Actually, you'd be surprised how much non-technical people Can be interested in the concept of open source.
Yesterday I went to my father and mother in laws house to give them a computer upgrade and show them (again) how to use email and burn a cd. Somehow the topic of Linux got raised - and I mentioned I had considered giving them Xandros instead of windows, but couoldn't because they use Finale - a windows and mac only music notation software. Getting them to switch from Finale is not an option, but they want their next computer to be a Linux one now. This would just be a web surfing machine...
Why do they Want linuix? Because we talked about it for an hour. I explained where it came from, why it exists, and how its free - and they loved it. I'm not a salesperson, but the concept of Free is powerful when explained properly, and even if they don't care about the capital-F Free part, the cheaper-then-microsoft-but-still-works part (I say cheaper because if you want to get someone using Xandros, Lindows or whatever, you really should buy them a copy - otherwise those companies will go out of business), coupled with fewer viruses, is a Big Deal to the average non-techie - especialy if they've ever gotten a virus or ad-package on their machine.
Heck, I'm in the 3k range and I thought the first 100 (or so) uids were test uids from when they made and tested the system before rolling it... I've NEVER seen one before.
Yeah, those occasionaly popup on the sourceforge sites - even though the XXX.neurokode.com sites are on sourceforge servers, it fails every once in awhile when trying to access sourceforge services. Very annoying, to say the least.
From the sourceforge.com site: "We're Sorry. The SourceForge.net Website is currently down for maintenance. We will be back shortly"
Part of this premise, starting on a shoestring budget, means that there are no employees - everyone involved should be a partner, because you don't have the money for employees. IANAL as well, but I do know that liability laws are very different in that situation versus having employees over to work, as well as zoning laws. As long as you aren't retail, having a business run from your house is usually ok... but asking a lawyer would never hurt - especialy if you live in a restricted community or have 4 partners coming over eating up parking spaces and such.
Note also that while the work you put in may be full-time, if you or anyone else involved is on unemployment, they have to be spending the time to meet the requirements of unemployment as well - sending out resumes, trying to get interviews, etc. In a sense, this means you may be working 2 full time jobs.
Nope. Collecting income while on unemployement is illegal in most states. Remember that the goal of unemployment is to help you out until you get back on your feet and find a job again. In fact, in most states, such as mine, you _can_ make money while on unemployment, as long as it isn't much:
This sort of odd-job income is encouraged, and there is actually a blank on the form for 'non-reoccuring income' you didn't get from a real job. Originnaly the intent was to let people do odd jobs, like roofing, house repairs, etc, while on unemplopyement, without screwing them out of the unemployment long term. Thus, the week you got 200$ for putting up some house siding, you write down on the unemployment card that you got 200$. Your next check from unemployment will be 200$ or so less. Income from a business you started is the same way.
Note, though, that you _must_ still be looking for full time work if you are to collect unemployment. This includes interviewing. And if you get an offer and turn it down in favor of your business, well, you just lost unemployment.
How do you find your customers? Do people find your site on Google searching for JSplash or do you have a catalog of potential buyers?
Actually, JSplash is just a demo app, something we've been meaning to release on sourceforge, but have been too busy to do. BSD style license.
JSplash is what landed us our first client though - we did it in around 10 hours (between two people) on a friday night. Note that time includes installing tomcat and all required libraries on our server. When we showed them a working slashdot clone (minus moderation and subscriptions, but you get the idea) and then told them how much that would of cost to have made, they were sold that we knew what we were doing and could get a lot done for low cost.
100% of our revenue so far has been from custom work of the following types:
- Remote monitoring applications. These use cellular networks to communicate with devices in the field. Note that the server side was already done, we wrote the client as a java web start application. The client is written mostly in Jython.
- Web application work. This is full cycle 'get me a solution that does X' kind of work. We've done Intranets, document management systems, and ecommerce systems.
- Fix-it work. This includes security audits on existing projects, as well as picking up projects other companies have fubared and bringing them to completion in a timely manner.
We've made no money from JSplash, remoteD, PDO or PHASE (another open source project that we haven't had time to release) - except for JSplash, the others are tools we wrote to scratch an itch we had, and we just wanted to share them with the community. It'd be nice to make some money from support contracts on those, if any of them ever took off (PDO is doing good so far), and that is actually one of our long term goals: To make OS tools people will use, and provide support contracts for those who need them. Not that we wouldn't support them for the community, but priority would come to those who paid - think of the ReiserFS model of support.
Anyway, the point is, we do mostly custom work. Now, to folloow through the intent of your question: How do we get the customers who pay for this? Do we advertise?
We, in the non-computer sense, networked. Everyone we used to work with (who didn't hate us or vise versa), we keep in contact with. We talk about what we're doing, and what we're capable of doing. Then, if someone asks them 'do you know of anyone good with technology X we could get to do Y?' - they say 'yes, I do.'
We've never advertised before, but we're entering a slow period, and so NeuroKode.com is about to get a revamped design, and we're about to send out our first Ad campaign. Simple tri-fold fliers to introduce ourselves and what we can do. I hate spam, and I hate the idea of sending out fliers to people who will 99.9% of the time just throw them away - but its less evil (IMHO) than email spam. Like google, we have a try-not-to-be-evil policy.
As for networking, keep in mind that people you worked with at clients/customers of your former employeer could be good contacts to keep. Of course, don't try to sell them the services your former employer sells them unless either A) your former employer is out of business or B) you do not have a non-compete agreement in place. Better than B is if you have a different product or service to sell them that you know they may need.
Oh, and one more thing: make sure you are good at what you do. You don't have to brag, but if you are the best PHP coder in your city, make sure people know. If you aren't the best at something, then become the best at something - provide the cheapest or best product (or preferably both) or services around. It's easier for word of mouth to work if you are Good at what you do/sell.
I did this over a year ago, with no financing. In fact, I was in debt upto my ears. First, some misconceptions need to be cleared up:
- don't get an office. They cost money. Work From Home. If you have multiple people, either work remotely and meeting irl a few times a week, or choose one central house/apartment and setup shop in a room there. Basements are fine, so are spare bedrooms.
- Use existing hardware.
- Get dirt cheap hosting and put up a good looking website. customers won't know you're only paying 5$ a month for the site.
- don't pay yourselves salaries - I've seen way to many people think 'I need X amount of cash to pay myself Y per week for six months until the business is making money'. Plan on paying yourself what you can, and using unemployment as a cushion until things take off.
Heres how it works: while on unemployment, come up with an idea for a type of software business, and then throw up a website (make sure it looks good), and start writing software. You have to keep looking for a real job, but as long as you aren't making money on the biz, you don't have any income to report, and still get unemployment. If you want to sell products, write them while still on unemployment. If you want to do consulting or custom work, be finding clients while on unemployment. If you are small enough, and have learned to be lean, then your first customers will pay enough that you drop off unemployment and go from there. If not, then divy up the money, pay for expenses, etc (The biz can pay you back for the web hosting, for example), then pay yourself. You Can make money while on unemployment, as long as it's not much - they will reduce how much you get from unemployment in a near 1:1 ratio.
If you do good, you may find yourself off unemployment and making better-than-unemployment wages within a month or two.
You may fail, miserably, but with a cost-of-entry of a few dollars a month and your time, it won't cost you much to fail. If you aren't on unemployment anymore - say if it ran out - then find a job somewhere else to tide you over while you try to get the business going. After all, a 8$/hr job at a bookstore is a lot more money than 0$/hr.
Also remember that starting a business is Not for everyone - many people want the security of a known salary, and don't like the idea of taking risks. Others don't want to work long hours, especialy on something so risky. Ask yourself if you are one of those people.
Me, I've been lucky, and perhaps that has skewed my perceptions. My friend and I were discussing starting our own company, and then a client fell into our lap... a client that by themselves paid our bills and allowed us to grow the business for 6 months. Of course, now we're looking for more clients, since things are slow, but thats the nature of owning your own biz - risk.
neurokode.com - yup, thats me and my partner, and yes, it needs work - we've been too busy to touch it much. Need contract development, or a code audit? Contact us. Want tools for DB development with python? Check out pdo.neurokode.com
I can understand your need to vent - but unfortunatly your tone and caps usage did not come off as sarcasm, and instead promoted the idea that you were very angry; it seemed too angry from my view, hence my response.
Whether you meant for it to or not, the implied anger (caps) and off-topic ranting (kazaa) made you look like a rather upset and over-the-top microsoft defender: a zealot fo the opposite stripe from that which you were pointing out. I'm not saying you are any such thing, as your reply mentions, I'm just saying you gave that impression. Or at least, I got that impression - which is a different issue.
It all comes down to writing style and the limitations of plain text. Without some way for others to know that your caps usage and such were sarcastic mimicing of the original poster and his type (as we now have from your reply), the reader can be get the wrong impression. Sublties of communication are difficult without body language, volumn and tone manipulation to provide context. Some users tend to use rather silly-looking psuedo html tags such as <sarcasm></sarcasm> - but despite their sillyness, they do work.
Perhaps I'm in the minority - perhaps most readers read your post as you intended. But I will say that for me, your message was _not_ clear, and the idea that you were a pro-ms defender of some zealotry was.
"If you're honestly serious, then you're a prime example of why people who dislike Microsoft are called extremist zealot idiots."
This is offtopic, but, not _all_ people who dislike microsoft are extremist idiot zealots. Some are not even idiots.
In fact, you zealotous (is that a word) attack against the person who made the original post was rather... odd. Going off on the whole Kazaa thing, for example.
I mean, come on, we all understand that the original post was (intentionaly or not) stupid and (intentionaly or not) kind of funny - akin to saying 'pepsi put a pepsi ad on the side of it's cans!'.
But attacking the user in such a manner is just... well, it implies an imbalance of some kind. Have you ever encountered someone who went Off with very little provocation in an irrational way, sometimes at the mention of a specific subject? That is being a zealot.
Seriously, calm down and quit attacking people for things like A) making jokes and B) expressing thier own views (correctly or wrongly) by using mispellings and namecalling. Instead, try to engage in intelligent conversation and/or debate. Having an intelligent debate is not only more entertaining (for the rest of us) - but it will give Your viewpoint an oppourtunity to shine. Namecalling, using all caps, and calling people zealots - like you have done - instead paints You as a zealot. This in turn can be viewed as a negative reflection on others who might share your basic viewpoint (in this case, that Microsoft is good). Ie, "geeze, look at this guy - This is why I hate microsoft so much - even the users are rude and asinine!" Ask yourself, is that really the impression you want to give?
No offense, but apple doesn't provide the level of service, even for it's 'pro' line, as do workstation vendors such as BOXX - Apple's market is not the same, and it's service levels reflect that.
The only place I've seen apple have the same level of service as a company such as BOXX, is for their rack mountable server line.
O.K., hopefully this will put to bed all those folks who cry about Apple computers being so damned expensive. Feature for feature, the G5 is about $600 cheaper than the Opteron. I certainly found this out when I was pricing workstations from Dell and other Wintel manufacturers and the G5's from Apple. I went with a fully loaded G5 and the price delta was $1200 cheaper going with the G5. Plus, OS X is soooooo nice.
I am very curious as to how you got an Opteron price from Dell, which doesn't Make an Opteron system.
I've read this sort of argument before, and what it comes down to is the difference in price between a comsumer system (G5) and a pro workstation (dual Opterons are not for the avergae consumer). The manufacturers making dual Opteron systems provide very heavy support - because their market (Engineering, 3d modeling, rendering) demands it. You pay for said support. The G5, however, comes with typical Apple support - which, while very nice, is not at the same level.
Also of note, the manufacturers making Opteron workstations tend to put on very high end graphics cards - not the game-use 9600 pro that comes standard on a G5.
Unfortunatly, no one makes a dual opteron that isn't targeted at a professional user currently - instead you have to cobble one together yourself. The price point drops considerably when you do this, becoming on par with that of the G5, but you wind up with 5+ warrenties to keep track of, and no central org to get service from.:(
Bandwith - the major cost of runing any hardware review site. By making a simple flash movie that displays a graph based upon passed in text data, they save bandwith. You download the flash movie once (or once every time they update it), and then everytime they display a graph your browser uses the cached movie, but with the new param set for what data labels and values to display. Sending even 15 lines of data is a lot smaller than sending a 300x120 pixel image for every single graph - especialy when a multi-page review may have 15+ graphs.
Yes, it sucks for the user who has to download whatever version of flash they use - and it sucks even more if the version they require is so new it isn't avail on all platforms, but they Do have a good reason.
The KDE folks are cranky because they want the money that is to be spent promoting and developing UserLinux to be spent on their project and not on Gnome.
No... I bet the KDE folks are 'cranky' because they've spent years writing a HUGE and free desktop and application system, much larger than the kernel, and now are seeing a competiting project being standardized as the single default for a high profile attempt at a standard distro...
Saying that the choice is there - like you and Bruce are both saying - doesn't work in this scenario as a way to say 'its ok' to the KDE developers. They've spent years working on this, emotions are going to be high, especially when this is a high profile standardization effort.
Did anyone else read KDE's counterproposal? I meqan, here these guys had just been told they would be put out of the project - and their response is basicaly 'We'll Dive In and make KDE do things you never expected and integrate it in such ways that it's super attractive - we'll add features, etc!' Frankly, I found Bruce's response rather rude - even though he may not of meant it that way - he basically told them 'You can do all that work if you want, in fact, please do! But we won't use it.' Which is actually less painful than if he'd responded with 'No thanks, we'll do that sort of thing with Gnome.' - The latter, while curt, at least is clear cut; meanwhile by encouraging the KDE team to develop everything they offered and yet refuse to use it, Bruce has publicly thrown down a kind of guantlet - he's Asked them to do the work - but the gain could be very small, and if they don't do it, everyone gets to point and say 'see, they couldn't live upto their proposal anyway'.
I know, I know, I'm probably reading too much into that sort of thing - and it's not like the KDE people have to do what he says - it's all open source software, and it's all about freedom!
Two things, and then I'll shut up:
- This debate, and the heated arguments and such, have been forseen for years - everyone who looked at the competing projects from the outside, objectively, knew that the 'competition' that was spuring them both forward, was also going to bite them in the arse.
- The burgening market Bruce references, for priorietary software for linux desktops, is already out there - and some companies write for Gnome, others write for KDE. By making this descision Bruce has either A) put the KDE companies in a bad position, or B) relegated UserLinux to mediocrity by alienating a large, existing user base. Neither outcome is good.
Begining on through, not until the end though, and definetly not into BG80... It just didn't keep me attention - partialy due to the reused effects shots each episode.
There is a box set of Macros out right now - look for a similar box to the robotech sets that were put out last year, but black.
It rocks.
It's much, much funnier - there's sexual induendo, all sorts of stuff. It's subtitled, but good. It's actually much Better than the first season of robotech, which surprised the hell out of me.
There's one scene, right after Rick transforms his veritech into a robot and falls into minmai's building, when Roy shows up and helps him out. After rick's veritech is back on it's feet, Minmai and her mom are on the street and say goodbye - they are going to the shelters, and turn and walk away... Rick and Roy stare at minmai's posterior as she walks away, then make fun of each other for being 'Dogs'...
When Rick and Minmai are trapped inside the sdf1, and minmai takes a shower, you see much more (no total nudity, but more than the calf and leg shot in the american), and minmai wonders to herself if she teased rick (sexualy) too much.
All in all, the added humor and sexual comments make the series more real than the americanized robotech. Real people think about sex. real people make jokes at their own expense and make fun of their friends in teasing ways.
Plus, a lot fo the removed voice-over story re-telling and plot-line fillins from the american version are just gone. The series is shorter, time wise, but better.
I'm planning on hunting down what the third generation was based upon next.
And am I the only one who watched the second generation recently and went "I didn't really like this as a kid... and I HATE this now!"
Like many, when I got a copy and started watching it for the first time since I was a child; I found the original to be very bubble-gummy and not as good as I remembered it. The same thing happened with Robotech.
I read several artciles and several points of view on the miniseries before it aired - and I decided to reserve judgement...
The 9/11 influence (which the producers say is there on purpose) was very present - it was much darker than I expected. The long leadup and character development before the actual attack got you attached and into the story so that the destruction didn't feel like a backdrop, but a very major event.
Production values were high, and the effects were great... and it was just enjoyable.
In my book, this blew sci-fi's attempt at Dune out of the water. I feel bad for everyone who wanted the original to continue - but I myself think I'd enjoy a series of This version of BG better than a continuation.
Hopefully, though, they will instead do a series of, uhm, mini-series of this - or the occasional movie. I say this because EJO and some of the other leads probably wouldn't go for a full series, And, because with a full series it would be too easy for it to become a new-planet-every-week serial as opposed to having the scope this mini series had.
When windows 95 came out, I was working part time at circuit city - long story - but the reason I mention it was the two ways we'd demo system performance for the next year after it came out:
- right click on the desktop, and choose display properties, then count the seconds. The count was typically from 3-7, which the 'monster' machines that had 32 megs of ram usually comming in at 2-3 - _just to launch the properties dialog!_
- see how many video windows we could get running at once of the included music videos that came with w95 before the video started getting choppy. Usually two, three on better machines, and towards the end the pentium 166s and 233mxs could go to four.
eMachines used to be utter crap, but as a disposable machine, they were decent. These days they seem to be pretty decent - even their notebooks! I bought a M5305 Back in June and... Wow. For 1100$ (after whatever sale/etc was going on where you bought it) I got a heck of a notebook. Sure, it has shared memory video, but the battery life is excellent, and out of 4 I've seen unboxed (others in my company got some) only 1 had a single bad pixel - and it wasn't even fully dead, just one of those off-color pixels that is too bright on one channel (green I think). My only regret with the purchase was that if I'd waited another month I could of gotten a M5310 - which went from a Athlon 2200 to a 2400 And added built in 802.11b.
Service is great - I called about some drivers I needed and could'nt find on their site when I was switching OSes. My hold time was about 2 minutes. They preload the machines with a utility now to autocheck for and install software/OS updates - and display 'important news' to the user. For non-techies, it seemed to be much more user friendly than, say, windows update.
As for Athlon64 motherboards - well, there aren't a _lot_ of them out there (especially compared to the selection for a regular athlon or intel processor), but there have been some for over 60 days, newegg lists 14 to choose from.
Of course, that doesn't mean you should buy one if you plan on upgrading... but the death of socket 754 after q2 next year is a different issue...
You seem to forget that an Athlon64 runs 32-bit software Very well - trouncing the p4 in many tests despite it's frequency difference.
You want a Powerful machine but don't want to spend tons of cash? You buy the emachine - you get the speed you want (or think you need) and you get bragging rights without having to spend so much cash.
eMachines audience has always been split - people who don't know what they are doing and buy for cheapness, and users who usually know a thing or two and want something on the cheap without the effort of building it themselves. Soemtimes the latter type is making a recomendation to a relative: "Buy the emachine - it'll perform just as well as the Dell, and you'll save money."
Anyway, my point is that your questions misses everyone else who is a potential computer buyer and doesn't see eMachines in a bad light.
(Which they used to deserve, btw, but this last year and a half since they got new ownership - they've really turned it around help desk wise, and quality wise - eMAchines have a much much lower defective rate than they used to (which used to be higher than HP, compaq and Sony's consumer pc return rate combined) - now on a par with other consumer PCs.)
Now if only they offered machines with no OS as a standard option...
I appreciate the apology, and the correction on BioAPI compliance.
I think the lack of documentation on the Identix website contributed greatly to this - a search for 'BioAPI' upon your website returns only a few documents, none of which are actually about BioAPI compatibility - except for one SEC filing referencing BioAPI modules, regarding Visionics technologies.
I think you may have read to much into my post though - as for your clarification and interpretation. I never intended, nor implied, that the BioAPI provided a standard biometric template interface: my point was that it appeared (at the time, and not just to myself, mind you) that this sort of stonewalling was being done against any and all standardization efforts within the industry. Identix was not the only organization that seemed to be doing this, but it was one of the biggest. The points about template compatibility and proper BioAPI usage are wasted on me - but it is better to mention them for the good of the audience here on slashdot.
Let us just say that before BioAPI there were other attempts at standards, and that I was (fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your view) employed by an organization building one of these, and building applications based upon our system; hence my experiences.
That is horrible, no pin or other source of id? Let me guess, it's a smartcard with the biometric key onboard as well? Ugh... smartcards are easy to hack, and I've never been one for any card that has the biometric key on it - it's silly and doesn't mean anything: you are trusting the card to do too much by asking it to match the data you hand it with a biometric key. The user (also read: "the potential threat") Brought the card with them...
Hrm, I'm not sure where to begin... perhaps a little background?
My 'faith' in these systems isn't grounded upon assumption - its based upon experience. For several years I was a developer of biometric security applications. My company worked on a common api that abstracted what device you were writing for - this meant I got to know the engineers very well from several companies as I made contacts in the industry. Thus, I can safely assume that my knowledge of these subjects is beyond your own... no offense. That being said, let us continue.
The first 'objection' I raised is important. In this industry, companies merge, new models come out and companies go out of business all the time. There are _many_ fingerprint scanners on the market, and all of them do things differently.
Which brings me to your second point... Closed formats are a huge problem. Every device maker has their own format, and they are _not_ simple to break. Maybe some newer devices by startups who are staffed by newcomers would have the problem of an easily decoded format - but not the veterans. When you are making a product whose potential market includes the highest levels of the military, you design for close scrutiny. These engineers have been in the field for years, and they are experts. Take that information, and add the fact that each device may store completely different types of information - one fingerprint scanner can store simple minuta about variant lines in a fingerprint. Not all lines are stored, not even the majority fo liens are stored. Instead, where the lines end, and what angle the end of a line was pointing in, those things may be stored. Some manufacturers store even more information - the number of lines a cross sectional imaginary line through the finger may traverse, etc. Then, add in the fact that most formats don't hold the actual data, but instead hold a series of one-way hashes of the actual data... and you have the sort of 'decoding' problem akin to reversing engineering md5 hashes to plain text for 30-300 datapoints, let alone what the plaintext data meant. I've seen people go mad trying to decode these formats, some of them were coworkers. All of them were very clever.
Ok, your third objection - about cards containing the cleartext account number. This is true, but each card also contains a card # - otherwise, everytime you would report a card stolen, you would get a new account number - instead you get a new card. Reporting the stolen card makes it null and void - any 'copied' cards would then contain the same card number, and be useless as well.
Your fourth popint is valid - people do roll out cheap systems where they should not be used. However, any guard that ignored problems with an instaled security system and did not report them - and, per your example, just started ignoring them - would and should be fired. This is gross negelegence. Also, any security system is only as good as it's weakest link, and a biometric should _never_ be used by itself - just as (for real security) a password should never be used by itself.
As for the system you tested, ov511s based systems are _not_ expensive. Old, greyscale camera only based systems are years out of date - and are reserved for the 'toy' market now - the sort of thing built into laptops and pdas (though many use contact based sensors instead of cameras, the same principles about cheapness apply). Some corporations still roll these levels of devices out to their desktops - usually out of ignorance. Expensive systems go for thousands of dollars, and can be worth every penny. Most systems under 500$ are not of high quality. If you were told this ws an expensive system, then they may have been quoting a price from years ago. As for how 'simple' the data presented was, remember that the vast majority of what you pay for in a biometric fingerprint scanner these days is the software-driver - the part that turns that image (and other information in more advanced scanners) into the data about a finerprint as described above.
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Actually, you'd be surprised how much non-technical people Can be interested in the concept of open source.
Yesterday I went to my father and mother in laws house to give them a computer upgrade and show them (again) how to use email and burn a cd. Somehow the topic of Linux got raised - and I mentioned I had considered giving them Xandros instead of windows, but couoldn't because they use Finale - a windows and mac only music notation software. Getting them to switch from Finale is not an option, but they want their next computer to be a Linux one now. This would just be a web surfing machine...
Why do they Want linuix? Because we talked about it for an hour. I explained where it came from, why it exists, and how its free - and they loved it. I'm not a salesperson, but the concept of Free is powerful when explained properly, and even if they don't care about the capital-F Free part, the cheaper-then-microsoft-but-still-works part (I say cheaper because if you want to get someone using Xandros, Lindows or whatever, you really should buy them a copy - otherwise those companies will go out of business), coupled with fewer viruses, is a Big Deal to the average non-techie - especialy if they've ever gotten a virus or ad-package on their machine.
Heck, I'm in the 3k range and I thought the first 100 (or so) uids were test uids from when they made and tested the system before rolling it... I've NEVER seen one before.
Yeah, those occasionaly popup on the sourceforge sites - even though the XXX.neurokode.com sites are on sourceforge servers, it fails every once in awhile when trying to access sourceforge services. Very annoying, to say the least.
From the sourceforge.com site:
"We're Sorry.
The SourceForge.net Website is currently down for maintenance.
We will be back shortly"
Part of this premise, starting on a shoestring budget, means that there are no employees - everyone involved should be a partner, because you don't have the money for employees. IANAL as well, but I do know that liability laws are very different in that situation versus having employees over to work, as well as zoning laws. As long as you aren't retail, having a business run from your house is usually ok... but asking a lawyer would never hurt - especialy if you live in a restricted community or have 4 partners coming over eating up parking spaces and such.
Note also that while the work you put in may be full-time, if you or anyone else involved is on unemployment, they have to be spending the time to meet the requirements of unemployment as well - sending out resumes, trying to get interviews, etc. In a sense, this means you may be working 2 full time jobs.
Nope. Collecting income while on unemployement is illegal in most states. Remember that the goal of unemployment is to help you out until you get back on your feet and find a job again. In fact, in most states, such as mine, you _can_ make money while on unemployment, as long as it isn't much:
This sort of odd-job income is encouraged, and there is actually a blank on the form for 'non-reoccuring income' you didn't get from a real job. Originnaly the intent was to let people do odd jobs, like roofing, house repairs, etc, while on unemplopyement, without screwing them out of the unemployment long term. Thus, the week you got 200$ for putting up some house siding, you write down on the unemployment card that you got 200$. Your next check from unemployment will be 200$ or so less. Income from a business you started is the same way.
Note, though, that you _must_ still be looking for full time work if you are to collect unemployment. This includes interviewing. And if you get an offer and turn it down in favor of your business, well, you just lost unemployment.
How do you find your customers? Do people find your site on Google searching for JSplash or do you have a catalog of potential buyers?
Actually, JSplash is just a demo app, something we've been meaning to release on sourceforge, but have been too busy to do. BSD style license.
JSplash is what landed us our first client though - we did it in around 10 hours (between two people) on a friday night. Note that time includes installing tomcat and all required libraries on our server. When we showed them a working slashdot clone (minus moderation and subscriptions, but you get the idea) and then told them how much that would of cost to have made, they were sold that we knew what we were doing and could get a lot done for low cost.
100% of our revenue so far has been from custom work of the following types:
- Remote monitoring applications. These use cellular networks to communicate with devices in the field. Note that the server side was already done, we wrote the client as a java web start application. The client is written mostly in Jython.
- Web application work. This is full cycle 'get me a solution that does X' kind of work. We've done Intranets, document management systems, and ecommerce systems.
- Fix-it work. This includes security audits on existing projects, as well as picking up projects other companies have fubared and bringing them to completion in a timely manner.
We've made no money from JSplash, remoteD, PDO or PHASE (another open source project that we haven't had time to release) - except for JSplash, the others are tools we wrote to scratch an itch we had, and we just wanted to share them with the community. It'd be nice to make some money from support contracts on those, if any of them ever took off (PDO is doing good so far), and that is actually one of our long term goals:
To make OS tools people will use, and provide support contracts for those who need them. Not that we wouldn't support them for the community, but priority would come to those who paid - think of the ReiserFS model of support.
Anyway, the point is, we do mostly custom work. Now, to folloow through the intent of your question: How do we get the customers who pay for this? Do we advertise?
We, in the non-computer sense, networked. Everyone we used to work with (who didn't hate us or vise versa), we keep in contact with. We talk about what we're doing, and what we're capable of doing. Then, if someone asks them 'do you know of anyone good with technology X we could get to do Y?' - they say 'yes, I do.'
We've never advertised before, but we're entering a slow period, and so NeuroKode.com is about to get a revamped design, and we're about to send out our first Ad campaign. Simple tri-fold fliers to introduce ourselves and what we can do. I hate spam, and I hate the idea of sending out fliers to people who will 99.9% of the time just throw them away - but its less evil (IMHO) than email spam. Like google, we have a try-not-to-be-evil policy.
As for networking, keep in mind that people you worked with at clients/customers of your former employeer could be good contacts to keep. Of course, don't try to sell them the services your former employer sells them unless either A) your former employer is out of business or B) you do not have a non-compete agreement in place. Better than B is if you have a different product or service to sell them that you know they may need.
Oh, and one more thing: make sure you are good at what you do. You don't have to brag, but if you are the best PHP coder in your city, make sure people know. If you aren't the best at something, then become the best at something - provide the cheapest or best product (or preferably both) or services around. It's easier for word of mouth to work if you are Good at what you do/sell.
did you read my post? the idea is to get the business going while you have income from unemployment, Not to collect double income.
Thats part of the risk involved - one where you go 'nope, starting a business isn't for me'.
As for me, i have a family and mortgage, but when no tech jobs are to be found, 8$/hr is still better than 0$/hr.
I did this over a year ago, with no financing. In fact, I was in debt upto my ears. First, some misconceptions need to be cleared up:
- don't get an office. They cost money. Work From Home. If you have multiple people, either work remotely and meeting irl a few times a week, or choose one central house/apartment and setup shop in a room there. Basements are fine, so are spare bedrooms.
- Use existing hardware.
- Get dirt cheap hosting and put up a good looking website. customers won't know you're only paying 5$ a month for the site.
- don't pay yourselves salaries - I've seen way to many people think 'I need X amount of cash to pay myself Y per week for six months until the business is making money'. Plan on paying yourself what you can, and using unemployment as a cushion until things take off.
Heres how it works: while on unemployment, come up with an idea for a type of software business, and then throw up a website (make sure it looks good), and start writing software. You have to keep looking for a real job, but as long as you aren't making money on the biz, you don't have any income to report, and still get unemployment. If you want to sell products, write them while still on unemployment. If you want to do consulting or custom work, be finding clients while on unemployment. If you are small enough, and have learned to be lean, then your first customers will pay enough that you drop off unemployment and go from there. If not, then divy up the money, pay for expenses, etc (The biz can pay you back for the web hosting, for example), then pay yourself. You Can make money while on unemployment, as long as it's not much - they will reduce how much you get from unemployment in a near 1:1 ratio.
If you do good, you may find yourself off unemployment and making better-than-unemployment wages within a month or two.
You may fail, miserably, but with a cost-of-entry of a few dollars a month and your time, it won't cost you much to fail. If you aren't on unemployment anymore - say if it ran out - then find a job somewhere else to tide you over while you try to get the business going. After all, a 8$/hr job at a bookstore is a lot more money than 0$/hr.
Also remember that starting a business is Not for everyone - many people want the security of a known salary, and don't like the idea of taking risks. Others don't want to work long hours, especialy on something so risky. Ask yourself if you are one of those people.
Me, I've been lucky, and perhaps that has skewed my perceptions. My friend and I were discussing starting our own company, and then a client fell into our lap... a client that by themselves paid our bills and allowed us to grow the business for 6 months. Of course, now we're looking for more clients, since things are slow, but thats the nature of owning your own biz - risk.
neurokode.com - yup, thats me and my partner, and yes, it needs work - we've been too busy to touch it much. Need contract development, or a code audit? Contact us. Want tools for DB development with python? Check out pdo.neurokode.com
Mod the parent up - I haven't laughed that hard since the day I found the Robot Ron website.
And yes, this post is redundant.
I can understand your need to vent - but unfortunatly your tone and caps usage did not come off as sarcasm, and instead promoted the idea that you were very angry; it seemed too angry from my view, hence my response.
Whether you meant for it to or not, the implied anger (caps) and off-topic ranting (kazaa) made you look like a rather upset and over-the-top microsoft defender: a zealot fo the opposite stripe from that which you were pointing out. I'm not saying you are any such thing, as your reply mentions, I'm just saying you gave that impression. Or at least, I got that impression - which is a different issue.
It all comes down to writing style and the limitations of plain text. Without some way for others to know that your caps usage and such were sarcastic mimicing of the original poster and his type (as we now have from your reply), the reader can be get the wrong impression. Sublties of communication are difficult without body language, volumn and tone manipulation to provide context. Some users tend to use rather silly-looking psuedo html tags such as <sarcasm></sarcasm> - but despite their sillyness, they do work.
Perhaps I'm in the minority - perhaps most readers read your post as you intended. But I will say that for me, your message was _not_ clear, and the idea that you were a pro-ms defender of some zealotry was.
"If you're honestly serious, then you're a prime example of why people who dislike Microsoft are called extremist zealot idiots."
This is offtopic, but, not _all_ people who dislike microsoft are extremist idiot zealots. Some are not even idiots.
In fact, you zealotous (is that a word) attack against the person who made the original post was rather... odd. Going off on the whole Kazaa thing, for example.
I mean, come on, we all understand that the original post was (intentionaly or not) stupid and (intentionaly or not) kind of funny - akin to saying 'pepsi put a pepsi ad on the side of it's cans!'.
But attacking the user in such a manner is just... well, it implies an imbalance of some kind. Have you ever encountered someone who went Off with very little provocation in an irrational way, sometimes at the mention of a specific subject? That is being a zealot.
Seriously, calm down and quit attacking people for things like A) making jokes and B) expressing thier own views (correctly or wrongly) by using mispellings and namecalling. Instead, try to engage in intelligent conversation and/or debate. Having an intelligent debate is not only more entertaining (for the rest of us) - but it will give Your viewpoint an oppourtunity to shine. Namecalling, using all caps, and calling people zealots - like you have done - instead paints You as a zealot. This in turn can be viewed as a negative reflection on others who might share your basic viewpoint (in this case, that Microsoft is good). Ie, "geeze, look at this guy - This is why I hate microsoft so much - even the users are rude and asinine!" Ask yourself, is that really the impression you want to give?
No offense, but apple doesn't provide the level of service, even for it's 'pro' line, as do workstation vendors such as BOXX - Apple's market is not the same, and it's service levels reflect that.
The only place I've seen apple have the same level of service as a company such as BOXX, is for their rack mountable server line.
O.K., hopefully this will put to bed all those folks who cry about Apple computers being so damned expensive. Feature for feature, the G5 is about $600 cheaper than the Opteron. I certainly found this out when I was pricing workstations from Dell and other Wintel manufacturers and the G5's from Apple. I went with a fully loaded G5 and the price delta was $1200 cheaper going with the G5. Plus, OS X is soooooo nice.
:(
I am very curious as to how you got an Opteron price from Dell, which doesn't Make an Opteron system.
I've read this sort of argument before, and what it comes down to is the difference in price between a comsumer system (G5) and a pro workstation (dual Opterons are not for the avergae consumer). The manufacturers making dual Opteron systems provide very heavy support - because their market (Engineering, 3d modeling, rendering) demands it. You pay for said support. The G5, however, comes with typical Apple support - which, while very nice, is not at the same level.
Also of note, the manufacturers making Opteron workstations tend to put on very high end graphics cards - not the game-use 9600 pro that comes standard on a G5.
Unfortunatly, no one makes a dual opteron that isn't targeted at a professional user currently - instead you have to cobble one together yourself. The price point drops considerably when you do this, becoming on par with that of the G5, but you wind up with 5+ warrenties to keep track of, and no central org to get service from.
Bandwith - the major cost of runing any hardware review site. By making a simple flash movie that displays a graph based upon passed in text data, they save bandwith. You download the flash movie once (or once every time they update it), and then everytime they display a graph your browser uses the cached movie, but with the new param set for what data labels and values to display. Sending even 15 lines of data is a lot smaller than sending a 300x120 pixel image for every single graph - especialy when a multi-page review may have 15+ graphs.
Yes, it sucks for the user who has to download whatever version of flash they use - and it sucks even more if the version they require is so new it isn't avail on all platforms, but they Do have a good reason.
The KDE folks are cranky because they want the money that is to be spent promoting and developing UserLinux to be spent on their project and not on Gnome.
No... I bet the KDE folks are 'cranky' because they've spent years writing a HUGE and free desktop and application system, much larger than the kernel, and now are seeing a competiting project being standardized as the single default for a high profile attempt at a standard distro...
Saying that the choice is there - like you and Bruce are both saying - doesn't work in this scenario as a way to say 'its ok' to the KDE developers. They've spent years working on this, emotions are going to be high, especially when this is a high profile standardization effort.
Did anyone else read KDE's counterproposal? I meqan, here these guys had just been told they would be put out of the project - and their response is basicaly 'We'll Dive In and make KDE do things you never expected and integrate it in such ways that it's super attractive - we'll add features, etc!' Frankly, I found Bruce's response rather rude - even though he may not of meant it that way - he basically told them 'You can do all that work if you want, in fact, please do! But we won't use it.' Which is actually less painful than if he'd responded with 'No thanks, we'll do that sort of thing with Gnome.' - The latter, while curt, at least is clear cut; meanwhile by encouraging the KDE team to develop everything they offered and yet refuse to use it, Bruce has publicly thrown down a kind of guantlet - he's Asked them to do the work - but the gain could be very small, and if they don't do it, everyone gets to point and say 'see, they couldn't live upto their proposal anyway'.
I know, I know, I'm probably reading too much into that sort of thing - and it's not like the KDE people have to do what he says - it's all open source software, and it's all about freedom!
Two things, and then I'll shut up:
- This debate, and the heated arguments and such, have been forseen for years - everyone who looked at the competing projects from the outside, objectively, knew that the 'competition' that was spuring them both forward, was also going to bite them in the arse.
- The burgening market Bruce references, for priorietary software for linux desktops, is already out there - and some companies write for Gnome, others write for KDE. By making this descision Bruce has either A) put the KDE companies in a bad position, or B) relegated UserLinux to mediocrity by alienating a large, existing user base. Neither outcome is good.
Begining on through, not until the end though, and definetly not into BG80... It just didn't keep me attention - partialy due to the reused effects shots each episode.
There is a box set of Macros out right now - look for a similar box to the robotech sets that were put out last year, but black.
It rocks.
It's much, much funnier - there's sexual induendo, all sorts of stuff. It's subtitled, but good. It's actually much Better than the first season of robotech, which surprised the hell out of me.
There's one scene, right after Rick transforms his veritech into a robot and falls into minmai's building, when Roy shows up and helps him out. After rick's veritech is back on it's feet, Minmai and her mom are on the street and say goodbye - they are going to the shelters, and turn and walk away... Rick and Roy stare at minmai's posterior as she walks away, then make fun of each other for being 'Dogs'...
When Rick and Minmai are trapped inside the sdf1, and minmai takes a shower, you see much more (no total nudity, but more than the calf and leg shot in the american), and minmai wonders to herself if she teased rick (sexualy) too much.
All in all, the added humor and sexual comments make the series more real than the americanized robotech. Real people think about sex. real people make jokes at their own expense and make fun of their friends in teasing ways.
Plus, a lot fo the removed voice-over story re-telling and plot-line fillins from the american version are just gone. The series is shorter, time wise, but better.
I'm planning on hunting down what the third generation was based upon next.
And am I the only one who watched the second generation recently and went "I didn't really like this as a kid... and I HATE this now!"
Like many, I had fond memories of the original.
Like many, when I got a copy and started watching it for the first time since I was a child; I found the original to be very bubble-gummy and not as good as I remembered it. The same thing happened with Robotech.
I read several artciles and several points of view on the miniseries before it aired - and I decided to reserve judgement...
The 9/11 influence (which the producers say is there on purpose) was very present - it was much darker than I expected. The long leadup and character development before the actual attack got you attached and into the story so that the destruction didn't feel like a backdrop, but a very major event.
Production values were high, and the effects were great... and it was just enjoyable.
In my book, this blew sci-fi's attempt at Dune out of the water. I feel bad for everyone who wanted the original to continue - but I myself think I'd enjoy a series of This version of BG better than a continuation.
Hopefully, though, they will instead do a series of, uhm, mini-series of this - or the occasional movie. I say this because EJO and some of the other leads probably wouldn't go for a full series, And, because with a full series it would be too easy for it to become a new-planet-every-week serial as opposed to having the scope this mini series had.
When windows 95 came out, I was working part time at circuit city - long story - but the reason I mention it was the two ways we'd demo system performance for the next year after it came out:
- right click on the desktop, and choose display properties, then count the seconds. The count was typically from 3-7, which the 'monster' machines that had 32 megs of ram usually comming in at 2-3 - _just to launch the properties dialog!_
- see how many video windows we could get running at once of the included music videos that came with w95 before the video started getting choppy. Usually two, three on better machines, and towards the end the pentium 166s and 233mxs could go to four.
Yeah, our IDs are _very_ close, heh.
eMachines used to be utter crap, but as a disposable machine, they were decent. These days they seem to be pretty decent - even their notebooks! I bought a M5305 Back in June and... Wow. For 1100$ (after whatever sale/etc was going on where you bought it) I got a heck of a notebook. Sure, it has shared memory video, but the battery life is excellent, and out of 4 I've seen unboxed (others in my company got some) only 1 had a single bad pixel - and it wasn't even fully dead, just one of those off-color pixels that is too bright on one channel (green I think). My only regret with the purchase was that if I'd waited another month I could of gotten a M5310 - which went from a Athlon 2200 to a 2400 And added built in 802.11b.
Service is great - I called about some drivers I needed and could'nt find on their site when I was switching OSes. My hold time was about 2 minutes. They preload the machines with a utility now to autocheck for and install software/OS updates - and display 'important news' to the user. For non-techies, it seemed to be much more user friendly than, say, windows update.
As for Athlon64 motherboards - well, there aren't a _lot_ of them out there (especially compared to the selection for a regular athlon or intel processor), but there have been some for over 60 days, newegg lists 14 to choose from.
Of course, that doesn't mean you should buy one if you plan on upgrading... but the death of socket 754 after q2 next year is a different issue...
You seem to forget that an Athlon64 runs 32-bit software Very well - trouncing the p4 in many tests despite it's frequency difference.
You want a Powerful machine but don't want to spend tons of cash? You buy the emachine - you get the speed you want (or think you need) and you get bragging rights without having to spend so much cash.
eMachines audience has always been split - people who don't know what they are doing and buy for cheapness, and users who usually know a thing or two and want something on the cheap without the effort of building it themselves. Soemtimes the latter type is making a recomendation to a relative: "Buy the emachine - it'll perform just as well as the Dell, and you'll save money."
Anyway, my point is that your questions misses everyone else who is a potential computer buyer and doesn't see eMachines in a bad light.
(Which they used to deserve, btw, but this last year and a half since they got new ownership - they've really turned it around help desk wise, and quality wise - eMAchines have a much much lower defective rate than they used to (which used to be higher than HP, compaq and Sony's consumer pc return rate combined) - now on a par with other consumer PCs.)
Now if only they offered machines with no OS as a standard option...
I appreciate the apology, and the correction on BioAPI compliance.
I think the lack of documentation on the Identix website contributed greatly to this - a search for 'BioAPI' upon your website returns only a few documents, none of which are actually about BioAPI compatibility - except for one SEC filing referencing BioAPI modules, regarding Visionics technologies.
I think you may have read to much into my post though - as for your clarification and interpretation. I never intended, nor implied, that the BioAPI provided a standard biometric template interface: my point was that it appeared (at the time, and not just to myself, mind you) that this sort of stonewalling was being done against any and all standardization efforts within the industry. Identix was not the only organization that seemed to be doing this, but it was one of the biggest. The points about template compatibility and proper BioAPI usage are wasted on me - but it is better to mention them for the good of the audience here on slashdot.
Let us just say that before BioAPI there were other attempts at standards, and that I was (fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your view) employed by an organization building one of these, and building applications based upon our system; hence my experiences.
That is horrible, no pin or other source of id? Let me guess, it's a smartcard with the biometric key onboard as well? Ugh... smartcards are easy to hack, and I've never been one for any card that has the biometric key on it - it's silly and doesn't mean anything: you are trusting the card to do too much by asking it to match the data you hand it with a biometric key. The user (also read: "the potential threat") Brought the card with them...
Hrm, I'm not sure where to begin... perhaps a little background?
My 'faith' in these systems isn't grounded upon assumption - its based upon experience. For several years I was a developer of biometric security applications. My company worked on a common api that abstracted what device you were writing for - this meant I got to know the engineers very well from several companies as I made contacts in the industry. Thus, I can safely assume that my knowledge of these subjects is beyond your own... no offense. That being said, let us continue.
The first 'objection' I raised is important. In this industry, companies merge, new models come out and companies go out of business all the time. There are _many_ fingerprint scanners on the market, and all of them do things differently.
Which brings me to your second point... Closed formats are a huge problem. Every device maker has their own format, and they are _not_ simple to break. Maybe some newer devices by startups who are staffed by newcomers would have the problem of an easily decoded format - but not the veterans. When you are making a product whose potential market includes the highest levels of the military, you design for close scrutiny. These engineers have been in the field for years, and they are experts. Take that information, and add the fact that each device may store completely different types of information - one fingerprint scanner can store simple minuta about variant lines in a fingerprint. Not all lines are stored, not even the majority fo liens are stored. Instead, where the lines end, and what angle the end of a line was pointing in, those things may be stored. Some manufacturers store even more information - the number of lines a cross sectional imaginary line through the finger may traverse, etc. Then, add in the fact that most formats don't hold the actual data, but instead hold a series of one-way hashes of the actual data... and you have the sort of 'decoding' problem akin to reversing engineering md5 hashes to plain text for 30-300 datapoints, let alone what the plaintext data meant. I've seen people go mad trying to decode these formats, some of them were coworkers. All of them were very clever.
Ok, your third objection - about cards containing the cleartext account number. This is true, but each card also contains a card # - otherwise, everytime you would report a card stolen, you would get a new account number - instead you get a new card. Reporting the stolen card makes it null and void - any 'copied' cards would then contain the same card number, and be useless as well.
Your fourth popint is valid - people do roll out cheap systems where they should not be used. However, any guard that ignored problems with an instaled security system and did not report them - and, per your example, just started ignoring them - would and should be fired. This is gross negelegence. Also, any security system is only as good as it's weakest link, and a biometric should _never_ be used by itself - just as (for real security) a password should never be used by itself.
As for the system you tested, ov511s based systems are _not_ expensive. Old, greyscale camera only based systems are years out of date - and are reserved for the 'toy' market now - the sort of thing built into laptops and pdas (though many use contact based sensors instead of cameras, the same principles about cheapness apply). Some corporations still roll these levels of devices out to their desktops - usually out of ignorance. Expensive systems go for thousands of dollars, and can be worth every penny. Most systems under 500$ are not of high quality. If you were told this ws an expensive system, then they may have been quoting a price from years ago. As for how 'simple' the data presented was, remember that the vast majority of what you pay for in a biometric fingerprint scanner these days is the software-driver - the part that turns that image (and other information in more advanced scanners) into the data about a finerprint as described above.