What if your cash register won't easily print custom strings on the receipt? Or you don't want your staff messing with the cash register settings?
Assuming you have your router/firewall nicely blocking abusable ports, you could just write the WEP key on a card by the tip jar. Smaller than the "Support Community Internet" sign of course;-)
A lot of routers support ASCII keys, so the staff can think up funny ones to use and the customers won't have to sit by the tip jar while entering the key.
As for "no access without purchase" or somesuch, think of it like reading the magazines. If someone plops down to surf and is too cheap to buy a coffee, it's at the staff's discretion to tolerate them or not. Same for excessive downloading - just like if someone's hogging all the magazines, it's usually enough to just point it out to them.
I would also put a nice silent little mini-itx system somewhere so the staff can easliy change the WEP key a couple times a day and can check e-mail when bored. And I'd have that little station free for customers too, just don't hog it.
A good way to prevent hogging of a free terminal in a cafe is to make it a little conspicuous. You have to stand up to use it, and there's no way to really hide what you're doing from others. Have a place to put down your coffee but no workspace. I've seen this done and it works great - people check their email or look something up on the net and don't stand there forever preventing others from using it.
As for the technology, 802.11b is probably enough for any normal sized community cafe, but you'd want g for bigger college-town setups.
I think it's a Good Thing for the customers who don't already know about WEP to at least learn enough to change the key. Print up a little flyer with simple explanations and a bit of propaganda about open-source and community networking, etiquette, etc.
And of course the little stand-up terminal should run a sweet desktop Linux (or *BSD), which would likely be a first impression of free software for a lot of people.
You're ready to go for under $500 plus the broadband fees.
I agree with your post, and this reply is off-topic w/r/t the donations, but...
Isn't the point of the Wiki that anyone can edit anything?
Unless I'm misinformed about that point, it seems like you would need an enormous audit trail on the database.
Because while anonymous expression is good for democracy, anonymous censorship is not.
I haven't used WikiPedia enough to know for sure, but in general your most interesting and important information could easily be your most obscure, with nobody checking back to see how it's been edited. If I write-up "Proof of the Existence of God" or somesuch, and it gets changed to a cookie recipe, that could be a Really Bad Thing.
isn't it about time to move up from 14,400 baud Fax transmission?!
Probably not. Faxes are used extensively in the developing world, where phone connections are often not so clear.
There's no reason you couldn't make a fax machine that also handled faster transmission rates and/or higher resolution, but you wouldn't want to make that the default. Plus you would have to convince your fax machine manufacturers that people would actually use it instead of scanning/e-mail when time or resolution is of the essence...
Last week's Economist had a very interesting article comparing early European coffee-houses to today's Internet.
One of their points was that while hotspots in cafes are a good idea, it's unlikely they will make anyone a lot of money, since in places where there is competition among coffee houses, a proprietor would likely give away the access just like they buy magazines and don't charge the customers to read them.
Put another way, I can set up good wireless in my urban cafe for less than a hundred bucks a month. It won't take me long to figure out that I can sell a lot more $3 coffees by giving it away.
Especially if the Giant Faceless Corporation down the street is charging people ten bucks an hour for the same thing.
The article is titled "the Internet in a cup" and is available on the paid section of the economist online: link. But then, you could probably drop down to the cafe and read it for free...
My advice is get a mini-ITX integrated mobo from VIA, like maybe this one that I have.
You can put a gig of RAM in it. It's small and quiet. It's not super fast but at 1GHz it's fast enough for most real work. It's got a PCI slot in case you need to add a modem.
If you add a 5400 RPM hard drive and a DVD+-RWCDRWblabla device and a low-power LCD monitor, you should be good to go for a proper desktop system with low power.
If I recall correctly the chip on that mobo draws something like 24W at full load.
You can even get an external power supply to help protect your wooded silence. Don't know much about electronics, but the external PS would probably be a good start if you want to hook it up to your alternative power source directly.
You can buy complete systems, or parts, or just learn a lot about the mini-ITX world and what people do with the computers, over at mini-itx.com.
I sometimes go live in a very small town in the mountains, not as remote as what you're talking about but still- noise is a much bigger factor when it's competing with the sound of the river than when it's competing with the sound of cars.
There is a chain of discount supermarkets in Hungary called Smatch. Probably all over Europe as well, not sure. I believe the company is Belgian. In Budapest there's about 180 of them, if I remember correctly.
Just some off-topic trivia for you, since it's your project.;-)
I'm doing my first MySQL work (done a lot of Oracle and a little PostgreSQL) and I was *flabbergasted* when I realized that, when you update a table but the data has not actually changed, you get success and zero rows updated.
Which is exactly what you get (and should get) when you try to update and no rows are found to update.
I suppose with no triggers anyway, it might be a tiny bit faster to skip the actual update when the data hasn't changed, but to real DB folks this is not only counter-intuitive, it's *scary*.
'Course this is 3.23, maybe they changed that in 4. I read that they added booleans in 4... though just as an alias for ItsyBitsyInt.
MySQL is fast and free and there is a lot of community support for beginners. And if you have oodles of RAM, the HEAP tables are a sweet thing indeed. As such it's good. But I sure hope nobody ever makes me use it for anything mission-critical... and I fear for people using this as an "enterprise" DB.
Your recent Slashdot post, titled "Re:not just Linux..." and currently moderated at +4/Funny, is in violation of the DMCA.
As you are probably aware, we have granted the general public a limited license to the character '\n' and this license does not include its representation in "escaped" format ('\n').
We hereby order you to remove the comment or to change it so that the copyrighted character in question is displayed in its properly licensed format, namely:
Be advised that this also applies to any posts you may make in the future, regardless of how they are moderated, and that similar restrictions apply to the character '\r' to which we own the copyright jointly with the Microsoft Corporation.
Sorry, I have to call bullshit on the popularity point.
I regularly take the capitol AMTRAK between Richmond and Sacramento. It's usually full enough, and when there is a big weekend it's packed. In any case that line at least has more than enough riders to be profitable, regardless of what the overall situation may be for AMTRAK or rail in California in general.
If you make decent connections possible, many people prefer the train. If you make *good* connections in your system, you can operate at near capacity.
Of course some things are obviously losing money, like my beloved ThroughWay coaches.
But to say that trains are unpopular just because you don't ride them much is, well, ignorant at best and most likely disingenuous.
Something along the lines of Saddam getting a moderately comfy cell in which to spend his days in quiet contemplation, maybe writing his memoirs or somesuch, in return for cooperation and not trying to push for a "real" trial.
Because a real trial would be highly embarrassing to Rummy et al, but would probably also end up with Saddam with a blindfold and one last cigar. The guy's evil but I don't think he has a death wish.
Because the scientists are refusing to sell this joker fuel, fuel they most likely need themselves so they don't get in deep penguin-droppings like said joker.
I'm sure he can radio someone who can bring him all the fuel he needs, and he can pay for it and fly away (or crash). And they're being really nice letting him stay on the couch and all, for free no less.
He's just whining. So let's rewrite the headline as "South Pole Scientists Refuse to Bail Out Reckless Adventurer" and then the icon will make more sense.
You don't usually get a free phone but you do get your phone much cheaper with a contract - in many cases the service provider actually loses money on the phone in order to get you as a customer.
Considering the bundle includes a monitor, a printer (ink-selling device) and a licensed 'doze, $300 is very cheap.
I think it would be completely reasonable if they tried to lock the system into AOL so you couldn't use another provider without, say, installing a new OS. That's exactly what the phone people do.
I agree with most of your points, but what's the paranoia about business cards? I saw that in several posts already.... but decent business cards cost all of $25.
I'm genuinely curious: is there some reason besides the $25 why people should not get business cards while bootstrapping the startup?
I work at home, and have off and on for a long time.
I hate it!
I do have a dedicated "office" room, but the space isn't the issue... it's that there are no people around. Or if there are, they are here to socialize.
I think it's a Good Thing on some very deep level to be around other people while working, at least some of the time. Programming for twelve hours straight without seeing another human being tweaketh the mind in harmful ways.
Since I work for myself, there's not much I can do about it right now. However, as soon as Profit allows, I will rent an office somewhere and arrange for others to share it, even if they aren't working for me.
The funniest thing about Stickies is how you end up with a huge disorderly pile of them on your desktop, and they all have vitally important information on them, if you could just remember the context!
Just like real Post-Its.
Now I wish someone would come up with a way to put Stickies all over my documents so other people could be as lost and confused as I am, just like in the old MegaCorp office....
A lot of the bashing is legitimate annoyance at the Truly Evil practice of the "flash intro" to sites, and at putting content in Flash that would be much better handled in HTML.
However, for the things it is better at, Flash isn't just better than HTML, it's better than anything else that's widely accepted. Of course there are things Java can do that Flash can't, but my own experience has been that few of those things add value to average users, while the bugginess of different Java implementations has always irked me.
Oh wait, now I'm bashing Java. Sorry.
Anyway, the sites that use Flash well are really amazing, and you can pack more interesting rich media into 10K of tightly-written Flash/Actionsript than into just about anything else.
For anyone interested in checking out the Flash world, I highly recommend Flashkit, a community site with very good forums and howtos.
(And yes, I do sometimes surf with lynx and links.)
They should, or at the very least release a format definition that isn't full of holes.
I don't think Macromedia has to worry about people beating them in the authoring tools market. Just like with Adobe Acrobat, there is one definitive authoring toolset. Nobody who's serious is going to use anything instead of that, though many may use things like Swish in addition.
Macromedia has tried to keep up player development for Linux, WinCE, etc - but in my opinion they haven't tried nearly hard enough. For that matter the player performs much worse on MacOSX, the platform used to create much of the best Flash content, than on 'Doze.
Any new competing format will hopefully push Macromedia to maximize acceptance of the player and format. I'm sure their execs lay awake at night dreaming of "SWF" being as well known as "PDF."
Open sourcing the player would indeed help them along in that task, and not only for Linux et al.
Slashdot Mirror
What if your cash register won't easily print custom strings on the receipt? Or you don't want your staff messing with the cash register settings?
;-)
Assuming you have your router/firewall nicely blocking abusable ports, you could just write the WEP key on a card by the tip jar. Smaller than the "Support Community Internet" sign of course
A lot of routers support ASCII keys, so the staff can think up funny ones to use and the customers won't have to sit by the tip jar while entering the key.
As for "no access without purchase" or somesuch, think of it like reading the magazines. If someone plops down to surf and is too cheap to buy a coffee, it's at the staff's discretion to tolerate them or not. Same for excessive downloading - just like if someone's hogging all the magazines, it's usually enough to just point it out to them.
I would also put a nice silent little mini-itx system somewhere so the staff can easliy change the WEP key a couple times a day and can check e-mail when bored. And I'd have that little station free for customers too, just don't hog it.
A good way to prevent hogging of a free terminal in a cafe is to make it a little conspicuous. You have to stand up to use it, and there's no way to really hide what you're doing from others. Have a place to put down your coffee but no workspace. I've seen this done and it works great - people check their email or look something up on the net and don't stand there forever preventing others from using it.
As for the technology, 802.11b is probably enough for any normal sized community cafe, but you'd want g for bigger college-town setups.
I think it's a Good Thing for the customers who don't already know about WEP to at least learn enough to change the key. Print up a little flyer with simple explanations and a bit of propaganda about open-source and community networking, etiquette, etc.
And of course the little stand-up terminal should run a sweet desktop Linux (or *BSD), which would likely be a first impression of free software for a lot of people.
You're ready to go for under $500 plus the broadband fees.
Man, now I just need to open a cafe!
I agree with your post, and this reply is off-topic w/r/t the donations, but...
Isn't the point of the Wiki that anyone can edit anything?
Unless I'm misinformed about that point, it seems like you would need an enormous audit trail on the database.
Because while anonymous expression is good for democracy, anonymous censorship is not.
I haven't used WikiPedia enough to know for sure, but in general your most interesting and important information could easily be your most obscure, with nobody checking back to see how it's been edited. If I write-up "Proof of the Existence of God" or somesuch, and it gets changed to a cookie recipe, that could be a Really Bad Thing.
Or am I just unclear on the concept?
isn't it about time to move up from 14,400 baud Fax transmission?!
Probably not. Faxes are used extensively in the developing world, where phone connections are often not so clear.
There's no reason you couldn't make a fax machine that also handled faster transmission rates and/or higher resolution, but you wouldn't want to make that the default. Plus you would have to convince your fax machine manufacturers that people would actually use it instead of scanning/e-mail when time or resolution is of the essence...
Last week's Economist had a very interesting article comparing early European coffee-houses to today's Internet.
One of their points was that while hotspots in cafes are a good idea, it's unlikely they will make anyone a lot of money, since in places where there is competition among coffee houses, a proprietor would likely give away the access just like they buy magazines and don't charge the customers to read them.
Put another way, I can set up good wireless in my urban cafe for less than a hundred bucks a month. It won't take me long to figure out that I can sell a lot more $3 coffees by giving it away.
Especially if the Giant Faceless Corporation down the street is charging people ten bucks an hour for the same thing.
The article is titled "the Internet in a cup" and is available on the paid section of the economist online: link.
But then, you could probably drop down to the cafe and read it for free...
Amazingly enough, Google gives me 11,800 pages for Theroy .
But "the Roy" gets me 66,100, and the first is a great artist with a really lousy web site.
"Art Bell" returns only 56,600.
Could take a while to read them all, theroetically.
My advice is get a mini-ITX integrated mobo from VIA, like maybe this one that I have.
You can put a gig of RAM in it. It's small and quiet. It's not super fast but at 1GHz it's fast enough for most real work. It's got a PCI slot in case you need to add a modem.
If you add a 5400 RPM hard drive and a DVD+-RWCDRWblabla device and a low-power LCD monitor, you should be good to go for a proper desktop system with low power.
If I recall correctly the chip on that mobo draws something like 24W at full load.
You can even get an external power supply to help protect your wooded silence. Don't know much about electronics, but the external PS would probably be a good start if you want to hook it up to your alternative power source directly.
You can buy complete systems, or parts, or just learn a lot about the mini-ITX world and what people do with the computers, over at mini-itx.com.
I sometimes go live in a very small town in the mountains, not as remote as what you're talking about but still- noise is a much bigger factor when it's competing with the sound of the river than when it's competing with the sound of cars.
Good luck.
There is a chain of discount supermarkets in Hungary called Smatch. Probably all over Europe as well, not sure. I believe the company is Belgian. In Budapest there's about 180 of them, if I remember correctly.
;-)
Just some off-topic trivia for you, since it's your project.
A funny thing to add to this...
I'm doing my first MySQL work (done a lot of Oracle and a little PostgreSQL) and I was *flabbergasted* when I realized that, when you update a table but the data has not actually changed, you get success and zero rows updated.
Which is exactly what you get (and should get) when you try to update and no rows are found to update.
I suppose with no triggers anyway, it might be a tiny bit faster to skip the actual update when the data hasn't changed, but to real DB folks this is not only counter-intuitive, it's *scary*.
'Course this is 3.23, maybe they changed that in 4. I read that they added booleans in 4... though just as an alias for ItsyBitsyInt.
MySQL is fast and free and there is a lot of community support for beginners. And if you have oodles of RAM, the HEAP tables are a sweet thing indeed. As such it's good. But I sure hope nobody ever makes me use it for anything mission-critical... and I fear for people using this as an "enterprise" DB.
(donning flame-proof suit...)
Dear EricTheGreen,
Your recent Slashdot post, titled "Re:not just Linux..." and currently moderated at +4/Funny, is in violation of the DMCA.
As you are probably aware, we have granted the general public a limited license to the character '\n' and this license does not include its representation in "escaped" format ('\n').
We hereby order you to remove the comment or to change it so that the copyrighted character in question is displayed in its properly licensed format, namely:
Be advised that this also applies to any posts you may make in the future, regardless of how they are moderated, and that similar restrictions apply to the character '\r' to which we own the copyright jointly with the Microsoft Corporation.
Failure to comply will result in legal fees.
Sincerely,
Dewey, Cheatham & Howe, on behalf of SCO.
Wow, I opened that in a background tab in Firebird, figuring I'd get a chuckle when I was done with Slashdot.
Then about ten minutes later I notice the scrolling status bar on my Slashdot tab:
Are YOU prepared for an emergency? How about for Y2K?
My first though was that someone had brilliantly hacked the comment system to include javascript... then I remembered the Firebird "feature."
after they bought Microsoft, anything is possible...
Sorry, I have to call bullshit on the popularity point.
I regularly take the capitol AMTRAK between Richmond and Sacramento. It's usually full enough, and when there is a big weekend it's packed. In any case that line at least has more than enough riders to be profitable, regardless of what the overall situation may be for AMTRAK or rail in California in general.
If you make decent connections possible, many people prefer the train. If you make *good* connections in your system, you can operate at near capacity.
Of course some things are obviously losing money, like my beloved ThroughWay coaches.
But to say that trains are unpopular just because you don't ride them much is, well, ignorant at best and most likely disingenuous.
You're right, but I expect they'll cut a deal.
Something along the lines of Saddam getting a moderately comfy cell in which to spend his days in quiet contemplation, maybe writing his memoirs or somesuch, in return for cooperation and not trying to push for a "real" trial.
Because a real trial would be highly embarrassing to Rummy et al, but would probably also end up with Saddam with a blindfold and one last cigar. The guy's evil but I don't think he has a death wish.
can be found here.
It's either much harder or much easier to read, depending on your point of view.
Because the scientists are refusing to sell this joker fuel, fuel they most likely need themselves so they don't get in deep penguin-droppings like said joker.
I'm sure he can radio someone who can bring him all the fuel he needs, and he can pay for it and fly away (or crash). And they're being really nice letting him stay on the couch and all, for free no less.
He's just whining. So let's rewrite the headline as "South Pole Scientists Refuse to Bail Out Reckless Adventurer" and then the icon will make more sense.
...a Slashdotting?
Crybabies!
The phone comparison is dead on.
You don't usually get a free phone but you do get your phone much cheaper with a contract - in many cases the service provider actually loses money on the phone in order to get you as a customer.
Considering the bundle includes a monitor, a printer (ink-selling device) and a licensed 'doze, $300 is very cheap.
I think it would be completely reasonable if they tried to lock the system into AOL so you couldn't use another provider without, say, installing a new OS. That's exactly what the phone people do.
Plus, the Moon is smaller.
If your supplies crash land on the wrong side of it, you just moon-walk over and pick them up.
On the other hand, your monkey is going to be a lot less happy there.
I too admire ancient Rome, but I must point out that the Empire frequently expanded to include people who didn't choose to be part of it.
You may be free to leave, but if it's your homeland that has been annexed, that's not much consolation.
On the other hand, life was often better under Roman rule (insert Monty Python voices here).
I agree with most of your points, but what's the paranoia about business cards? I saw that in several posts already.... but decent business cards cost all of $25.
I'm genuinely curious: is there some reason besides the $25 why people should not get business cards while bootstrapping the startup?
I work at home, and have off and on for a long time.
I hate it!
I do have a dedicated "office" room, but the space isn't the issue... it's that there are no people around. Or if there are, they are here to socialize.
I think it's a Good Thing on some very deep level to be around other people while working, at least some of the time. Programming for twelve hours straight without seeing another human being tweaketh the mind in harmful ways.
Since I work for myself, there's not much I can do about it right now. However, as soon as Profit allows, I will rent an office somewhere and arrange for others to share it, even if they aren't working for me.
Oh yeah, and I need a cute secretary...
The funniest thing about Stickies is how you end up with a huge disorderly pile of them on your desktop, and they all have vitally important information on them, if you could just remember the context!
Just like real Post-Its.
Now I wish someone would come up with a way to put Stickies all over my documents so other people could be as lost and confused as I am, just like in the old MegaCorp office....
Oh, wait...
I just had a look at the Plone site and I like it.
Can we have Slashdot in Plone now please?
Seriously though, it would make a great CMS migration case study.
I agree.
A lot of the bashing is legitimate annoyance at the Truly Evil practice of the "flash intro" to sites, and at putting content in Flash that would be much better handled in HTML.
However, for the things it is better at, Flash isn't just better than HTML, it's better than anything else that's widely accepted. Of course there are things Java can do that Flash can't, but my own experience has been that few of those things add value to average users, while the bugginess of different Java implementations has always irked me.
Oh wait, now I'm bashing Java. Sorry.
Anyway, the sites that use Flash well are really amazing, and you can pack more interesting rich media into 10K of tightly-written Flash/Actionsript than into just about anything else.
For anyone interested in checking out the Flash world, I highly recommend Flashkit, a community site with very good forums and howtos.
(And yes, I do sometimes surf with lynx and links.)
They should, or at the very least release a format definition that isn't full of holes.
I don't think Macromedia has to worry about people beating them in the authoring tools market. Just like with Adobe Acrobat, there is one definitive authoring toolset. Nobody who's serious is going to use anything instead of that, though many may use things like Swish in addition.
Macromedia has tried to keep up player development for Linux, WinCE, etc - but in my opinion they haven't tried nearly hard enough. For that matter the player performs much worse on MacOSX, the platform used to create much of the best Flash content, than on 'Doze.
Any new competing format will hopefully push Macromedia to maximize acceptance of the player and format. I'm sure their execs lay awake at night dreaming of "SWF" being as well known as "PDF."
Open sourcing the player would indeed help them along in that task, and not only for Linux et al.