Scott_MacGregor

Your new office looks great! Nice job with the layout, and a cute puppy too.

Too bad we do not have a government that is willing to protect our US based businesses from this kind of nuisance lawsuit money grabbing.

So we have the EU, the USA, Austrailia and China all seeking to influence the internet in different ways. It seems like the only big places around the globe that are not trying to control it are most of Asia, India and South America.

Too bad the internet is curently not a safe harbor from the politicians who change from time to time.

Well since I am in an "out of the box" thinking mode today, here is my idea for you based on that. For me it’s all about the folding green.

First off, I’m not a fiction reader at all. I only read technical stuff, but I do not believe this specific idea is being done in fiction works.

Why not offer to work with an already successful best-selling fiction writer and automate one existing bestseller work. Turn the book into software and have multiple paths through the story that vary depending upon user input. Let the reader modify the character names, and put in some random paths that auto-generate depending on the readers choices. Have the ending be totally random from a choice of 10 endings.

Instead of a single story, the reader would be buying a set of random stories with a common thread based on a best seller. You could try selling it through regular book channels like Amazon and Borders and let the reader have 3 complete reads for X dollars plus the ability to recharge the number of available re-reads via a website generated password for X dollars.

Offer a 50/50 split on the net profits with the author on the shipped software.

The benefit to you would be starting out with a product that already has a proven demand—more likely to have cash flow. Plus you can learn the business somewhat.

The benefit to the author is additional income and lots of media exposure publicizing the book.

If this is popular, every so often the scenarios, paths and randoms can be refreshed online for an additional fee.

The interactiveness of the story may draw additional new readers (buyers) plus re-sell to those who bought the hardcopy. A lot of new books come out every year and from a money in pocket standpoint not very many hit a home run. It seems logical that piggybacking our type of technical expertise on a proven winner might make you a lot more money than trying to go it alone.

Note: If you do this and make it big, you owe me a pizza for this. (I’m serious)

The radio news down here in Austin is saying the so-called "hacker" is a car salesman that was fired from one of the many used car dealerships down here.

They are also saying he took home (stole) a peice of special hardware used to call over the phone lines and disable cars for people who fail to make their payments. Something the finance manager would use from time to time.

No much hacking, just a theft and several phone calls over his home phone land line.

We moved to Austin to benifit from the much better tax structure and lack of red tape when operating compared to California. Texas is very business freindly on purpose. They focus on it, and so far seem to be doing a pretty good job of it.

Austin is a nice place and the people are very nice, but in the summer the humidity and heat gets pretty bad. Too bad its not right on the ocean like California or Seattle.

To begin with, I love cars. I live in cities so I can have a great lifestyle, and to take advantage of all the city has to offer. So you and I are sort of thinking along the same lines, but making a different choice--for different reasons.

I love cars so much that once we get this business profitable and I get enough income from it I will probably buy a convertible Bentley GT like this one:

http://images.paraorkut.com/img/pics/glitters/b/bently_-8712...

I am not sure if people who drive their own car vs. ride on a bus are doing it out of any having less of a tolerance for the fistfights or other social problems though. I think that the convenience (and for some the prestige) of driving is why people drive rather than it being a cost point or service issue. I do not think public transportation will ever --draw--people out of their cars. To me it’s comparing apples to oranges.

I love having a car and would really hate having to ride a bus or train. Although I do agree with you that public transit is lacking in some ways, in many places the cost is subsidized by the taxpayers to keep it affordable and it does serve to make life easier (and nicer) for people without a car.

In times past, trains used to have separate cars for 1st class, 2nd class and 3rd class. Maybe given the current political climate the cities would be hostile to allowing a separate bus service to operate in this manner. A separate bus service that would be viewed as superior to the buses serving the general population might be frowned upon by the cities and for that reason be impossible to get going. Plus, what would stop the same problem causing riders from occasionally riding the upscale bus and causing the same problems.

California State Univeristy

You will probably want to use Quickbooks. A lot of CPA's understand it. Do not use spreadsheets because spreadsheets do not have an audit trail.

Talk to a CPA that has experiance in our industry and follow that persons advice.

Our startup would not be as fleshed out if we only had one person. In addition to having two minds and four hands working at the same time. We actually have synergy going when it comes to fine tuning our vision and then putting it into operation.

We eat dinner together every night and most of the time, the focus of conversation revolves around where we are now and what needs to be done to get where we are going. It really serves to keep the fire lit on our efforts. It’s like having a half-time pep talk in a football locker room every night. If you sat in on one of these dinners with us you would come away confident and energized, ready to put your all into it without reservation. Synergy is an amazing asset.

I think that there is so much to do on a startup that having the right person to work with makes it more valuable, especial if you have synergy between the founders.

I like ten.tld. It seems more memorable and unique. Plus I could see the logo having a lot of first impression impact.

Email messages are stored in open human readable text on the email server, unless they are encrypted.

An Administrator on a Microsoft server with the proper permission level can open the mail directory on the server and see all of the user directories inside. Then simply open the directory and see all of the email message files. Since they are plain text they can be opened with a text editor such as WordPad and easily read.

Linux is the same.

I am not sure if XOBNI crawls the user mailbox on the email server. More likely, it is getting the information it needs from the Outlook .pst file that is on the user’s client machine. The .pst file is a little database just for Outlook to use.

I went to a Microsoft Office developers brunch a while back (good food) and I think I remember they said that they were opening a lot of their Office products to developers so they could make apps to tie in to them.

Here is link to the MSN Developers Network that might help you: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

It is not terrorism it was a guy named Joe Stack from Austin. The founder of a software business. Apparently he was ticked off at the IRS for interfering with his business.

He founded his company in California but moved to Austin to take advantage of the growing high tech industry in Texas.

Here is a copy of his online posting just before he did this:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack...

Austin is so nice and crime free something like this is crazy.

Now who in here will be the first to develop a slick dedicated Windows desktop sidebar client for this, or an Outlook plugin?

If it was a Microsoft product, it would probably run right on the desktop in a sidebar. Then they would have a developers conference for it in Las Vegas with a free brunch too. [A different promotional stratagy than Google].

Just an observation; If someone is getting remunerated to post certain articles on here as a paid shill it stands to reason that that person will not reveal this fact.

The obvious question is why would the payee not just sign up and post whatever it is they want posted and save the money. It would only take a few minutes to post something.

Genetics Research:

Pedigree Analysis: A Family Tree of Traits

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_...

Materials and Equipment:

  Paper 

  Pen 

  Access to a photocopier (optional)

I found this article, quite interesting. It was a lot deeper than I originally thought it would be. On topic, but from a very unique angle. Very well written too.

If we can handle this perceived need completely within our industry without outside intervention it seems like it will present more of a money making opportunity for a lot more people in our industry. To get this off the ground, I think initially this should be viewed as a new product opportunity for the search providers.

This really might be a case of "If you build it they will come", and if the framework is put in place intelligently, a lot of money can be made quickly from simple add on products.

From the blog: "There is a lot of online material being developed, but it isn’t organized in a way where it is easy to find the best material that fits what you want to do." "We need a simple way of taking all of the education pieces and organizing them and then rating them in context."

I think we are at a point that the internet needs an agreed upon standard specifically for educational material. A standard that developers can use on their finished product to allow it to be considered for special educational indexing.

It seems like this could be most easily accomplished by using a system of appending the file type such as foo.aspe1 for formal educational level 1 material, foo.aspi7 for independent study material level 7, and so forth. The level rating like the e1 and i7 used in the example should be left up to the material developer to decide upon.

By further adding information to the file type, such as foo.aspEGe1, for elementary geometry, the type of material could be easily set forth for indexing. Material such as Cisco Certification Study material or MCSE study material could fall under .aspcee9 for instance, for computer education educational level 9.

It seems like this basic level of information in the file type would be sufficient to handle the gross special indexing of the material, other factors, for instance, Egyptian Prehistory, could be handled through normal search indexing within the special indexing.

A concern with the indexing process will probably be spam and pornography getting into the system. It seems like it would be fairly easy to control the use of the special educational file types by requiring the use of a special educational SSL certificate where the developing/posting party is definitely known to the SSL authority. Rouge SSL authorities (those breaking the indexers rules) could be delisted from the special indexing system. Using a special certificate designation for this purpose, such as SSL2 or SSLE, would probably be the easiest to implement and allow sufficient control by the indexer for delisting purposes.

As far as add on products one thing that comes to mind is profiting from the search providers implementing a system that allows user feedback into the indexing system where searching users can Blend the natural search results with prior user feedback on any number of predefined factors. Users should be able to easily propose new Blend categories into the system for global inclusion.

This Blend in the search results would be to attract users and to allow add on builders to financially capitalize on the fact that there are a number of educational people and parents who have very strong feelings (complaints) one way or the other about the specific content and presentation methods used in the educational material.

Why not offer both types of instruction and let the teachers recommend which students should learn by which method. It seems like having an option would make it more likely more students would do better. Why limit the students to only one option.

Logo 47 seems more memorable to me. Meaning if I surfed off your site and 1 month later seen #47 somewhere else I would be more likely to remember it is associated with your company.

1. I like the colors just the way they are, the blues, greens and grays, etc. I also like the female face with the headphones, I hope you own the image because it could be a strong brand image for you. She is very unique with the green eyes, green headphones and tattoos on her fingers and wrists.

2. I wonder, and probably others will wonder what those tattoos say or are, so maybe you could play it up a little and put something about it in your FAQ’s as a marketing angle to set your business off from the competition as hip, cool and unique. Think about what your target market would find memorable about this.

3. Some say they think the site is ugly, interestingly I do not think it is ugly, in fact I like it a lot. The fonts, colors, pics, etc., really seem to work for me. If you are shooting for a big time corporate look like some of Version’s or Sprints pages I think you have come pretty close, an 8.5 out of 10. I agree with some of the suggestions about having a designer look at it and suggest improvements, but if it were my site I would limit those changes to small customer tested iterations in layout vs. color and content.

4. My test of your site was if I were looking for a product of your type, based on this website would I personally trust the download enough to give it a try. My answer based on your website is 98% yes. Meaning if I were a potential customer I would download, set it up and give it a try, yes without a doubt I would. Then providing the product was a better than the competition I would keep it--sale made. So as far as the site goes you could change it, pretty it up with different colors ect., but that might change my personal decision to download, but I am only one person and the site needs to be tested in live commerce still, so do iterate and test.

5. The Features page has a display problem on my big monitor with IE 7.0.5730.11. The four boxes on the right are lined up 50% on top of the text on the left. Also the text in the bottom box is displaying outside the bottom of the box.

A tip: If you’re using an x-y-z style of coding with layers or something similar, sometimes the older non-layer style (x-y) will be more cross browser compatible with less work.

6. If you are not already using banner ads, personally I think the site is good enough to spend banner ad promotion money on right now. If it were my site and ad money I would start a banner ad campaign right now if you think the product is ready to release to the public. Just iterate the site slowly with only very minor changes, and then test the changes on actual click through customers with an A-control site and a B-iterated site setup to see if the changes make any difference in amount of downloads between the two sites.

7. I would make the link to Green Ear more prominent and play it up a lot more. it will add gravitas to the product and possibly increase downloads.

I use Outlook with Business Contact Manager. It was a pain to get it set up just like I wanted it, but now i am glad I did. I discard hardcopies of business cards and just manually put the info into Outlook along with any notes I want to make.

If you have not already done so, you might want to try installing rkhunter (Rootkit Hunter). It scans for rootkits, backdoors and possible local exploits. It does this by comparing SHA-1 hashes of important files with known good ones in online databases, searching for default directories (of rootkits), wrong permissions, hidden files and suspicious strings in kernel modules.

Maybe installing Jailkit to chroot SSH users might plug a hole for you too. This is a set of utilities to limit user accounts to specific files using chroot() and or specific commands. It is used to secure cvs, sftp, shell or daemon processes. You can give your users shell access without having to fear that they can see your whole system. Your users will be jailed in a specific directory which they will not be able to break out of.

As a future potential preventative, you might want to think about installing fail2ban. It is an intrusion prevention framework. It blocks selected IP addresses for hosts that are trying to breach the system's security by monitoring log files and will ban any host IP that makes too many login attempts or performs any other unwanted action within a time frame defined by the administrator.

These are for Linux, and I’m not an expert with them, so I can’t really walk you through installing or using them, but you might want to look into them and see if they might help you.

If this "Security" stuff is not your cup of tea, these guys might be able to help: http://www.serverwizards.com/ I have never used them, but have come across a few of their happy "Security" customers in tech forums in the past. I keep them in my contact list just in case.

It seems to me like the Boston Police and The Powers That Be who they work for in Boston do not want any non-police witnesses with video evidence who could appear in court. I would assume they fear that non-police made video evidence might conflict with what the officers actually testify to in cases, and that this would give irrefutable evidence to a judge and jury as to what really happened.

Every corner store seems to have video surveillance to help deter crime I see nothing wrong with the public making videos of police officers. To me it actually seems like a very good idea.

Since you already have a degree, if you are interested in learning PHP, Zend offers training. When you finish the training you can test for certification from ZEND. As far as PHP goes, this is probably much more in-depth than you will get from a university course.

Here is a link if you are interested: http://www.zend.com/en/services/training/

One thing that has helped me in the past is studying existing code and then making modifications to it.

Folks, we have a 1st place winner of the 2010 HN Science Fair here. Seriously though, way to think outside the box. X-Box that is, lol.

Really though, nice job, I’m impressed. This is an interesting invention.

When you work out your burning energy (calories) and losing water through sweat.

  1. Try eating an extra healthy snack like a cup of yogurt and a piece of fruit before you go to bed every day, like a ritual even if you’re not hungry.


  2. Your body seems to need more water to replenish what you sweat out, that’s why you’re thirsty. Try hydrating yourself more by drinking "a lot" of water starting when you get up in the morning and sipping all day long like bodybuilders do.

Maybe that will help.

Seriously $100 to do statistical work? The site looks very nicely laid out, but I have to wonder what the purpose of this competition is.

My first inclination with such a low prize amount is to be a little suspicious of the motives behind this effort. For instance, is some local political figure wanting to do something that might be viewed as controversial and this site is a CYA move before taking that action?

What I mean is will this site be used by some politician to set himself up to make the statement in public "We tried to get X done with this website campaign, paid millions of the taxpayers money for web development, even offered a cash prize (without saying how much the prize was) but the results were trivial so now we have no other option than to do Y (whatever controversial thing the politician’s contributors wanted done in the first place).".

To the OP: if this is your site and you are seriously looking to promote it and attract contestants you might want to think about bumping the $100 grand prize up to at least $1,000. It seems to me the $100 will not be enough (after taxes) for people to take the effort to get involved. Maybe seek monetary sponsorship from the city for the prize amount.

Excel

Here are my predictions (the lucky 7) for the next decade:

1. Our vision for our company will be in place, our startup won’t be a startup anymore, it will be a full fledged powerhouse that will change the way certain things are done (that’s still under wraps) for a lot of people. Our company will be an important part of people’s lives and over this decade we will flex and grow to meet their demands and expectations. Some of you in this forum will be working for us. You will be well paid and you like it.

2. The media as we know it now will fade away from people’s lives like the Oldsmobile and the Pontiac. Perfectly viable businesses, self-destructed, not important enough to qualify for taxpayer bailouts just gone from the scene like the horse and buggy. They had a good run but now it’s over.

3. WIFI will be free for everyone in all major metropolitan areas and it will be 100% taxpayer supported.

4. The governments (with the exception of China and Australia) will cease trying to regulate and criminalize the internet %100, and will allow it to exist and grow according to the will of those who use it and build it.

5. Taxes in California will be the lowest in the nation. Arnold Schwarzenegger will admit he has read HN on a daily basis for years to keep his spirits up about the economy but has never made a single post.

6. Politically, Generation-X will be in power--look out.

7. No more airline travel hassles in the USA, people will be able to board and fly without government restrictions or searches.