(Levine is the author of a book for Dummies about Internet Privacy. He says the same things I have been telling people all my life – everything anyone records about you will be used against you at some point. Your only defense is to not let them record it in the first place.)
I’m pretty sure Glenn must be getting financial help from his parents. He does not make enough money teaching and playing to be saving, like he says. Another reason I think so, is because he has never grown up and has the wrong attitudes for independent survival. You can only cling on to certain ideals when you have the money to do so. I quit the band because of one of those attitudes, that as long as he makes $50, the rest of us will come truckin’ along and play half-gigs for free. Now he is sending me ‘evil’ messages on my cell. That’s what I mean by never growing up. He is still into this new age and voodoo stuff and the parts of life that you believe rather than understand.
I’m thinking of ways to market my printer database without selling the farm. I keep returning to my booklet idea. I print a specialized booklet that targets one relationship. They would see the results, but not the query that produces it. While I don’t want anyone knowing how the tables are constructed, I’ll abide by the Elliot formula. Of every 100,000 people who see it, 1,000 might realize it is a database, 10 might decide to copy it, and 1 will actually do anything but will realize it is work and go nowhere with it. I ran some test cases y’day and already it is plain the catalogs are using flat files, plain from the repetition and mistakes. It would be ideal to sell the idea to some outfit like downloads.com, who have printer drivers but not in a format you can investigate. You have to already know what printer you have and go looking for it.
That is a spinoff, I know. The important thing is the concept of piggybacking. For example, it is labor intensive to try to look up all printers with cartridges that cost less than $30. Or even to know what selection of printers are available. I am very aware that there are no databases that contain warnings about printers. For example, I think people should be warned about the Hewlett-Packard printer driver installation process. You think you are just loading some software to make your printer work, and HP pulls a fast one. Their disk downloads tons of crap into your program subdirectory, where it is very difficult to find or uninstall. Then, although they don’t (yet) require registration or activation, there is a ton of advertising and pop-ups every two weeks thereafter.
Back to my printer database. It is a start since I have always believed the best use of the internet was to look up facts, not fiction. Facts belong in a database or they are hard to find. The degree of difficulty between placing fact and fiction on the internet is probably best revealed by the fact that the net is mostly fiction. Any foof out there can create fiction.
I put in another ten hours of study, likely because one way or the other, my time is going to get less available. There was an interesting documentary on China, featuring Wal-Mart. It went on about how 3% or so of the market could afford upscale products, and that was still so many hundred million people. The problem is that that 3% have utterly no compassion for the other 97% nor any reason to develop such concern. These people do not have a philosophy or religion that sanctifies helping your fellow man and once they adopt American business methods without American respect for human rights, look out.
You would have found me in the Ft. Lauderdale library all afternoon. They kicked one lady beside me off the terminal because she had looked up a book on a website instead of the index. She was sitting right next to me and the staff were over there within minutes. I told you, those busy looking people behind the counter are watching your screen, for those of you who thought I was imagining things. Ft. Lauderdale library are some of the worst abusers of privacy I’ve ever seen. They actually watch which aisles you walk down and have a code system of little head nods between themselves.
Thom at ABC is really keen on this ¾ way house. I asked him to find any written information that would give some idea of the operating expenses. The government pays $900 per person per month, two to a room. So a three bedroom place is $5,400 per month. I need to know exactly where the demarcation of responsibility is, both morally and legally. If I can invest say, $30,000 startup capital and I am not liable if some ex-con slashes his wrists or some granny won’t take her medicine, I will consider it. Don’t worry, I know that I could not distance my self from the entire operation, but I only want to deal with the numbers part. I want 20%, or $500 per month clear income.
Don’s theory is that the reason you need a Win 98 boot disk, but not a XP boot disk is because of the different FAT versions. I don’t understand it, but I think the theory is valid. This discussion resulted in our first original really super-geek computer word, created by us surrounding the merits of a larger than necessary active partition. He says make the partition three times larger than needed, I say a few megabytes over is lots. Anyway, you want the word we coined: “undefragmented”.
The 30 to 40 minute dead time during the install gave us time to go over our direction. My business philosophy stands firm, the purpose of investment is to earn a return, not to hire high-priced labor. Thus, whatever we do it must be something we can both put together and maintain on our own.
I looked keenly at the ways that ISPs do business and it does not look so great. Not only is there cutthroat competition, lots of the ‘services’ offered seem to be intentionally labor intensive. My suspicion is that most people who start an internet business don’t really know what they are getting into. One book stated that to get a ‘storefront’ on AOL, you fork over $125,000 plus 10% of the sales. I don’t know if I’d do that even if I had the money.
It is becoming a little more clear how the existing places do business. The whole structure is inefficient for what outwardly should be a model of streamlined computer efficiency. Not so, there is an expensive surprise awaiting you every step of the way, and often from people who know you’ve gone too far to back out. Many otherwise reputable sources fail to warn you about the gouging and nobody seems to list all the pitfalls. That form you pay somebody to put on your web page will not work unless you pay more to have it activated.
Our liveliest conversation was the printer database. Don is fascinated by the technology, but like a lot of people, only learned it well enough to pass an exam. This is not uncommon, I know many people who did fine with computer studies until they hit the part about relational database. They found it harder than matrix algebra. Part of the vagueness is, in my opinion, the result of not being able to physically see these relationships. I finally gave him a copy of the junction table. That may not have helped. Most people can see the one to many relationships between the manufacturer and the fact that each manufacturer produces both printers and cartridges. It is the connection between the two ‘many’ tables that loses them. How can 1900 printers and 800 cartridges have over 9,000 unique relationships?
He’ll get it once he uses it a few times. That always helps. He hasn’t learned to mentally separate the single occurrence of an item to the fact that a clone of that entity exists as many times as there are relationships in which it is an element. The books don’t help by stressing that each item only appears once, which is true. This is not to be confused with the fact that there can be many repeats of that item in a compound key. He was bowled over by the immensity of the junction table. I consoled him by pointing out most people haven’t a clue how this works.
The junction table is large. It is the table that represents the relationships in this database. One of the things I chose when I started was a database large enough to discourage any quick imitations. If you think people won’t steal a good idea and milk it, you’ve never heard of Bill Gates. You may think the reason he dropped out of college is because his marks were so high the professors could not grade his exam answers, but I think otherwise (that he was kicked out, I mean, notice that they won’t even tell you what courses he was taking). Alas, I have no such wealthy and influential family with the connections to bail me out and everything I have of value was earned in my own lifetime. There is nothing wrong with healthy peasant stock as long as you aren’t one of them.
I showed him the source documents (catalogs from office supply joints, which are getting pretty chewed up by now). Like myself, Don likes to be shown the intermediate steps. One process that really impressed him was the speed and accuracy with which the database could find errors in the originals. He was amused that the database is so accurate that I never bother to go back and edit the sources. It is easier to flag the error and carry on, an error is only another piece of information. Equally, he was captivated by the (almost continual) process of sorting for duplicates, but that is so undemanding a better explanation may be he has just never seen it done before.
Nightie-night. It was another 20 hour day.
