04.29.07
Posted in News and Announcements at 21:14 by lnxwalt
It has only been a short time since I’ve had a yard suitable for growing a garden, so this is all sort of new to me.
A short time ago, we had a sudden cold snap. It was a minor storm coming through Southern California, but it still brought winds cold enough to kill nearly all of our tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers. It was followed by a foretaste of our desert heat, which has not helped the surviving plants at all.
Of course, the year’s crop of rabbits is rather large–they are getting past two fences to get into the garden–as well as getting into fenced areas in most of the yards in the neighborhood. The dogs are getting their exercise, that’s for sure.
These are things that we accept, because they come with living in the area. If we choose not to accept them, we will become exceedingly frustrated. Man may not like to admit it, but he cannot yet control nature. Any attempts to do so on more than a very limited scale are doomed to fail.
If your business is in an industry that is affected by weather changes, you should be prepared for anything. Even NOAA Weather Service forecasters are often wrong on the size and timing of events. This is even more pronounced in this time of climactic change. The fact is, we don’t know what the temperature, precipitation, or winds will be like next year. Our predictions fail often enough that it affects those who depend upon them.
For example, those of us who work for the federal disaster-relief agency read the forecasts last year for extra hurricane activity. Now, none of us wants these things to happen or for people to be harmed by these events. But your bank account and creditors, not to mention those rug rats that see you as a living wallet, all depend upon you being deployed on a disaster-relief effort for a certain proportion of the year. When nothing happened in the second half of 2006, it affected our pocketbooks.
Have you begun laying aside some funds to tide you over during a prolonged slump? Do you have the classic of camping food and sealed water, plus clothing, blankets, medical supplies, sleeping bags, and a tent for yourself, your family members, and your animals? Do you have an alternate source of income available for times when your primary trade is in hiatus? We all hear this advice and think one of these days, I’ll get prepared, but it will never happen until and unless you actually make the effort to do something about your own disaster-preparedness and financial security.
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04.27.07
Posted in News and Announcements at 19:40 by lnxwalt
WCC is pleased to announce the pre-release version of Slingshot, one of our blogs with an attitude. Slingshot’s purpose is to be a little more contentious, hopefully in a humorous fashion, against those that harm consumers and smaller businesses. (Need I say that technology-related businesses are our emphasis?)
There are some things we are still working on with it, as you’ll see immediately. Recently, we have slung rocks at Google, Microsoft, and the Supreme Court. If you check around 11PM Pacific, we have another one launching.
Slingshot uses Pivot, and is the first of our Pivot-powered blogs to come online. Improvements are coming there, as on the rest of our newly rebranded WCC COMMUNITIES site.
We were attempting to build WCC Communities using Joomla!, but found that there was too much emphasis on “boxes” of content. This new CMS seems to be much more focused around generating and creating the content. We have not yet made the move to integrated identities for WCC Communities, either. Each application (currently four different blogging systems, the community site, and a forums site) has its own membership listings. Partly, this is a result of using an outside hosting service and pre-built applications. Over time, we may attempt to merge these into one unified whole, where membership entitles commenting and participation privileges across the site.
As always, if you are in our area and your small business needs IT-related assistance, contact us: sales [at] webconnectconsulting [dot] com.
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Posted in News and Announcements at 03:59 by lnxwalt
In an effort to make our public face and outreach activities easier to manage, we are currently changing some of our tools.
Current Situation
Official Blogs include this one (using WordPress software), and several others hosted using B2Evolution software. The B2Evo software, even though it has the same ancestor as WordPress, is a mess to work with. Many times we have only part of the administration pages–for days at a time–or it is full of PHP error messages (or even worse, “HTTP 500: Internal Server Error” messages).
Changes
We are moving our B2Evo blogs to Pivot and Nucleus. In either case, we have to configure the software and set up themes and widgets, plus import any content that is coming from the old B2Evo blogs.
We also intend to get deeper into covering local events–we live here and we want to ensure that things work better for local residents–and businesses.
Times have been slow at my main employer, but business has been slow to pick up apart from them as well. I will be looking for a temporary position so I can pay the bills while we weather this time period. If you are aware of Linux/BSD-related positions in the Victor Valley/Barstow, Palmdale/Lancaster, or Inland Empire (San Bernardino/Ontario/Redlands/Riverside/Rancho Cucamonga) areas, please forward the information to me: huckstech [at] webconnectconsulting [dot] com.
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04.25.07
Posted in Legal Issues at 06:40 by lnxwalt
We mentioned the spam / splog problem recently. As a way to limit the spread of splogs and blog spam, all comments and trackbacks are moderated and will not appear without approval. Further, comments require that you join this blog with a valid e-mail address (and after all of that, we still moderate).
We have similar policies in effect with our other blogs as well. Some of our blogs use B2Evolution software. In these blogs, only members can comment, and both comments and trackbacks are moderated. We also have blogs that run on Pivot software. Comments are moderated, but membership is not required.
If you desire to comment, but do not want to bother joining, set up your own blog, post a comment there and use trackback to us here.
The content of this site may not be used for commercial purposes without our prior and express written permission.  If you see this or any other article / posting from this site on one of those dot-info sites, click on the “gooogle” link and report the site for theft.
Note: by commenting on our blogs, you give us permission to use your words and ideas for any purpose. In practice, we do not intend to use your words for advertising (for example) without your express permission to do so. However, we may discuss a topic that comes from a comment.  We may even endeavor to provide products or services based upon something you say.
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Posted in Small Business at 06:15 by lnxwalt
A number of consumer electronics stores are in financial trouble because a very large competitor decided to reduce its prices on 42-inch flat-panel televisions.
It is an important question: at what point do your customers no longer need your advice and consulting about what to buy and what to do with it after buying it? If your customers completely understand your products, it would seem that they no longer need your helpful and friendly “advisors” to help them decide what would best meet their needs.
Once that point is reached, your customers no longer need your help, which means that the time is right for a competitor to undercut your pricing and seize your market share. When I was in college, we went on a field trip to Orange County, where we visited a retail nursery (a place that sells plants) that had a wonderfully-successful marketing strategy: they met their competitors’ prices, but also had a large number of exclusives, which were priced quite a bit higher. This higher margin allowed their sales staffers to become both subject experts and near-experts in understanding human nature. They used this combination to become a powerhouse competitor.
As I recall, at this time, they already had a few warehouse-style hardware stores in their area. This company drew visitors and customers from all over Southern California.
At one point, even large specialty retailers like Blockbuster suffered at the hands of Wal-Mart. Since Wal-Mart’s business is diverse, it can afford to underprice its competitors on one or a few kinds of merchandise, making up the difference on other products. Blockbuster could not match the pricing of Wal-Mart, nor could they spread the lower revenue across a wide variety of products.
If you are in business, you will have competitors that are larger, better-financed, and with other areas or locations that enable them to spread the cost of a price war across a larger base. It is not guaranteed that they will choose to use price cuts as their primary weapon, but it is often the way they choose.
You need to think about what your business has to offer. What is your USP? If you had to come up with just one thing that is the reason why it is better to buy from you than from anyone else, what would that thing be? If you do not have an answer to that question, you have not thought about it from the standpoint of your customers.
When there are dozens of businesses in your industry (your competitors) within a fifteen to thirty minute commute from your place of business, there must be a reason why your customers choose you.
There is probably a particular slice of the overall market that choose your business and its products or services. There may be several such slices and those slices may have little or nothing in common. Think about it: do your customers seem to be around the same age? Marital status? Political affilliation? Education level? Are they all in the same zip code?
This isn’t the time to go into Marketing 305 (Principles of Marketing) again. Instead, get yourself a copy of Entrepreneur
magazine or a good introductory marketing book.
You can not depend on government regulators to level the playing field either. Just as one large software company recently changed the minds of the state of Florida in under 24 hours, a large company in your industry might easily convince regulators to allow them to step all over you and then grind you under their feet because you dared to compete with them. Instead, you must go places (into parts of the market) where the big guys will never be able to fit.
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04.24.07
Posted in Legal Issues, News and Announcements at 05:58 by lnxwalt
If you have done many Web searches lately, you have seen dozens or hundreds of spam blogs that pop up during your searches. Recently, I was searching on a blog search site for information on a particular topic and had to wade through about five pages of “splogs” (spam blogs) before I found the first results. They do this because they are looking for “easy money.”
You know, the same thing that is offered on those late-night infomercials: send us a few hundred dollars and you can make $5,000 per day sitting around in your underwear. No more getting up in the morning, showering and shaving, wearing the accepted clothing for your industry, and getting on the freeway. No more boss telling you to stop lollygagging. Become an overnight millionaire on the Internet!
If you are not reading this article through your feed reader or on our site, you are probably seeing stolen content. If so, please click on the “Goooogle” link and report the site you see this content on. I believe it violates the terms of Google Adsense to completely duplicate existing content.
The thing is, this is not anything new. One of the reasons that e-mail and IM are getting clogged with spam and “spim” is because companies see a way to send out millions of advertisements at almost zero marginal cost. If even 1/10 of 1% of the targeted people respond with clicks (or worse yet, purchases), the spammers make money.
Before that, it was junk mail to postal mail boxes. Send out a few thousand advertisements and if you get a 1% or 2% response, you’re making money. Especially since “bulk” mailers get frequent-customer discounts from the Postal Service. Isn’t it nice that I pay full price when I send real mail, some of which goes to subsidize the people that send me junk mail that I have to throw out each day.
We get the scams where someone is trying to sneak money out of their country. These things are not new. There were other ways that they tried to get you to hand over cash in exchange for an expected jackpot.
We get the chain letter that promises wealth if we forward and poverty if we do not. But again, these things are not new. Except back in the pre-networked world, these things were typed up and duplicated and you were actually supposed to send cash to one of the previous recipients.
Some time back, I had sent for some information from one of those wholesalers that have the “start a business plan.” I already knew what I wanted to do, but I was willing to look at other options. After a wait that was so long I had nearly forgotten I had sent for it, I got a packet a couple of weeks ago. The packet was long on “sign up NOW and start making the money you’ve dreamed of making” and short on details like what you’d be doing in order to make the money. Then today, I got a telephone call from a salesman, a very rude and pushy salesman, a very rude and pushy salesman who let me know that I wasted his time and money by sending for information without being convinced to purchase their plan. After that, they could have said, “we’ll send you all the gold in Ft. Knox and you don’t have to pay us anything,” I would still have nothing to do with them. So then I checked on Rip-Off Reports and there they were, with a long page full of complaints and some vehement defenders who could easily have been employees.
As I said, there is nothing new there. I first became aware of this kind of behavior–something for nothing–while reading Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Later, I read about FBI and Secret Service agents and the founding of those agencies, which was heavy on various something-for-nothing scams that have been pulled over the years. (As a child, I probably read more in two weeks than I currently read in a year.)
I recommend that you check out White Collar Fraud before investing in any kind of business.
Aside from that, do not contribute to the continued existence of the something-for-nothing fraudsters. You do this by refusing to buy from spam that you receive and by refusing to join the “we’ll make your rich overnight” plans. If their product or service really made people rich, do you think they would be sharing it? I mean, come on. One of the richest guys in the world regularly gets in trouble because his company tries to put its competitors out of business. So there is no way to convince me that someone who had a fool-proof, easy-to-follow cash-generation system would sell it to outsiders for a few hundred dollars each. It would be locked up under guard somewhere in the inventor’s underground vault.
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04.23.07
Posted in FLOSS, Small Business at 02:51 by lnxwalt
Many times, companies may wish to leave the dominant platform (that is, operating system, office suite, Web browser, and other associated software) because of such problems as spyware and virus/trojan/worm infections. At the same time, they may wish to continue to enable non-technical users to perform their duties. If this describes your company, we have two suggestions for you.
Let me note that these two suggestions are for non-technical users as well as technical users. Technical users should also consider three more options, which will be discussed later.
First, some assumptions:
- Reasonably new hardware, say a year or two old, with a Pentium 4 or equivalent processor running at 2 GHz or higher clock speed.
- At least 512 MB of RAM. These systems will run with 256 MB, but opening multiple applications at once can sometimes be slow.
- A technical person to help you get set up and to do occasional maintenance work on your systems. Obviously, it is always better if this person is internal to your company, because he or she is more likely to understand the particular challenges that your business faces. Likewise, he or she will have direct insight into exactly what software your users need in order to do their jobs effectively.
On to the recommended desktops:
Linux Mint is an easy-to-use Linux-powered desktop with Sun Java and Adobe Flash pre-installed. It comes with the Evolution e-mail & calendaring client installed. In my tests, it picks up the wireless card on my Dell XPS M140 notebook computer better than Windows does—I saw some nearby networks that I hadn’t picked up in almost a year. I was able to head over to YouTube and watch videos, listen to streaming audio feeds, and even view AOL video (which I had never before been able to see with my standard security settings).
With its GNU+Linux operating system and its customized GNOME desktop, Linux Mint is one of the best out-of-the-box experiences I have ever had. It gives the “WOW” that Windows Vista promises, without all of the anti-user and anti-purchaser stalkerware built into Vista. Linux Mint is so exciting that I may even make it my primary desktop.
If you have a Windows domain server and need your desktops to integrate with it, Xandros is the desktop for you. It easily integrates with Active Directory and domain controllers, PPTP VPNs, and can run both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office software. Xandros is all business, including the ability to install Internet Explorer 6 and run some ActiveX controls. Switching to Xandros is relatively painless for small-scale conversions and pilot projects. As the number of desktops involved increases, it is worthwhile to get the network control tools they offer.
This one has a little bit of configuration involved. This is not difficult, and is roughly comparable to the configuration needed for using Windows 2000 in the same situation.
Linux Mint uses the same software packaging system as the Debian and Ubuntu families of GNU+Linux operating systems. In fact, Mint is based on Ubuntu. Linux Mint’s desktop places the taskbar in the familiar bottom of the desktop, as opposed to the top (common on GNOME-based desktops such as Ubuntu and Fedora) and removes the multiple desktops feature to make it more familiar to Windows users. Xandros is also a Debian-based operating system, but has packages certified for corporate use available from the Xandros corporate servers for paid subscribers. Xandros now features 3D desktops.
Linux Mint is a free download. Xandros has a free “community version” and the fully-supported commercial version.
For more technically-inclined users, these are still good desktops, but will require some tweaks in order to satisfy. For such users, I would recommend Kubuntu or Ubuntu; Fedora (especially if you like to fiddle and customize things); or PC-BSD.
In each of these desktops, the system is designed in ways that minimize the damage that viruses, worms, and other malware can do. No system can prevent a user from giving bad software as much access as he or she has, but these desktops generally limit the damage in ways that Windows was not designed to do. Despite the advertising of the major anti-virus vendors, it not generally necessary to install anti-virus in GNU+Linux-based or BSD-based operating systems, although I generally do install ClamAV or similar products. I would certainly use Linux-native protection instead of the corporate Symantec subscription on Linux or BSD systems.
If you are considering upgrading or replacing your Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows XP desktops, I would encourage you to consider Linux Mint and Xandros for your non-technical users and those two plus Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora, or PC-BSD for your technical users.
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04.17.07
Posted in Industry News, News and Announcements, Small Business at 22:31 by lnxwalt
Jonathan Scwartz, CEO/President of Sun Microsystems, has some sage advice about your brand. Your brand is a lot more than you think it is. This is the best advice on the topic that I have ever seen.
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Posted in Industry News, Legal Issues at 01:54 by lnxwalt
In Defense Of Free Markets
Or, Reasons Why Antitrust Laws Must Be Enforced
Sadly, the technology news and information site C|Net has allowed itself to be used as a tool of monopolists. Why is Microsoft under fire for antitrust violations? I am not an attorney, but just reading the news and my old business law texts says that they are under fire because their whole strategy is based upon violating those laws.
Case in point, taken directly from the C|Net article: CompTIA’s Lars Liebeler defends Microsoft on violations relating to server interoperability. In fact, Microsoft took the industry-standard Server Message Block protocol and extended it so that no other vendors’ products would work with theirs—clearly anti-competitive behavior, designed to limit the choices available to purchasers who had Windows servers.
One thing never seems to change: Microsoft is always enduring some antitrust challenge–even when it is working with other industry players to create better products. Take, for example, Microsoft’s recent agreement with Novell to make Windows server software interoperate better with the Linux server products of Novell.
Last month, oblivious to this agreement, the European Commission issued another statement of objections alleging that Microsoft engaged in bad faith to thwart interoperability in the server market. The Commission’s proposed remedy would require Microsoft to make its valuable intellectual property available to its competitors–for free.
Mr. Liebeler ignores the details of the Microsoft-Novell agreement. Note that no matter where one stands on the agreement, it does nothing for those who use Samba apart from Novell / Suse. As it is Samba, not Novell, that is creating the software, Microsoft’ should be working with Samba and other SMB/CIFS server software makers. Novell reuses Samba’s work in their own products and formerly employed a leading developer in the Samba team. Yet, an agreement with Novell can only mean that Novell may get some of the missing documentation that nearly all server software makers have sought for years.
Besides this, is Microsoft paying IBM a licensing fee for using SMB as the core of the now-renamed CIFS? After all, the SMB protocol is IBM’s “valuable intellectual property” that underlies Microsoft’s revised protocol suite. In essence, Microsoft has taken an open standard and made a few secret, incompatible changes to block their competitors out. This is hardly innovation and surely not worth legal protection as “intellectual property.”
One thing that this behavior surely is, and that is anti-competitive behavior—you know, the kind of thing that the Sherman and Clayton acts were passed to eliminate.
Yet the Commission alleges that Microsoft has established “unreasonable” prices for its protocol licensing of its server technology in Europe. The Commission characterizes Microsoft’s proprietary server software protocols, which is protected by patent, copyright and trade secret law, as containing “virtually no innovation.”
The Commission then remarkably concludes that everyone in the industry, nonetheless, “needs” Microsoft’s protocols, and that Microsoft should provide them “royalty-free.” What the Commission demands in the end is that Microsoft make its intellectual property available to its competitors for free.
Attempting to “outlaw” the Microsoft-Novell deal through changes to the GPL or trying to force Microsoft to disclose its software protocols through regulation and litigation both suffer from the same erroneous foundational assumption–that there is something wrong with the operation and functioning of the free market in general, and that IP protections that underlie the free market.
The free market theory lists certain underlying assumptions, without which it cannot be expected to work. One of those assumptions is that goods and services are functionally identical, that is that the goods or services from one producer can be used as drop-in replacements for similar goods from another producer. As soon as this becomes untrue, producers gain market power, which violates another underlying assumption: namely that neither buyers nor sellers individually have any market power, the ability of an individual buyer or seller to affect the pricing of the particular good or service in the general market. It is helpful if someone arguing from a free market standpoint understands the requirements for free markets to exist.
This position is directly contrary to a central premise of free-market economics: IP protections will encourage investment and result in a wider breadth and depth of innovation.
I am amazed that an attorney and free market advocate knows so little about the topic. “IP protections” are incompatible with free market economics. Their justification is based on the idea of market failures where an inventor or other creator may not be able to reap adequate reward for his or her creative works before copycats move in and make those works low-price commodities. In the server market, whatever minor creative work was exercised has already been compensated many times over, so this so-called need for IP protections does not apply.
Furthermore, since software has a near-zero incremental cost per unit, theory demands that any IP protections be strictly limited in time and scope. I suspect that his advocacy is not borne out of any commitment to the theories and ideas behind free markets, but merely promoting and protecting the interests of the organization’s largest member. That makes this article dangerous, because those who are not acquainted with these ideas might absorb this wholesale, without vomiting up the anti-competitive, anti-consumer portions of the rant. That would be truly negative for all consumers of server software as well as for Microsoft’s competitors (some of which are presumably also members of CompTIA).
Smaller businesses, our target market, can benefit by taking a look at server implementations that utilize Samba and other FLOSS-based implementations of SMB/CIFS. It is important to note that Microsoft’s monopoly-preserving actions could cause some problems between their products and some of the other products listed on the Wiki page.
I note that Mr. Liebeler is the antitrust counsel for CompTIA, and that Microsoft is a leading member of the group. I am not suggesting anything improper about it, but surely the point of view expressed must be informed by the dependence of the organization upon the continued good will of such an important member.
In fact, I would suggest that CompTIA is not independent enough to be critical of Microsoft when it deserves it.
I think we should always be sure to praise them when it is proper to praise them, just as we criticize them when it is proper to criticize them. The Eolas suit against Microsoft, for example, was completely groundless—in my opinion—and should have been thrown out from day one. Eolas, in targeting Microsoft, went after deep pockets, but threatened everyone in the industry that used plugins to enable one application to utilize another to manipulate an object within the first application. The OLE system is an example, and could easily result (if this is never rectified) in large damages against any company building OLE-capable software going back to the time the patent was issued.
Yet, while we should support Microsoft in this fight, we should not turn a blind eye to their misbehavior. In the server field, there are a number of companies that build servers that utilize what is publicly known about SMB/CIFS. Enterprises can purchase server software from numerous vendors that will work with one another, but each one has a certain amount of trouble working with a Microsoft Windows-based server, not because Microsoft was innovative, but because they made incompatible changes in their implementations of the protocol.
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04.16.07
Posted in Industry News, Legal Issues at 04:01 by lnxwalt
James Robertson of Cincom Smalltalk has been following the story. Apparently, a woman wrote in her blog about a bad personal experience with an employment agency. The agency responded with a personal attack in the comments of her blog, followed by a letter from an attorney to remove the blog entry or face a suit.
Naturally, the woman posted the information about the letter, and the story has ballooned to something much bigger, with other bloggers now posting their personal experiences and discussion about the threat now being on television, YouTube, and other blogs.
I have little to add to the conversation, other than to repeat Mr. Robertson’s comments: this is just plain dumb. The company should fire whomever decided to threaten / sue, fire the person who leaked personal information in the response to the blog posting, and immediately do whatever they can to patch things up. Now, without further commentary, here are some links to information about the situation.
If you have a small business and you are not participating in a discussion with your customers, your prospective customers, and the online society at large, you are not prepared for what could happen to your business.
If your first reaction is legal, you are living in the wrong century. The 71,000,000 bloggers are vocal and active. They are fast to close ranks against attackers, especially non-blogging attackers. Citizen journalism and advocacy is truly liberating, and repressive nineteenth century legal weapons will fail to stamp out negative information from a dispersed target.
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