Or, one day, we could do live chat follow-ups. Give us time, give us time...
- Robin
My wife never heard of boo.com
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 5
My wife is the reason boo.com failed. She's got high-limit credit cards, she likes to buy clothes, she's amenable to mail-order and Internet buying, and she's online (professionally and recreationally) for up to 10 hours per day. If she wasn't boo.com's perfect potential customer, who was?
But when I showed Debbie this Slashdot post, she said she'd never heard of boo.com and certainly hadn't ever bought anything from them.
Upon reflection, she thought she *might* have checked out the site briefly when it first launched, but found it unusable (because of all the Java). and didn't think their clothing selection was very exciting or that their prices were anything special, so she forgot about it.
Multiply Debbie by millions of other women online, and it should be obvious why the company failed.
I have a big M&M corner workstation that has an adjustable keyboard shelf and an adjustable monitor shelf that easily holds a 21" Trinitron, has lots of room under it for a drawer unit on one side and two CPUs on the other, and has enough surface space (and a rugged enough surface) to build a whole new puter on one side of it. This is the best computer desk I have ever owned.
The people who should tell the server/DDoS story are the ones who are doing the actual server work, and right now they're simply too busy working to do any story-telling.
They're also mad. This site is their "baby," and I think that if Martin, the two Pats, Chris, Liz or anyone else on that team tried to write anything right now, we'd get nothing but a string of cusswords.
Give them some time. Let them work without everyone trying to look over their shoulder. I'm as frustrated as anyone else, but I'm willing to wait until there's an end to the story and hear the whole thing at once.
- Robin
Re:The Slashdot article on WashPost is dumb
on
Hump Day Quickies
·
· Score: 4
The "adult supervision" thing is an in-joke. I'm so much older than everybody else who writes for Slashdot (except for Jon "gasbag" Katz) that I might as well be the scoutmaster of Geek Troop # 64.28.67.48.
Think of the old joke about the difference between the Army and the Boy Scouts: They both wear green and sleep in tents a lot, but -- unlike the Army -- the Boy Scouts have adult supervision.
John Schwartz, the Post reporter who did the story, is a very nice guy with a wry sense of humor -- and about 700% more tech knowledge than most of the mainstream press people I've met in the DC area. He's even starting to get into Linux.
Remember, Schwartz was trying to explain Slashdot to a typical newspaper audience. That's not an easy task. Think: the site's name alone makes most people say "Huh?"
I think the d00d did about as good a job as could have been done, even though some of his research was a little outdated. I have moved (Whoo!) to a double-wide bouse trailer since I last talked to him.
This link will take you to Unicomp, my personal favorite keyboard manufacturer. They sell numerical keypads and all kinds of other neat keyboards - like the 85-key straight-up, heavy-duty IBM keyboard I got from them a little while ago - brand new, for less than old ones go for on eBay. They are the actual manufacturer, so when you call for info you get someone who can actually help you. Prices are decent, too.
I'll answer this because I've been in the limousine business -- and taking credit cards -- for many years.
You need a credit history to take credit cards because it's insanely easy for a card-taking merchant to commit fraud. It wouldn't be hard to put huge, unauthorized charges on a few hundred customers' credit cards, wait 48 hours for the money to be deposited in your business bank account, withdraw it, and skip town. By the time the customers got their statements and started squawking, you'd be long gone.
This is why the the merchant banks that process credit cards like to see some "hard" evidence of a significant business investment. Putting up a Web site takes nothing. Ditto home-based businesses, which a lot of merchant banks won't accept at face value. When I first started processing credit cards for my home-based limo business (in pre-Internet days), the merchant bank sent a guy out with a camera to take pictures of my limousines, and they checked the registrations to make sure they were really mine. Once they had determined that, yes, there was a big investment there, enough that I was unlikely to leave it behind and run off to Mexico if I got my hands on $10,000 or $20,000 in fast cash, I was good to go.
And now, the Internet. In the eyes of the merchant banks, all online businesses are flaky, from your little startup all the way up to established ones like ThinkGeek. The problem with businesses that operate online - and those that operate over the telephone - is that they have no real way to prove that the credit card number a customer has just typed into a form or read them over the telephone really belongs to the person at the other end. Many online (and phone) businesses will now ship merchandise only to the billing address shown in the credit card issuers' records as belonging to that card holder. Others are asking to have proof of identity faxed to them; CowboyNeal recently had an online merchant demand copies of his most recent credit card statements, which he felt (rightly) was going too far. But no matter what, there is currently no way to accept credit cards online or by phone that is as fraud-preventing as the good old fashioned physical imprint (or electronic card reader "swipe") combined with a driver's license or other photo ID on a sale made in person.
And now, the software problem. Yeah, all the credit card acceptance software you can get is a rip. It's all for proprietary OSes and it costs through the nose. I bought my old "sits on the desk" physical Tranz 330 Terminal 5 years ago for under $300, and they want more than that for the software alone these days. I'm still using the physical terminal, becaus my limo volume isn't high enough (fewer than 100 total credit card sales per month), and it doesn't take me long enough to manually punch in the numbers, to justify a change.
I have been told, by the tech guys at Novus/Discover, which has been my credit card processor for many years, that if someone called them who was seriously interested in developing an Open Source and/or Free software package that would work on Linux, they'd be happy to help or at least to furnish the software hooks needed to write for their system.
Now, here's how you can handle things as a startup: through friends. It's not cheap setting up a secuire server, getting the certificate for it, and getting a merchant account even if you meet all the specs. You may be better off finding a friend who already has an account and all this machinery in place, and letting them "sell" your product for you in return for a cut of your sales slightly higher than the credit card company's cut. That is, if they're paying 2.2% for credit card processing, and 2.8% for Amex charge card processing, you pay them 5% or 6%, even slightly higher. Note that I say they "sell" your product or service for you, because terms of most credit card merchant accounts prohibit "renting" that account out to other businesses.
Indeed, even though I already have a merchant account, I've considered doing something sort of like this if I ever decide it would be worthwhile to accept credit cards directly online - I have a friend who has a secure server, and for a small, fixed monthly fee he'd happily put up a credit card transmittal page for my business on his site which would then forward the customer's info to me via encrypted e-mail. I would still use my merchant account (and manual terminal), but would be spared the expense and trouble of doing the secure server thing.
There are a lot of alternatives out there if you have a little imagination and some friends who already have established businesses. I am a big believer in cooperating with others. Even in the limo business, which can be cutthroat, I have found that it's better and more relaxed to work closely with other small limo companies than to regard them as enemies to be vanquished a la Bill Gates.
BTW, I strongly recommend Novus/Discover as a fine credit card processor for small businesses. http://www.discoverbiz.com/ is their URL. I tried several others before them, but they have proved, over the years, to give the best service and the lowest rates.
Shopping note for new business owners: when a credit card processing company demands an "up front" application fee, say no. There's a whole industry out there that, in my opinion, does nothing but take advantage of new businesses owned by people who don't know any better. They get that fee, and if you get turned down they still profit from you. I found it *easier* to get an account with Novus/Discover than with any of the "front fee" crowd, and it cost *much less* to set up. If you can't get on with a major, do the friend thing for your first year, until you have enough of a sales and credit track record that one of them will deal with you. To get a (hopefully positive) credit rating going quickly, list your business with Dun and Bradstreet (biz credit rating agency) as soon as you can.
"Why was Bruce the only person who received credit for his comments? Does this stem from the Katz-book thing? Can we expect to see only famous people owning their comments?"
It was the way RMS formatted his replies, taking one question at a time in informal dialogue fashion instead of replying to multi-part questions in one big lump. I left Bruce's name in because Richard did, and because they're both high-profile people in this particular area.
Besides, I get bored using the same format for every interview and thought doing it a little differently -- just once -- would break things up.
The choice had nothing to do with the Hellmouth book thing (which I had *nothing* to do with, BTW). I didn't even think about it while I was formatting this interview.
No offense taken - I agree with you. Remember, many Americans are as unhappy with the U.S. government as you are, but as long as a majority of our fellow citizens doesn't even bother to vote, and corporate dollars control our electoral politics, things are not likely to change.
It's gotten to the point where it looks like the best we can do is find "workarounds" for some of the dumber laws.
I don't support copyright or patent violations per se, but some of the things we are allowing to be copyrighted and patented, and the way some of the copyright and patent holders act (making threats that cause large legal bills even if they are not valid), we might as well all get used to being outlaws. This country once tried to ban alcoholic beverages -- and created a large group of outlaws by doing so. Then the U.S. government decide to go to "war" against some popular recreational drugs -- and created a whole new class of drug outlaws. Now we seem bent on creating intellectual property outlaws.
In the end, what happens is that U.S. citizens lose respect for *all* laws, and stop caring about whether they follow them or not. And citizens of other countries lose respect for the U.S. in general.
I don't think updates on old stories pointing to later, separate updates are necessary; a search of Slashdot will show the update alongside the original story.
Don't forget, there's a search form at the bottom of every Slashdot page.
That's the idea - to make this a weekly thing, with its own icon and section. We get a *lot* of follow-ups to stories we've already run that are too important to be buried in the comments on the original story or get attached (as updates) to stories that have scrolled off the main page (which means that hardly anyone would see them), but that don't quite deserve a main page story of their own.
Hence Slashback (trial name only; suggestions happily accepted).
Tim is in charge of this. If you have ideas on how to make it better, send e-mail directly to timothy@slashdot.org.
Supposedly one of the great advantages of Open Source and/or free software is that you can release it as/when you please, instead of following a schedule laid down by a marketing department or other "outside" influence.
I don't code. I write. And I can tell you I usually write *much better* when I have time to step back and look at my work than when I've got to have it in by 9 a.m. (or when I'm dashing off a fast post like this...)
Many of my friends who *do* code say they do their best work in the same way. Each to his or her own.
This item got submitted at least 100 times. I selected a submission at random after eliminating the ones with obvious bad links or major spelling/grammatical errors.
"Danborg" is not a friend -- or an enemy. I don't know him/her/it at all. He/she/it simply had one of the earlier, more coherent submissions.
When an item is submitted to Slashdot more than 100 times, by definition at least 99% of the submissions will be rejected, many of which are probably just as good as the selected one.
Can't speak for all telcos, but Bell Atlantic offers an option that'll automatically block any calls from numbers caller ID can't read. I don't get a lot of telemarketing calls right now, but if they get out of hand, the way they have a few times in the past, I'll spring for this.
Actually, I'm a major Stallman fan, and one of the things I respect most about the man is his willingness to stand up for his beliefs instad of trying to tone them down for the sake of popularity.
BTW, I totally agree with the statement that my "...accomplishements so far pale in comparison to Mr. Stallman's.":)
I don't use Linux because of stock prices, and I doubt that anyone sane is running around saying "Oh, Linux-oriented stocks are down. I guess I'd better run out and get Win2K for my server."
The fortunes of Linux -- the operating system -- are not tied in any way to the fortunes of any single company that sells Linux software, hardware or information. That is the beauty of open source software, and why I use it almost exclusively.
Another note: the stock price of a company doesn't necessarily affect its operations in any way other than its ability to use its stock to buy other companies or raise further funds through borrowing or new offerings. A company that goes public gets the original opening day "set" price and that's all. If the stock then goes up by some huge amount, the company gets nothing out of it. If the stock later goes down, the company take no loss.
For news about the stock market, I usually turn to CNNfn or CBS MarketWatch, not to Slashdot. This is not the *only* source of online news, you know. (*g*)
A few weeks ago, here in Maryland, a group of schoolgirls accused a teacher of sexual harassment. He was suspended from teaching, his name was in all the local papers, and his life was generally turned to mud.
The only problem with the whole thing was that the girls had made the whole thing up.
Before charges were filed, the "usual experts" evaluated them. The girls' allegations were accepted at face value (at first) by cops, the Montgomery County school system, and local prosecutors.
Does anyone remember Tawana Brawley up in New York a decade or so back? A crackhead girl made up a tale of kidnapping and rape, with major racial implications, to cover up the fact that she had skipped school for several days to hang around with an idjit boyfriend and get stoned.
Now we're going to have anonymous accusations, eh?
I suppose this is going to be a great boon to companies that do background and general private investigating, companies like... Pinkerton! But for the rest of us, the whole idea is a horror.
They'd keep you going for a couple of days without sleep. The speed made you a little jumpy, of course, but that wasn't really a handicap under the circumstances...
Oh, come on. Dealing with 2700 U.S. tax jurisdictions (or however many there are) would not be a major problem for online retailers. Less than a month after any 'net tax legislation passed, there would be dozens of competing (commercial) tax calculation and check-writing software packages on the market.
I'm sure Intuit could come up with an e-commerce plugin for QuickBooks and sell it for a low enough price that it wouldn't represent any kind of significant entry barrier for small businesses.
That said, I must admit that I dislike sales taxes more than other taxes because they throw more administrative load per dollar collected onto the businesses that collect them than any other kind of tax, which makes them the least efficient tax there is. They are also regressive -- poor people pay a higher percentage of their income in sales taxes than rich people almost every time, and I don't personally believe this is fair.
(Why do I beliee in "soak the rich" taxes? Very simply, because I've been both "poor" and "rich" in my life, and I can assure you that it's a lot easier to pay $100,000 in taxes on a $250,000 income than it is to pay even $1000 when you're only making $20,000.)
Tax policy is rough to make. No matter what you do, someone is pissed. But we must face the fact that if we're going to have roads, police, fire departments, NASA, libraries, public schools and colleges, publicly-funded scientific research (like the research that created the Internet itself), and all the rest of the *positive* things government provides, we are going to have some sort of taxes.
We can reasonably argue, however, that Internet businesses should pay fewer taxes than "physical" businesses because they don't require as much physical infrastructure (roads, sewers, etc.) as traditional shopping centers, and that their comparative eco-friendliness (less individual driving) should give them even more of a break. And we can discuss *how* Internet businesses should be taxed. I personally would like to see a (for instance) 2% national (U.S.) sales tax on Internet purchases -- with an additional 1% override going to the jurisdiction in which the seller is physically located so that local governments actively support the growth of 'net businesses.
Then you get into questions like, "What is an Internet business?" What about my limo business, which gets at least 80% of its new business over the 'net, but does virtually all transactions in person? What about Internet-based support services like LinuxCare, which may have consultants spread out all over the place?
It goes on and on. These arguments are just beginning, and are likely to be with us for the rest of our lives. We might as well get used to them.
More aptly, what if 95% of all popular music was controlled by only four or five record companies and those companies formed a trade association whose main purpose was to keep its members' products selling for high prices instead of allowing "the market" to determine what a given song was worth?
The end result would probably be wholesale music piracy using technology the record companies couldn't control.
Not that anything like this could ever happen in real life, mind you; this is just Monday morning speculation on Slashdot...
Rob Malda and Jeff Bates live in Holland, MI... Timothy Lord and I live in adjoining Maryland towns... Cliff "Ask Slashdot" Wood lives in VA... Jamie McCarthy lives in Kalamazoo, MI (semi-near Holland)... Michael Sims lives on Staten Island in New York... Emmett Plant lives in Philadelphia PA... Nik Clayton lives in England... Jon Kats lives in New Jersey...
On freshmeat, scoop lives in Germany... Jeff Covey, Steve Killen, and Dan Pearson live in Maryland... Skud and Nathan live in Australia...
Andover's HQ is in Massachussets. I fly there once or twice a month, and that's enough. The trick seems to be that people performing defined individual tasks can easily telecommute, but management work is easier if everyone is in the same place most of the time. But since we like to keep editorial separated from management and ad sales, it's probably a Good Thing that I'm 400 miles away from HQ and that Rob/Jeff are 1000 miles away.
Programming, writing, and editing are all essentially solitary tasks, and since that's what we do, telecommuting works for us.
I don't think it would work as well if we were running a machine shop or auto repair garage, though.:)
Andover.net did an *Open IPO* that anyone could have gotten in on at the "insiders' price." One of the big reasons the company chose this type of IPO over a traditional one was to eliminate all the "Who got the letter? Did you get the letter?" problems.
I got a demo Psion netbook the other day and almost immediately loaned it to one of the freshmeat kids to play with. Guess what he's doing with it?:)
Actually, the netbook is cute enough on its own that I think I'll keep it even if I end up using the proprietary OS that comes with it.
No reason not to *try* to run Linux on everything. Or to get a Merlin wireless card to work on a Psion or, failing that, through an analog cellular phone...
Slashdot Mirror
Or, one day, we could do live chat follow-ups. Give us time, give us time...
- Robin
My wife is the reason boo.com failed. She's got high-limit credit cards, she likes to buy clothes, she's amenable to mail-order and Internet buying, and she's online (professionally and recreationally) for up to 10 hours per day. If she wasn't boo.com's perfect potential customer, who was?
But when I showed Debbie this Slashdot post, she said she'd never heard of boo.com and certainly hadn't ever bought anything from them.
Upon reflection, she thought she *might* have checked out the site briefly when it first launched, but found it unusable (because of all the Java). and didn't think their clothing selection was very exciting or that their prices were anything special, so she forgot about it.
Multiply Debbie by millions of other women online, and it should be obvious why the company failed.
- Robin
Staple s page for it.
- Robin
The people who should tell the server/DDoS story are the ones who are doing the actual server work, and right now they're simply too busy working to do any story-telling.
They're also mad. This site is their "baby," and I think that if Martin, the two Pats, Chris, Liz or anyone else on that team tried to write anything right now, we'd get nothing but a string of cusswords.
Give them some time. Let them work without everyone trying to look over their shoulder. I'm as frustrated as anyone else, but I'm willing to wait until there's an end to the story and hear the whole thing at once.
- Robin
The "adult supervision" thing is an in-joke. I'm so much older than everybody else who writes for Slashdot (except for Jon "gasbag" Katz) that I might as well be the scoutmaster of Geek Troop # 64.28.67.48.
Think of the old joke about the difference between the Army and the Boy Scouts: They both wear green and sleep in tents a lot, but -- unlike the Army -- the Boy Scouts have adult supervision.
John Schwartz, the Post reporter who did the story, is a very nice guy with a wry sense of humor -- and about 700% more tech knowledge than most of the mainstream press people I've met in the DC area. He's even starting to get into Linux.
Remember, Schwartz was trying to explain Slashdot to a typical newspaper audience. That's not an easy task. Think: the site's name alone makes most people say "Huh?"
I think the d00d did about as good a job as could have been done, even though some of his research was a little outdated. I have moved (Whoo!) to a double-wide bouse trailer since I last talked to him.
- Robin
This link will take you to Unicomp, my personal favorite keyboard manufacturer. They sell numerical keypads and all kinds of other neat keyboards - like the 85-key straight-up, heavy-duty IBM keyboard I got from them a little while ago - brand new, for less than old ones go for on eBay. They are the actual manufacturer, so when you call for info you get someone who can actually help you. Prices are decent, too.
I'll answer this because I've been in the limousine business -- and taking credit cards -- for many years.
You need a credit history to take credit cards because it's insanely easy for a card-taking merchant to commit fraud. It wouldn't be hard to put huge, unauthorized charges on a few hundred customers' credit cards, wait 48 hours for the money to be deposited in your business bank account, withdraw it, and skip town. By the time the customers got their statements and started squawking, you'd be long gone.
This is why the the merchant banks that process credit cards like to see some "hard" evidence of a significant business investment. Putting up a Web site takes nothing. Ditto home-based businesses, which a lot of merchant banks won't accept at face value. When I first started processing credit cards for my home-based limo business (in pre-Internet days), the merchant bank sent a guy out with a camera to take pictures of my limousines, and they checked the registrations to make sure they were really mine. Once they had determined that, yes, there was a big investment there, enough that I was unlikely to leave it behind and run off to Mexico if I got my hands on $10,000 or $20,000 in fast cash, I was good to go.
And now, the Internet. In the eyes of the merchant banks, all online businesses are flaky, from your little startup all the way up to established ones like ThinkGeek. The problem with businesses that operate online - and those that operate over the telephone - is that they have no real way to prove that the credit card number a customer has just typed into a form or read them over the telephone really belongs to the person at the other end. Many online (and phone) businesses will now ship merchandise only to the billing address shown in the credit card issuers' records as belonging to that card holder. Others are asking to have proof of identity faxed to them; CowboyNeal recently had an online merchant demand copies of his most recent credit card statements, which he felt (rightly) was going too far. But no matter what, there is currently no way to accept credit cards online or by phone that is as fraud-preventing as the good old fashioned physical imprint (or electronic card reader "swipe") combined with a driver's license or other photo ID on a sale made in person.
And now, the software problem. Yeah, all the credit card acceptance software you can get is a rip. It's all for proprietary OSes and it costs through the nose. I bought my old "sits on the desk" physical Tranz 330 Terminal 5 years ago for under $300, and they want more than that for the software alone these days. I'm still using the physical terminal, becaus my limo volume isn't high enough (fewer than 100 total credit card sales per month), and it doesn't take me long enough to manually punch in the numbers, to justify a change.
I have been told, by the tech guys at Novus/Discover, which has been my credit card processor for many years, that if someone called them who was seriously interested in developing an Open Source and/or Free software package that would work on Linux, they'd be happy to help or at least to furnish the software hooks needed to write for their system.
Now, here's how you can handle things as a startup: through friends. It's not cheap setting up a secuire server, getting the certificate for it, and getting a merchant account even if you meet all the specs. You may be better off finding a friend who already has an account and all this machinery in place, and letting them "sell" your product for you in return for a cut of your sales slightly higher than the credit card company's cut. That is, if they're paying 2.2% for credit card processing, and 2.8% for Amex charge card processing, you pay them 5% or 6%, even slightly higher. Note that I say they "sell" your product or service for you, because terms of most credit card merchant accounts prohibit "renting" that account out to other businesses.
Indeed, even though I already have a merchant account, I've considered doing something sort of like this if I ever decide it would be worthwhile to accept credit cards directly online - I have a friend who has a secure server, and for a small, fixed monthly fee he'd happily put up a credit card transmittal page for my business on his site which would then forward the customer's info to me via encrypted e-mail. I would still use my merchant account (and manual terminal), but would be spared the expense and trouble of doing the secure server thing.
There are a lot of alternatives out there if you have a little imagination and some friends who already have established businesses. I am a big believer in cooperating with others. Even in the limo business, which can be cutthroat, I have found that it's better and more relaxed to work closely with other small limo companies than to regard them as enemies to be vanquished a la Bill Gates.
BTW, I strongly recommend Novus/Discover as a fine credit card processor for small businesses. http://www.discoverbiz.com/ is their URL. I tried several others before them, but they have proved, over the years, to give the best service and the lowest rates.
Shopping note for new business owners: when a credit card processing company demands an "up front" application fee, say no. There's a whole industry out there that, in my opinion, does nothing but take advantage of new businesses owned by people who don't know any better. They get that fee, and if you get turned down they still profit from you. I found it *easier* to get an account with Novus/Discover than with any of the "front fee" crowd, and it cost *much less* to set up. If you can't get on with a major, do the friend thing for your first year, until you have enough of a sales and credit track record that one of them will deal with you. To get a (hopefully positive) credit rating going quickly, list your business with Dun and Bradstreet (biz credit rating agency) as soon as you can.
- Robin
I thought about that, but I was getting a phone call every other minute and wanted to get the piece up at 11 a.m. and ran out of time. :)
- Robin
"Why was Bruce the only person who received credit for his comments? Does this stem from the Katz-book thing? Can we expect to see only famous people owning their comments?"
:)
It was the way RMS formatted his replies, taking one question at a time in informal dialogue fashion instead of replying to multi-part questions in one big lump. I left Bruce's name in because Richard did, and because they're both high-profile people in this particular area.
Besides, I get bored using the same format for every interview and thought doing it a little differently -- just once -- would break things up.
The choice had nothing to do with the Hellmouth book thing (which I had *nothing* to do with, BTW). I didn't even think about it while I was formatting this interview.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
- Robin
No offense taken - I agree with you. Remember, many Americans are as unhappy with the U.S. government as you are, but as long as a majority of our fellow citizens doesn't even bother to vote, and corporate dollars control our electoral politics, things are not likely to change.
It's gotten to the point where it looks like the best we can do is find "workarounds" for some of the dumber laws.
I don't support copyright or patent violations per se, but some of the things we are allowing to be copyrighted and patented, and the way some of the copyright and patent holders act (making threats that cause large legal bills even if they are not valid), we might as well all get used to being outlaws. This country once tried to ban alcoholic beverages -- and created a large group of outlaws by doing so. Then the U.S. government decide to go to "war" against some popular recreational drugs -- and created a whole new class of drug outlaws. Now we seem bent on creating intellectual property outlaws.
In the end, what happens is that U.S. citizens lose respect for *all* laws, and stop caring about whether they follow them or not. And citizens of other countries lose respect for the U.S. in general.
- Robin
I don't think updates on old stories pointing to later, separate updates are necessary; a search of Slashdot will show the update alongside the original story.
Don't forget, there's a search form at the bottom of every Slashdot page.
- Robin
That's the idea - to make this a weekly thing, with its own icon and section. We get a *lot* of follow-ups to stories we've already run that are too important to be buried in the comments on the original story or get attached (as updates) to stories that have scrolled off the main page (which means that hardly anyone would see them), but that don't quite deserve a main page story of their own.
Hence Slashback (trial name only; suggestions happily accepted).
Tim is in charge of this. If you have ideas on how to make it better, send e-mail directly to timothy@slashdot.org.
- Robin
Supposedly one of the great advantages of Open Source and/or free software is that you can release it as/when you please, instead of following a schedule laid down by a marketing department or other "outside" influence.
I don't code. I write. And I can tell you I usually write *much better* when I have time to step back and look at my work than when I've got to have it in by 9 a.m. (or when I'm dashing off a fast post like this...)
Many of my friends who *do* code say they do their best work in the same way. Each to his or her own.
- Robin
This item got submitted at least 100 times. I selected a submission at random after eliminating the ones with obvious bad links or major spelling/grammatical errors.
"Danborg" is not a friend -- or an enemy. I don't know him/her/it at all. He/she/it simply had one of the earlier, more coherent submissions.
When an item is submitted to Slashdot more than 100 times, by definition at least 99% of the submissions will be rejected, many of which are probably just as good as the selected one.
- Robin
The jwz interview was a live chat thing on slashnet,org, not a Slashdot interview. We'll have him here eventually, I'm sure.
:)
- Robin
PS - no, the editors never read Slashdot.
Can't speak for all telcos, but Bell Atlantic offers an option that'll automatically block any calls from numbers caller ID can't read. I don't get a lot of telemarketing calls right now, but if they get out of hand, the way they have a few times in the past, I'll spring for this.
- Robin
Actually, I'm a major Stallman fan, and one of the things I respect most about the man is his willingness to stand up for his beliefs instad of trying to tone them down for the sake of popularity.
:)
BTW, I totally agree with the statement that my "...accomplishements so far pale in comparison to Mr. Stallman's."
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
I don't use Linux because of stock prices, and I doubt that anyone sane is running around saying "Oh, Linux-oriented stocks are down. I guess I'd better run out and get Win2K for my server."
The fortunes of Linux -- the operating system -- are not tied in any way to the fortunes of any single company that sells Linux software, hardware or information. That is the beauty of open source software, and why I use it almost exclusively.
Another note: the stock price of a company doesn't necessarily affect its operations in any way other than its ability to use its stock to buy other companies or raise further funds through borrowing or new offerings. A company that goes public gets the original opening day "set" price and that's all. If the stock then goes up by some huge amount, the company gets nothing out of it. If the stock later goes down, the company take no loss.
For news about the stock market, I usually turn to CNNfn or CBS MarketWatch, not to Slashdot. This is not the *only* source of online news, you know. (*g*)
- Robin
A few weeks ago, here in Maryland, a group of schoolgirls accused a teacher of sexual harassment. He was suspended from teaching, his name was in all the local papers, and his life was generally turned to mud.
... Pinkerton! But for the rest of us, the whole idea is a horror.
The only problem with the whole thing was that the girls had made the whole thing up.
Before charges were filed, the "usual experts" evaluated them. The girls' allegations were accepted at face value (at first) by cops, the Montgomery County school system, and local prosecutors.
Does anyone remember Tawana Brawley up in New York a decade or so back? A crackhead girl made up a tale of kidnapping and rape, with major racial implications, to cover up the fact that she had skipped school for several days to hang around with an idjit boyfriend and get stoned.
Now we're going to have anonymous accusations, eh?
I suppose this is going to be a great boon to companies that do background and general private investigating, companies like
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
The Army used to hand out amphetamines like mad.
They'd keep you going for a couple of days without sleep. The speed made you a little jumpy, of course, but that wasn't really a handicap under the circumstances...
- Robin
Oh, come on. Dealing with 2700 U.S. tax jurisdictions (or however many there are) would not be a major problem for online retailers. Less than a month after any 'net tax legislation passed, there would be dozens of competing (commercial) tax calculation and check-writing software packages on the market.
I'm sure Intuit could come up with an e-commerce plugin for QuickBooks and sell it for a low enough price that it wouldn't represent any kind of significant entry barrier for small businesses.
That said, I must admit that I dislike sales taxes more than other taxes because they throw more administrative load per dollar collected onto the businesses that collect them than any other kind of tax, which makes them the least efficient tax there is. They are also regressive -- poor people pay a higher percentage of their income in sales taxes than rich people almost every time, and I don't personally believe this is fair.
(Why do I beliee in "soak the rich" taxes? Very simply, because I've been both "poor" and "rich" in my life, and I can assure you that it's a lot easier to pay $100,000 in taxes on a $250,000 income than it is to pay even $1000 when you're only making $20,000.)
Tax policy is rough to make. No matter what you do, someone is pissed. But we must face the fact that if we're going to have roads, police, fire departments, NASA, libraries, public schools and colleges, publicly-funded scientific research (like the research that created the Internet itself), and all the rest of the *positive* things government provides, we are going to have some sort of taxes.
We can reasonably argue, however, that Internet businesses should pay fewer taxes than "physical" businesses because they don't require as much physical infrastructure (roads, sewers, etc.) as traditional shopping centers, and that their comparative eco-friendliness (less individual driving) should give them even more of a break. And we can discuss *how* Internet businesses should be taxed. I personally would like to see a (for instance) 2% national (U.S.) sales tax on Internet purchases -- with an additional 1% override going to the jurisdiction in which the seller is physically located so that local governments actively support the growth of 'net businesses.
Then you get into questions like, "What is an Internet business?" What about my limo business, which gets at least 80% of its new business over the 'net, but does virtually all transactions in person? What about Internet-based support services like LinuxCare, which may have consultants spread out all over the place?
It goes on and on. These arguments are just beginning, and are likely to be with us for the rest of our lives. We might as well get used to them.
- Robin
More aptly, what if 95% of all popular music was controlled by only four or five record companies and those companies formed a trade association whose main purpose was to keep its members' products selling for high prices instead of allowing "the market" to determine what a given song was worth?
The end result would probably be wholesale music piracy using technology the record companies couldn't control.
Not that anything like this could ever happen in real life, mind you; this is just Monday morning speculation on Slashdot...
- Robin
Rob Malda and Jeff Bates live in Holland, MI ... Timothy Lord and I live in adjoining Maryland towns ... Cliff "Ask Slashdot" Wood lives in VA ... Jamie McCarthy lives in Kalamazoo, MI (semi-near Holland) ... Michael Sims lives on Staten Island in New York ... Emmett Plant lives in Philadelphia PA ... Nik Clayton lives in England ... Jon Kats lives in New Jersey ...
... Jeff Covey, Steve Killen, and Dan Pearson live in Maryland ... Skud and Nathan live in Australia ...
:)
On freshmeat, scoop lives in Germany
Andover's HQ is in Massachussets. I fly there once or twice a month, and that's enough. The trick seems to be that people performing defined individual tasks can easily telecommute, but management work is easier if everyone is in the same place most of the time. But since we like to keep editorial separated from management and ad sales, it's probably a Good Thing that I'm 400 miles away from HQ and that Rob/Jeff are 1000 miles away.
Programming, writing, and editing are all essentially solitary tasks, and since that's what we do, telecommuting works for us.
I don't think it would work as well if we were running a machine shop or auto repair garage, though.
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
Andover.net did an *Open IPO* that anyone could have gotten in on at the "insiders' price." One of the big reasons the company chose this type of IPO over a traditional one was to eliminate all the "Who got the letter? Did you get the letter?" problems.
- Robin
Actually, the netbook is cute enough on its own that I think I'll keep it even if I end up using the proprietary OS that comes with it.
No reason not to *try* to run Linux on everything. Or to get a Merlin wireless card to work on a Psion or, failing that, through an analog cellular phone...
This is the kind of thing that makes life fun!
- Robin