dan_the_welder

FreeNAS is awesome and extensible. Out of the box it's quite functional and it's open source.

It's the backbone of my work/home network. All the Linux boxes have it mounted in the home directory, so all the machines with Rhythmbox think it's local. All the windows machines can access it easily.

There are a dozen services you can enable as your needs dictate. Setup is straightforward through a web interface. Extra bonus it runs headless on crap hardware, in my case a 433mghz Emachine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS

How about a response instead of a downvote? This is getting stupid.

I asked a legitimate question, which given the fact y'all want to be millionaires selling software deserves an actual response.

That's great. Can't both co-exist?

Well, on the other side of it. It only takes one bad customer having a bad day to shit all over your business. Some people are crazy and vindictive. Like the guy who reported me to the Consumer Product Safety Commission on fictitious grounds because I refused to be extorted.

Yeah, this is perfect for an April's fools gag. It's still pretty good.

It's weird they did not put in a more visible link to their real service. http://www.macminicolo.net

As a big fan of the GPL I don't mean to come across as totally flippant. However, I just don't see a problem with people selling themes.

In a hurry, not enough skills, buy a theme. Skilled with the time to make your own, then roll your own.

You have a choice, you are not compelled to pay for a theme if you don't want to. The software will continue to work regardless.

Unless there is some kind of legal stalking horse that could affect the GPL, I don't see the point of all the fuss.

I use both Wordpress and Joomla and I see the same kind of thriving ecosystem around both projects. Commercial and non-commercial plugins and themes for both. Seems like a good thing to me and I don't see why it has to be an either/or situation.

If I am missing something then I would like to hear it.

I think the barriers to entry in many business fields are just getting higher and higher.

Is the Wordpress founder annoyed somehow that he has helped create a thriving marketplace?

I was enthusiastically commenting on a healthy niche market and then I used a metaphor point out that it's not just a hobby or a toy that these people are working on. It's a sophisticated tool that interfaces with the outside world much like CNC, which happens to be my area of interest.

Metaphor: "It's train CNC!"

Simile: "It's like CNC for trains!"

Literal truth: "It's called DCC actually"

If your point was to add information, then there was a better way to do it.

It has been said that what the current patents issue creates is a landscape where you can only be the one winner or among the many losers.

If there was a different solution, then there could be many small players filling different niches. This would be a win since there would be many opportunities to create a business and contribute to the economy.

Look at ISPs, if all you have is Comcast then you have a parallel to the current patents winner take all situation with all the problems that creates.

I really think the larger issue is that if people can't create businesses that fill out the economic landscape then those people are not able to work to their potential and that is a huge unintended drag on growth.

I just took a look at the JMRI page and it's very a very cool little niche market ecosystem. Software and hardware both.

Yet another advanced peripheral system, Train CNC!

It's an analogy. A tool to further understanding. On many levels software is just like many other businesses, Just like many other businesses are like software on some levels.

I own a restaurant and I release early and often!

I just put Evince on all my Windows machines and I am very happy about it. I was able to remove all the Adobe Air bonus arterial sclerosis.

I tried Foxit and was not very impressed. I thought it was interesting that the Evince windows port was made since the last time I looked for an Acrobat replacement about a year ago.

Right with you on the custom furniture thing. Most skilled crafts-people are booked for months ahead.

The ones that I know don't want to scale because then they would not be making furniture, they would be running a business.

Interestingly, a furniture 'startup' is frequently a vehicle for one person to make a living doing what they love. Often after years of working as a professional in another field making money for the family, building a nest egg, tooling up, honing their skills and trying to develop a reputation and market.

The I want it now crowd make me want to quit what I used to love doing.

The fallout from the last decade has been, an inability to discern quality, often using price as the yardstick, and a voracious impatience.

I make physical goods though, so your mileage may vary.

It's a catchy name. They were smart to jump on it. One of the bands I linked is pretty heavy grunge metal and the other is an international singer songwriter, so I think their net is pretty wide.

Not my personal company, the one I use... which is tiny.

They have treated me well, I have not noticed any downtime, but I am not very sensitive to that.

They also allow virtual domains, so I have three websites, two very low traffic, for the price of one.

My tiny hosting company Varialhosting offers POP and Imap. I did a quick search and there are tons of providers that offer Imap.

Yet another point in support of my new adage, " Live in the Cloud, die by the cloud."

Got Buzzed? Got Blogger DMCA'd? Tired of having targeted ads in your email, tired of worrying about data retention policies?

Then I encourage you to spend a low, low 100 bucks a year on your own hosting and domain, with email and all the website a humble blogger can eat.

Not to be sarcastic, but there is the whole internet full of tools to point people at your Bandcamp or MySpace page, in fact that's what people are doing for their MySpace music pages, promoting them on Facebook and in some cases writing their address on bathroom walls.

Also, there is something to be said for doing a single thing and doing it well. Managed hosting of musicians websites and nothing else.

If anything this is the year of overshoot, Google wants to be Facebook, Facebook wants to be Twitter (still), the Sixty One decided to be more like a glossy magazine.

Everyone wants to be your single source, conveniently forgetting that this is the internet we are talking about and not the cable or phone company.

That's a really well done page, unlike most of the eye-pain clutter people generally do.

Take a look at Bandcamp, it's the last nail in MySpace's coffin.

Main page, http://www.bandcamp.com/

Random couple of artist pages for an indication of the customization available, never mind the billing and music serving back end.

http://redfang.bandcamp.com/ http://danielaspector.bandcamp.com/

Microsoft makes productivity software, games, embedded OSes, hardware, business software, commercial suites.....etc etc etc. They can't focus with so many irons in the fire.

Apple makes well designed prosumer products....and thats it. They are focused on shiny, evolved high end consumer goods.

Apple will refine and refine and refine, while MS will dump things unless it's a huge money maker or they have an axe to grind.

Not an Apple fanboy BTW, I personally don't like anything Apple, and would be 100% Linux if not for legacy software that I need Windows for.

I am personally quite happy with the Windows 95 look and feel and set up all my machines, Linux or Windows, with plain vanilla UIs and remove anything extraneous.

As far as the tablet thing goes, most Windows tablets were well over 2000 dollars, so I really blame the hardware manufacturers for that one.

Initial after some browsing:

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 71,124 tested so far.

Enabled Private Browsing:

Within our dataset of about ten thousand visitors, only one in 36,313 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

A few minutes later public browsing:

Within our dataset of about ten thousand visitors, only one in 18,187 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

How did they go from 70k to 10k? WTF EFF?

You have to please everyone. From the morons to the tech savvy. It's a thankless job, because unless you get it exactly right, someone is gonna be pissed off.

I'm still looking :(

This is where I live. I am a small business or two. I have been building my own CNC machines. I manufacture a niche product.

The comments on this article are mostly regurgitated economist speak, efficiency figures prominently. The fact of the matter is, efficiency means one group gets as much of the pie as possible.

There are lots of people and they all need to earn a living. Big business strives for efficiency and they lay people off, because they are efficient. You however are unemployed.

Small businesses are only going to grow in number and the amazing thing about this phase that we are in is that sophisticated tools are becoming widely available. That means that small businesses will be able to produce more and more sophisticated products, creating more jobs as a result of this terrible inefficiency.

The future looks like this: Commodities and niche products.

A friend who can switch with you is the best.

I agree with your friend, it's my observation that all human behaviors are somewhere on a spectrum. People have different abilities or cultural ability to discern the resolution. Some see in black and white and some see greyscale.