Skype Prime echoes the End of Civilization

OK, maybe it won't be as popular as I'm making it out to be. Maybe this is actually how business is done already. Maybe I like to beat a dead horse, did you ever think of that? Huh? OK, so here's my business model, plain and simple for all to see. Skype knows all about this, and they seem to think it's a good enough idea to incorporate this into their internet telephone product.

Edited transcript from the Board Meeting follows, I tend to run all of my ideas by Joe whenever I feel like talking and he's got time to listen. Here goes:

[7:27:43 PM] Yebyen says: Skype Prime Beta
[7:27:45 PM] Yebyen says: did you know about this
[7:45:28 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: Prime seems way useful for making dough.
[7:46:03 PM] Yebyen says: The money goes to Paypal, 15% VAT if you are living in EU
[7:46:40 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: paid debian support?
[7:47:02 PM] Yebyen says: i was just thinking (been meditating for weeks actually) about your distaste for metrics and performance standards as arbitrary
[7:47:46 PM] Yebyen says: and been thinking and it's a pretty big hangup for me, thinking I shouldn't be paid a rate unless I'm providing that much value, nearly impossible standard to meet for me today
[7:47:55 PM] Yebyen says: and even harder to prove
[7:48:13 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: I no longer believe they are arbitrary. Now I think they are there to reinforce the arbitrary dominance of the small group of capitalist elites and the technocrats that enable them to dominate the rest of us.
[7:48:26 PM] Yebyen says: right
[7:48:54 PM] Yebyen says: well i think there are not actually a small group of technocratic capitalist elites
[7:49:11 PM] Yebyen says: but actually an enormous unmanageable oligarchy-like system
[7:49:39 PM] Yebyen says: and as you convince a single person from a group to give you money, and he's happy about it, he tells his friends and you are suddenly overwhelmed with more work than you can handle
[7:49:51 PM] Yebyen says: or he tries to manage you, and you are suddenly subject to his tax
[7:49:55 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: we'll there are two groups. a tiny group of large-scale capitalist and a larger group (bout 20 percent of population) of technocrats and bureaucrats that run society and make decisions
[7:50:10 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: on behalf of the tiny owning class, but with their own interests in mind
[7:50:16 PM] Yebyen says: that makes sense
[7:50:23 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: some of which might be noble, others might be not
[7:50:39 PM] Yebyen says: i was listening this video at work
[7:50:43 PM] Yebyen says: about 1:20 long
[7:51:32 PM] Yebyen says: here's the link, if you ever want to break your head this did it for me
[7:53:07 PM] Yebyen says: Building Gods
[7:53:20 PM] Yebyen says: talks about the artilects and the terrans
[7:53:42 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: scientology?
[7:53:58 PM] Yebyen says: and the terrans are the ones who believe that any technology advancements are extremely dangerous, likely to result in further enslavement of mankind by our mechanical overlords
[7:54:04 PM] Yebyen says: are those terms from scientology?
[7:54:27 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: nope, but they sound like they could be :)
[7:54:39 PM] Yebyen says: and the other group, the ones who are content with building artilects, the cosmists
[7:55:26 PM] Yebyen says: go on building artilects for the betterment of their selves and their fellow man, whether causing irreparable damages or not
[7:56:01 PM] Yebyen says: the artilect is supposed to be the intelligent computer, the one that can be self-replicating and self-improving with unbounded limits
[7:56:40 PM] Yebyen says: but presumably still improved by interaction with and development from humans... otherwise they would surely destroy us or leave the planet

... and after a brief intermission, when I emptied the washing machine into the dryer...

[8:11:40 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: we do code reviews with every commit. I'm really liking it
[8:11:56 PM] Yebyen says: i do that too, they're called commit messages :D
[8:12:09 PM] Yebyen says: the trick is getting people to read them, which is what I assume you mean
[8:20:10 PM] Yebyen says: we've got this guy David who reminds me of Brock
[8:20:24 PM] Yebyen says: lots of energy, always something to contribute
[8:20:58 PM] Yebyen says: he's the guy I met randomly on my first day who I e-mailed then he proceeded to send me a 3 page essay full of useful information
[8:21:08 PM] Yebyen says: written on the spot, from the hip
[8:21:21 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: about how the company works?
[8:21:32 PM] Yebyen says: about libraries and code I might be interested in
[8:21:46 PM] Yebyen says: i have no idea how the company works, other than one or two products pay for the operation of the whole company
[8:22:26 PM] Yebyen says: then later I found out that he's actually the one in charge of staking out the new co-ops and it was no accident I met him on my first day!
[8:22:36 PM] Yebyen says: whether he put himself in that position or was appointed, hard to say
[8:22:50 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: how many coops do they have?
[8:23:08 PM] Yebyen says: a boat load, there are at least 10 who I have encountered with regularity in the lunchroom
[8:23:20 PM] Yebyen says: three of us just in my area
[8:23:42 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: do you get company lunches? do they pay for the time when you take lunch?
[8:23:59 PM] Yebyen says: we're all encouraged to take a 1 hour unpaid lunch
[8:24:14 PM] Yebyen says: and we all pay, prices are reasonable and cheaper than most restaurants nearby
[8:24:36 PM] Yebyen says: but we're right near main street and broad, exchange, ford street area
[8:24:47 PM] Yebyen says: which means we have access to nick tahou's and a lot of good restaurants
[8:24:48 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: sounds pretty decent. I take 30 minutes unpaid lunch usually because I want to get home earlier
[8:24:57 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: cool :)
[8:25:05 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: have you been going to the real nick tahous for lunch?
[8:25:19 PM] Yebyen says: for lunch, god no, only twice since I've been there
[8:25:33 PM] Yebyen says: but to pick up a plate from nicks ON THE WAY home is amazing
[8:25:52 PM] Yebyen says: 1 hour lunch is good if you can maintain it, without that it's hard to get to know your co-workers in this atmosphere
[8:26:12 PM] Yebyen says: if you want to maintain a separation between work and play, you want to be talking about work when you're on paid time
[8:26:29 PM] Yebyen says: or not talking, just coding... and when you're on lunch, you want to be doing anything else
[8:26:49 PM] Yebyen says: unless David cons you into a chat about something work related, has happened a couple of times and usually worthwhile
[8:27:12 PM] Yebyen says: speaking of which
[8:27:18 PM] Yebyen says: yoga, web design, bed for me

... then, after only a few seconds, I manage to spend the next half hour sitting in front of the computer in spite of my better judgment, talking about the fleecing of my customers as if they're never going to read this!

[8:27:45 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: got logged off by skype install. I want to check out Prime
[8:28:01 PM] Yebyen says: i'm not paying for this chat
[8:28:09 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: :D
[8:28:15 PM] Yebyen says: but the next one we could think about it
[8:28:23 PM] Yebyen says: my business model right now is very interesting
[8:29:20 PM] Yebyen says: i set an hourly rate (usually exhorbitant), i fudge the hours to make the pricing reasonable once the job is nearing completion, and my clients tend to tell me when the sale is made, by writing out a check
[8:29:40 PM] Yebyen says: afraid i'm going to have to start printing invoices soon though, that's an awful lot to manage
[8:32:14 PM] Yebyen says: i say exhorbitant, but the rate Lomax quoted is twice that
[8:37:49 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: I'm having trouble finding people who do paid phone support on skype.
[8:46:34 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: do you think something like rentacoder (for phone support on god knows what - maybe gardening?) could be made utilizing skype Prime?
[8:52:11 PM] Yebyen says: i think paypal is kind of expensive, but certainly not much more expensive than accepting a credit card for business
[8:52:22 PM] Yebyen says: skype prime is per-minute fees
[8:52:36 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: or per-call
[8:52:58 PM] Yebyen says: still, i think you're unlikely to find coders charging a rate per-minute for consultations
[8:53:06 PM] Yebyen says: or anything but per-project or stipend-style funding
[8:53:31 PM] Yebyen says: "we'll pay you x dollars weekly while you code this for us"
[8:53:33 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: Well, like a per-call for some single tech problem
[8:53:43 PM] Yebyen says: project accounting is sooo difficult
[8:53:44 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: like help with apache
[8:53:52 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: setting up and etc
[8:53:59 PM] Yebyen says: i could be Apache support on skype
[8:54:12 PM] Yebyen says: problem is there's already good free support in the form of forums
[8:54:36 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: the customer would post a request on rentsupport.com and he'd get offers from programmers
[8:54:40 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: or techies
[8:54:48 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: and then they'll arrange the time of call and the charge
[8:55:18 PM] Yebyen says: very hard to have a person who is going to ask a pointed question in the room with a person who is going to deliver a quick and easy answer, and know exactly which one should be paying the other
[8:55:18 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: or the site would arrange that. the customer and the techie would agree on what each wants
[8:55:52 PM] Yebyen says: i would do freelance apache admin for so long and eventually somebody comes along says "hey i want you on my staff"
[8:56:23 PM] Yebyen says: how does that conversation end... "come work for me, train the rest of my staff to do what you do, and we'll make a killing"
[8:56:29 PM] Yebyen says: only then you're breeding competition
[8:56:35 PM] Yebyen says: that's why you move to alaska before you start any of this
[8:56:37 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: that's a good point. I'm not sure what kind of services there'd be exactly though

... and here, I actually threaten to send a bill! this is where the conversation dwindles.

[8:57:10 PM] Yebyen says: consultation
[8:57:40 PM] Yebyen says: you spend 5 minutes explaining what it is you want to do, i spend 5 minutes telling you about the best deployment of whatever it is you want that I've ever seen before, and some features I know about that I've never seen used in something like that
[8:57:49 PM] Yebyen says: you write a check, and I send you on your way
[8:58:42 PM] Yebyen says: or, you say "ok, lets build it, this is how much of my budget/equity I'm willing to fork over based on my gauge of your competence and value to the project"
[8:59:17 PM] Yebyen says: all of this is dependent on an established credit as a valuable consultant for [foo]
[8:59:28 PM] Yebyen says: here comes openid and jyte
[8:59:34 PM] Yebyen says: now, where's my check?
[9:00:46 PM] Yebyen says: i wonder if it's possible to pass out tokens allowing a person to validate your openid
[9:00:48 PM] Yebyen says: rather than a webserver
[9:02:22 PM] Yebyen says: probably no point in that, you write your own knowledge base and at that point they have to log into your website and they have a thousand other ways to authenticate you
[9:02:30 PM] Yebyen says: and you can bill them however you like

Sharing Bandwidth and Disk

Bandwidth and Disk are interrelated just as money and time, but this doesn't mean it behooves anyone to meter it and charge extra for heavy use. Extra value is sometimes a product of sharing, and as you will recall sharing is caring!

I once discovered software for digital media transcription (read: backup), and the peasents rejoiced as they were enlightened. A copy house is like a data warehouse; duplicates of written or copy material are produced, that's copy that's sometimes written on CD and Disk media. Optical media can be reverse-mastered into an image which can be loaded from disk and accessed directly or copied to produce a duplicate of the original media. Files and disks can be shared as well as copied, and so can compressed files.

Network disk can be used to share files within a group; issues sometimes arise when clients and servers part ways, and revision control like Subversion helps determine original authorship. A server maintains a catalog of changes made by users who collaboratively administer a file space. Commits that derive from outside sources should provide citations. New and unique information is sometimes produced, and new ideas are dated in case of patent litigation.

This is all of the software you need to be a producer of media content on a desert island; that and an internet connection. Ideally we have a more elegant system for generating income from distribution than sending out messages stuffed into plastic bottles and hoping that they return filled with gold doubloons... still we might be surprised just how often this works!

Morning Activities

Today, yoga and the mac. I can sacrifice my second monitor from the office, it's kind of fuzzy anyway and would make a much better TV in the main room.

Lets see if I can hook up the cable modem via USB to the mac, and set it up as a router... yeah, on second thought lets not do that. It could be a good idea. But then I might still might need to hook up another hub or router in lieu of just the Airport Express.

We're going to need a hub one way or another, unless I get another Mac Mini or hook it up with wireless. I do have that spare wireless card at Tuesday Studios...

Next option for something to do is to move Blackruby to the home office, and made it into a server/router combination. I want to make one machine responsible for the VPN, so the rest can just auto configure by means of DHCP and be "on the network" as if connected directly to the main office LAN. The future is hazy with regard to how this is actually going to fall together.

Current location: Home Office
Next stop: Tuesday Studios Main Office

Outbox:

• Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop LiveCD

Inbox:

• Wireless MiniPCI Dell TrueMobile 1150
• 2 More Monitors (from Warsaw: for BlackRuby Primary Head, Notebah x2 Heads)
• Internet Stealing Device (from Waterloo)
• VPN Link (from Home to Tuesday)


• Secure Remote Access

That is all, until later.