I outsource my payroll services to a payroll firm, I outsource my legal needs to a law firm, and my accounting to an accounting firm. Meanwhile, my clients outsource their web needs to my company.
It's cheaper and faster to outsource parts of your business to a company that specializes in it. It's cheaper to hire us for $10,000 than it is to hire individual employees at $30-$50k each (plus benefits, taxes, equipment, space, etc.).
Character map is an onscreen keyboard which sends the text to a field inside itself - not to an external program. You then copy and paste from that field into whatever you want. Since you're not sending keystrokes, the keylogger would need to also intercept any copy-paste that you do.
I was trying too hard to be funny, I know... but I figured I'd toss that out there.
I know a guy with a shop that sells upright and cocktail-style arcade games. He sells on eBay and some of his products include 39-in-1 boards with classic games combined into one board - he slaps the board into a cabinet and they sell like hotcakes. (Even better is his customized PC-in-a-cabinet-and-load-whatever-you-want-box.) A while back, his eBay account was suspended because eBay was sent a cease and desist letter from Namco. Apparently they do not approve of these multi-game boards and fight them tooth and nail. He was buying these boards from an overseas supplier - and as it turns out, Namco can't do anything to the company making them so they go after the people buying 'em.
The copyrights on these games hasn't expired, so even if you could legally make a clone console it wouldn't affect the real problem - illegal ROMs.
What kind of legal action? Dell is hardly a monopoly and they are certainly not required to offer multiple OSes or sell competing processors any more than Taco Bell is required to sell Lasagna.
Virtual Property, eh? Not at all like domain names, right?
Online "property" has as much value as people are willing to pay for it. This is why we spend thousands of dollars on shiny rocks and metals (to say nothing of the diamond cartel). This is also why we hold onto generally worthless items because of sentimental value. (I had my Chuck Taylor All-Stars for years after they were too worn out to wear).
So I'm not surprised that this guy is making money. He found something that he expected people would want, and snatched it up so he could be the one to sell it to 'em.
Sure, just send me your credit card billing information, I'll email you a link to the software, and bill you at the end of the month for whatever it costs (which I know but can't tell you yet).
Sounds like ROYAL PRINCE MR UBUKWE got into the retail software business.
I completely agree.. I was pretty impressed when I started seeing video game ads that weren't PS2, X-Box, or Gamecube only, but all of them (and PC!). It speaks to customer demand and good business.
You said it, but I don't think you understood it -
The tech people say it's time to ditch Microsoft.
The business people don't necessarily get it. I talked to a guy yesterday who owns a group of companies such as an ISP, a computer repair shop, computer retail sales shop, web design firm, and business tech consulting company. He was showing me a home-grown web application that was quite impressive... until I asked him if it worked on Firefox. He laughed, looked at me and said, "No. Why would I support a browser with less than 1% of the market share?" I corrected him - 11% according to recent articles and as high as 40% on many of my clients' websites. His response was something along the lines of "when it gets to 40% across the board, I'll consider supporting it."
The point is, he's a business owner in our industry. He's a smart tech guy, but he's fully adopted Microsoft and defends its use. He can make a strong case for them to his clients, which are many. Business people don't see the world the same way that the tech folks do.
I see no reason to complain. Google, Wal-mart, etc. can track my viewing/purchase/search habits all they like. How is this going to be abused? Now I'm a security and privacy nut - but this seems excessive. They'll show ads to me based on my interests? Great! I'd rather see ads for things I'd purchase than crap I don't want. Wal-mart decides to stock shelves with things that are relevant to my area's purchase history - so if I go into a Wal-mart, it's more likely to carry something I intend to buy.
It's smart business - a hell of a lot smarter than blindly throwing ads out there hoping they'll be used. In fact, I'd argue that the Internet is more relevant because businesses can see the value in it. Many of us wouldn't have jobs if there weren't such potential.
Still, I do enjoy sitting on the back porch in the morning with a newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The Internet is way too heavy to read on the back porch.
And you'll probably get at least one nice lunch out of the sales deal. I recommend saving your lunch money and asking for sales visits from all of the major players.
You're completely right in this. Consider the growing length of commercials before movies these days. I was frustrated to discover that my television show last week had three minutes of commercials followed by four minutes of content followed by three minutes of commercials. From 8:39-8:42/8:43-8:47/8:48-8:51.
My response to my friend was just that - the industry bombards us with lower quality, higher quantity, and more intrusive/annoying advertisements. Our reaction is to fight back by skipping and blocking them. The "social contract" is out of balance.
The point is advertising is used to pay for "free" content. It might cost millions to produce a television show that you watch for free. The only way they can do this is to show ads. If you don't like it, you don't have to watch it. If nobody watches it, the show will eventually disappear.
You can't demand free content and not expect to pay for it somehow. Even Wikipedia needs money to stay alive - donations from individuals and companies. If they run out of support, they will disappear.
Hey, if you can make $100 for showing one ad, you might as well show fifteen and quit your job so you can sit at home growing a beard.
I was just explaining to a friend of mine who works for an online marketing company (they do ad placement) He said I was breaking a social contract by blocking ads - that I am hurting the revenue stream for the content producer, which in turn will hurt my ability to access the content for free. I agree with this, but I object to the terms of the social contract.
But there's more to it than that. You wouldn't watch a television show that was 24 minutes of commercials and 6 minutes of show, would you? When 80% of my screen is covered by ads and I have to fight pop-ups and pop-unders, I'm going to either eliminate the ads or go away.
With the exception of DVRs, you can't really do anything about the number of television commercials. But the competition for your time is so fierce that producers know that showing too many ads will result in less viewers. And since you can freely walk away, you're not forced to watch them. But you do - for fear (of missing part of the show when it comes back!), laziness, or apathy. And the ads do have an effect, whether you believe they do or not.
I set up a website to mimic PayPal's. I sniff traffic on a network that you happen to be routed through and spot the legitimate PayPal email you received. My script intercepts that email, finds those "last four digits," and drops them into the site I set up. When you visit PayPal.com, I route your traffic to my fake PayPal site. You don't know the difference, so you continue to enter your new credit card information. Once completed, I change the routing back to normal so you don't notice anything's amiss.
The weakest part here is re-routing you to a different site... I'm not sure whether that could be done without also changing the URL in your browser, but I know there are some ways to do that (Unicode URL hack, for example).
I'm just saying, it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
Of course you can't, but the risk you'd undertake is largely mitigated by patience in the market. With that kind of investment, you can afford to take a loss over short periods because you're not cashing out. Even if you take a loss for two or three years, you're likely to make up for it with decent gains over the course of your life. I'm young, so that's how I've approached my investing (per the advice of my advisor).
Does it count support.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com as two sites? Does it count mail.mydomain.com as a website if it's just a webmail portal? What about two sites such as www.school.edu and www.school.edu/~philosophy? As the post asks, how about landing/ad pages for domain speculation? Does it distinguish between domain.com and www.mydomain.com? What if www.domain.com is a pointer to www.mydomain.com? Does it record a difference between using host headers, a meta redirect, or server side redirect?
My guess is that the numbers are entirely estimated from a small sample that is not representative of the actual number. The margin of error is probably very high.
You couldn't afford your lifestyle on $100k/year? I know that I could live on a salary much, much lower than that simply because I already do. It's a matter of living within your means and making your money as effective as possible. Eventually you'll pay off your debts and be able to live on even less. At that point, you're just accumulating wealth.
Suppose you were offered $5 million dollars. Unless you are currently making and spending all of a $500k+ salary, that should be plenty for you to retire on.
Personally, I wouldn't quit working if I had that money. I'm not that kind of person. I'd go nuts. Instead I'd use the extra money to finance a new business. The one I've got could use a boost like that.
I had the average stock market return rate of 12% in mind. I also had mutual funds ranging from 15% aggressive (much more risk) to 7% conservative (much less risk) in mind. With these things, you can play a bit more conservative with your money and still come out with 10%. Your principal isn't protected, no.
When I was in high school, a teacher asked us if we'd like to retire on one million dollars. Of course everyone said yes. He argued that one million dollars, forty years from now (approximately when my classmates would be retiring), will not be enough to sustain us.
Meanwhile, I know enough financial folks - analysts, CPAs, and consultants - to realize that there are ways to get high returns on your money. You just have to be patient and willing to take a risk. $1,000,000 is enough that the risk is worth it.
If you're really, really conservative you could look at a high-yield money market and bring down 3-4% with more protection than stocks/funds but still not FDIC-insured. Some folks live on 40k/year.
My father-in-law tells me that when I make my first million, I need to invest it all, take 10% return, and live off the $100,000/year.
Not that I think it's going to happen quite that way, but there's no reason you need to take $400k and stuff it under the mattress, either. Nor do you need to retire on that.
Or if they let you save your files locally. Which can and probably should be an option. Maybe the default can be to save a copy both locally and on the server.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point on outsourcing.
I outsource my payroll services to a payroll firm, I outsource my legal needs to a law firm, and my accounting to an accounting firm. Meanwhile, my clients outsource their web needs to my company.
It's cheaper and faster to outsource parts of your business to a company that specializes in it. It's cheaper to hire us for $10,000 than it is to hire individual employees at $30-$50k each (plus benefits, taxes, equipment, space, etc.).
Well, by the time someone plants a keystroke logger on your machine, I'd guess they could do a lot more.
But technically I think it works the same way.
Character map is an onscreen keyboard which sends the text to a field inside itself - not to an external program. You then copy and paste from that field into whatever you want. Since you're not sending keystrokes, the keylogger would need to also intercept any copy-paste that you do.
I was trying too hard to be funny, I know... but I figured I'd toss that out there.
Good thing I type everything in with charmap.
ßöôÝà!
Indeed.
And I don't appreciate this!
'That guy on the median at the intersection of Ironwood and Laneview St.'
I've since moved on to the corner of Ironwood and Edison. Better traffic flow.
Story time.
I know a guy with a shop that sells upright and cocktail-style arcade games. He sells on eBay and some of his products include 39-in-1 boards with classic games combined into one board - he slaps the board into a cabinet and they sell like hotcakes. (Even better is his customized PC-in-a-cabinet-and-load-whatever-you-want-box.) A while back, his eBay account was suspended because eBay was sent a cease and desist letter from Namco. Apparently they do not approve of these multi-game boards and fight them tooth and nail. He was buying these boards from an overseas supplier - and as it turns out, Namco can't do anything to the company making them so they go after the people buying 'em.
The copyrights on these games hasn't expired, so even if you could legally make a clone console it wouldn't affect the real problem - illegal ROMs.
What kind of legal action? Dell is hardly a monopoly and they are certainly not required to offer multiple OSes or sell competing processors any more than Taco Bell is required to sell Lasagna.
Virtual Property, eh? Not at all like domain names, right?
Online "property" has as much value as people are willing to pay for it. This is why we spend thousands of dollars on shiny rocks and metals (to say nothing of the diamond cartel). This is also why we hold onto generally worthless items because of sentimental value. (I had my Chuck Taylor All-Stars for years after they were too worn out to wear).
So I'm not surprised that this guy is making money. He found something that he expected people would want, and snatched it up so he could be the one to sell it to 'em.
Sure, just send me your credit card billing information, I'll email you a link to the software, and bill you at the end of the month for whatever it costs (which I know but can't tell you yet).
Sounds like ROYAL PRINCE MR UBUKWE got into the retail software business.
I completely agree.. I was pretty impressed when I started seeing video game ads that weren't PS2, X-Box, or Gamecube only, but all of them (and PC!). It speaks to customer demand and good business.
You said it, but I don't think you understood it -
The tech people say it's time to ditch Microsoft.
The business people don't necessarily get it. I talked to a guy yesterday who owns a group of companies such as an ISP, a computer repair shop, computer retail sales shop, web design firm, and business tech consulting company. He was showing me a home-grown web application that was quite impressive... until I asked him if it worked on Firefox. He laughed, looked at me and said, "No. Why would I support a browser with less than 1% of the market share?" I corrected him - 11% according to recent articles and as high as 40% on many of my clients' websites. His response was something along the lines of "when it gets to 40% across the board, I'll consider supporting it."
The point is, he's a business owner in our industry. He's a smart tech guy, but he's fully adopted Microsoft and defends its use. He can make a strong case for them to his clients, which are many. Business people don't see the world the same way that the tech folks do.
I see no reason to complain. Google, Wal-mart, etc. can track my viewing/purchase/search habits all they like. How is this going to be abused? Now I'm a security and privacy nut - but this seems excessive. They'll show ads to me based on my interests? Great! I'd rather see ads for things I'd purchase than crap I don't want. Wal-mart decides to stock shelves with things that are relevant to my area's purchase history - so if I go into a Wal-mart, it's more likely to carry something I intend to buy.
It's smart business - a hell of a lot smarter than blindly throwing ads out there hoping they'll be used. In fact, I'd argue that the Internet is more relevant because businesses can see the value in it. Many of us wouldn't have jobs if there weren't such potential.
Still, I do enjoy sitting on the back porch in the morning with a newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The Internet is way too heavy to read on the back porch.
And you'll probably get at least one nice lunch out of the sales deal. I recommend saving your lunch money and asking for sales visits from all of the major players.
You're completely right in this. Consider the growing length of commercials before movies these days. I was frustrated to discover that my television show last week had three minutes of commercials followed by four minutes of content followed by three minutes of commercials. From 8:39-8:42/8:43-8:47/8:48-8:51.
My response to my friend was just that - the industry bombards us with lower quality, higher quantity, and more intrusive/annoying advertisements. Our reaction is to fight back by skipping and blocking them. The "social contract" is out of balance.
You should read up on Social Contracts.
The point is advertising is used to pay for "free" content. It might cost millions to produce a television show that you watch for free. The only way they can do this is to show ads. If you don't like it, you don't have to watch it. If nobody watches it, the show will eventually disappear.
You can't demand free content and not expect to pay for it somehow. Even Wikipedia needs money to stay alive - donations from individuals and companies. If they run out of support, they will disappear.
Hey, if you can make $100 for showing one ad, you might as well show fifteen and quit your job so you can sit at home growing a beard.
I was just explaining to a friend of mine who works for an online marketing company (they do ad placement) He said I was breaking a social contract by blocking ads - that I am hurting the revenue stream for the content producer, which in turn will hurt my ability to access the content for free. I agree with this, but I object to the terms of the social contract.
But there's more to it than that. You wouldn't watch a television show that was 24 minutes of commercials and 6 minutes of show, would you? When 80% of my screen is covered by ads and I have to fight pop-ups and pop-unders, I'm going to either eliminate the ads or go away.
With the exception of DVRs, you can't really do anything about the number of television commercials. But the competition for your time is so fierce that producers know that showing too many ads will result in less viewers. And since you can freely walk away, you're not forced to watch them. But you do - for fear (of missing part of the show when it comes back!), laziness, or apathy. And the ads do have an effect, whether you believe they do or not.
Just some thoughts...
It's a stretch, but there are still ways.
A hypothetical:
I set up a website to mimic PayPal's. I sniff traffic on a network that you happen to be routed through and spot the legitimate PayPal email you received. My script intercepts that email, finds those "last four digits," and drops them into the site I set up. When you visit PayPal.com, I route your traffic to my fake PayPal site. You don't know the difference, so you continue to enter your new credit card information. Once completed, I change the routing back to normal so you don't notice anything's amiss.
The weakest part here is re-routing you to a different site... I'm not sure whether that could be done without also changing the URL in your browser, but I know there are some ways to do that (Unicode URL hack, for example).
I'm just saying, it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
Of course you can't, but the risk you'd undertake is largely mitigated by patience in the market. With that kind of investment, you can afford to take a loss over short periods because you're not cashing out. Even if you take a loss for two or three years, you're likely to make up for it with decent gains over the course of your life. I'm young, so that's how I've approached my investing (per the advice of my advisor).
Does it count support.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com as two sites? Does it count mail.mydomain.com as a website if it's just a webmail portal? What about two sites such as www.school.edu and www.school.edu/~philosophy? As the post asks, how about landing/ad pages for domain speculation? Does it distinguish between domain.com and www.mydomain.com? What if www.domain.com is a pointer to www.mydomain.com? Does it record a difference between using host headers, a meta redirect, or server side redirect?
My guess is that the numbers are entirely estimated from a small sample that is not representative of the actual number. The margin of error is probably very high.
You couldn't afford your lifestyle on $100k/year? I know that I could live on a salary much, much lower than that simply because I already do. It's a matter of living within your means and making your money as effective as possible. Eventually you'll pay off your debts and be able to live on even less. At that point, you're just accumulating wealth.
Suppose you were offered $5 million dollars. Unless you are currently making and spending all of a $500k+ salary, that should be plenty for you to retire on.
Personally, I wouldn't quit working if I had that money. I'm not that kind of person. I'd go nuts. Instead I'd use the extra money to finance a new business. The one I've got could use a boost like that.
I had the average stock market return rate of 12% in mind. I also had mutual funds ranging from 15% aggressive (much more risk) to 7% conservative (much less risk) in mind. With these things, you can play a bit more conservative with your money and still come out with 10%. Your principal isn't protected, no.
When I was in high school, a teacher asked us if we'd like to retire on one million dollars. Of course everyone said yes. He argued that one million dollars, forty years from now (approximately when my classmates would be retiring), will not be enough to sustain us.
Meanwhile, I know enough financial folks - analysts, CPAs, and consultants - to realize that there are ways to get high returns on your money. You just have to be patient and willing to take a risk. $1,000,000 is enough that the risk is worth it.
If you're really, really conservative you could look at a high-yield money market and bring down 3-4% with more protection than stocks/funds but still not FDIC-insured. Some folks live on 40k/year.
My father-in-law tells me that when I make my first million, I need to invest it all, take 10% return, and live off the $100,000/year.
Not that I think it's going to happen quite that way, but there's no reason you need to take $400k and stuff it under the mattress, either. Nor do you need to retire on that.
Or if they let you save your files locally. Which can and probably should be an option. Maybe the default can be to save a copy both locally and on the server.