I know this isn't the first time, but thought I'd ask:
Cliff, was this a screwup, or do you plan to pick fun Troll questions like this regularly? Cuz if you do, I'll start writing some questions....
Based on the success of Tomb Raider, it's clear that sex is superfluous and I have decided to write a paper on this. Can anyone talk to me about the overall trends toward the entire species dying off due to lack of interest in anyone else in comparison with Laura or Angelina, and what's the consensus on how quickly this will happen?
A cousin of mine who works on an Free Software project just got hired by Microsoft and I'm wondering just how long it'll be before everyone doing free software gets hungry, gets real jobs, and Linux dies off?
My cat just hurled up something truly horrendous. Has anyone tried using this stuff for case modding or overclocking? If I do, where should I submit my story? Tom's hardware seems the obvious choice, but this goop smells suspiciously like the Register's style of investigative journalism.
Well, the overclocking didn't work quite as planned, but the heat and electrical jolt seem to have spawned a new life form. Am I required to get a patent on it, and if so, is there a GNU-like document for preserving li'l blobby's rights without exploiting him/her/it?
Somewhere, I remember seeing an article that the total data bandwidth of the USA is dominated by Netflix. By this, the article meant, there are more gigs of data shuffling around the continent in Netflix envelopes than on all the fat data pipes combined.
That was several months ago. Netflix has had negligible market penetration (think... how many of your family have even *heard* of Netflix or dvdbarn?). In the next few years we're to expect action by Blockbuster in this niche. Some are predicting 30 percent or more of households will have an 'unlimited rental' membership somewhere by the time the market saturates.
Meanwhile, the regulated residential broadband providers are resisting/lobbying/preventing any competition, telecom reform has just taken it in the teeth, and most home users I've talked to have seen stagnation or degradation in the measured bandwidth per buck they're getting in the last 2 years. A lucky few are seeing alternative providers and the beginnings of competition, but I'm betting a decade goes by before we see enough alternatives that prices drop hard and performance soars.
As much as I love 802.11b and other wireless protocols, that mediocre pipe ain't the answer to a whole neighborhood of VOD-loving customers without some astounding cell-like protocol improvements to get a couple dozen 8mB/s (based on my replay/tivo experience; I'm likely wrong on this detail) streams of data per Access Point out to all them suburbanites.
From there, a buncha me-too's on stuff like people liking ownership of dvd's, the effect of PVR's, market-stifling price structures, fingers pointed at how well Music-on-Demand is working (see market stifling price structures), DivX as a cautionary tale, etc etc. that everyone else is saying.
Does anyone know when Aibo will come out with Sony Memory Stick interfaces? Then I can have a puppy capable of carrying a flower and a well formatted data file, all in one. And it doesn't need to be let out at 3am.
Ooh, speaking of which, I've gotta go let the dog in!
99.99% of the time (my guess), you're gonna have a few bureaucratic hoops to jump through. This is the least of your problems starting out.
Something I haven't seen mentioned: if you DO have trouble (I've seen some wierd-ass fights inside homeowner associations in the news), find a workaround address. Hell, a mailbox at Mailboxes Etc. might be sufficient, but most consulting types I know find a semicompatible firm to work with, or a small-business facility, an incubator/innovation center run by local money, an office-rental facility, etc.
I did like the remark that worrying about zoning should be a business goal. That whole forgiveness/permission axiom comes to mind when dealing with anyone but the IRS.
People talk about the lack of job security when you work for yourself. I disagree. I think that I have more security: I know exactly what the books say, and what my prospects are. I know that right now I have enough cash for several months even if I don't invoice a dime, and I know how much I'm going to invoice. That's a lot more information I've ever had from any other employee. And I can't get escorted off the premesis at 4:30 on Friday and told that my personal belongings will be shipped to me...:)
My way of thinking of this is that even *if* I get 'laid off' by a client, it is a tenth (give or take) of my overall income/revenue. I've lost a few minor (and one major) clients in the last couple years, and they admit they need me but can't get funding approved. Meanwhile, I found others. A lost customer is worrisome, but that's a lot better than the pit I felt when I got laid off once.
I realized after posting this that, like a few others, I'd misread the question. Mine is a pointer toward 'how to make the code grow', not 'am I a success?'. Feel free to mod me down to -1 as offtopic, but check out his book. If not for the good project advice, then because you damn well NEED cvs.
There. 'Nuff said.
As for the correct reading of this question about success, everyone else has said it well. All I can add is a quote: "if you're not having fun, you're probably not doing it right..."
The biodiesel we'll be producing is not subsidized in any way, shape or form by the US government. The true cost of our biodiesel is (approx) $1.50/gallon to produce and sell and be self-sustaining.
Oh, and WHY IN THE HELL NOT?!
First, it's a bit disingenuous to say you don't pay federal taxes like other vehicle fuels, and then to claim no subsidy. Any economic advantage counts as a subsidy. If not technically, then in spirit.
Second, if you're creating local jobs and allowing fuel production to become local, why on earth are you not chasing for subsidies?! Make a few farmers happy, too, since it gives them another stable market for their crops. Farmers like stable demand and more markets! Besides, then they can buy vehicles that burn their own commodities.
Farming is so rife with federal price controls, federal purchasing programs, income tax breaks, sales tax exemptions and incentives and subsidies that I doubt you can completely claim you're not subsidized, anyway. It's just too byzantine a system. So, again, you don't have to push for more subsidies, but don't hide from them. Personally, I say use the system and lobby for subsidies in the name of apple pie, farmers and the good old US of A. Embrace the horror! Get that biodiesel price down another dime and let some farmer buy another gasoline-guzzling SUV with the profit he makes off your biodiesel (now that'll be ironic). But successfully competing in the whole market, flaws and subsidies included, is the only way to see widespread (not just 5-25%) adoption.
Challis, ID... as in Idaho, so yes, I'm in the US. Last time I saw, there were 67 cents per gallon of taxes here. That's been years ago, when a local gas station protested the taxes by changing their huge overhead sign prices to "$.72 (plus tax)". On each pump was a sticker itemizing the state/federal taxes.
True cost (not sure what that means) of $1.50, using volunteers (price will climb when paychecks are needed), using poor/small scale efficiencies (price will drop as scale increases), with a bit of vagueness on the per-gallon state tax being included or not. I'm your typical *late* early adopter, so this sort of matters: if you can't convince me, you're going to have great trouble getting 5% adoption. I apologize if I misread it, but I can read your posting either way: do people pay $1.50 plus.45 = 1.95 a gallon (for what I understand is lower fuel mpg efficiency)? or is it $1.05 plus.45 = 1.50 for a final cost? To your credit, a 20 or 30 cent per gallon premium still makes up so tiny a percentage of the overall cost of owning a car for an infrequent driver like me that I am interested enough to keep looking into the idea.
You mentioned one other thing: pollution. How does biodiesel burn? What impurities or exhausts do we have to deal with? Environmentally, a nice thing about fuel cells and electric cars is they let you concentrate the dirty stuff (assuming combustion still is used to create the H2 fuel) at a plant with scrubbers, monitors and more elaborate antipollution measures, rather than using the 'catalytic converter and a prayer' (or as my dad called it, 'the solution to pollution is dilution') way of handling auto exhaust. So, what's the worst thing that comes out of a biodiesel exhaust pipe? Is there a way that some impurities in the biodiesel risk us seeing really nasty exhaust/byproducts? Does a fouled cylinder (glow plug, not spark plug, I assume?) or an otherwise poorly tuned engine cause the same exponential increase in toxins that a car engine sees?
Again, I'm throwing these out not as a troll, but because these are the hard questions I'll ask myself before buying any such item. I would literally rather stay with the devil I know than wait 20 years for us to figure out the problems with a new substance, so different is itself not an argument for me.
As for the fuel price, 20 or 30 cents a gallon could be a big deal for people. I hesitated buying my first hybrid car (a civic) last year simply because the car's features were too stripped down and the car carried a price premium that'd cost me 20 years to recover. That's what I mean by *late* early adopter. I'll buy environmental items, but only if it makes good economic *and* environmental sense. If a car is 70% more energy-efficient but the price is so high it'll still take me 20 years to recover the higher cost, I can't afford to change, and will just continue my efforts to drive less and adopt other no-cost ecologically-sound habits.
We plan on selling biodiesel for approximately USD$1.25-$1.50
Not trying to be a troll, but what's the effect (either way) of all the taxes included in any automotive fuel. I mean, you either end up at $2 or more per gallon with the taxes, or Oregon* is going to make an exemption that costs them a necessary chunk of their annual budget? You're damned either way, it seems, unless you're foreseeing am early-achievable mass-production cost that hits before-tax petrochemical fuel costs.
I realize this doesn't happen instantly (early adopters will get biodiesel taxfree, I'm assuming), but seriously, what happens when a larger percentage of the population goes this route?
The issue is like soaring state/federal tarrifs on landline phones, as people shift to untaxed alternatives (cells, IP telephony). The tax structure game has to be zero-net-sum, so either the loophole closes or everyone else pays extra.
So... is it realistic to see costs of biodiesel hitting whatever the pretax costs are for diesel or other automotive fuels?
--
* I initially had a remark about your state's financial straits and 4-day school weeks, but a nearby school (Challis, ID) just did the same thing. Glass houses, stones, etc. The news quote that blew my mind was the HS principal saying "the kids seem to like the idea." Duh.
I agree that coolness/spin or a large market or need are critical factors.
However, those are largely things we don't control. The controllable factors of success are more interesting to me. I guess it's because there are lessons on software engineering here. Cool projects can be run into the ground, and tiny niche projects can do well if they're well-run.
Hands down, the best nuts-n-bolts coverage I've ever seen on important issues to successfully developing open source is in a book by Karl Fogel, Open Source Development with CVS. Fogel's one of the developers behind CVS and it's planned successor, Subversion
The book is an interesting paradox: it has 1/2 the chapters GPL'ed. When I started working with CVS, they were useful enough that I bought our development team two copies of the book. Then I read the rest of it... and those are the chapters I'm talking about. Absolutely, they're the best summary of what it takes to successfully run a GPL-ish project. (Ironically, they've GPL'd the technical detail chapters and you have to buy the book to read the parts that talk about things critical to the success of an open source project).
Success is helped by things like doing lots of releases (seeing progress gets others to buy in, and not seeing progress leads to people quitting in frustration) and only adding features you need (let someone else add the features they need). There's a lot more here, but I'm not about to steal Fogel's thunder. Many of these are ideas that are effective in regular development, especially on custom coding projects within big companies.
The focus on GPL code is not the same as on shrinkwrapped products: you're not trying to add features just to add selling points. You're trying to get more people to use the project.
and a $28,500 fine - that's £18,355 in real money.
The corrected text is: that's £18,355 in monopoly money.
Seriously, it was da*n funny to see a website with a vast USA audience get all provincial about the USA. We're so bad about it, and I like the 'turnabout is fair play' school of thinking.
Speaking of which, what's the correct term for this sort of a gaff/slur/self-centeredness?
Lacking specific hardware, it becomes quite a challenge to get a good fast media system to self-config and run without a hitch. For a young project like MythTV, that could take a while.
Solution: XBox software hack. See slashdot for Sunday. standardized platform, cheap, etc. Even if just as the 'view' half of a mythtv pair (latest version allows a recorder or player subconfiguration), that'd be a cool, quiet stereo component solution.
Heh... after this weekend's hack, I'm closer to buying an xbox than I've ever been.
Myth1: Maybe your Tivo doesn't skip commercials automagically, but my replay does just that. I watch 3 hours of programming in 2 hours, roughly. It has a single-button-press option that turns this feature on or off, and in configs there's a spot to select whether each new program has this on or off by default.
Alas, all is not perfect in Replay land... sometimes it misinterprets what a commercial start/stop is, and you lose some of the show. This leads to a few moments of 'rewind, off commercialAdvance (CA), watch the show segment that got chomped, ffwd thru to the end of the commercials, reactivate commercial advance'.
When a show has this happen twice, I tend to leave CA off for the rest of the show.
To be fair, I'm so hooked on CA that I leave it on by default, and once or twice a week run into something that has annoyingly wrong tags. I literally *am* what the networks are afraid of. My daughter's not getting 20 minutes per hour of commercialistic indoctrination as she watches shows. Of course, that just means we're targetted that much more on pokemon,spongebob and Dora merchandise, but thank god I haven't had to fight the barbie wars yet.
Incidentally, peer-edited TV is what I figure I'll resort to if the networks kill my commercialAdvance button's functionality. MythTV, plus some shared data via XML for where commercials are in a given show. With the software breakdown on XBox this weekend, I'm betting it quickly becomes a candidate for the player module of MythTV's latest version.
I do not owe the entertainment industry a profit, and have too many artistically-inclined friends that aren't benefitted by the industry's chokehold on popular media consumption for me to not care two licks what happens to them. There are victims to their heavy-handed methods of marketing entertainment.
Here in the United States...not...enough emphasis on science and mathematics in... schools... With religious fundamentalists clammoring about... Evolution... We need... free journals for the masses... media outlets (scientific or otherwise) will publish only what they find interesting and what they know will sell instead of what may be most valuable... should thus be treated before making any moves towards a grass-roots movement like this. After all, breaking down nuclear physics (like string theory) or techniques of treating cancer (like inhibiting angiogenesis) loses something in the translation when forced to use 6th-grade terminology.
Meanwhile, over in Dukeofshadows posts, we do not place enough emphasis on whitespace and carriage returns.
Duke, you lost me at the first sentence. You're modded 5 and I still couldn't/didn't read you. Whitespace. It's free. It's not fattening. It's not against anyones religion that I'm aware of. Either hit return or toss in a few <p> tags. Seriously, until I hit the paste button and went to work with the dots, I DIDN'T READ YOUR POST.
Now, chances are you just misposted plain text as 'html formatted' and got burned, but your post shows a bit of what is wrong with scientists versus the media:
Having a good message isn't enough to DEMAND attention. You still have to sort of 'market' your message. Don't blame the readers if the message is unappetizing. That's like criticizing people for preferring filet mignon over gruel.
I'm a physicist. I'm told regularly that I'm a great teacher and writer. In other words, I communicate ideas well. You just didn't. Ignoring (for a moment) the substance of your post, you failed to communicate effectively. Tech journals largely fail, too. And it isn't a matter of dumbing down the language. Einstein said it best when he said that anyone that couldn't teach their ideas to a twelve-year-old was a charlatan. While I suspect he was 10% wrong (some brilliant people can't write well), most people don't try hard enough, but blame the world for not seeing their brilliance despite it being mired in goopy writing.
From what I've seen, a good researcher is rare. A good teacher is equally rare. A good researcher that can communicate cleverly and remain technically precise is rarer than a thunderbolt on a blue-sky day.Feynman's Freshman Physics lectures to CalTech are a damn good example. That said, even for the 1 in a million that can do these things well, crisp writing takes lots of extra effort. It isn't worth the effort when writing for an audience of knowing peers, which means PhysRev shouldn't waste it's time trying to be Discovery For Kids.
Next, you say we should fix other stuff before fixing the issue at hand. I say work on them all at once:
Demand more of the media. Complain and ridicule writers of goop or out-and-out wrongness.
I do think we're gaining ground in terms of the quality of science writing and writers' ability to balance readability and technical correctness. This belief comes from asking my non-techie, non-scientist friends and family.
I'd like a primetime engineering company show instead of another one about lawyers. I'd say this was more boring than watching paint dry based on my day, but I know how lame most lawyers' days are and look how little that matters to TV writers. I'm willing to risk the (well-known) back edge of this two-edged sword just to improve respect of science and engineering and gain a venue for day-in, day-out presentation of smart science, good engineering, etc. As much as ER creates armchair doctors, it also repeatedly reinforces the wisdom of consulting experts when needed and gives the profession added public respect for it's hard work.
We need more science-for-poets/politicians courses taught well to nonscientists to gain their trust and respect. Otherwise, people that flunked algebra are going to be making tech policy without our advice. Anyone wanna bet on Senator Disney^H^H^H^H^H Hollings' science grades?
We seem to finally be exploring populist mechanisms for making science/engineering cooler and more relevant for students.
While I understand that BattleBots isn't good science and I cringe at the idea of building robots that hack at each other, I respect their ability to give engineering and and electronics and other unpopular topics an air of popularity and coolness. If I were a nerdy teen again, I'd at least gain respect because my designs for killer robots actually worked. Better than battlebots is is the national robotics competition that my nephew is in. It's spearheaded by Dean Kamen (what's it's name, anyone? First?!).
As for the lack of whitespace in your post, it could have been worse. ItCouldHaveBeenTheEvenMoreFrighten ingLandOfNoWhitespaceAtAll. Hungarian Notation meets flamewar.
And we all know there's only one thing worse than that... no, not all lowercase and no whitespace...
Worst of all are those really big german adjectives. Like the one for this tank
Yeah, I know...this started out screaming to be modded offtopic, troll and etc. I've edited the hell out of it since then, so now I'm on point. Still, I'm not grabbin the karma bonus, but I'll at least sign my name 'cuz this stuff matters and I did try to be funny. Whadda I know, it's 4 am... well, it was when I started. Now, it's daylight outside.
I worked for a year in a company that had lots of sun servers, and not a lick of windows at any level except desktop clients. This was circa Redhat 4, so linux at the desktop was far from anyone's mind.
The guy I replaced had come to loggerheads with the CEO when it came to platforms for the complex web applications we created. Boss wanted Microsoft, and surrendered when my predecessor said: "Fine... but you carry the pager for it. You get to find someone to come in at 3am, or on sunday, or whenever else it fails. Microsoft servers lock up. And I refuse to let your decision dominate my personal life, so if YOU want to have Microsoft behind all this stuff, you need to guarantee ME that I won't be expected to support hardware on my personal time. On the other hand, if you buy what I recommend, I'll carry the pager."
Microsoft reliability has improved since then, but the argument might still work. All it takes is a techie willing to walk out the door.
In other news, several terrorist cells are suspected of being responsible for the snowstorms that have crippled the eastern US over the last few weeks.
A high-ranking White House official with a predisposition for overreacting and fascist rulemaking has blamed the ready availability of instructions for snow-guns on the internet, and has asked that so-called weathermen stop presenting contradictory explanations for these terrorist incidents. The same official also insisted that anyone that discounts his theory is practicing poor science and harming the US's ability to combat terrorism wherever he sees it.
Damn, if I didn't have one of my rare modded-to-5 posts directed at this nimrod, I'd sure like to burn my own modpoints giving you a prop for this one.
That's one of the cleverest/funniest and most short-n-to-the-point things I've read lately. And, I tend to be a big proponent of spaceflight just because I hate to think we're too at-risk for extinction if we all sit on this one rock and get on each others nerves waiting for a big asteroid. Either way, we are the old cliche: 'all our eggs in one basket'.
Again, thanks!
(anyone out there got modpoints to burn? Read my msg's parent #5395267)
There needs to be a mod for nonexpert-blowing-posteriorized-smoke!
Having seen the goop that was modded way up as I scanned this, I feel compelled to reply to several messages at once:
Natron 2.0: Why do we need to send one all the way to Pluto? Is it that much of a concern to us? We know it is a barren icy wasteland, what more do we need?
Change that to "we suspect..." and please read/internalize a quote from Werner Von Braun: "Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Go grab a copy of Heinlein's remarks on receiving heart surgery that was a byproduct of the space age. Research incidental discoveries of every planetary fly-by we've done (every one taught us something noteworthy). Try to find the tenuous links between exploration and discoveries. And stop spouting off opinions with the wrong verb.
westyvw: That aside, I hate space exploration. I want our problems solved first. Why go out there when we are so busy trying to kill ourselves here? I do not understand the point of exploring space at all, its such a waste of money, time, and resources. I am a geek, and that makes me realize the folly all the more. Until we develop the tech to do it right, Blow it off.
(I deleted an extensive flame, questioning westyvw's parentage and marvelling at his ability to exist without the brains normally needed for autonomic activity)
If I'm not mistaken, there aren't a lot of Al Qaeda space launches. In fact, I see a pretty strong link between hateful regimes and the utter lack of money spent on basic research in any humanitarian or scientific field. A lot has been learned in pursuit of warlike activities, admittedly, but just because we can't bend these backwaters' worldthink to our enlightened ways, doesn't mean we should sit around and wait for them to agree with us before we continue advancing.
Still, by your logic, I'd at least prioritize. TV, Brittney Spears, novels, the arts, all sports, all cuisine and restaurants, and a few dozen other pursuits are a greater waste of time than scientific research. Live an ascetic life and then come back telling me that the money can be better spent elsewhere. Oh, and your 'net connection... no, make that anything electronic you own... are all forfeit unless needed in a specific mission to combat death and despotism worldwide.
I hope the above paragraph is the stupidest, scariest thing you've ever read. Your belief has an underlying kernel of truth that can best be laid bare by just thinking of the absurdity of self-denial until everyone else in the world stops being so wrong-headed. Like communism, it's a nobel (a freudian typo?... I meant noble) idea that so far fails in every implementation.
Developing the 'tech to do it right' without practice is impossible and absurd. Heck, even in modern times, new boat designs have sunk fresh out of the drydock. We explore, we learn, and we stretch into the most unfamiliar areas first because they sometimes reveal deeper questions we didn't even know we should ask. Also we spend years dissecting the failures for lessons and improvements.
Who the FSCK modded this up (as insightful) to a 5??
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In a followup, thasmudyan suggests we skip the unmanned cheap exploration and instead set up a mars colony, then contradicts him/herself by suggesting that the space station is worthless in paragraph one and then suggesting that we set up a probe assembly and launch point on the moon. The space station has a shallower gravity well and a more forgiving landing/linkup point than the moon. In other words, it is an attempt to build a staging point for space research. That having been said, if it costs thousands per pound just for fuel to get away from the earth (and about half as much for fuel to land on the moon and relaunch it), how inexpensive will it be to build a semiconductor fab, ship pig-iron, build a machinist shop, have a full suite of materials testing and QA devices, etc etc etc lofted into space? For a long time to come, the most we can hope for is reusability and assembling things prebuilt and tested down here where everything's available and shipping costs are 1e5 cheaper.
As for thasmudyan's belief that there's potentially a conspiracy to keep space travel expensive, I find all the kennedy-assassination theories more plausible. The cost of escaping earth's gravity is so high, you can pay an engineer for ten years and spend less than lofting him into space. There isn't a techie alive that wouldn't love to see those numbers brought down to a level that makes a week in space affordable. It matters to most of us much more than mere money ever could. Getting thousands of geeks to remain silent about ways to drop those costs would be impossible. Space travel remains expensive not out of a conspiracy, but simply because it is that hard, that iffy, that expensive.
If you don't believe me, you don't understand the technical extremes we're talking about here. Check again the ongoing postmortem of Columbia's failed reentry, and imagine building any device (no matter how simple) that performs well under these extremes of heat and cold. If it seemed easy, find any 1 thing that performs well both immersed in liquid nitrogen and exposed to a blowtorch. Last of all, imagine building something complex enough to support life for days and still withstand those two thermal extremes, plus a thousand other issues like extreme acceleration forces, radiation, hard vacuum, repeated hot/cold cycling for anything going in/out of unfiltered sunlight, etc., etc., etc.
This complexity is why we have the phrase "It isn't rocket science."
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Thankfully, the anti-nuke protest was modded down low enough I only saw responses. Hospitals and highway departments have nastier stuff than the 'nuclear batteries' used to power probes. If I were Roblimo, anyone saying 'chernyobl in space' without a new argument would immediately have all karma stripped. If I were king, they'd get flogged.
Have fun. All I know is any name beats the everloving s**t out of PCCard. I can't count all the times I've had to break out of a conversation to make sure whoever I was doing a support call for was talking about a PC-CARD (like a credit card) and not a PC card (like one you open up the PC and install inside).
Oh god. I just channeled my own voice from the future: "No, is that a *NEW* card you've installed, or is it..."
I agree, though focusing on _good_ SF would be even better. I am not sure that 'Children of Dune' would qualify.
I used to read a lot of SF, and a hefty amount of SF commentary (reviews, interviews, commentary interspersed in anthologies, etc). From this, for years I was vaguely aware that a lot of SF authors hated the term 'sci-fi', preferring SF. But I didn't grasp why.
So, while I agree that the Sci-Fi channel is a horrible, ugly, bastard child of 50's-era, drive-in, bad-movie, goober-slobbering stupid
stuff riddled with off-topic nonscience/nonsense, laserguns and rubber-suit aliens, too stupid to parody itself and show
MST3K or 'Plan 9 from Outer Space', the SciFi channel did do one helpful thing:
They made it clear to me what it is that all those SF authors so feared and despised about the term, 'sci-fi'. The only channel I cringe more about is 'Lifetime'. My wife watches both of them just enough that I sometimes worry about her.
Meanwhile, I keep hoping that someone would take the best SF, plus some good shows off TechTV, use the product lines from ThinkGeek for advertising and throw in stuff like Futurama, Farscape, Babylon, and old Trek for filler, older stuff (Buck Rogers serials, twilight zone) for a humorous/heartwarming look back and stuff like MST3K and Plan 9 for farce/camp value.
by Lucas Membrane (524640)... I've got a legitimate business... 80,000... might want my firm's software....polite and informative email trying to attract a sale. But now, because of all the smut and scams, it might make me a criminal to try to promote my business. Jeez.
Man, talk about unimaginative.
Take a course on marketing. Buy a book. Hire a *good* marketing firm (most are wannabees (or even grifters) unable to document success or failure).
Advertise in trade journals and other places where chunks of your estimated 80k hang out.
Attend, Sponsor, etc. trade shows. Get your name out there.
Create brochures, white papers, etc.
Create a marketing presence via a well-done website, with substance.
Buy access to a relevant, well-established list that has a good chance of carpet-bombing your intended market. I don't mean spammers. I mean the 'daily update' opt-on list run by your trade magazines. In my case, that's eweek, computerworld, etc.
...etc. In short, conventional marketing.
DO NOT COMPLAIN THAT THESE COST MONEY. Spam is a something-for-nothing proposition ONLY from your perspective and we're tired of carrying your lazy ass.
Entice sign-ups on an email list at your website, your brochures, trade journal ads, trade shows, local chamber activity, trade association meetings, or whatever fits. This is a critical step in building your own free mailing list for future contacts of opt-in email recipients.
Use the email list wisely. Send something periodically that is both newsworthy and interesting and valuable to your recipients (oh, and relevant to the offer they signed up for, obviously). In every one of those mailings, spend a few seconds top and bottom selling your product.
It is critical that you make the news/gift part of your emails useful enough to generate what is called viral marketing. Let your customers find you and stick with you until they need your product.
Presto, you're not spamming. What's more, if you do the above steps well, you'll have 40k of your known customers and another 20k of complete strangers and undiscovered markets, clammering for your advice, and remembering you when they need your product/services.
DO NOT COMPLAIN THAT THESE TAKE A LOT OF EFFORT. That's why a good marketing firm costs a lot... marketing is time/labor/talent expensive.
Now, go away and leave me alone. This is kindergarten level net marketing stuff. I'm not even getting into the other obvious ideas like becoming a known expert on usenet or web discussions, etc. No, you don't get to send me email unsolicitedly. If I care about your topic, I sign up 9 out of 10 times. I sign up for work-relevant newsletters I see friends/colleagues getting. I'll make it easy for you in that regard... but if you don't get my consent first, I'll never forgive you for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this isn't the first time, but thought I'd ask:
Cliff, was this a screwup, or do you plan to pick fun Troll questions like this regularly? Cuz if you do, I'll start writing some questions....
Based on the success of Tomb Raider, it's clear that sex is superfluous and I have decided to write a paper on this. Can anyone talk to me about the overall trends toward the entire species dying off due to lack of interest in anyone else in comparison with Laura or Angelina, and what's the consensus on how quickly this will happen?
A cousin of mine who works on an Free Software project just got hired by Microsoft and I'm wondering just how long it'll be before everyone doing free software gets hungry, gets real jobs, and Linux dies off?
My cat just hurled up something truly horrendous. Has anyone tried using this stuff for case modding or overclocking? If I do, where should I submit my story? Tom's hardware seems the obvious choice, but this goop smells suspiciously like the Register's style of investigative journalism.
Well, the overclocking didn't work quite as planned, but the heat and electrical jolt seem to have spawned a new life form. Am I required to get a patent on it, and if so, is there a GNU-like document for preserving li'l blobby's rights without exploiting him/her/it?
Somewhere, I remember seeing an article that the total data bandwidth of the USA is dominated by Netflix. By this, the article meant, there are more gigs of data shuffling around the continent in Netflix envelopes than on all the fat data pipes combined.
That was several months ago. Netflix has had negligible market penetration (think... how many of your family have even *heard* of Netflix or dvdbarn?). In the next few years we're to expect action by Blockbuster in this niche. Some are predicting 30 percent or more of households will have an 'unlimited rental' membership somewhere by the time the market saturates.
Meanwhile, the regulated residential broadband providers are resisting/lobbying/preventing any competition, telecom reform has just taken it in the teeth, and most home users I've talked to have seen stagnation or degradation in the measured bandwidth per buck they're getting in the last 2 years. A lucky few are seeing alternative providers and the beginnings of competition, but I'm betting a decade goes by before we see enough alternatives that prices drop hard and performance soars.
As much as I love 802.11b and other wireless protocols, that mediocre pipe ain't the answer to a whole neighborhood of VOD-loving customers without some astounding cell-like protocol improvements to get a couple dozen 8mB/s (based on my replay/tivo experience; I'm likely wrong on this detail) streams of data per Access Point out to all them suburbanites.
From there, a buncha me-too's on stuff like people liking ownership of dvd's, the effect of PVR's, market-stifling price structures, fingers pointed at how well Music-on-Demand is working (see market stifling price structures), DivX as a cautionary tale, etc etc. that everyone else is saying.
Be sure to take a moment in the usual big-box stores and ask for MoneyDance. Build some demand for alternative software.
Ooh, speaking of which, I've gotta go let the dog in!
Something I haven't seen mentioned: if you DO have trouble (I've seen some wierd-ass fights inside homeowner associations in the news), find a workaround address. Hell, a mailbox at Mailboxes Etc. might be sufficient, but most consulting types I know find a semicompatible firm to work with, or a small-business facility, an incubator/innovation center run by local money, an office-rental facility, etc.
I did like the remark that worrying about zoning should be a business goal. That whole forgiveness/permission axiom comes to mind when dealing with anyone but the IRS.
There. 'Nuff said.
As for the correct reading of this question about success, everyone else has said it well. All I can add is a quote: "if you're not having fun, you're probably not doing it right..."
First, it's a bit disingenuous to say you don't pay federal taxes like other vehicle fuels, and then to claim no subsidy. Any economic advantage counts as a subsidy. If not technically, then in spirit.
Second, if you're creating local jobs and allowing fuel production to become local, why on earth are you not chasing for subsidies?! Make a few farmers happy, too, since it gives them another stable market for their crops. Farmers like stable demand and more markets! Besides, then they can buy vehicles that burn their own commodities.
Farming is so rife with federal price controls, federal purchasing programs, income tax breaks, sales tax exemptions and incentives and subsidies that I doubt you can completely claim you're not subsidized, anyway. It's just too byzantine a system. So, again, you don't have to push for more subsidies, but don't hide from them. Personally, I say use the system and lobby for subsidies in the name of apple pie, farmers and the good old US of A. Embrace the horror! Get that biodiesel price down another dime and let some farmer buy another gasoline-guzzling SUV with the profit he makes off your biodiesel (now that'll be ironic). But successfully competing in the whole market, flaws and subsidies included, is the only way to see widespread (not just 5-25%) adoption.
True cost (not sure what that means) of $1.50, using volunteers (price will climb when paychecks are needed), using poor/small scale efficiencies (price will drop as scale increases), with a bit of vagueness on the per-gallon state tax being included or not. I'm your typical *late* early adopter, so this sort of matters: if you can't convince me, you're going to have great trouble getting 5% adoption. I apologize if I misread it, but I can read your posting either way: do people pay $1.50 plus .45 = 1.95 a gallon (for what I understand is lower fuel mpg efficiency)? or is it $1.05 plus .45 = 1.50 for a final cost? To your credit, a 20 or 30 cent per gallon premium still makes up so tiny a percentage of the overall cost of owning a car for an infrequent driver like me that I am interested enough to keep looking into the idea.
You mentioned one other thing: pollution. How does biodiesel burn? What impurities or exhausts do we have to deal with? Environmentally, a nice thing about fuel cells and electric cars is they let you concentrate the dirty stuff (assuming combustion still is used to create the H2 fuel) at a plant with scrubbers, monitors and more elaborate antipollution measures, rather than using the 'catalytic converter and a prayer' (or as my dad called it, 'the solution to pollution is dilution') way of handling auto exhaust. So, what's the worst thing that comes out of a biodiesel exhaust pipe? Is there a way that some impurities in the biodiesel risk us seeing really nasty exhaust/byproducts? Does a fouled cylinder (glow plug, not spark plug, I assume?) or an otherwise poorly tuned engine cause the same exponential increase in toxins that a car engine sees?
Again, I'm throwing these out not as a troll, but because these are the hard questions I'll ask myself before buying any such item. I would literally rather stay with the devil I know than wait 20 years for us to figure out the problems with a new substance, so different is itself not an argument for me.
As for the fuel price, 20 or 30 cents a gallon could be a big deal for people. I hesitated buying my first hybrid car (a civic) last year simply because the car's features were too stripped down and the car carried a price premium that'd cost me 20 years to recover. That's what I mean by *late* early adopter. I'll buy environmental items, but only if it makes good economic *and* environmental sense. If a car is 70% more energy-efficient but the price is so high it'll still take me 20 years to recover the higher cost, I can't afford to change, and will just continue my efforts to drive less and adopt other no-cost ecologically-sound habits.
I realize this doesn't happen instantly (early adopters will get biodiesel taxfree, I'm assuming), but seriously, what happens when a larger percentage of the population goes this route?
The issue is like soaring state/federal tarrifs on landline phones, as people shift to untaxed alternatives (cells, IP telephony). The tax structure game has to be zero-net-sum, so either the loophole closes or everyone else pays extra.
So... is it realistic to see costs of biodiesel hitting whatever the pretax costs are for diesel or other automotive fuels?
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* I initially had a remark about your state's financial straits and 4-day school weeks, but a nearby school (Challis, ID) just did the same thing. Glass houses, stones, etc. The news quote that blew my mind was the HS principal saying "the kids seem to like the idea." Duh.
However, those are largely things we don't control. The controllable factors of success are more interesting to me. I guess it's because there are lessons on software engineering here. Cool projects can be run into the ground, and tiny niche projects can do well if they're well-run.
Hands down, the best nuts-n-bolts coverage I've ever seen on important issues to successfully developing open source is in a book by Karl Fogel, Open Source Development with CVS. Fogel's one of the developers behind CVS and it's planned successor, Subversion
The book is an interesting paradox: it has 1/2 the chapters GPL'ed. When I started working with CVS, they were useful enough that I bought our development team two copies of the book. Then I read the rest of it... and those are the chapters I'm talking about. Absolutely, they're the best summary of what it takes to successfully run a GPL-ish project. (Ironically, they've GPL'd the technical detail chapters and you have to buy the book to read the parts that talk about things critical to the success of an open source project).
Success is helped by things like doing lots of releases (seeing progress gets others to buy in, and not seeing progress leads to people quitting in frustration) and only adding features you need (let someone else add the features they need). There's a lot more here, but I'm not about to steal Fogel's thunder. Many of these are ideas that are effective in regular development, especially on custom coding projects within big companies.
The focus on GPL code is not the same as on shrinkwrapped products: you're not trying to add features just to add selling points. You're trying to get more people to use the project.
Seriously, it was da*n funny to see a website with a vast USA audience get all provincial about the USA. We're so bad about it, and I like the 'turnabout is fair play' school of thinking.
Speaking of which, what's the correct term for this sort of a gaff/slur/self-centeredness?
Problem: specific hardware.
Lacking specific hardware, it becomes quite a challenge to get a good fast media system to self-config and run without a hitch. For a young project like MythTV, that could take a while.
Solution: XBox software hack. See slashdot for Sunday. standardized platform, cheap, etc. Even if just as the 'view' half of a mythtv pair (latest version allows a recorder or player subconfiguration), that'd be a cool, quiet stereo component solution.
Heh... after this weekend's hack, I'm closer to buying an xbox than I've ever been.
Myth1: Maybe your Tivo doesn't skip commercials automagically, but my replay does just that. I watch 3 hours of programming in 2 hours, roughly. It has a single-button-press option that turns this feature on or off, and in configs there's a spot to select whether each new program has this on or off by default.
Alas, all is not perfect in Replay land... sometimes it misinterprets what a commercial start/stop is, and you lose some of the show. This leads to a few moments of 'rewind, off commercialAdvance (CA), watch the show segment that got chomped, ffwd thru to the end of the commercials, reactivate commercial advance'.
When a show has this happen twice, I tend to leave CA off for the rest of the show.
To be fair, I'm so hooked on CA that I leave it on by default, and once or twice a week run into something that has annoyingly wrong tags. I literally *am* what the networks are afraid of. My daughter's not getting 20 minutes per hour of commercialistic indoctrination as she watches shows. Of course, that just means we're targetted that much more on pokemon,spongebob and Dora merchandise, but thank god I haven't had to fight the barbie wars yet.
Incidentally, peer-edited TV is what I figure I'll resort to if the networks kill my commercialAdvance button's functionality. MythTV, plus some shared data via XML for where commercials are in a given show. With the software breakdown on XBox this weekend, I'm betting it quickly becomes a candidate for the player module of MythTV's latest version.
I do not owe the entertainment industry a profit, and have too many artistically-inclined friends that aren't benefitted by the industry's chokehold on popular media consumption for me to not care two licks what happens to them. There are victims to their heavy-handed methods of marketing entertainment.
We don't need no steenkin' public domain. --Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Had to see what you meant, since I didn't recognize the name.
Here's the link that woulda made milk come out my nose...
http://abc.net.au/arts/fools/essay/img/fp667.jpg
Duke, you lost me at the first sentence. You're modded 5 and I still couldn't/didn't read you. Whitespace. It's free. It's not fattening. It's not against anyones religion that I'm aware of. Either hit return or toss in a few <p> tags. Seriously, until I hit the paste button and went to work with the dots, I DIDN'T READ YOUR POST.
Now, chances are you just misposted plain text as 'html formatted' and got burned, but your post shows a bit of what is wrong with scientists versus the media:
Having a good message isn't enough to DEMAND attention. You still have to sort of 'market' your message. Don't blame the readers if the message is unappetizing. That's like criticizing people for preferring filet mignon over gruel.
I'm a physicist. I'm told regularly that I'm a great teacher and writer. In other words, I communicate ideas well. You just didn't. Ignoring (for a moment) the substance of your post, you failed to communicate effectively. Tech journals largely fail, too. And it isn't a matter of dumbing down the language. Einstein said it best when he said that anyone that couldn't teach their ideas to a twelve-year-old was a charlatan. While I suspect he was 10% wrong (some brilliant people can't write well), most people don't try hard enough, but blame the world for not seeing their brilliance despite it being mired in goopy writing.
From what I've seen, a good researcher is rare. A good teacher is equally rare. A good researcher that can communicate cleverly and remain technically precise is rarer than a thunderbolt on a blue-sky day. Feynman's Freshman Physics lectures to CalTech are a damn good example. That said, even for the 1 in a million that can do these things well, crisp writing takes lots of extra effort. It isn't worth the effort when writing for an audience of knowing peers, which means PhysRev shouldn't waste it's time trying to be Discovery For Kids.
(Yeah, I ignored the whole tarpit of overpriced peer-review-journals on purpose. Many go there, none return).
Next, you say we should fix other stuff before fixing the issue at hand. I say work on them all at once:
- Demand more of the media. Complain and ridicule writers of goop or out-and-out wrongness.
- I do think we're gaining ground in terms of the quality of science writing and writers' ability to balance readability and technical correctness. This belief comes from asking my non-techie, non-scientist friends and family.
- I'd like a primetime engineering company show instead of another one about lawyers. I'd say this was more boring than watching paint dry based on my day, but I know how lame most lawyers' days are and look how little that matters to TV writers. I'm willing to risk the (well-known) back edge of this two-edged sword just to improve respect of science and engineering and gain a venue for day-in, day-out presentation of smart science, good engineering, etc. As much as ER creates armchair doctors, it also repeatedly reinforces the wisdom of consulting experts when needed and gives the profession added public respect for it's hard work.
- We need more science-for-poets/politicians courses taught well to nonscientists to gain their trust and respect. Otherwise, people that flunked algebra are going to be making tech policy without our advice. Anyone wanna bet on Senator Disney^H^H^H^H^H Hollings' science grades?
- We seem to finally be exploring populist mechanisms for making science/engineering cooler and more relevant for students.
While I understand that BattleBots isn't good science and I cringe at the idea of building robots that hack at each other, I respect their ability to give engineering and and electronics and other unpopular topics an air of popularity and coolness. If I were a nerdy teen again, I'd at least gain respect because my designs for killer robots actually worked. Better than battlebots is is the national robotics competition that my nephew is in. It's spearheaded by Dean Kamen (what's it's name, anyone? First?!).As for the lack of whitespace in your post, it could have been worse. ItCouldHaveBeenTheEvenMoreFrighten ingLandOfNoWhitespaceAtAll. Hungarian Notation meets flamewar.
And we all know there's only one thing worse than that... no, not all lowercase and no whitespace... Worst of all are those really big german adjectives. Like the one for this tank
Yeah, I know...this started out screaming to be modded offtopic, troll and etc. I've edited the hell out of it since then, so now I'm on point. Still, I'm not grabbin the karma bonus, but I'll at least sign my name 'cuz this stuff matters and I did try to be funny. Whadda I know, it's 4 am... well, it was when I started. Now, it's daylight outside.
About managers being Gatesean fanboys:
I worked for a year in a company that had lots of sun servers, and not a lick of windows at any level except desktop clients. This was circa Redhat 4, so linux at the desktop was far from anyone's mind.
The guy I replaced had come to loggerheads with the CEO when it came to platforms for the complex web applications we created. Boss wanted Microsoft, and surrendered when my predecessor said: "Fine... but you carry the pager for it. You get to find someone to come in at 3am, or on sunday, or whenever else it fails. Microsoft servers lock up. And I refuse to let your decision dominate my personal life, so if YOU want to have Microsoft behind all this stuff, you need to guarantee ME that I won't be expected to support hardware on my personal time. On the other hand, if you buy what I recommend, I'll carry the pager."
Microsoft reliability has improved since then, but the argument might still work. All it takes is a techie willing to walk out the door.
What happened on conan? Or are you just going to depress me... nah, either way, I'm concerned now. What up?
A high-ranking White House official with a predisposition for overreacting and fascist rulemaking has blamed the ready availability of instructions for snow-guns on the internet, and has asked that so-called weathermen stop presenting contradictory explanations for these terrorist incidents. The same official also insisted that anyone that discounts his theory is practicing poor science and harming the US's ability to combat terrorism wherever he sees it.
Factions such as the Weather Underground and the Internet Storm Center are high on his list of targeted terrorist groups.
Damn, if I didn't have one of my rare modded-to-5 posts directed at this nimrod, I'd sure like to burn my own modpoints giving you a prop for this one.
That's one of the cleverest/funniest and most short-n-to-the-point things I've read lately. And, I tend to be a big proponent of spaceflight just because I hate to think we're too at-risk for extinction if we all sit on this one rock and get on each others nerves waiting for a big asteroid. Either way, we are the old cliche: 'all our eggs in one basket'.
Again, thanks!
(anyone out there got modpoints to burn? Read my msg's parent #5395267)
There needs to be a mod for nonexpert-blowing-posteriorized-smoke!
Having seen the goop that was modded way up as I scanned this, I feel compelled to reply to several messages at once:
Change that to "we suspect..." and please read/internalize a quote from Werner Von Braun: "Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Go grab a copy of Heinlein's remarks on receiving heart surgery that was a byproduct of the space age. Research incidental discoveries of every planetary fly-by we've done (every one taught us something noteworthy). Try to find the tenuous links between exploration and discoveries. And stop spouting off opinions with the wrong verb. (I deleted an extensive flame, questioning westyvw's parentage and marvelling at his ability to exist without the brains normally needed for autonomic activity)If I'm not mistaken, there aren't a lot of Al Qaeda space launches. In fact, I see a pretty strong link between hateful regimes and the utter lack of money spent on basic research in any humanitarian or scientific field. A lot has been learned in pursuit of warlike activities, admittedly, but just because we can't bend these backwaters' worldthink to our enlightened ways, doesn't mean we should sit around and wait for them to agree with us before we continue advancing.
Still, by your logic, I'd at least prioritize. TV, Brittney Spears, novels, the arts, all sports, all cuisine and restaurants, and a few dozen other pursuits are a greater waste of time than scientific research. Live an ascetic life and then come back telling me that the money can be better spent elsewhere. Oh, and your 'net connection... no, make that anything electronic you own... are all forfeit unless needed in a specific mission to combat death and despotism worldwide.
I hope the above paragraph is the stupidest, scariest thing you've ever read. Your belief has an underlying kernel of truth that can best be laid bare by just thinking of the absurdity of self-denial until everyone else in the world stops being so wrong-headed. Like communism, it's a nobel (a freudian typo?... I meant noble) idea that so far fails in every implementation.
Developing the 'tech to do it right' without practice is impossible and absurd. Heck, even in modern times, new boat designs have sunk fresh out of the drydock. We explore, we learn, and we stretch into the most unfamiliar areas first because they sometimes reveal deeper questions we didn't even know we should ask. Also we spend years dissecting the failures for lessons and improvements.
Who the FSCK modded this up (as insightful) to a 5??
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In a followup, thasmudyan suggests we skip the unmanned cheap exploration and instead set up a mars colony, then contradicts him/herself by suggesting that the space station is worthless in paragraph one and then suggesting that we set up a probe assembly and launch point on the moon. The space station has a shallower gravity well and a more forgiving landing/linkup point than the moon. In other words, it is an attempt to build a staging point for space research. That having been said, if it costs thousands per pound just for fuel to get away from the earth (and about half as much for fuel to land on the moon and relaunch it), how inexpensive will it be to build a semiconductor fab, ship pig-iron, build a machinist shop, have a full suite of materials testing and QA devices, etc etc etc lofted into space? For a long time to come, the most we can hope for is reusability and assembling things prebuilt and tested down here where everything's available and shipping costs are 1e5 cheaper.
As for thasmudyan's belief that there's potentially a conspiracy to keep space travel expensive, I find all the kennedy-assassination theories more plausible. The cost of escaping earth's gravity is so high, you can pay an engineer for ten years and spend less than lofting him into space. There isn't a techie alive that wouldn't love to see those numbers brought down to a level that makes a week in space affordable. It matters to most of us much more than mere money ever could. Getting thousands of geeks to remain silent about ways to drop those costs would be impossible. Space travel remains expensive not out of a conspiracy, but simply because it is that hard, that iffy, that expensive.
If you don't believe me, you don't understand the technical extremes we're talking about here. Check again the ongoing postmortem of Columbia's failed reentry, and imagine building any device (no matter how simple) that performs well under these extremes of heat and cold. If it seemed easy, find any 1 thing that performs well both immersed in liquid nitrogen and exposed to a blowtorch. Last of all, imagine building something complex enough to support life for days and still withstand those two thermal extremes, plus a thousand other issues like extreme acceleration forces, radiation, hard vacuum, repeated hot/cold cycling for anything going in/out of unfiltered sunlight, etc., etc., etc. This complexity is why we have the phrase "It isn't rocket science."
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Thankfully, the anti-nuke protest was modded down low enough I only saw responses. Hospitals and highway departments have nastier stuff than the 'nuclear batteries' used to power probes. If I were Roblimo, anyone saying 'chernyobl in space' without a new argument would immediately have all karma stripped. If I were king, they'd get flogged.
Hey, laugh it up about 'newcard'.
Seriously.
Have fun. All I know is any name beats the everloving s**t out of PCCard. I can't count
all the times I've had to break out of a conversation to make sure whoever I was doing
a support call for was talking about a PC-CARD (like a credit card) and not a PC card (like
one you open up the PC and install inside).
Oh god. I just channeled my own voice from the future: "No, is that a *NEW* card you've installed, or is it..."
So, while I agree that the Sci-Fi channel is a horrible, ugly, bastard child of 50's-era, drive-in, bad-movie, goober-slobbering stupid stuff riddled with off-topic nonscience/nonsense, laserguns and rubber-suit aliens, too stupid to parody itself and show MST3K or 'Plan 9 from Outer Space', the SciFi channel did do one helpful thing:
They made it clear to me what it is that all those SF authors so feared and despised about the term, 'sci-fi'. The only channel I cringe more about is 'Lifetime'. My wife watches both of them just enough that I sometimes worry about her.
Meanwhile, I keep hoping that someone would take the best SF, plus some good shows off TechTV, use the product lines from ThinkGeek for advertising and throw in stuff like Futurama, Farscape, Babylon, and old Trek for filler, older stuff (Buck Rogers serials, twilight zone) for a humorous/heartwarming look back and stuff like MST3K and Plan 9 for farce/camp value.
- Take a course on marketing. Buy a book. Hire a *good* marketing firm (most are wannabees (or even grifters) unable to document success or failure).
- Advertise in trade journals and other places where chunks of your estimated 80k hang out.
- Attend, Sponsor, etc. trade shows. Get your name out there.
- Create brochures, white papers, etc.
- Create a marketing presence via a well-done website, with substance.
- Buy access to a relevant, well-established list that has a good chance of carpet-bombing your intended market. I don't mean spammers. I mean the 'daily update' opt-on list run by your trade magazines. In my case, that's eweek, computerworld, etc.
- ...etc. In short, conventional marketing.
- DO NOT COMPLAIN THAT THESE COST MONEY. Spam is a something-for-nothing proposition ONLY from your perspective and we're tired of carrying your lazy ass.
- Entice sign-ups on an email list at your website, your brochures, trade journal ads, trade shows, local chamber activity, trade association meetings, or whatever fits. This is a critical step in building your own free mailing list for future contacts of opt-in email recipients.
- Use the email list wisely. Send something periodically that is both newsworthy and interesting and valuable to your recipients (oh, and relevant to the offer they signed up for, obviously). In every one of those mailings, spend a few seconds top and bottom selling your product.
- It is critical that you make the news/gift part of your emails useful enough to generate what is called viral marketing. Let your customers find you and stick with you until they need your product.
- Presto, you're not spamming. What's more, if you do the above steps well, you'll have 40k of your known customers and another 20k of complete strangers and undiscovered markets, clammering for your advice, and remembering you when they need your product/services.
- DO NOT COMPLAIN THAT THESE TAKE A LOT OF EFFORT. That's why a good marketing firm costs a lot... marketing is time/labor/talent expensive.
Now, go away and leave me alone. This is kindergarten level net marketing stuff. I'm not even getting into the other obvious ideas like becoming a known expert on usenet or web discussions, etc. No, you don't get to send me email unsolicitedly. If I care about your topic, I sign up 9 out of 10 times. I sign up for work-relevant newsletters I see friends/colleagues getting. I'll make it easy for you in that regard... but if you don't get my consent first, I'll never forgive you for it.