Daynote ,Svenson

MM-cxviii     Thursday

2000-04-27

After some rain at night we get basically the same weather as yesterday, with the same temperatures.

Working (well mostly talking but that is how it goes) on the performance problem in TeleSales. A first try, replacing the 'buffercopy' with 'assign' statements doesn't produce a consistent improvement. Our next try is much more involved, a database change always is, and will take a lot more work.

The Micro Payments topic landed with a thud on the back-channel and the dust takes a lot of time to settle.
(Check Chris and Bob and the others of the The Gang )
One thing not (<yet>) mentioned is taxation. Governments like to put taxes on anything (bet you didn't know that :-( ) as long as the payment is between two non commercial (that is VAT-registered) parties this is a problem. Not worth tackling for small amounts any way. If however the payments are logged at a third party and the total volume gets big enough things become different. You can bet on it that government will take a good, hard look at it (throwing a fair number of bureaucrats at it). Yea, millicent with micro-tax.
And few people would notice it at first. Say you view 30 pages a day (just read all the daynotes and you add up to about 30) at 0.1 $cent per page and you take the Belgian Tax rates (21%) you end up paying 3.6$cent. Hardly noticeable. At the end of the year you have paid 109.5$ to the daynoters and 23 $ to the government (but then to which government?).
(The 109.5$ is of course income for the daynoters and that is taxed as well but this enters a different discussion. )

And extra thought : how do web-crawlers and search engines handle Millicent?

What would Millicent bring in for me?

I just checked my stats (3rd or 4th time ever). Last month I got 2289 page-view hits, 25% of this were the redirection pages which I think should not be millicent-ed, leaving 1716 hits. So I would net about $17 per month from which I would have to subtract the handling costs (unless the Millicent service is free). Of course if millicent chases away visitors things look different.