I run the infrastructure for a couple of small companies. I use PowerWare 9120 fully online UPS's that can power the rack of 5 servers and misc routers, firewalls, whatnot for about an hour. For around $6K I had a Generac emergency auto-failover generator installed which has worked flawlessly. Power goes about for about 45 seconds and I'm back online with full power.
Power went out around here about 3 hours ago due to high winds. The generac guardian propane generator kicked in automatically within 45 seconds and the entire house, including furnace, coffee maker, the server racks, both T1's, etc is operational. On 2 100 gallon propane tanks I've run the entire operation for up to 4 days. I cannot tell you how much this rocks.
I think I'll pour myself another cup of coffee.:)
All told the installed cost was about $5K including all the wiring, gas hookups, breaker panel and moving 12 of the house circuits over to the generator backed panel. The entire installation took only about 5 hours. I did, however, have existing propane tanks.
The generator, on propane, can put out 15Kw which is plenty to run a house even in the middle of a Washington DC summer with the AC running.
It senses commercial power and automatically starts the generator, which takes about 45 seconds all told to come online, and then switches the house over to generator power. Once commercial power comes back, the system switches to it and shuts down the generator after a cooldown period.
The generator runs a selftest for 12 minutes once a week.
It's free to use for non-professionals if you use it with your TD AMERITRADE account. There's a VBscript and C++ API for creating your own indicators, reports and extensions.
For the curious, we just released the 9.0.1 version of our windows based portfolio manager/charting/trading platform app called Personal Stock Streamer, which now provides free streaming realtime quotes to non-professionals for up to 600 tickers when used with supported brokerage accounts.
Being self-employed is alot more difficult, challenging and risky than simply being an employee. You'll have less vacation and alot more stress. Doing the technical work is the easiest part of being successfully self-employed. The upside, however, is potentially unbounded.
Before making the switch from salaried to contractor, get your personal finances under control. Your own finances will dicate how long you can float during lean times and there will be lean times. Reduce your monthly burn as much as reasonable. Don't take on unnecessary debt. Be wary of recurring expenses. Make sure you have good records. Get comfortable with Quicken. Understand how much money you need on a month to month basis in order to stay afloat. Know how long you can burn before you run out of cash. Beware of estimated taxes. In a highly variable income environment sometimes making too much money can be worse than too little; one $40K month can blow you into the next tax bracket throwing your whole year off and possibly running you into trouble on April 15th.
Understand pre-tax vs. post tax money. Understand what's a business expense and what isn't. Based on performance year to date project out what you expect to make in the months ahead.
Buy the NoLo Press book - Software Development, A Legal Guide. Read it.
Buy The "Getting to yes" book by the Harvard Press. Other books to consider: "Inside the tornado", "selling the invisible".
Your first year is the most important. Keep track of/everything/. Understand what your good months are and what the lean times are. Chances are, if your business is like most, the fall will be your best time. Mid-summer the worst.
Understand that you're not self-employed, you're running a business.
Get a contact manager and start jotting down/everyone/ you meet, who they are, what they do and how they fit into a "funnel" of prospective clients. You just never know who is going to turn into a customer or refer business your way.
Contracts and new relationships take years to develop. Start building them on day 1.
Generally avoid the temptation to allow one client to be too large a percentage of your income. Even if the money is good, sometimes scaling back and taking on more clients is better. Think portfolio diversification.
Assuming you're doing coding, everyone will ask you for exclusives on your code. Find a reason that makes sense to them that they don't want an exclusive. Try to own everything you write. License it non-exclusively to your clients. Over time your portfolio of code will be worth vastly more than the higher rate you might make by licensing it exclusively to your client - and that will be your leverage. If you do it right, you can move from hourly consulting/contracting to building a business with real value (and frankly most clients will want to know that a codebase has a life of it's own.)
If you're making the transition from employee to contractor with a client already willing to fund you nearly full time, it's easier than striking out completely on your own.
If you're totally on your own, forget everything you think you know about marketing. Forget every vacuous marketeer you've met. Find a good one and befriend them. (trust me on this one, marketing is the key to surviving losing that huge client that's been keeping you fat, happy and complacent all this time.) Understand how to speak in the language of your target audience. They will probably not care about abstract interfaces, execution times or coding elegance. When pricing yourself speak in their language; understand not what you are doing, but what it means for them. A good resource of articles is http://www.turningpointemarketing.com/ - disclaimer, these people are a customer of mine.
Every moment of every day you are self-employed has to be marketing. Doing excellent code is marketing. Telling someone what you do is marketing. Build a website about what you do.
If I understand correctly, Sklyarov is an/employee/ of a/company/ that produces the the code that is under question. Apart from the obvious that Elcomsoft is a Russian company, since when are employees of a company criminally liable for what their company does? Since he's been arrested does this create a precendent that programmers working for a company could be jailed if their/company/ products "violate" the DMCA?
If he can be jailed for writing an E-book format reader, can programmers at Corel, Sun, etc be jailed for writing an MSWord reader? (If modified rot13 can be called encryption, one would certainly imagine that a binary format like msWord would fall under the "encryption" category - how is "encryption" defined in the DMCA?)
Slashdot Mirror
This works great for reducing the effectiveness of dictionary attacks:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/sshutout
I run the infrastructure for a couple of small companies. I use PowerWare 9120 fully online UPS's that can power the rack of 5 servers and misc routers, firewalls, whatnot for about an hour. For around $6K I had a Generac emergency auto-failover generator installed which has worked flawlessly. Power goes about for about 45 seconds and I'm back online with full power.
When running on a smallish generator there are some things you need to know. You'll need fully online UPS's. The cheap consumer grade ones you buy at Best Buy probably won't cut it. Here's some more info: http://yml.com/fv-b-1-71/Generac-Guardian-Emergency-Standby-Generator.html
Power went out around here about 3 hours ago due to high winds. The generac guardian propane generator kicked in automatically within 45 seconds and the entire house, including furnace, coffee maker, the server racks, both T1's, etc is operational. On 2 100 gallon propane tanks I've run the entire operation for up to 4 days. I cannot tell you how much this rocks.
I think I'll pour myself another cup of coffee. :)
All told the installed cost was about $5K including all the wiring, gas hookups, breaker panel and moving 12 of the house circuits over to the generator backed panel. The entire installation took only about 5 hours. I did, however, have existing propane tanks.
The generator, on propane, can put out 15Kw which is plenty to run a house even in the middle of a Washington DC summer with the AC running.
It senses commercial power and automatically starts the generator, which takes about 45 seconds all told to come online, and then switches the house over to generator power. Once commercial power comes back, the system switches to it and shuts down the generator after a cooldown period.
The generator runs a selftest for 12 minutes once a week.
More info:
http://yml.com/homepage.html?article_id=71
While it's not open source you could give Personal Stock Streamer a try:
http://www.personalstockstreamer.com/
It's free to use for non-professionals if you use it with your TD AMERITRADE account. There's a VBscript and C++ API for creating your own indicators, reports and extensions.
For the curious, we just released the 9.0.1 version of our windows based portfolio manager/charting/trading platform app called Personal Stock Streamer, which now provides free streaming realtime quotes to non-professionals for up to 600 tickers when used with supported brokerage accounts.
Being self-employed is alot more difficult, challenging and risky than simply being an employee. You'll have less vacation and alot more stress. Doing the technical work is the easiest part of being successfully self-employed. The upside, however, is potentially unbounded.
/everything/. Understand what your good months are and what the lean times are. Chances are, if your business is like most, the fall will be your best time. Mid-summer the worst.
/everyone/ you meet, who they are, what they do and how they fit into a "funnel" of prospective clients. You just never know who is going to turn into a customer or refer business your way.
Before making the switch from salaried to contractor, get your personal finances under control. Your own finances will dicate how long you can float during lean times and there will be lean times. Reduce your monthly burn as much as reasonable. Don't take on unnecessary debt. Be wary of recurring expenses. Make sure you have good records. Get comfortable with Quicken. Understand how much money you need on a month to month basis in order to stay afloat. Know how long you can burn before you run out of cash. Beware of estimated taxes. In a highly variable income environment sometimes making too much money can be worse than too little; one $40K month can blow you into the next tax bracket throwing your whole year off and possibly running you into trouble on April 15th.
Understand pre-tax vs. post tax money. Understand what's a business expense and what isn't. Based on performance year to date project out what you expect to make in the months ahead.
Buy the NoLo Press book - Software Development, A Legal Guide. Read it.
Buy The "Getting to yes" book by the Harvard Press. Other books to consider: "Inside the tornado", "selling the invisible".
Your first year is the most important. Keep track of
Understand that you're not self-employed, you're running a business.
Get a contact manager and start jotting down
Contracts and new relationships take years to develop. Start building them on day 1.
Generally avoid the temptation to allow one client to be too large a percentage of your income. Even if the money is good, sometimes scaling back and taking on more clients is better. Think portfolio diversification.
Assuming you're doing coding, everyone will ask you for exclusives on your code. Find a reason that makes sense to them that they don't want an exclusive. Try to own everything you write. License it non-exclusively to your clients. Over time your portfolio of code will be worth vastly more than the higher rate you might make by licensing it exclusively to your client - and that will be your leverage. If you do it right, you can move from hourly consulting/contracting to building a business with real value (and frankly most clients will want to know that a codebase has a life of it's own.)
If you're making the transition from employee to contractor with a client already willing to fund you nearly full time, it's easier than striking out completely on your own.
If you're totally on your own, forget everything you think you know about marketing. Forget every vacuous marketeer you've met. Find a good one and befriend them. (trust me on this one, marketing is the key to surviving losing that huge client that's been keeping you fat, happy and complacent all this time.) Understand how to speak in the language of your target audience. They will probably not care about abstract interfaces, execution times or coding elegance. When pricing yourself speak in their language; understand not what you are doing, but what it means for them. A good resource of articles is http://www.turningpointemarketing.com/ - disclaimer, these people are a customer of mine.
Every moment of every day you are self-employed has to be marketing. Doing excellent code is marketing. Telling someone what you do is marketing. Build a website about what you do.
That should be http://www.neophoto.com.
If they have a windows PC check out NeoPhoto; http://www.neophoto.com. Makes webpages quick. Very easy for novice users.
Reason: Skylarov works for a /company/, right?
/employee/ of a /company/ that produces the the code that is under question. Apart from the obvious that Elcomsoft is a Russian company, since when are employees of a company criminally liable for what their company does? Since he's been arrested does this create a precendent that programmers working for a company could be jailed if their /company/ products "violate" the DMCA?
If I understand correctly, Sklyarov is an
If he can be jailed for writing an E-book format reader, can programmers at Corel, Sun, etc be jailed for writing an MSWord reader? (If modified rot13 can be called encryption, one would certainly imagine that a binary format like msWord would fall under the "encryption" category - how is "encryption" defined in the DMCA?)
This could set some scary precendents.