These apply only to local newspapers and/or business publications. If your potential buyers are IT execs who read NewsForge for Open Source-specific news, and sites like C|Net for more general tech news, you are dealing with reporters who *love* to be educated, enjoy technology, and could care less about the fact that your company just signed a lease for another 8,000 square feet of office space or promoted some sales dude to VP.
And above all else, avoid "clueless suit" quotes in press releases. No corporate officer in a computer or Internet company with more than a few dozen employees ever has anything to say about a product that a journalist wants to hear. You're better off quoting some of the people who actually made the product -- and making sure tech reporters can get hold of that person easily for more info.
But you won't be allowed to follow these rules. Most PR material is put out to make execs feel studly, not to get stories written.
The Internet Press Guild has a piece called The Care and Feeding of The Press that every PR person (or anyone who plays a PR person on TV) ought to read.
Microfiche records of old newspapers (and old magazines back in the stacks) are a researcher's staple, and an important one. Now it seems many publishers are trying to stop this. There have been questions on Slashdot and elsewhere about what's going to happen to scholarly journals when they become purely electronic, and access to them is all pay-to-play. The same question ought to be asked about popular media, too.
Before the Internet got big, I spent a lot of my time in library reference rooms, mostly at either the Enoch Pratt (Baltimore public) main branch or at the Johns Hopkins Eisenhower Library, which kindly gave me a courtesy card to use even though I was not associated with the University.
I have also spent many happy hours at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
I have dug up -- and based many stories on -- little, overlooked nuggets of information I picked up browsing through old newspapers and magazine articles and obscure references. For example, while hanging out in a private library owned by an insurance company (The Equitable) and scrounging through old city directories, I noticed that in 1800 or so, Baltimore had many "Tea Rooms for Refined Young Ladies" located near the shipping docks (Fells Point).
I wondered why in hell a rough sailor's district had so many such establihements until I realized that they were all whorehouses, which led to a wonderful little article about prostitution in Baltimore over two centuries.
I had a lot of fun researching that piece... lots more fun than writing (ahem) about software...
See what can happen when you hang around in libraries and museums? And why the DMCA is a bad idea? Think of future journalists who won't be able to get editors to pay them to hang out with whores, because they won't have access to enough historical records to justify writing that kind of story.
I don't count. I write for plenty of media that have nothing to do with OSDN, and anything I send to K5 has to go through the same moderation process as anyone else's work.
Well, I own "Robin's Limousine" and "roblimo.com," and I operate in/near Baltimore MD USA. What if a Robin Miller in Baltimore (County Cork) Ireland registered "roblimo.co.ie" or called his company "Robin's Limousine"? What should I do?
As it happens, there *is* such a person, and if he ever registers the appropriate domain name and I find out about it, I'll put a link to his site on mine and request the same in return, and offer to buy the beer if he comes to my part of the world, and hope for a similar offer if I go to his.
Perhaps I am not suited for life in the world of Big Business...
I'm about as immersed in philosophizing, technology, and tech journalism as it's possible to be, but now and then I like a nice, predictable, no-brainer action movie.
Last night my wife and I watched the video of Jackie Chan's "Drunken Master," in which the highest tech shown was a steam-powered locomotive, and we liked it fine.
This afternoon or evening or later this week we'll probably go see "Exit Wounds," and chances are that we'll like it, too. There won't be a single plot surprise, and we already know the Seagal character (there's only one) inside and out, but so what?
Seagal movies are not meant to be taken seriously.
My friend Joe, at Amnet Computer, has always made his own certs and has never had any problems. He stores no credit card info or other potentially compromising information on any publically-accessible machine. The sole purpose of his cert is to create an SSL "pipe" between your machine and his "public" one, so there is no reason for him to pay VeriSign or others to have a little logo on his page. Joe's customers tend to be sophisticated (Linux or BSD) computer buyers who know perfectly well what he's doing and why, so the little logo isn't going to impress them one way or the other.
Yes, the insurance aspect of the big-time cert companies is nice, but more important for many businesses that do B2C ecommerce is that the "VeriSign" logo, like one from the Chamber of Commerce or Better Business Bureau, helps assure customers that there's a substantial business behind the Web site they see. But plenty of businesses do well without joining a CoC or the BBB (the best auto repair shop I've found locally belongs to neither, for instance), especially those that foster close personal relationships with customers.
I have never taken credit cards directly online for my limo business. I started it in pre-Internet days and still have the same old XON credit card terminal I got in the late 80s, and it still works fine. Customers either hand us their cards when they get in one of the limos or, if it's something like a business person whose company is paying or a celeb whose travel is being covered by a production company (which is how most celebrity transport is handled, BTW), a secretary or other admin person usually calls or faxes directly with the trip/charter information anyway and includes the credit card number and expiration date in that call or fax.
My limo partner and I are considering taking cards directly online before long. Small businesses (like ours) that don't have (*cough*) huge amounts of VC or IPO cash tend to be far more conservative than wing-ding companies because if we don't make a profit almost every single month we go broke. (The garage where we take our limos is *just now* thinking about putting up a Web site.)
But if I decide to take credit cards online, I am *not* going to fork over $200 or $300 or $400 for a third-party cert. I'll just put an ordering page -- one page -- on Joes's server and ride on *his* cert in return for a small fee, like maybe a six-pack or two.
Good thought -- but politicians haven't made the best interview guests on Slashdot so far. Maybe I'll call the man's press secretary and see if I can set one up, as long as you realize that the answers we get are likely to have been written by staffers, not the Congressman himself.
Dave Farber agreed to a Slashdot interview back in January. I sent the questions but he never returned the answers despite several resendings and requests.
Depends where in Maryland. The liquor store nearest my home (Howard County) is open Sundays. And in some counties you can buy beer and wine in grocery stores while in others you can't.
But almost all MD counties allow bars to stay open later at night than liquor stores.
The supposed rationale for more liberal regs governing bars than liquor stores is that a bartender serving by the drink can cut you off when you've had enough, but if you buy from the store you can go off alone and glug yourself into a coma.
Yes, the fact that bars can sell "packaged goods" (booze to go) means this is a specious argument, but so is our fine governor's stance against smoking while relying on tobacco tax revenues or railing against gambling while the State runs a lottery.
I long ago gave up looking for logic in government (or big company) actions. You can't find what's not there.
Even simpler solution: Since the U.S. government belongs to U.S. citizens, and I'm one of those citizens, tell your boss that I personally order the release of all software developed with my tax money under the GPL.
If either the contractor that is paying you or anyone in the MEDCOM chain of command doesn't like this, tell them I must ask for their resignations, effective immediately, along with return of any of my money they have spent on proprietary software.
Robin Miller
Elkridge, MD
-------
US citizen,
voter, and
taxpayer.
No, nothing like that. I'd gotten a number of "Why don't you interview CowboyNeal" requests from readers. One day in IRC I asked him and he said "Sure."
(We did CmdrTaco and Hemos about a year ago. Scroll back through the "Interview" section to find that one. It's still on the servers.)
AFAIK, Pater is going to be around for a long, long time. He is a friend and valued coworker, and if you want to misinterpret his lightheartedness, that's up to you.
So you know, Pater is more than a little shy, *very* self-effacing, and has a fine if somewhat dry sense of humor. And he is much loved by everyone involved with Slashdot, and by everyone who meets him at trade shows or other public meetings.
Here's another good Ricochet review - I have one and I love it. I live and spend most of my time in the Baltimore/Washington area where there's pretty good coverage.
$70/month is totally worthwhile for ISDN speed without a physical connection. I can now work online from my yard, my boat, my limo, wherever.
And Ricochet is a total no-brainer to get working in Linux. I configured KPPP to do it in about 15 seconds. (Gnome dial or console PPP might take 20 seconds.:-)
If it was just me using the net at home instead of me and my wife both working online all the time, with her doing massive email work (managing big email newsletter subscription stuff) I'd dump @home and use nothing but Ricochet - with dialup backup "just in case" as always, of course.
-Robin 'roblimo' Miller
"Proud owner of the only Linux-running, Rolls-bodied, wireless Internet-capable stretch limousine in the State of Maryland -- possibly the world."
I've been on both Slashdot since we thought people with UIDS above 1000 were newcomers, I've been on the Well even longer, and I have never thought Slashdot was as polite or well-moderated as the Well.
And FYI, Rob Malda couldn't spell then either, and we *liked* him that way, dammit!
- Robin 'roblimo' Miller
"happily not correcting CmdrTaco's
spelling since Slashdot started."
Funny. When I read this story I didn't get the impression that either high school students or MCSEs were being called retards. I took the comment as meaning "someone without years of Linux experience could get this running."
Ignorance and stupidity are not the same thing. A high school student -- or someone who has only dealt with Windows OS -- who wants to explore Linux clustering is almost certainly not stupid. This person is looking to expand his or her understanding of networking and computing.
Personally, I think the idea of giving people who are bright, but have never set up a Linux cluster before, simple software tools to get started in this area is marvelous. Once they master the basics, they can move on to more advanced, more complex admin methods.
And another thing - in the original article, a big reason mentioned for making simpler clustering software is that it helps eliminate the tedium of setting up machine after machine, all with the same configuration. This is A Good Thing for people of any skill level.
In the U.S. most companies are required to store income records for seven years, and that includes credit card purchase slips or files.
I still run my limo service credit cards throught the same old manual imprinter and submit charges through the some old XON machine I got 10 years ago, and store the (paper) receipts in a safe.
If I moved to online credit card processing, I think I'd store my financials on a removable hard drive and put that drive in the safe when I was away from my office.
Slashdot Mirror
And above all else, avoid "clueless suit" quotes in press releases. No corporate officer in a computer or Internet company with more than a few dozen employees ever has anything to say about a product that a journalist wants to hear. You're better off quoting some of the people who actually made the product -- and making sure tech reporters can get hold of that person easily for more info.
But you won't be allowed to follow these rules. Most PR material is put out to make execs feel studly, not to get stories written.
- Robin
- Robin
Microfiche records of old newspapers (and old magazines back in the stacks) are a researcher's staple, and an important one. Now it seems many publishers are trying to stop this. There have been questions on Slashdot and elsewhere about what's going to happen to scholarly journals when they become purely electronic, and access to them is all pay-to-play. The same question ought to be asked about popular media, too.
Before the Internet got big, I spent a lot of my time in library reference rooms, mostly at either the Enoch Pratt (Baltimore public) main branch or at the Johns Hopkins Eisenhower Library, which kindly gave me a courtesy card to use even though I was not associated with the University.
I have also spent many happy hours at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
I have dug up -- and based many stories on -- little, overlooked nuggets of information I picked up browsing through old newspapers and magazine articles and obscure references. For example, while hanging out in a private library owned by an insurance company (The Equitable) and scrounging through old city directories, I noticed that in 1800 or so, Baltimore had many "Tea Rooms for Refined Young Ladies" located near the shipping docks (Fells Point).
I wondered why in hell a rough sailor's district had so many such establihements until I realized that they were all whorehouses, which led to a wonderful little article about prostitution in Baltimore over two centuries.
I had a lot of fun researching that piece... lots more fun than writing (ahem) about software...
See what can happen when you hang around in libraries and museums? And why the DMCA is a bad idea? Think of future journalists who won't be able to get editors to pay them to hang out with whores, because they won't have access to enough historical records to justify writing that kind of story.
- Robin
- Robin
Well, I own "Robin's Limousine" and "roblimo.com," and I operate in/near Baltimore MD USA. What if a Robin Miller in Baltimore (County Cork) Ireland registered "roblimo.co.ie" or called his company "Robin's Limousine"? What should I do?
As it happens, there *is* such a person, and if he ever registers the appropriate domain name and I find out about it, I'll put a link to his site on mine and request the same in return, and offer to buy the beer if he comes to my part of the world, and hope for a similar offer if I go to his.
Perhaps I am not suited for life in the world of Big Business...
- Robin
I'm about as immersed in philosophizing, technology, and tech journalism as it's possible to be, but now and then I like a nice, predictable, no-brainer action movie.
Last night my wife and I watched the video of Jackie Chan's "Drunken Master," in which the highest tech shown was a steam-powered locomotive, and we liked it fine.
This afternoon or evening or later this week we'll probably go see "Exit Wounds," and chances are that we'll like it, too. There won't be a single plot surprise, and we already know the Seagal character (there's only one) inside and out, but so what?
Seagal movies are not meant to be taken seriously.
They're mindless escapism.
- Robin 'deserves a mental break today' Miller
Yes, the insurance aspect of the big-time cert companies is nice, but more important for many businesses that do B2C ecommerce is that the "VeriSign" logo, like one from the Chamber of Commerce or Better Business Bureau, helps assure customers that there's a substantial business behind the Web site they see. But plenty of businesses do well without joining a CoC or the BBB (the best auto repair shop I've found locally belongs to neither, for instance), especially those that foster close personal relationships with customers.
I have never taken credit cards directly online for my limo business. I started it in pre-Internet days and still have the same old XON credit card terminal I got in the late 80s, and it still works fine. Customers either hand us their cards when they get in one of the limos or, if it's something like a business person whose company is paying or a celeb whose travel is being covered by a production company (which is how most celebrity transport is handled, BTW), a secretary or other admin person usually calls or faxes directly with the trip/charter information anyway and includes the credit card number and expiration date in that call or fax.
My limo partner and I are considering taking cards directly online before long. Small businesses (like ours) that don't have (*cough*) huge amounts of VC or IPO cash tend to be far more conservative than wing-ding companies because if we don't make a profit almost every single month we go broke. (The garage where we take our limos is *just now* thinking about putting up a Web site.)
But if I decide to take credit cards online, I am *not* going to fork over $200 or $300 or $400 for a third-party cert. I'll just put an ordering page -- one page -- on Joes's server and ride on *his* cert in return for a small fee, like maybe a six-pack or two.
- Robin
I would rather have seen a sweeping saga of the battle instead of a person-to-person story of two snipers that merely used the battle as a backdrop.
The battle of Stalingrad has the makings of at least half a dozen great movie epics in it. "Enemy at the Gates" isn't one of them.
- Robin
Clay is a regular Slashdot reader and posts from time to time. :)
- Robin
Good thought -- but politicians haven't made the best interview guests on Slashdot so far. Maybe I'll call the man's press secretary and see if I can set one up, as long as you realize that the answers we get are likely to have been written by staffers, not the Congressman himself.
- Robin
And yes, if you want to do limo-LAN, I have a hub, a gateway, and an inverter that'll keep up to 4 laptops charged all the time.
So (yawn) I'm supposed to be impressed with some guy in Boston who has *one* laptop in a lowly stock Mercedes sedan?
- Robin
(for those who Slashdot readers who don't know, I have the "roblimo" nick because I have owned a limo service for many years.)
It was a posting mistake. Fixed now. :)
- Robin
Other than that, he seems like a decent guy.
- Robin
An "instant boot" in Linux combined with a journaling file system would be perfect for laptops.
- Robin
Depends where in Maryland. The liquor store nearest my home (Howard County) is open Sundays. And in some counties you can buy beer and wine in grocery stores while in others you can't.
But almost all MD counties allow bars to stay open later at night than liquor stores.
The supposed rationale for more liberal regs governing bars than liquor stores is that a bartender serving by the drink can cut you off when you've had enough, but if you buy from the store you can go off alone and glug yourself into a coma.
Yes, the fact that bars can sell "packaged goods" (booze to go) means this is a specious argument, but so is our fine governor's stance against smoking while relying on tobacco tax revenues or railing against gambling while the State runs a lottery.
I long ago gave up looking for logic in government (or big company) actions. You can't find what's not there.
- Robin
Even simpler solution: Since the U.S. government belongs to U.S. citizens, and I'm one of those citizens, tell your boss that I personally order the release of all software developed with my tax money under the GPL.
If either the contractor that is paying you or anyone in the MEDCOM chain of command doesn't like this, tell them I must ask for their resignations, effective immediately, along with return of any of my money they have spent on proprietary software.
Robin Miller
Elkridge, MD
-------
US citizen,
voter, and
taxpayer.
(We did CmdrTaco and Hemos about a year ago. Scroll back through the "Interview" section to find that one. It's still on the servers.)
AFAIK, Pater is going to be around for a long, long time. He is a friend and valued coworker, and if you want to misinterpret his lightheartedness, that's up to you.
So you know, Pater is more than a little shy, *very* self-effacing, and has a fine if somewhat dry sense of humor. And he is much loved by everyone involved with Slashdot, and by everyone who meets him at trade shows or other public meetings.
- Robin
The URL = http://cowboyneal.org/ in case you don't feel like scrolling back to the top of the story.
- Robin
Not true!
No Slashdot editors post comments, ever.
- Robin
$70/month is totally worthwhile for ISDN speed without a physical connection. I can now work online from my yard, my boat, my limo, wherever.
And Ricochet is a total no-brainer to get working in Linux. I configured KPPP to do it in about 15 seconds. (Gnome dial or console PPP might take 20 seconds. :-)
If it was just me using the net at home instead of me and my wife both working online all the time, with her doing massive email work (managing big email newsletter subscription stuff) I'd dump @home and use nothing but Ricochet - with dialup backup "just in case" as always, of course.
-Robin 'roblimo' Miller
"Proud owner of the only Linux-running, Rolls-bodied, wireless Internet-capable stretch limousine in the State of Maryland -- possibly the world."
But there's an interview with me here -- on a Brazilian site.
- Robin
I suppose we should make CowboyNeal an interview victim soon, eh? :)
- Robin
I've been on both Slashdot since we thought people with UIDS above 1000 were newcomers, I've been on the Well even longer, and I have never thought Slashdot was as polite or well-moderated as the Well.
And FYI, Rob Malda couldn't spell then either, and we *liked* him that way, dammit!
- Robin 'roblimo' Miller
"happily not correcting CmdrTaco's
spelling since Slashdot started."
Funny. When I read this story I didn't get the impression that either high school students or MCSEs were being called retards. I took the comment as meaning "someone without years of Linux experience could get this running."
Ignorance and stupidity are not the same thing. A high school student -- or someone who has only dealt with Windows OS -- who wants to explore Linux clustering is almost certainly not stupid. This person is looking to expand his or her understanding of networking and computing.
Personally, I think the idea of giving people who are bright, but have never set up a Linux cluster before, simple software tools to get started in this area is marvelous. Once they master the basics, they can move on to more advanced, more complex admin methods.
And another thing - in the original article, a big reason mentioned for making simpler clustering software is that it helps eliminate the tedium of setting up machine after machine, all with the same configuration. This is A Good Thing for people of any skill level.
- Robin
In the U.S. most companies are required to store income records for seven years, and that includes credit card purchase slips or files.
I still run my limo service credit cards throught the same old manual imprinter and submit charges through the some old XON machine I got 10 years ago, and store the (paper) receipts in a safe.
If I moved to online credit card processing, I think I'd store my financials on a removable hard drive and put that drive in the safe when I was away from my office.
- Robin