32-Bit PowerPC Mac OS X Tiger Macintoshes are still in quite common use. My Mom has a G4 iMac, her sister has a G3 iBook. They are both in mint condition; neither has any reason at all to purchase new hardware.
Imagine my great surprise when early this morning I discovered that "Reset Safari" does NOT delete the cookies for the Safari 3.1.1 that's on Mom's 10.4.11 iMac.
That's a potential online banking and credit card number theft exploit.
The author's thesis was quite intuitively illustrated by the Google AdSense "Heat Map", which depicted a schematic of your typical web page, with a header, navigation bars down both sides, a footer, and some blocks where the content lay.
Heeding the advice of the Heatmap by placing one's Ad Units in the "Hot Spots" on one's old pages quite commonly doubled one's monthly revenue.
However the last time I went to look for it at Google's AdSense support site I could not find it. I don't know whether they moved it or took it down.
For your own purposes, try placing important links at different places on your pages, leave them there for a week - as the traffic to most sites tends to be cyclical with a one-week period - then analyze your web server logs so as to determine how many internal referrals to other pages on your own site resulted from each link.
I analyze my own logs with Analog (http://analog.cx/) which is powerful and configurable but has a steep learning curve. If you don't have the headspace to Read The Fine Manual, there are many fine competitors readily available.
Each subsequent week, move each of those experimental links to a distinctly different place on your pages.
Upon finding the most-effective placement for each link, put all the links in their best places, then try altering their presentation: text color, typeface size and style, backround color and the like.
Once you've found the best combination of everything, you will be in a good position to earn some coin via PPC ads.
I myself for three solid years earned $3,500.00 per month on the average, $5,000.00 for two different months, with just two Ad Units on just one single quite lengthy, well-researched piece on copyright law:
Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
Among the reasons I work as a coder rather than a Physicist is that coding accomodates my Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder in a way that Academia does not.
Whenever I go back to school I always end up spending a lot of time in nuthouses.
I wrote this particular piece in a locked Psychiatric Inpatient Unit at Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland. While we were not permitted our power cords, the nurses were happy to juice our devices behind the nurse's station.
Stanford Medical Center even has complementary wireless for the patients.
However I was not permitted even my iPhone at Western State Hospital in Lakewood, Washington, not because it was regarded as dangerous, but because the staff did not want to have to pay for replacement of repair if my devices were stolen or damaged. That actually happened once, as they did at one time allow patients to possess computers in the locked wards.
So I continued working on Warp Life, my iOS App, by writing out its source code by hand, on paper with a pencil.
Back in the day, that was the only way one COULD write software, as keypunch machines and their operators were expensive, precious resources.
All the "borkers" (a derogatory term for "brokers", ie. headhunters, recruiters) tell me I'm worth $65.00 working W-2 through a "Body Shop" (staffing agency), in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area.
I'm presently working remotely, for the most part from Starbucks and Burgerville in Salmon Creek, Washington for quite a lot less than that.
This because I really DO NOT require $65.00 per hour to be happy as a clam.
The borkers all quite suddenly, as well as quite unanimously urged me to increase my rate from $50.00 to $65.00 at the exact same time!
I expect that word got out among them that they were successful in placing similarly-experienced peers of mine for $65.00, which meant that the borkers could obtain ($65.00 - $50.00)/ $50.00 = 30% more commission almost overnight, were it not that I think borkers are the Spawn of Satan.
$65/hour is awfully low if you are paying pay roll taxes, funding your own retirement, and buying your own medical insurance, not to mention vacation and other benefits that you are forgoing as an indie.
That's what I was told was - nine months ago - the going rate for W-2 Senior Software Engineers in Portland and Seattle.
I expect it's a lot more than that in The Valley, and may be a lot more than that now, here in Portland.
However I don't actually require anywhere near $65.00 to be happy.
The borkers wanted me to require $65.00 to accept a gig so THEY would be happy, not I.
All I really require to be happy, is enough cash for WiFi, a single room in a shared house, bus and train tickets about three to four days per week, decent grub and other sundry expenses.
I used to make $120.00 shortly before the Dot-Com crash hit, but that was one of the most horribly depressing experienes of my entire life.
I'd rather make quite a lot less than what I am worth, as I'm rather happy only charging what I actually require for happiness.
If not money, you should get something else out of your job...easier, flexibility, good cause...maybe a non profit...but just doing charity for a company is very odd. You should realize your value even if that doesn't involve money. You might be happy as a phd student, pay is similar, you get to do alot for yourself.
Actually I would far rather be a Physics PhD, but academia does not accomodate my mental illness of Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder in the way self-employed Software Consulting does:
I regard the Computer Industry as much the same kind of Den of Iniquity as Iesu regarded the Money Changer-Infested Temple.
Really I would rather have nothing to do with computers but I must pay the rent somehow.
All I ever wanted was to create something of real lasting value that I would leave behind after I'm gone.
When I attended the Portland Startup Weekend a couple years ago, some Cute Young Thang pitched an iOS App that would help her make new friends by hooking up with nearby strangers who were running that same App.
I can really see how a sexual predator would really get into that.
Some other guy pitched an App that would help him try out new kinds of beer.
I was at the time easily twice the age of everyone else in attendance, even the Startup Weekend Staff. They were all wearing blue jeans, t-shirts and sneakers, I was wearing a medium grey pinstripe suite, a pale blue polka-dot tie and black leather dress shoes.
I was very tired as I had not slept in days so I was unable to give my full pitch as I had rehearsed it, but more or less:
"Why are you even in this business? What are you going to leave behind for your loved ones when you're gone?"
"Will any of the code you write this weekend still be in use ten thousand years from now?"
I pitched my proposal for an automated free website critique tool, that enable most web designers to fix the most common mistakes, but meant to make some coin through paid, more in-depth critiques as well as web design, website operation and SEO consulting.
I have known very well that I have been in the wrong line of work for over twenty years yet I cannot seem to find my way out.
I may know how to get out of coding now though but it remains to be seen.
azakia, a Flash App once requested my permission to turn on my Mac's built-in video camera and microphone.
Funny how I was just then commanded by G-d Almighty Himself to unstall my Flash plugin.
While Flash does require permission to enable video and sound input, I am dead certain that someone with a clue could find a way to do so without actually asking permission.
It's not like those who like to hang at Websites of Ill Repute are diligent about keeping their patches up-to-date.
If you have any additions, comments or corrections please mail them to mdcrawford@gmail.com
If you have a LOT of additions, please permit me to send you an OpenOffice spreadsheet that I've already set up.
I will of course put this all into PostgreSQL but I have never designed a database schema in all of my days, so I've been working out the schema design in my spreadsheet.
While I have managed to come up with several ways to automate most of this, I have as yet been doing all the research and HTML markup completely by hand. While pleasant work, it is quite tedious and time consuming.
As a result I haven't been getting a whole lot of sleep lately.
I also have pages with actual payloads for Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, Washington and Santa Cruz, California.
My original research technique is lucidly explained in the Santa Cruz page but does not work at all anymore, as hardly anyone ever puts their street address on their business websites!
Over the weekend or so I'll start coding up a Bot that does most of the heavy lifting for me but even so it won't be foolproof I will have to clean up the data quite a bit by hand.
In the long run I will permit anonymous visitors to suggest new entries with the aid of a Captcha as well as manual moderation.
I contemplated allowing each individual employer to register so they could maintain their own entries but in the end decided against it, in part because I'm not really a web developer, and in part to keep a lid on spam.
I have posted about 28 links on my Seattle page, but I have about 120 more in an OpenOffice spreadsheet. However I haven't been getting much sleep at all the least three weeks to I better get some Zs before my eyeballs both start bleeding.
I have a total of 27 separate OOo Calc documents, one for each of the countries I've researched so far. My United States spreadsheet is the most extensive, with a couple dozen states and a couple dozen cities. My Canada spreadsheet has most but not all of the provinces, and most but again not all of the larger cities in the provinces I do have.
I decided the other day to give our friends in Ukraine a leg up, as I know very well that they're heavily into software development, but could only find just one employer, in Kiev. However I have some connections so I will track them all down Real Soon Now.
Please understand that much of my Global Computer Employer Index site consists of mere placeholder pages, so I could work out the overall web design, the directory and document heirarchies, the navigation and the user interface.
I think I've finally got a handle on that, and just now uploaded a new revision, which has quite a lot of work on the navigation, eight or so new countries, many new cities and a few new US states.
I added placeholders for a dozen or so cities in Los Angeles County, as I asked my friend Sari Gennis, a really high-end animator - she was the Art Director for FernGully - to pass my LA County page's link around among her colleagues. I wanted them to see that there really would be something there.
I've had my Santa Cruz County, California page online since 1997, when my former employer Live Picture announced it was moving from scenic, pristine Scotts Valley to San Jose. For most of us LP employees that would mean a treacherous, potentially deadly commute over the Santa Cruz Mountains via Highway 17, so I developed my first software employer research techniques, threw the page up on my site, then quietly passed the link around among my coworkers.
This had the eventual result that some complete stranger emailed to inquire as to my favorite restaurant, then a few days later I received a $100.00 gift certificate, as I had enabled him to find a new coding job!
tl;dr: Forensic Accounting is the way the Feds busted Al Capone for tax evasion; they never did pin a murder rap on him.
Even if no one is cooking the books a shop like Mt. Gox needs Forensic Accountants anyway, because someone could always have made an honest mistake.
I myself Found Religion the day I decided I'd grown weary of a ten-cent error in my quickbooks. I required eighteen hours to clue in to that it was two separate errors that totalled ten cents, as well as to locate the actual errors.
(Now I use GnuCash. There's a damn good reason for double-entry accounting; GnuCash uses it but Quicken and QuickBooks do not!)
Off By One?
Storing a long result into a short?
Even so, a Forensic Accountant would have caught the problem well over a year ago.