It is a lot like RMS's itch to scratch concept, you have to find a business community with an itch, and scratch it for them. Another tip is that the most common itch businesses have is lower costs. If you can make a product that lowers the cost, in an easily measurable way, you might get a few customers. If you get one customer, treat them really well, they will be your best form of advertising, but if they are not happy, your new business probably will not survive to find another. Bad word of maouth is a killer.
Starting a well capitalized business in the best of times is difficult, but even in the worst of times it is possible to succeed in business. It will take more work than you think it will, but also probably the most rewarding work you can do. Before you start, I suggest that you read something similar to What Color is Your Parachute, it is an excellent review to help you make sure that you are ready to be in business for yourself. If you are ready and able to start a business, pick something that you really want to do, and focus in on it. You unlikely to succeed if you try to do everything for anyone. Currently anything related to integration or web services is en vogue, if that floats your boat. Another possible idea would be to get into something similar to what your old company did, especially if you can get some of the old customers, it might be large enough to susutain a smaller business.
Before you start the business, you or the other founder should take a class on accounting. Your local community college is very likely to have something that you can audit, take at a reduced rate for no grade. This will be quite helpful, especially if neither of you has experience with bookkeeping. Get something to keep your books, Staples has Peachtree for free after reabate, or GNUCash might be enough in the beginning. Related to accounting, the one thing every failed business has in common is that they all ran out of cash. Profits don't matter, its how much cash you pull in, your suppliers will not let you spend retained earnings. Keep a close eye on your cash position, and know whether you are making cash or spending it at least monthly. Finally, if you decide to go into business with another person, spend the few hundred and let a lawyer either create the articles of incorporation, or partnership agreement. They know many more potential problems than you or I can imagine, and should have some advice for how to structure the company to minimize them.
More frankly, it is extremely rare for a business to be profitable in the first year. If you and your partners do not have enough save to meet each of your personal expenses for at least 6 months stick out for anything you can find to come up with a little capital.
Some of the better ideas I have heard to drum up business are:
1. Help some folks with their PCs first, then eventually you might meet a small business owner who needs help with a bigger project.
2. Give a talk and be willing to answer questions about IT to your local chamber of commerce or businessperson's association.
3. Advertising. One of the places you might consider is talk radio, most of the audience is less techincal, usually wealthier, and more likely to own a business than the average American.
The advice about finding a salesperson is excellent, we geeks are not usually the best at selling things.
Do not try to get too big too quickly, you will kill your cash flow as you grow. But realize that the way businesses make money is through leverage, either charging more than it costs for your employees, or on the financial side, through the use of debt. I doubt you will find a bank willing to offer you a loan early in the life of your business, but be extreemly careful regarding debt. Non-debtors never go bankrupt, they may not succeed, but the lender never has to come after assets if you do not owe them anything.
Lastly, (Is this the third time I have tried to close, I am beginning to sound like a pastor)good luck especially if you decide to venture forth in the the exciting world of business.
I think the point of his filter is that your filter is unique to you. The filter is designed to pick up that you like foo, but don't like cc or something similar and it asigns a probability of the message being something that you would delete based on you current kept and deleted files. So unless there would have to be a word that everyone kept on their good list, and the spammer would have to keep up with the fact that your good list changes.
If foo was one of the words that had a low probablity of being a spam, but spammers started using foo, and it still saw enough other bads to delete it, it would probably lower the likelihood that foo indicated a good message. It looked like a really solid system, hope someone finds a way to get this added to more inboxes quickly.
Office is worth nearly as much as Windows to Microsoft. They don't specifically separate office from their other applications, like Project or Visio, but I be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that Office is at least 80% of their applications group, which generated about $9.5 Billion in revenue last year.
Sun didn't spend all that money on Star expecting to make it back selling Office Suites, they want to reduce Microsoft's strength, to make it easier to compete at the server level. Similar to Dell's plan to start selling printers, to eat into HP's main profit line, with the goal to break even, but capture more profits from the PC business.
I happen to fit directly into the target Office suite marktet, and Star Office is the only suite out there that is competitive with MS Office. Nothing against GNUmeric, KOffice, SmartSuite, or Word perfect, which all are nice, but they cant do everything as well as MS and Star Office do.
To put you in my shoes about office suites, imagine how unproductive you would be using notepad. That is whre the free office suites were 2 years ago. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but you get the point. Yeah you could use them, but it was not going to be easy or fun. Alos realize that the people who use an office suite for their job do not care about their text editor. As long as it can open the occasional text file we get, it will be fine.
On a server? The only Linux products sun is offering are servers to sell to the current big iron customers who need cheap front end boxes. I doubt they ship with X much less a full featured office suite. I believe the Red Hat version that Sun started with was Red Hat's Advanced Server product.
I think all of the filming is done for the entire trillogy. I believe that Mr. Jackson did not want the characters to age inbetween films, and this cuts your risk of actor becoming famous between films and getting more money.
Wil Wheaton is the actor who is best known for playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Turns out unlke the character, Wil is quite cool, a linux user, runs a pretty good blog, and supports most of the goals of the EFF.
Thats probably just hardware/OS/whatever they happen to be bundling. $20k for a HP/Sun/IBM unix workstation is pretty much par for the course. Sun usually has a cheaper option, but the others hold the line pretty well. I think the average cost last year for Unix (non x86)workstations was around $10,000. They have fallen significantly because Intel hardware became competitive in performance.
Re:I've recently lost a bunch of weight..
on
Exercise for Geeks?
·
· Score: 1
I started walks and hikes last year, after I noticed that I got fatter following graduation. I attributed the weight gain to not walking all over campus. I live in Montana now so there are lots of cool areas for hikes through the hills, but I would think that almost anywhere would have a good place to walk or hike. After you have done it for a while and are getting into better shape, you can move into jogging, if you want.
If you have an agreement regarding who gets your inventions, whatever it says. This is why most creative types will have to sign as a condition of employment. Most of the agreements give almost all rights of your inventions to the company, especially if they are related to the field in which you are employeed.
Lacking a specific agreement, and depending on the state's laws, your invention would belong to you in both cases, if you you developed the invention using your own materials, and on your own time. Although, Intel probably would have a better case against you if they decided to sue, because they could argue that you were exposed to RAM developments through your employment there.
Alcatel's products are mostly commercial telecommunications products, like Lucent or Nortel. They also have router lines that compete with Cisco, Juniper, and others. I think they have sold their cellular handset division, but they might still have a stake in it.
The company materials/time principle comes from the Shopright Doctrine, however this only covers inventions/intelectual property that is created by employees without a contract that relates specifically to ideas. If you are employeed to generate ideas, then your ideas generated, while you are employees by the company, generally belong to the company, regardless of when you came up with the idea. Now, IANAL but that was what the lawyers explained to us in the few law classes I have taken.
Re:NOT 3G wireless == useless in 6 months?
on
Danger Device Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Its not 3G wireless unless their with NTT DoCoMo, or possibly SK Telecom. This should be compatable with AT&T Wireless, Cingular & T-Mobile, even after their upgrades. I don't think it will be compatable after they upgrade to UMTS, but that is still a long way off. It won't be compatable with Verizon Wireless, Sprint PCS, or Nextel, unless they have a CDMA version in the works. Of the regonals I know of, AllTel, CellularOne, and I'd assume CenturyTel won't work either.
I believe the name refers to its size, its bigger than a cell phone, but small enough that you can put it in your hip pocket. The idea being that this can replace some people's laptop.
I believe that you can still find single card games in Atlantic City if you look hard enough. The secret to winning if you have a slight odds advantage is bankroll your betting very well. Thats all the casinos are doing, they know they have an advantage, keep a large bankroll and let the law of large numbers work in thier favor.
Be careful if you try to go down now to make your fortune, rumor has it that the enforcers are being reintroduced to Vegas since the corporate types are losing money on the casinos.
Counting cards isn't that difficult, the easiest methods simply have you add 1 for cards below a six and subtract 1 for 10s, you have to divide your count by the number of decks in the shoe. Highly favorable situations (lots of 10s and few low cards) favor players who get larger payouts for blackjacks, and unfavorables (lots of low cards) favor dealers who are less likely to bust when they hit on those high hands where they have to hit. Then you increase and decrease your bet to get large returns during the favorable times and reduce them during unfavorables.
Counting all the cards rapidly takes practice, and learning how to change your bets, without attacting attention, to provide adaquate returns is the main skillful part of counting cards.
If you just want to relax, Craps with odds cut the house edge to a fraction of a percent, or Baccarat only involves 1 decision with odds nearly as favorable as strategy blackjack. Its also fun to watch the ceremony involved in a Baccarat game.
They have the rights to publish games under their engine, that doesn't mean that they can't sell those rights, or leave them unpublished if the game is so crappy that it would reflect badly upon the publisher.
Or if you are an individual with a business license, or you just make up a name for the bsuiness on the business name line. Dell does not check to ensure that you actually operate a business before selling you stuff out of the business sections of their web page.
If you need a diamond, but don't want to support DeBeer's African practices, you could get a Russian or Australian Diamond. They take a little more looking, you should be able to find one on Google, but they are a diamond, that was probably mined with slightly more concern for the miners. The Russian Diamond Syndicate claim's that Russia produces 20% of the world's diamonds.
The moon shot does have significant potential, and should increase India's status in the world. Which rightfully or wrongfully, is probably the main reason for the launch. They have been trying for the past few decades to prove that they two should be included in the league of important nations. I wonder if the marginal returns of the second moon shot will yield nearly as many innovations as the first did.
I wonder if a national highway system might be a better application for this funding. I realize that it would probably cost more than 80 million to build it, but it could certainly make a great start. Also highways are an excellent way to create consumer benefits for a very large number of people, by providing opportunities that never would have been possible without it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a lot like RMS's itch to scratch concept, you have to find a business community with an itch, and scratch it for them. Another tip is that the most common itch businesses have is lower costs. If you can make a product that lowers the cost, in an easily measurable way, you might get a few customers. If you get one customer, treat them really well, they will be your best form of advertising, but if they are not happy, your new business probably will not survive to find another. Bad word of maouth is a killer.
Starting a well capitalized business in the best of times is difficult, but even in the worst of times it is possible to succeed in business. It will take more work than you think it will, but also probably the most rewarding work you can do. Before you start, I suggest that you read something similar to What Color is Your Parachute, it is an excellent review to help you make sure that you are ready to be in business for yourself. If you are ready and able to start a business, pick something that you really want to do, and focus in on it. You unlikely to succeed if you try to do everything for anyone. Currently anything related to integration or web services is en vogue, if that floats your boat. Another possible idea would be to get into something similar to what your old company did, especially if you can get some of the old customers, it might be large enough to susutain a smaller business.
Before you start the business, you or the other founder should take a class on accounting. Your local community college is very likely to have something that you can audit, take at a reduced rate for no grade. This will be quite helpful, especially if neither of you has experience with bookkeeping. Get something to keep your books, Staples has Peachtree for free after reabate, or GNUCash might be enough in the beginning. Related to accounting, the one thing every failed business has in common is that they all ran out of cash. Profits don't matter, its how much cash you pull in, your suppliers will not let you spend retained earnings. Keep a close eye on your cash position, and know whether you are making cash or spending it at least monthly. Finally, if you decide to go into business with another person, spend the few hundred and let a lawyer either create the articles of incorporation, or partnership agreement. They know many more potential problems than you or I can imagine, and should have some advice for how to structure the company to minimize them.
More frankly, it is extremely rare for a business to be profitable in the first year. If you and your partners do not have enough save to meet each of your personal expenses for at least 6 months stick out for anything you can find to come up with a little capital.
Some of the better ideas I have heard to drum up business are:
1. Help some folks with their PCs first, then eventually you might meet a small business owner who needs help with a bigger project.
2. Give a talk and be willing to answer questions about IT to your local chamber of commerce or businessperson's association.
3. Advertising. One of the places you might consider is talk radio, most of the audience is less techincal, usually wealthier, and more likely to own a business than the average American.
The advice about finding a salesperson is excellent, we geeks are not usually the best at selling things.
Do not try to get too big too quickly, you will kill your cash flow as you grow. But realize that the way businesses make money is through leverage, either charging more than it costs for your employees, or on the financial side, through the use of debt. I doubt you will find a bank willing to offer you a loan early in the life of your business, but be extreemly careful regarding debt. Non-debtors never go bankrupt, they may not succeed, but the lender never has to come after assets if you do not owe them anything.
Lastly, (Is this the third time I have tried to close, I am beginning to sound like a pastor)good luck especially if you decide to venture forth in the the exciting world of business.
I think the point of his filter is that your filter is unique to you. The filter is designed to pick up that you like foo, but don't like cc or something similar and it asigns a probability of the message being something that you would delete based on you current kept and deleted files. So unless there would have to be a word that everyone kept on their good list, and the spammer would have to keep up with the fact that your good list changes.
If foo was one of the words that had a low probablity of being a spam, but spammers started using foo, and it still saw enough other bads to delete it, it would probably lower the likelihood that foo indicated a good message. It looked like a really solid system, hope someone finds a way to get this added to more inboxes quickly.
The savings was from proprietary Unix hardware to Lintel boxes. Not from Windows to Linux.
The Political Economy Research Center is a great place for you libertarians to support for free market environmentalism.
Office is worth nearly as much as Windows to Microsoft. They don't specifically separate office from their other applications, like Project or Visio, but I be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that Office is at least 80% of their applications group, which generated about $9.5 Billion in revenue last year.
Sun didn't spend all that money on Star expecting to make it back selling Office Suites, they want to reduce Microsoft's strength, to make it easier to compete at the server level. Similar to Dell's plan to start selling printers, to eat into HP's main profit line, with the goal to break even, but capture more profits from the PC business.
I happen to fit directly into the target Office suite marktet, and Star Office is the only suite out there that is competitive with MS Office. Nothing against GNUmeric, KOffice, SmartSuite, or Word perfect, which all are nice, but they cant do everything as well as MS and Star Office do.
To put you in my shoes about office suites, imagine how unproductive you would be using notepad. That is whre the free office suites were 2 years ago. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but you get the point. Yeah you could use them, but it was not going to be easy or fun. Alos realize that the people who use an office suite for their job do not care about their text editor. As long as it can open the occasional text file we get, it will be fine.
On a server? The only Linux products sun is offering are servers to sell to the current big iron customers who need cheap front end boxes. I doubt they ship with X much less a full featured office suite. I believe the Red Hat version that Sun started with was Red Hat's Advanced Server product.
Also good is Samurai Swords, aka Shogun. Its quite similar to the Total War: Shogun series for the Computer.
I think all of the filming is done for the entire trillogy. I believe that Mr. Jackson did not want the characters to age inbetween films, and this cuts your risk of actor becoming famous between films and getting more money.
Wil Wheaton is the actor who is best known for playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Turns out unlke the character, Wil is quite cool, a linux user, runs a pretty good blog, and supports most of the goals of the EFF.
Thats probably just hardware/OS/whatever they happen to be bundling. $20k for a HP/Sun/IBM unix workstation is pretty much par for the course. Sun usually has a cheaper option, but the others hold the line pretty well. I think the average cost last year for Unix (non x86)workstations was around $10,000. They have fallen significantly because Intel hardware became competitive in performance.
I started walks and hikes last year, after I noticed that I got fatter following graduation. I attributed the weight gain to not walking all over campus. I live in Montana now so there are lots of cool areas for hikes through the hills, but I would think that almost anywhere would have a good place to walk or hike. After you have done it for a while and are getting into better shape, you can move into jogging, if you want.
If you have an agreement regarding who gets your inventions, whatever it says. This is why most creative types will have to sign as a condition of employment. Most of the agreements give almost all rights of your inventions to the company, especially if they are related to the field in which you are employeed.
Lacking a specific agreement, and depending on the state's laws, your invention would belong to you in both cases, if you you developed the invention using your own materials, and on your own time. Although, Intel probably would have a better case against you if they decided to sue, because they could argue that you were exposed to RAM developments through your employment there.
Alcatel's products are mostly commercial telecommunications products, like Lucent or Nortel. They also have router lines that compete with Cisco, Juniper, and others. I think they have sold their cellular handset division, but they might still have a stake in it.
The company materials/time principle comes from the Shopright Doctrine, however this only covers inventions/intelectual property that is created by employees without a contract that relates specifically to ideas. If you are employeed to generate ideas, then your ideas generated, while you are employees by the company, generally belong to the company, regardless of when you came up with the idea. Now, IANAL but that was what the lawyers explained to us in the few law classes I have taken.
Its not 3G wireless unless their with NTT DoCoMo, or possibly SK Telecom. This should be compatable with AT&T Wireless, Cingular & T-Mobile, even after their upgrades. I don't think it will be compatable after they upgrade to UMTS, but that is still a long way off. It won't be compatable with Verizon Wireless, Sprint PCS, or Nextel, unless they have a CDMA version in the works. Of the regonals I know of, AllTel, CellularOne, and I'd assume CenturyTel won't work either.
I believe the name refers to its size, its bigger than a cell phone, but small enough that you can put it in your hip pocket. The idea being that this can replace some people's laptop.
I believe that you can still find single card games in Atlantic City if you look hard enough. The secret to winning if you have a slight odds advantage is bankroll your betting very well. Thats all the casinos are doing, they know they have an advantage, keep a large bankroll and let the law of large numbers work in thier favor.
Be careful if you try to go down now to make your fortune, rumor has it that the enforcers are being reintroduced to Vegas since the corporate types are losing money on the casinos.
Counting cards isn't that difficult, the easiest methods simply have you add 1 for cards below a six and subtract 1 for 10s, you have to divide your count by the number of decks in the shoe. Highly favorable situations (lots of 10s and few low cards) favor players who get larger payouts for blackjacks, and unfavorables (lots of low cards) favor dealers who are less likely to bust when they hit on those high hands where they have to hit. Then you increase and decrease your bet to get large returns during the favorable times and reduce them during unfavorables.
Counting all the cards rapidly takes practice, and learning how to change your bets, without attacting attention, to provide adaquate returns is the main skillful part of counting cards.
If you just want to relax, Craps with odds cut the house edge to a fraction of a percent, or Baccarat only involves 1 decision with odds nearly as favorable as strategy blackjack. Its also fun to watch the ceremony involved in a Baccarat game.
They have the rights to publish games under their engine, that doesn't mean that they can't sell those rights, or leave them unpublished if the game is so crappy that it would reflect badly upon the publisher.
For a bigger business, 1 m covers costs for a few days or less.
Or if you are an individual with a business license, or you just make up a name for the bsuiness on the business name line. Dell does not check to ensure that you actually operate a business before selling you stuff out of the business sections of their web page.
If you need a diamond, but don't want to support DeBeer's African practices, you could get a Russian or Australian Diamond. They take a little more looking, you should be able to find one on Google, but they are a diamond, that was probably mined with slightly more concern for the miners. The Russian Diamond Syndicate claim's that Russia produces 20% of the world's diamonds.
The moon shot does have significant potential, and should increase India's status in the world. Which rightfully or wrongfully, is probably the main reason for the launch. They have been trying for the past few decades to prove that they two should be included in the league of important nations. I wonder if the marginal returns of the second moon shot will yield nearly as many innovations as the first did.
I wonder if a national highway system might be a better application for this funding. I realize that it would probably cost more than 80 million to build it, but it could certainly make a great start. Also highways are an excellent way to create consumer benefits for a very large number of people, by providing opportunities that never would have been possible without it.
Yeah then we will all start up new tribal idenities based on the planet we are from, but Earthlings will continue to look down on all of them.
I guess I got into them too late, it took me 30 minutes, well it seemed like that anyway, to pick a name that no one else had.