Don't bother unless you have a free accountant. I've been through the math and I just can't justify all the hassle for what little I'd save. Sure, a bunch of people that have never done this will tell you that you can deduct your car payment, part of your house, etc. But when you start doing that stuff, the corporation owns that car and part of your house. Sell your house and you've got twice the tax hassle. Plus, chances are that you'll only do this for 2-3 years.
Go with a simple sole proprietorship. Use your own name like "Joe Smith's Services" and you'll save about $150 and 2 hours spent getting a DBA. Lease what you can, like computers, and it's easy to deduct that cost. Don't build up any assests in the company and you don't have to deal with depreciation. Your taxes are easy enough that you can do them yourself.
Don't forget health insurance. See if your state has an open enrollment period for the self-employed. Get into a plan then, even if you're on COBRA at the time.
If you do incorporate, beware of that friendly recruiter. There are a ton of places that will file everything for you for as low as $150. If the recruiter wants $1,000 or more, he's ripping you off.
Borland is a member of the eclipse.org Consortium. Perhaps their new IDE is Eclipse. I hope so. The more I work with Eclipse, the more I like it. There's room for improvement, but those improvements are being made. Eclipse is the only open-source software my company has committed to. It's becoming a core part of our flagship product. No other open-source product can say that.
Do you want to give your external hard drives, digital cameras, and iPods IP addresses?
No. Just like I don't have to give my boxes IP addresses. It's called DHCP. Whee. The disk controller does DHCP for the drives. Simple solution.
Do you want to have to worry about firewalling & routing for you iPod?
Don't have to. I think your brain blockage is in assuming that your hard drive, iPod and digital camera would plug into the same hub you connect to AOL with. That's like assuming that just because your old digital camera and your 14.4 modem both use serial ports, that you have to route between them.
How would you coordinate the caches of two different machines using the same disk? If you don't want to do that, do you want to worry about some sort of locking mechanism for the disk, to prevent concurrent access?
1. This is done all the time with NFS and SMB. It was solved 15-20 years ago. 2. How do you solve this when two different machines share a SCSI or IDE disk? You don't. Don't share drives.
We looked into this about two years ago and found that the Bigmouth did most of what we wanted for $295. I left before they bought it, but it was the solution we were going with at the time.
Uninstallation? Drag the folder from my hard disk to the Trash!
I recently installed Basilisk II, an open-source Mac emulator (68k macs only so far). Despite the fact that I used to use Macs back when the IIfx was the hot machine and A/UX was the unix on macs, I still have a hard time believing the way MacOS works. I refuse to believe that IE4 and Netscape don't install crap all over the drive. I'm still looking for the uninstaller. It's got to be there. That and I only created a 200 meg disk image. I figured that wouldn't let me do much, but I would add other disks. Crap, my stripped-down Win98 base image in VMWare is over 150 megs. But I've got MacOS, IE4 with Outlook, Netscape3, Wordperfect, and a dozen other apps and I'm still not taking up 100 megs.
I have to agree. I'm amazed when my manager badmouths the dual Pentium II server (NT4) I use for all our demos and prototypes. But that "ancient" server handles hundreds of users at a time. He's just itching to buy a new 4 processor Dell or some such thing. I'm more interested in putting VMWare and Linux on the old box and doubling its load.
Even better, at my last company someone found a HSI pcmcia card and put our entire server app on a Toshiba Libretto. The thing was smaller than the CSU/DSU. Ran great.
You know, for some reason I've been playing with DOS again lately. Now I have a boot floppy and parallel port ethernet adapter that give me telnet, ssh, and ftp on just about any Intel machine. I use MS-DOS, but there are free (beer and at least semi-open) alternatives. There are several browser choices, even at least one GUI one. For some coolness, try DESQView or DESQView/X.
One consideration is how much effort you want to spend on the business side. For me, I decided it just isn't worth the hassle and expense of a corporation or fancy expenses.
Deducting part of your house means it becomes partially a business asset and when you sell it you have to account for the gain. If you don't lease a car, it's a pain to expense a car you own. Expensing computers and software means depreciating them over 5 years. Just bill 10% or 20% more hours and don't worry about it.
Even as a corporation, you probably don't need liability or workman's comp insurance. It depends on the state, but in mine I don't need it until I hit 4 employees. Of course, clients want to see a certificate of insurance. I just give them a letter quoting the state law.
I've done the corporation route, but today I'm just a simple sole proprietorship doing 1099 work. I'd consider trading in to go back to an employee, but it would have to be a good offer.
I enjoy not being reorganized. Guys I've worked with have been reorganized every 3-6 months while I've had the same duties and boss for 15 months. I enjoy not being distracted by worthless stock options. I actually don't miss the Christmas party -- I never enjoyed them. I enjoy not having the IS weenies worry about what software is on my computer or having to fight them for months to order a bigger disk or more memory. I enjoy working from home with a 19" monitor and nobody watching over my shoulder as I read Slashdot.
Don't try to undercut the competition. Don't compete on price. Compete on quality.
Realize that a lot of potential clients have no idea what they want or need. Or worse, what it will cost.
Don't grow too big or too fast. Every person you hire is a huge expense that is hard to cut.
Network like crazy. Use competitors and people in unrelated areas. If someone calls you to sell your company insurance, send them a pile of cards and offer them a comission on sales.
Give everyone 2 or more business cards so they have spares to give away.
Build a good collection of samples. Nothing's more impressive than to be able to see actual work product.
When times are lean or you're just starting, it's easy to find free and low-paying work to pad a portfolio. Call a church, school, or even small companies.
So why didn't a network admin at MIT notice this? I guess they suck just as much at MIT as they did at my school. They're probably too busy playing MUDs and downloading porn.
On a more enterprising front, sysadmins at my school started their own ISP by stealing bandwidth from the school.
Our DBA is like this. There's no way she could deploy MySQL or PostgreSQL. She doesn't do anything without getting on the phone to the vendor. Most of us developers have deployed and patched just as many databases and other products and have hardly ever picked up the phone, but she's gotta call to walk through installing a patch.
It makes me wonder if someone screwed up hiring her and maybe the DBA on her resume stood for something else.
Exactly my suggestion. Put VCDs of the Budweiser frogs on eBay.
Somehow I imagine the advertisers would have a problem with that, but they sure didn't have a problem with adcritic losing tons of cash streaming their commercials.
Re:not as easy as you might think
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I worked for a software company and put a time bomb into one of their products, just to show it could be done. Even when they knew it was in there and what it did, they couldn't find it for hours. I pointed to the exact code and they still didn't understand what it did, but someone said "oh yeah, I saw that last week and thought it looked odd." I doubt he did (such a bullshitter), but even if he had, he wouldn't have figured it out. He would have given up and ignored it. Not anymore. And that's with a team of under 5 people touching that product. Imagine a team the size of the WinXP one.
No OS can run Windows apps better than Windows itself.
Many reviewers claimed that OS/2 ran Win16 apps better than Windows 3.x. Windows NT did a fantastic job with many Win16 apps. (They ran in sort of a VM so that NT was protected from their crap.)
Windows NT/2000/XP run many Win32 apps better than Windows 95/98/ME.
There's always room for improvement, especially over the DOS-based kludge that is Win 95/98/ME. Improving performance and stability over the WinNT code base isn't easy. Most of the instability I see is related to either bad configuration (usually a user screwup, but not always) or crappy drivers. To me it seems a lot harder to f-up a Linux box (short of the popular rm -rf/) and the drivers are more stable.
Ok. This is sick. I'm actually starting to like AOL-TimeWarner. The RoadRunner TOS used to prohibit VPNs (and game servers, web hosting, etc.) on residential service, though they rarely if ever enforced it. I just checked them again and the latest ones don't even mention it. Whoohoo!
Plus they recently added a nationwide dialup service. 10 hours / month for free, 99 cents an hour after that. In the past year I've had only three memorable outages and one was at 1am.
Do this make me sound like Scott Case's bitch or what?
Slashdot Mirror
But how did you build your binaries? You really should read this before you trust a compiler that you didn't bootstrap yourself.
Where can you ride one of these without people constantly annoying you with questions?
Go with a simple sole proprietorship. Use your own name like "Joe Smith's Services" and you'll save about $150 and 2 hours spent getting a DBA. Lease what you can, like computers, and it's easy to deduct that cost. Don't build up any assests in the company and you don't have to deal with depreciation. Your taxes are easy enough that you can do them yourself.
Don't forget health insurance. See if your state has an open enrollment period for the self-employed. Get into a plan then, even if you're on COBRA at the time.
If you do incorporate, beware of that friendly recruiter. There are a ton of places that will file everything for you for as low as $150. If the recruiter wants $1,000 or more, he's ripping you off.
Borland is a member of the eclipse.org Consortium. Perhaps their new IDE is Eclipse. I hope so. The more I work with Eclipse, the more I like it. There's room for improvement, but those improvements are being made. Eclipse is the only open-source software my company has committed to. It's becoming a core part of our flagship product. No other open-source product can say that.
Do you want to give your external hard drives, digital cameras, and iPods IP addresses?
No. Just like I don't have to give my boxes IP addresses. It's called DHCP. Whee. The disk controller does DHCP for the drives. Simple solution.
Do you want to have to worry about firewalling & routing for you iPod?
Don't have to. I think your brain blockage is in assuming that your hard drive, iPod and digital camera would plug into the same hub you connect to AOL with. That's like assuming that just because your old digital camera and your 14.4 modem both use serial ports, that you have to route between them.
How would you coordinate the caches of two different machines using the same disk? If you don't want to do that, do you want to worry about some sort of locking mechanism for the disk, to prevent concurrent access?
1. This is done all the time with NFS and SMB. It was solved 15-20 years ago. 2. How do you solve this when two different machines share a SCSI or IDE disk? You don't. Don't share drives.
Please.
Yep. Required DOS 2.0 or higher and a 286 or higher. Scary.
We looked into this about two years ago and found that the Bigmouth did most of what we wanted for $295. I left before they bought it, but it was the solution we were going with at the time.
Rig some toggle switches on both power lines to each drive and have the operator manually turn on the drives as the machine is powering up.
Or do the right thing and go SCSI.
Uninstallation? Drag the folder from my hard disk to the Trash!
I recently installed Basilisk II, an open-source Mac emulator (68k macs only so far). Despite the fact that I used to use Macs back when the IIfx was the hot machine and A/UX was the unix on macs, I still have a hard time believing the way MacOS works. I refuse to believe that IE4 and Netscape don't install crap all over the drive. I'm still looking for the uninstaller. It's got to be there. That and I only created a 200 meg disk image. I figured that wouldn't let me do much, but I would add other disks. Crap, my stripped-down Win98 base image in VMWare is over 150 megs. But I've got MacOS, IE4 with Outlook, Netscape3, Wordperfect, and a dozen other apps and I'm still not taking up 100 megs.
I have to agree. I'm amazed when my manager badmouths the dual Pentium II server (NT4) I use for all our demos and prototypes. But that "ancient" server handles hundreds of users at a time. He's just itching to buy a new 4 processor Dell or some such thing. I'm more interested in putting VMWare and Linux on the old box and doubling its load.
Even better, at my last company someone found a HSI pcmcia card and put our entire server app on a Toshiba Libretto. The thing was smaller than the CSU/DSU. Ran great.
You know, for some reason I've been playing with DOS again lately. Now I have a boot floppy and parallel port ethernet adapter that give me telnet, ssh, and ftp on just about any Intel machine. I use MS-DOS, but there are free (beer and at least semi-open) alternatives. There are several browser choices, even at least one GUI one. For some coolness, try DESQView or DESQView/X.
So we can expect a sequel to ttyquake?
This compares with Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Macintosh operating systems, which hold a combined global usage share of more than 98 percent.
I made my own comparison and found that Microsoft's Windows and Linux hold a combined global usage share of more than 91%.
What's with not breaking out the Windows and Mac numbers? Oh that's right. This is a bash Linux study.
Deducting part of your house means it becomes partially a business asset and when you sell it you have to account for the gain. If you don't lease a car, it's a pain to expense a car you own. Expensing computers and software means depreciating them over 5 years. Just bill 10% or 20% more hours and don't worry about it.
Even as a corporation, you probably don't need liability or workman's comp insurance. It depends on the state, but in mine I don't need it until I hit 4 employees. Of course, clients want to see a certificate of insurance. I just give them a letter quoting the state law.
I've done the corporation route, but today I'm just a simple sole proprietorship doing 1099 work. I'd consider trading in to go back to an employee, but it would have to be a good offer.
I enjoy not being reorganized. Guys I've worked with have been reorganized every 3-6 months while I've had the same duties and boss for 15 months. I enjoy not being distracted by worthless stock options. I actually don't miss the Christmas party -- I never enjoyed them. I enjoy not having the IS weenies worry about what software is on my computer or having to fight them for months to order a bigger disk or more memory. I enjoy working from home with a 19" monitor and nobody watching over my shoulder as I read Slashdot.
We are shopping for an OS that works even when drives fail.
I heard this was on the BeOS roadmap.
On a more enterprising front, sysadmins at my school started their own ISP by stealing bandwidth from the school.
It makes me wonder if someone screwed up hiring her and maybe the DBA on her resume stood for something else.
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/N5/html/maindb.php on line 44
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in
Unable to select database
Somehow I imagine the advertisers would have a problem with that, but they sure didn't have a problem with adcritic losing tons of cash streaming their commercials.
I worked for a software company and put a time bomb into one of their products, just to show it could be done. Even when they knew it was in there and what it did, they couldn't find it for hours. I pointed to the exact code and they still didn't understand what it did, but someone said "oh yeah, I saw that last week and thought it looked odd." I doubt he did (such a bullshitter), but even if he had, he wouldn't have figured it out. He would have given up and ignored it. Not anymore. And that's with a team of under 5 people touching that product. Imagine a team the size of the WinXP one.
No OS can run Windows apps better than Windows itself.
Many reviewers claimed that OS/2 ran Win16 apps better than Windows 3.x. Windows NT did a fantastic job with many Win16 apps. (They ran in sort of a VM so that NT was protected from their crap.) Windows NT/2000/XP run many Win32 apps better than Windows 95/98/ME.
There's always room for improvement, especially over the DOS-based kludge that is Win 95/98/ME. Improving performance and stability over the WinNT code base isn't easy. Most of the instability I see is related to either bad configuration (usually a user screwup, but not always) or crappy drivers. To me it seems a lot harder to f-up a Linux box (short of the popular rm -rf /) and the drivers are more stable.
Ok. Who rooted the Christmas tree box?
Plus they recently added a nationwide dialup service. 10 hours / month for free, 99 cents an hour after that. In the past year I've had only three memorable outages and one was at 1am.
Do this make me sound like Scott Case's bitch or what?