephen Evans intimates that "internet zealots" with a grudge against The SCO Group perpetrated the My.Doom email virus which attacked the sco.com website.
Mr. Evans is welcome to his opinion but having provided not one shred of evidence to support it, he comes across as a SCO spokesman, echoing their corporate view that Linux/Free Software people are thugs and hooligans rather than honest, hard working people working to improve the world. People, I might add, who are as appalled at these denial-of-service attacks as everybody else.
It is much more likely and believable that the virus was targeted at SCO as a joke by whatever teenager or immature adult who released it. If Mr. Evans stops and thinks for a minute, he will realize that it does the Linux/OSS community little good to be perceived as "internet vandals" (to use his term), whereas it does paint SCO as the innocent victim. (Mr. Evans will further note that SCO had plenty of warning of this virus and chose not to alter their DNS settings, as Microsoft did, to avoid their site being taken down.)
Given the BBC's scepticism about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I would expect you to take a properly dim view of this worm incident as well.
Don't forget another important detail: Google is a profitable company, unlike Netscape, which basically burned through its investor capital while giving away its flagship product and losing web server sales to Microsoft IIS.
Also, Google is about to go public and turn into probably a $30 billion company. That will give them a massive war chest to fend off Microsoft with new products, more aggressive ad prices, etc.
Of course, Microsoft has the biggest war chest of all, so I wouldn't bet on Google winning in the long run, but they have a better chance to stay in the ring and keep their independence than Netscape did.
I respectfully disagree. You may be "old at 40" in many jobs relative to the age of new hires, but you are not at any disadvantage in terms of software development skills, creativity, experience, smarts, know-how, people skills, patience, etc.
As an old fart in my late 30s-early 40s I have watched young 18-year-old or 20-year-old hotshots from MIT come do a year or two of internship, or newly graduated 23-year-olds fresh from the compsci mills, and they are a marvel to behold; they talk fast, think fast, and type fast. However, they also make a big mess because they haven't learned how to be engineers yet, only coder/hackers. They are disorganized, they make huge mistakes in their designs, can't document for shit, they go down blind alleys... all the mistakes we also made as neophytes. Don't get me wrong--we love these young tykes and we know that when they're 35 they'll be awesome, but right now most of them can't program their way out of a paper bag. At the better companies, the management knows this as well. By contrast, I've noticed that older beginners tend to be more patient and humble and tend to "grow up" in the field a lot faster.
Regarding your contention that someone can be too old for anything, I would say that can't possibly be true. There are millions of people every year who discover their true calling and proceed to change careers in mid-life. This is what makes the U.S. such a great country; it's not the crooked politicians, the rigged elections, the oligarchical corporations, malls, racism, the self-centered lawsuit-happy masses, etc. It's the freedom and opportunity to go back to school and reinvent yourself, something which is next to impossible in most other places.
Ironically, I just had an interview today for a hospital volunteer position; I'm thinking of switching from software engineering into the healthcare field, maybe even medical school. The interviewer is a person who was once in theatre, now in hospital work, and is studying to become an ordained minister. Needless to say I got a very sympathetic hearing on my career aspirations.
One thing I've learned through all this is to never tell someone they can't achieve something. There are enough obstacles in the road so why create imaginary ones? If the O.P. wants to go into computers, more power to'em. Heck, if nothing else, they can moonlight in an E.R. once a month to pay the bills and still do what they love.
among other things, employment for a whole bunch of scientists and engineers. Massive projects like Apollo, SSTL and ISS may seem like dead-end or pork-barrel projects to the general public, but they create jobs in science and technology, thus creating demand for scientists and technologists, thus causing more people to major in scientific fields. At least they're not becoming lawyers, and beyond that they're generating new tech for us all to enjoy.
What about microcomputers? I read somewhere that some of the technology for modern microprocessors was developed for the space program (and for missiles). Solar power was also implemented (but not invented) for the space program. Your reference to metallurgy is valid and also ceramics, propulsion systems, high density batteries, scratch-proof lenses, advances in hydroponics, radiation insulation, etc. The list goes on and on.
Then there's the intangible benefits of a national research and exploratory mission that is peaceful in nature. Many people in this kind of discussion forum mock George W. Bush's (as yet unannounced) space initiative and out of the other corner of their mouth they mock his aggressive foreign policy. Well which is it? You want the U.S. to avoid military adventures overseas and also not to explore the heavens? Put all that money to use funding housing for the poor? Isn't $5 trillion spent on the poor since 1960 enough already? Let's spend it on people who will actually give us something in return--rocket scientists, physicists, astronomers, engineers, programmers, science teachers, etc. Let's invest it in ways that will create the economic opportunities that the poor really need... and keep our patronizing sympathy to ourselves.
In fact, the space program is the best way the U.S. can marshal its resources and inspire a new generation of young scientists and technologists. It worked in 1960 and it can work again in the 21st century. It can invigorate the sciences and get kids of all colors and economic classes to think big, to reach for the stars. It can and will result in new technological breakthroughs in medicine, propulsion, materials sciences, and other areas that we can only imagine today.
The superpowers of the late 21st century will be those nations and alliances of nations that leave Earth orbit to explore and exploit the resources of the entire solar system. Offworld factories and mining facilities, economies of scale in lift technologies, and critical mass numbers of go-to people in space will eventually pay back in spades the necessary trillions of dollars of investment that have been made and have yet to be made.
Americans can go there; or, we can sit on our fat duffs and let others go there, but someone will go there. If we let others take the initiative, then sure we will go to space someday--as steerage passengers on Chinese orbiters--after saving our pennies from serving fast food to our Chinese and European bosses visiting on holiday.
Ogg is good technology. It's open, people can incorporate it into their products without patent and royalty concerns, and it's about as good as anything else out there. Perhaps the consumer market will be owned by a mixture of WMA, AAC and MP3, but for specialized applications Ogg is the way to go.
It's like with other open source tools; so long as you share your improvements with the world, you can use it for free. This is very appealing to someone developing a product that compresses audio for whatever purpose.
It's a niche product at this point but I believe it has a role to play in embedded systems of various sorts if not in popular music players.
Second that on Taxcut. It installed and ran on my linux workstation with Crossover and the only problem was that clicking "help" made it crash (apparently tries to launch a browser).
As a long time Turbotax user, I had initially investigated their Turbotax-on-the-Web, which I thought would be a great cross-platform solution, but it required a certain version of Internet Explorer. I complained to the company but they did not indicate that they had any flexibility on this. What's the point of the web if it's Windows-only, grumble grumble.
Now Vanguard is offering complementary access to Turbotax on the Web for its account holders for 1040 Basic, 1040EZ and State filing starting in mid-January; we'll see if they've fixed their browser incompatibilities yet, otherwise I'm sticking with Taxcut for another year.
FYI, the web site is "anti-slash.org" and judging by the kind of forum postings they have, it's comprised of some pissed off 13-year-olds with too much time on their hands. They archive highly rated postings from slashdot.org and encourage their buddies to repost them as a way to dilute the value of Slashdot's forums. I notice they have archived three of my postings. This is of dubious legality; don't Slashdot posters own their postings?
Incidentally, the registrant is listed as follows, according to a GoDaddy.com whois search: ID:0-776643-Gandi Name:John Marriott Organization:John Marriott Street1:506 E Sherman St City:St. Joseph State/Province:Illinois Postal Code:61873 Country:US Email:marriott@uiuc.edu
How is the paper handling on your E310? My Optra E312 is prone to jams and multi-feeds. Lexmark tech support denies it's a problem and will supply a long document on how to properly feed paper, what kind of paper to use, how to tighten the guides and then loosen them to the exact paper width, not to ever add an extra sheet to an existing stack, don't use used paper, etc. In fact it comes off as one long excuse for their sucky paper feed mechanism.
The only real solution I have found is to feed one page at a time. It works pretty well with Linux, but I'd never buy another one just based on this multi-feed problem and Lexmark's unwillingness to fix it.
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I've seen a similar scenario up close, except that it was her husband and her brother that she accused of sexual abuse of the children. She had been going to a "religious" group for years and basically had been inducted into a cult; apparently when the husband started objecting to how she was siphoning money to these crooks they told her to make these false accusations in retaliation.
The men wisely chose to fight the charges, and both the brother and the husband ultimately were completely exonerated. The husband won custody of the children, and the accuser has lost all credibility. Before he was cleared, the brother, who had just finished eight years of grueling 120-hour weeks to build his medical career, spent about six months wondering if the next knock on the door was going to be the police come to lock him up and destroy his life in the blink of an eye.
Playing the pedophilia card has become a weapon for vicious and cynical people; it's easy to horrify juries with graphic descriptions of pedophilia, and children can be coached to say almost anything. Lives have been ruined, careers destroyed, and children traumatized almost as much as if true pedophilia had occurred.
This is not to say that there aren't plenty of pedophiles out there who need to be incarcerated to protect society, but it's such a travesty of justice that someone could easily wind up in jail or on a sex offenders list for the rest of his life as the result of a false accusation. If the accusee is innocent, plea bargaining is never a wise move, no matter what one's lawyer advises. Lawyers are out to help themselves, not their clients. Fight them, take lie detector tests, show them your home PC, whatever it takes to establish your innocence. This Russian guy was tragically mislead by a crook with a law degree; I hope he can somehow clear his name but he's into it pretty deeply now.
I'm glad you're here, and I'm sorry you're so disappointed in the U.S. In your spare time, take an American history course and you will be surprised at some things. The U.S. has *always* been full of people that questioned and defied and even rebelled against the elites. It's part of our national character, and for better or worse it means there is a substantial chunk of anti-intellectualism here. Europe, east Asia, and India are places with relatively ancient cultures where learning is cherished and respected. Not so the U.S.
However, what the U.S. really has to offer is openmindedness. You can come here with a wacky idea, and you're guaranteed to find someone who will back your idea. It's what made the economy so successful.
Nice, orderly, disciplined schools are a foreign concept bolted onto the American culture with mixed results. Here in Boston, there used to be outstanding public schools such as Boston Latin, and today the teachers don't even bother to assign homework because the kids simply won't do it. On the other hand, African-Americans and Jews and lots of others were not allowed into certain schools and universities and clubs and parks and jobs, and now they (increasingly) are.
Two world wars brought about a kind of heirarchical discipline in American society that has now broken down; however we do have more freedom, Patriot Act notwithstanding. The U.S. is in a chaotic time in its history but the odds are that it will gather its wits and make a comeback yet again.
Agreed; it better be free.
If they charge for this super-wine or david or whatever it's going to be called, the cost will be hard to justify because the real thing will just be incrementally more expensive.
Wine or something similar represents a huge threat to Microsoft's business model. Wine + Linux + MS Office 97 would wipe out a significant chunk of their revenue. New computers would come outfitted with cheap or free copies of Linux + wine to eliminate the $50-$90 licensing fee for Windows, and businesses could continue to use their old Office licenses. If I were IBM, I'd be salivating right now; it's such a nice opportunity to annoy MS.
Actually, I wish IBM would pour a few million bucks into the Wine project or Codeweavers.com and give them the funding they need to make all those current apps out there work in Linux. Yeah, yeah, wine's already pretty good, but I'm just impatient!
You'd think.
Unfortunately, Corel seems to have called it wrong several times in the past. They bought Wordperfect from Novell, a questionable move to begin with, and proceeded to sit on it and not market it aggressively.
They then half-heartedly began their Java/Linux initiative, came up with a very promising user-friendly Linux distro, and then dropped it.
More recently, I attempted to obtain the original Wordperfect for Linux from their website because I had a wordperfect document to convert--it's simply not available. When you consider the breadth and depth of the original Wordperfect Corp.'s offerings, where they had a powerful and universally respected product running on several platforms and the original CEO said he'd rather see it running everywhere even as pirated copies, this current stewardship of the Wordperfect line is just pathetic.
To top things off, Corel accepted a huge investment from Microsoft--the ultimate humiliation. Microsoft obviously just did it to fend off accusations of monopolistic practices (and to neutralize Corel in the PC office software and desktop OS space).
Now we're expected to trust Corel on this new initiative. Meh. I'll believe it when I see it. Corel once upon a time was an innovative company with its cool graphics software, but they've lost their edge. Too bad.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Had Bush said nothing about space, he would have been attacked for lack of leadership. Now, people criticize him because he did say something, and something pretty bold at that. As for the money, if Americans really want it to happen they can allocate the money. It's not his money, it's our money.
This Weinberg article is right for the wrong reasons. Sure, we can continue to send robots to explore the planets, and of course it will cost less than sending people. However, this isn't about saving money, it's about exploration, colonization, exploitation of offworld resources. It's also about firing the imaginations of a new generation of young people to pursue careers in science and technology, as happened in the Sixties.
As I like to say in these discussions: the superpowers and the dominant nationstates of the late 21st century will be those countries that go into space and stay there. The tremendous mineral resources to be found in asteroids will enable space colonies to become self-sustaining; solar power will keep their lights on and help them recycle, advances in material science will keep them safe from radiation, and new launch and landing technologies like the space elevator will drastically lower cost of doing business. Just imagine the industrial advances that can be made in an environment of limitless energy, limitless materials, zero pollution problems, and zero gravity.
If the United States accepts the thinking of cynics like Weinberg, that we can sit back safely here on Earth and let robots scrape around up there, then eventually others will surpass us in manned space exploration. Someday, sure, we'll all be able to fly into space, but it will be as steerage passengers on Chinese space boats--assuming we can afford it after the complete collapse of America's one-time leadership in science and technology.
You've gotten lots of advice already so I'll just stick to the questions no one else has answered so far. You asked what kind of people to go to. There are hundreds of web design companies around the country (I assume you're US-based) and probably thousands of individual web designers. They charge money to set up sites, so it might be worthwhile to get two or three quotes and see what kind of bucks you'll need to lay out. You can just cold-call some people who advertise in your local newspaper, or you can go to one of the various tech networking events around town; just stand up and announce you're looking for a web designer and they will flock to you like flies to honey. I agree with those who recommend open source, apache/mysql/php based solutions that you can easily modify and admin without paying someone.
If you're really looking to save bucks and start small, put up an ad at the local community college or university in the computer or web design office and get a student. They're eager to add more sites to their portfolio and will probably work for either free or minimal bucks. Many students have grown up with computers and are pretty adept, but make sure you interview them thoroughly and check out some of their existing work. If you find a rising star, it's a win-win situation.
There are lots of sub-$10 a month hosting companies out there and you should choose one with a wide range of bandwidths and colocation options, in case you grow quickly (a nice problem to have). Don't start with a tiny ISP that can't handle your growing pains.
As others in this forum have mentioned, you should focus on the business plan (whether or not this is a for-profit operation) and make sure you have a way to spread the word and draw people to your site. I disagree with those who think there's no more room for new online communities; if you have a great idea, go for it and ignore the naysayers. Their ancestors also said the world was flat and men would never fly. Good luck!
Yes, I'm a Finale-turned-abc user; most of the typesetting I do is simple lead sheets, and abc on Linux is just superb for this application. I create and modify tunes using Emacs and abc-mode, compile to PostScript using abc2ps (create a keyboard macro that puts abc2ps with desired parameters into the compile command, bind compile to F10 or something and you can quickly recompile your music with one keystroke), and view it with GhostView (set gv to auto redisplay). It is almost as fast and simple as a WYSIWYG music editor such as Finale, WinABC, etc., and in some ways it's better. With these tools I get almost instant visual feedback on my changes but retain the efficiency of simple text entry. The postscript output can easily be ps2pdf'ed for posting or emailing, printouts look superb, and it takes up miniscule amounts of disk space.
After 12 years of Finale typesetting, I've finally found something better and more suitable to my needs. ABC's not for everyone, of course, but the price is right and it's a great fit for people who are comfortable with command lines and just need simple lead sheets.
Great advice except for the no taxes part. That's against the law. You are required to report your income whether it's cash or check. Actually, some of your clients will probably prefer to write you a check anyway so you will have a paper trail.
Furthermore, if you want to account for your time in order to impress a potential employer in the future, you had better have your ducks in a row; there are ways of finding out. Otherwise, you will have to lie and say you spent the summer doing nothing. That might be dodgy given the fact that 30-40 people around your neighborhood will testify that they hired you, and hundreds more saw your flyer.
Maybe you are OK with working under the table like the thousands of carpenters and the like who try to get paid in cash, but if you ever want to do work for the federal government either as an employee or contractor, they will probably want to know every job you had for the past 10 years, so you then have the choice of perjuring yourself or admitting that you owe back taxes, neither of which is particularly great news to the employer.
Finally, you should consider that finances are a vital part of running a business; the accounting and tax work you will do will be useful experience for later on when you start the next great software company or whatever you end up in.
Good luck!
NZheretic, some of your post is copied from David Mohring's post on Linuxworld.com. I didn't bother to check the rest but it sounds like you're good at cutting and pasting, if not thinking. You really should credit your sources when piecing together this kind of mega-cut'n'paste karma-honeypot post.
We should be moving toward more open sharing of information, not the opposite. All we'll end up with is a dearth of new knowledge. It will be like pouring hot salt water into the gears; eventually it will rust up and grind to a halt.
As usual, everyone should write to their congress critters and register their opinions.
Moderators found this interesting, but it's still off topic.
And how many times do you need to repeat this posting before everyone gets your point, Mr. Karma Whore?
I think the OP's point was that Linux users (not necessarily your mother but people who consciously want to adopt Linux despite the lack of some software availability) now have one more useful tool that runs natively and one less reason to have to run Windows. The fact that Audacity is cross-platform is only good news; it can get adopted more widely this way. Spreading the roots makes the tree stronger.
I think CoolEdit and its successor Adobe Audition are slicker, more mature products, but Audacity does a lot of the same basic audio editing stuff natively in Linux, and it's only getting more powerful. I've been using 1.2rc1 for several months and I love the new effects that have been implemented. For example, it's great to be able to highlight a section of a track and change the pitch. Now I have to believe you can do that in CoolEdit 2000 but it's not obvious to me how.
As for installing Linux, you should have your mom check out recent versions of Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc., which come with slick, user-friendly installers that anyone can operate. Debian is more geared toward the hobbyist/techie/professional class of users.
Weird. I've been annoyed by the lack of a SQRT button in Kcalc, too, and the 3.2 release didn't fix it. Furthermore, X^Y is available in all modes, whether Show All or Hide All. Are you really using the Kcalc from the KDE project?
Your point is well taken regarding competition. However, if someone is the technology leader, and you want to bypass them to gain more upstream revenue, you had better have something better up your sleeve. Thus far Yahoo's search does not seem even as good as Google's, so there's no compelling reason for everyone to switch from "googling" to "yahooing" now.
Consider this analogy. Redhat, one of the market leaders in Linux distributions (or at least they were until they dropped the retail version), decides to drop market leader KDE in favor of their own, homebrew windowing desktop environment. (Just assume for the moment that KDE's the technology leader, though of course that's debatable.) RH comes out with a mediocre, "me-too" window environment that's not quite as good as KDE but promises at some unspecified time in the future to equal if not surpass it. Is this a wise business decision? Is this a good use of their core strengths and resources? Of course, YHOO already purchased Inktomi so perhaps they need to leverage its technology to justify the purchase, though it does make me wonder what their long term plan is.
As a Yahoo stockholder, I do hope they do well; despite what that guy said about "pimping for google", I'm simply interested in creating some dialogue. However, the market so far does not seem too impressed (although to be fair, YHOO is up 300% from a year ago, so the market has probably already factored in this new feature).
Most people use Google as their default search tool, even a lot of those unsophisticated Windows users whose IE still comes up with the default MSN page. It's entered the vernacular as a common verb.
How does Yahoo! improve its service by switching away from Google? Unless they have developed an equivalent if not better search engine, which up until now no one has done, all they are doing is downgrading the quality of their service.
Thumbs down, Yahoo. Use the best tool for the job.
I love my T|T, too. But, would love it even more if it
1) didn't occasionally crash, or fails to turn on, requiring a soft reset (about every month or two, usually when I'm showing it off to a non-Palm user)
2) didn't allow apps like Documents To Go to crash the system when editing huge documents, requiring a FACTORY RESET (yes, that means reinstall everything).
3) didn't have the gimmicky slider. I would be happy with the T|E form factor but with the T|3's feature set. I don't care if it sticks an extra inch out of my pocket.
4) worked great with Linux. I mean come on, guys, give people another excuse to dump Windows, dammit. Microsoft's your competition, you know. JPilot is a pretty good substitute, despite a few UI limitations (grumble).
5) had longer battery life. The effective life of the T|T in heavy use is about 3 hours, I've found, using a keyboard and minimal backlighting. Make it a bigger battery or whatever it takes. Making the battery replaceable would be nice, too. For that matter, make the indicator light show when the thing's finished charging (fixed in T|3?).
Here's what I said:
In the story "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty", Stephen Evans intimates that "internet zealots" with a grudge against The SCO Group perpetrated the My.Doom email virus which attacked the sco.com website.
Mr. Evans is welcome to his opinion but having provided not one shred of evidence to support it, he comes across as a SCO spokesman, echoing their corporate view that Linux/Free Software people are thugs and hooligans rather than honest, hard working people working to improve the world. People, I might add, who are as appalled at these denial-of-service attacks as everybody else.
It is much more likely and believable that the virus was targeted at SCO as a joke by whatever teenager or immature adult who released it. If Mr. Evans stops and thinks for a minute, he will realize that it does the Linux/OSS community little good to be perceived as "internet vandals" (to use his term), whereas it does paint SCO as the innocent victim. (Mr. Evans will further note that SCO had plenty of warning of this virus and chose not to alter their DNS settings, as Microsoft did, to avoid their site being taken down.)
Given the BBC's scepticism about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I would expect you to take a properly dim view of this worm incident as well.
Don't forget another important detail: Google is a profitable company, unlike Netscape, which basically burned through its investor capital while giving away its flagship product and losing web server sales to Microsoft IIS.
Also, Google is about to go public and turn into probably a $30 billion company. That will give them a massive war chest to fend off Microsoft with new products, more aggressive ad prices, etc.
Of course, Microsoft has the biggest war chest of all, so I wouldn't bet on Google winning in the long run, but they have a better chance to stay in the ring and keep their independence than Netscape did.
I respectfully disagree. You may be "old at 40" in many jobs relative to the age of new hires, but you are not at any disadvantage in terms of software development skills, creativity, experience, smarts, know-how, people skills, patience, etc.
As an old fart in my late 30s-early 40s I have watched young 18-year-old or 20-year-old hotshots from MIT come do a year or two of internship, or newly graduated 23-year-olds fresh from the compsci mills, and they are a marvel to behold; they talk fast, think fast, and type fast. However, they also make a big mess because they haven't learned how to be engineers yet, only coder/hackers. They are disorganized, they make huge mistakes in their designs, can't document for shit, they go down blind alleys... all the mistakes we also made as neophytes. Don't get me wrong--we love these young tykes and we know that when they're 35 they'll be awesome, but right now most of them can't program their way out of a paper bag. At the better companies, the management knows this as well. By contrast, I've noticed that older beginners tend to be more patient and humble and tend to "grow up" in the field a lot faster.
Regarding your contention that someone can be too old for anything, I would say that can't possibly be true. There are millions of people every year who discover their true calling and proceed to change careers in mid-life. This is what makes the U.S. such a great country; it's not the crooked politicians, the rigged elections, the oligarchical corporations, malls, racism, the self-centered lawsuit-happy masses, etc. It's the freedom and opportunity to go back to school and reinvent yourself, something which is next to impossible in most other places.
Ironically, I just had an interview today for a hospital volunteer position; I'm thinking of switching from software engineering into the healthcare field, maybe even medical school. The interviewer is a person who was once in theatre, now in hospital work, and is studying to become an ordained minister. Needless to say I got a very sympathetic hearing on my career aspirations.
One thing I've learned through all this is to never tell someone they can't achieve something. There are enough obstacles in the road so why create imaginary ones? If the O.P. wants to go into computers, more power to'em. Heck, if nothing else, they can moonlight in an E.R. once a month to pay the bills and still do what they love.
among other things, employment for a whole bunch of scientists and engineers. Massive projects like Apollo, SSTL and ISS may seem like dead-end or pork-barrel projects to the general public, but they create jobs in science and technology, thus creating demand for scientists and technologists, thus causing more people to major in scientific fields. At least they're not becoming lawyers, and beyond that they're generating new tech for us all to enjoy.
What about microcomputers? I read somewhere that some of the technology for modern microprocessors was developed for the space program (and for missiles). Solar power was also implemented (but not invented) for the space program. Your reference to metallurgy is valid and also ceramics, propulsion systems, high density batteries, scratch-proof lenses, advances in hydroponics, radiation insulation, etc. The list goes on and on.
Then there's the intangible benefits of a national research and exploratory mission that is peaceful in nature. Many people in this kind of discussion forum mock George W. Bush's (as yet unannounced) space initiative and out of the other corner of their mouth they mock his aggressive foreign policy. Well which is it? You want the U.S. to avoid military adventures overseas and also not to explore the heavens? Put all that money to use funding housing for the poor? Isn't $5 trillion spent on the poor since 1960 enough already? Let's spend it on people who will actually give us something in return--rocket scientists, physicists, astronomers, engineers, programmers, science teachers, etc. Let's invest it in ways that will create the economic opportunities that the poor really need... and keep our patronizing sympathy to ourselves.
In fact, the space program is the best way the U.S. can marshal its resources and inspire a new generation of young scientists and technologists. It worked in 1960 and it can work again in the 21st century. It can invigorate the sciences and get kids of all colors and economic classes to think big, to reach for the stars. It can and will result in new technological breakthroughs in medicine, propulsion, materials sciences, and other areas that we can only imagine today.
The superpowers of the late 21st century will be those nations and alliances of nations that leave Earth orbit to explore and exploit the resources of the entire solar system. Offworld factories and mining facilities, economies of scale in lift technologies, and critical mass numbers of go-to people in space will eventually pay back in spades the necessary trillions of dollars of investment that have been made and have yet to be made.
Americans can go there; or, we can sit on our fat duffs and let others go there, but someone will go there. If we let others take the initiative, then sure we will go to space someday--as steerage passengers on Chinese orbiters--after saving our pennies from serving fast food to our Chinese and European bosses visiting on holiday.
Ogg is good technology. It's open, people can incorporate it into their products without patent and royalty concerns, and it's about as good as anything else out there. Perhaps the consumer market will be owned by a mixture of WMA, AAC and MP3, but for specialized applications Ogg is the way to go.
It's like with other open source tools; so long as you share your improvements with the world, you can use it for free. This is very appealing to someone developing a product that compresses audio for whatever purpose.
It's a niche product at this point but I believe it has a role to play in embedded systems of various sorts if not in popular music players.
Second that on Taxcut. It installed and ran on my linux workstation with Crossover and the only problem was that clicking "help" made it crash (apparently tries to launch a browser).
As a long time Turbotax user, I had initially investigated their Turbotax-on-the-Web, which I thought would be a great cross-platform solution, but it required a certain version of Internet Explorer. I complained to the company but they did not indicate that they had any flexibility on this. What's the point of the web if it's Windows-only, grumble grumble.
Now Vanguard is offering complementary access to Turbotax on the Web for its account holders for 1040 Basic, 1040EZ and State filing starting in mid-January; we'll see if they've fixed their browser incompatibilities yet, otherwise I'm sticking with Taxcut for another year.
FYI, the web site is "anti-slash.org" and judging by the kind of forum postings they have, it's comprised of some pissed off 13-year-olds with too much time on their hands. They archive highly rated postings from slashdot.org and encourage their buddies to repost them as a way to dilute the value of Slashdot's forums. I notice they have archived three of my postings. This is of dubious legality; don't Slashdot posters own their postings?
Incidentally, the registrant is listed as follows, according to a GoDaddy.com whois search:
ID:0-776643-Gandi
Name:John Marriott
Organization:John Marriott
Street1:506 E Sherman St
City:St. Joseph
State/Province:Illinois
Postal Code:61873
Country:US
Email:marriott@uiuc.edu
How is the paper handling on your E310? My Optra E312 is prone to jams and multi-feeds. Lexmark tech support denies it's a problem and will supply a long document on how to properly feed paper, what kind of paper to use, how to tighten the guides and then loosen them to the exact paper width, not to ever add an extra sheet to an existing stack, don't use used paper, etc. In fact it comes off as one long excuse for their sucky paper feed mechanism.
The only real solution I have found is to feed one page at a time. It works pretty well with Linux, but I'd never buy another one just based on this multi-feed problem and Lexmark's unwillingness to fix it.