Category Archives: Business

Freedom in the modern age.

Business, concepts, Government, Inspiration, The World, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Well I have never talked on here about entertainment before but here is one that is good.  If you do or do not know there was a show called Jericho.  Last night was the last episode of it.  It was a really great, well written show.  It lost some people because for a while it went a bit slow, and most shows with arc don’t last once you miss a episode or too and the network changed it’s time slot at a very critical time in the development of the show.  (Arc is when a show is a story from one episode to the next so you have to watch them in order to understand fully what is going on.)  Basically they did not give it the chance they should have and it failed.   It was canceled after the first season, but the largest fan outcry in TV history made them bring it back.  They did so with little advertising and fanfare, and had a second season of only 7 episodes that mostly concluded the entire story.

The reason this show was special is because it touched on subject that are almost never talked about on TV in this way.  Maybe it made some of the corporate people unhappy with the direction it was going.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A SPOILER.

Basically the story goes like this.  There are bombs that go off and destroy the 23 largest cities in the US except New York.  Communication and power stop.  Food runs out and people in rural Kansas start fighting to survive.  Well equipped mercenaries raid towns and take all the resources and kill many people.  At some point a goverment is put in place.  The old US has the east, TX is independent and the west forms a new nation.  The nation formed in the west is totally controled and financed by a huge mega corporation, the same one that ran the war in Iraq for the US and hired all the mercanires that the US used worldwide before the attack.  The corporation quickly takes part of everything.  They take away freedom, they surround each town with checkpoints so that only products that say can get in or out.  They rush a new constitution that takes away all the power of the people and gives it to the corporation.  Everything is unfair but they have all the resources and power.  Soon the people start to revolt, and by the end of the show all the viewers are calling for revolution.  The last episode is the start of this revolution with Texas shooting down airplanes from this new western nation.

Much of the show focused on the trap of giving corporations too much control of the government, which in turn takes rights away from the people.  This is something that is happening right now in the United States.  There are so many ways that our freedom has been taken.  The government is fairly corrupt.  They spend way too much, and take way too much.  They also spend so much more than they take in.   Who said the federal goverment should secure travel?  Who said they should put so much control on what we eat?  Who said that the government should run the school system in such a poor way?  We tax people so unevenly but yet the government mails out billions of dollars in checks.  The show Jericho showed how this line of thinking will only result in loss of freedom, and at some point the people will revolt.

If you told anyone 20 years ago the things that are going on in this nation right now they would have said you are crazy, that could never happen.  That is way overstepping the role of government.  I guess they are doing it just slow enough that most people don’t notice.   The education system has failed the public by creating the dumbest population this nation has ever had.

People in our nation now expect to carry ID everywhere, go through government checkpoints to travel.  It took me over a year to have our federal government allow my wife to enter the nation, they have no right to say who I can and can’t marry.  People expect to give a personal ID number every time they talk business on the phone.  People expect their information, privacy, and rights to be disrespected.   Most of them are so miseducated that they simply believe what they are told by the media, they have no idea how to think for themselves.

If it goes much farther down this path I will really start to fear for the future success of my country, the United States of America.  Most of the nation and the decisions are totally out of the control of the people, and most of the people disagree with many of the decisions.  Most people think we are not to be the world police, they think we spend way too much and should not carry debt.  Everyone I know thinks the tax system is crazy and needs to be replaced, but yet every year it gets more complex.  When will the craziness end.   Maybe only with revolution.

Cheer up, the nation depends on it.

Business, Inspiration, Investment, Money, , , ,

We are not really in a recession or a depression…  What we are in is a crisis of consumer confidence.   Let me explain, when people think that things may be bad they stop spending and that thinking CAUSES things to be bad.  It is funny, over 70% of the people think the economy is in trouble but also over 70% of people said that they personally were doing as good or better than 2 years ago.

The reason they think this way is because they hear the stories from the media, the hear what is going on with their unlucky friends, and the belive the hype.  In reality most every measure of corporate profits is UP, and many other measures are also up.  The GDP will be up this year, exports are way up.  Things are looking up in many ways, so stop being so down, tune out the negative media and cheer up.  When you do this everything will get better, spending will go up, sales will go up and, yes, even housing prices will go up again.

Start today, go buy something.  If you are one of the 70% that are doing fine, then do your civic duty and shop, shop like you did two years ago.  If you want a computer go to Emerald Computers this month and get $50 off by using coupon code march50.

Anyway cheer up.  It will make you feel better, and help our economy grow.

The key to commercial success for Linux

Business, concepts, Investment, Marketing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

You use a computer, and read blogs so you probably know a bit about computer and you probably know about Linux. Linux is great, robust and free OS. It runs almost all web servers and websites. Including google, wordpress and billions of others. Linux is very secure, robust, fast and hack proof. It makes great servers because servers are ran by experts. Without Linux the web would not exist as we know it.

Well for over a decade now they have been trying to make it popular for your desktop computer that you use every day as well. One of the best parts about Linux is that anyone with knowledge is free to change and customize it exactly how they see fit, and they have. Almost everything in Linux has at least 3 different programs that do the same thing, but they do it in different ways. People then pick and choose the different parts of Linux and combine them into a complete Operating System. They call this a distribution or distro. There are now 100’s of up to date distros, all with different ways of doing things and different followings. This has helped Linux in the past but in the world of mass merchandising it also has hurt Linux.

The problem is that when a company writes software to work on Linux they must assume things about how the computer is set up. Because there are 100’s of different ways to do this, and only a few million Linux users, they simply don’t bother. Companies that make drivers and hardware also don’t bother. The Linux people thus have to do all of it themselves. And, if they do it for one distro of Linux it probably will not work on many others. So the game makers, and the people who make the huge programs we need to function usually don’t bother making a Linux version. There is no Photoshop, QuickBooks, MSN or Yahoo chat with webcam, or robust video editing software in Linux because these are very complex and would usually be distro specific, and the userbase does not justify the cost.

The strength of Microsoft Windows was the fact that it was closed and controlled. People could not change the OS, all the rules from computer to computer were exactly the same. Because of this people could code for just ONE OS, that they knew would be supported and work for at least a decade. This is exactly what they did, 1000’s of companies started writing. Hardware makers could design one driver to work with the OS and everything was easy, because it was a standard platform, that was predictable. Windows was not the coolest, and it sure was not the most secure or robust, and they charged a huge price for it, but all of this was worth it because it was STANDARD. Nothing is more important than something being standard when it comes to business, and all the geeks need to learn this. McDonalds does not made the best burgers, but I have ate them in 5 different nations and they are all the same. When it is the same it is predictable, and you need that to get investors and make money flow. This is the main reason the Linux world still has less than 1% of desktop computers.

So now what? Well in a dream world someone with great power and clout would take all the best parts of Linux, get a ton of people behind him and release the ultimate distro of Linux. He would promise to not change it for at least 6 months and also promise that anything written for it will work for years on the newer versions. By creating a standard and unifying the Linux world programmers would start making software work on Linux and soon it would gain marketshare. It will be better and be free than windows, and soon takeover the world from the grasp of Microsoft.

Someone else, a tech billionaire named Mark Shuttleworth thought EXACTLY the same way, and he used his power and clout to do it. He calls it Ubuntu. He only release every 6 months, and he has static versions that are supported for two years or more. He then went much farther, he made a community around it. They have great free tech support with forums and chat. As well has many other great features and designs.  My good friend Matthew Helmke is one of the leading Ubuntu experts and forum leaders and inspired me to try it out.

This OS has the chance to become huge. For over a year now Linux has been the top distro, and it growing faster than the rest of the Linux world put together. The standard it presents has already encouraged many companies to start writing software for Linux. Many large games are not tested on Ubuntu. If you use Linux, switch to Ubuntu, for the sake of the Linux world. Raising a unified standard is the only hope that Linux has at commercial success.

I hope this explanation of a very tech thing from a business perspective educated both the techs and the business people who usually don’t understand each other.

I will offer much more of this sort of knowledge in the future so be sure to subscribe to this blog!.

Jason Dragon.