People still believe that.
Today I hopefully saved a guy $160. His college-age kid was at the register at the local OfficeMax about to by Windows Office Student Edition. The cashier said "$160". The dad said "WHAT?" (Yes, he shouted.)
I explained to both that they should try OpenOffice.org. And why. They were both rather incredulous that free software was office. I brought up the site on my phone to show them. They were still incredulous. The dad even asked me if the site would still be there when they got home. Really.
But when I explained that they could always try it and if it didn't work they could come back to the store later and pay $160, but it was worth trying to save.
They left before I did, without buying it, so I think Open Source may stand a chance in that family.
Allegedly Verizon turned Jobs down without even listening to his pitch, a decision they may well regret now that they are hemorrhaging customers.
Anyone remember when the IBM folk came frst to CP/M developer Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc.? He was out for the day, so they left, and went to visit Bill Gates.
Bill became (for a while) the richest man on earth, and Kildall died after a fight in a Monterey, Calif., restaurant.
The interesting Wikipedia article found here gives a slightly sanitized version of the story; it seems there's nowhere to get attributions of any of the juicy details.
It doesn't cost them anything. It shows up as a one year registration but they have five days to "return" it. And since they don't have to pay until the five days are over it's no money out of pocket at all.
If you're in the webhosting business (I am) you'll pay about the same per month for a RHEL license as you will for a Microsoft Windows Web Server edition 2008.
Is this a gutshot reaction or something? Seriously, I don't see what the problem with this is. They're not planning to put up pictures of recently released criminals. They're not planning to put up pictures of sex offenders in your neighborhood. They're not planning to put up pictures telling you to vote Republican. This is to be used same way as America's Most Wanted and backs of milk cartons. At least for now. If that changes, then start complaining.
Give 'em time, they'll do all of those things. They'll take one small step at a time. If you wait for it to happen before you complain it'll be way too late.
Back in the early days of the first TRS-80, my company Practical Applications, now out of business for many many years, issued a music program for the Radio Shack TRS-80. It relied on the non-shielding employed (or should that be the shielding not employed on that early personal computer, and we offered both a musical keyboard and also some available music.
The sound came from the speaker of any nearby AM-band radio.
All the newspapers have to do is give me chance to read them online.
Not the way they (don't) do it now, forcing me to register and then tracking every story I read. In some cases not even publishing online until their print version hits the porches.
They could even charge me for the privilege, but there's no real need for them to do so, the newsprint on which they deliver their print versions, and delivery thereof, costs more than what they charge me, so they can certainly make enough money through advertising to cover the web-distribution model.
As long as they won't give me good timely delivery of news and features without invading my privacy, they can forget about my business.
Thanks for your info. I'm in the U.S. and I can only hope the situation is the same here. I must admit that channels 7.x are working fine today.
The in-attic antenna is UHF-VHF and it works extremely well for both analog transmissions, even though we're in an almost-fringe area. And all three networks (here, channels 2, 4, and 7) are on the same mountain top (it's not that tall a mountain though we call it one) and the antenna points toward that mountain. Other channels seem to work well, though many are in completely different directions. The "talk" in town is that the difference is power. Digital reception without cable was actually a surprise to me, since the salespeople at the "big-box" store where I bought the set tried hard to sell me cable (I cannot get a "dish" for satellite reception in my apartment complex), but it's so good except for channel 7 that I'm loathe to subscribe to cable and lose all the other great digital channels I'm getting.
I'm going to try the more expensive (hopefully better) amplifier from Radio Shack if the channel drops out again; if that doesn't help I'll reserve making a decision until analog completely goes away. At that point I may be so addictive to my range of digital channels over the air that I'll forget about cable.
Sort of, but not quite. The government and broadcasters aren't going to pay to upgrade anyone's home antenna but they are going to increase the power of the digital transmissions when the analogue ones have been turned off, so the problem will just go away.
The fear was that digital transmitters might have caused interference to the existing analogue service so they were all made low power, but with analogue gone that's no longer an issue.
Can you point to a site to confirm that? I'm currently having problems with only one channel, and I don't want to move to cable.
I'm in Riverside, Calif. I have TV outlets in the living room and every bedroom of my apartment; I can choose cable or attic-antenna, but it's one or the other for the entire apartment.
I get about 50 channels (lots of digital, and all the over-the-air HDTV, stations, except one) but the one I don't get is one I don't want to lose when the US goes all digital. The local ABC affiliate's digital stations are often dark. If I switch to cable I lose most of the PBS digital channels; I only get one from the local PBS station; now I have Los Angeles, Orange County, and Riverside/San Bernardino to choose from, and lots of channels from each.
I've just today tried the cheaper Radio Shack amp; it doesn't help. I'm going back for the expensive one tomorrow.
I loved it when Craig Dykstra defends a computer copy of the Dungeons and Dragons board game.
I wonder if the publishers of the board game ever paid TSR, the company losing money when people play the computer version instead of the original?
All of that said, I guess those software protection people are right; there are less and less versions of almost all commercial products. But wait, there are more and more versions of all the free software.
Back on topic, I sure wish my car had the same amount of automation as the Mars Rovers. I could just type in "work" to the GPS, the autopilot takes over, and I nap on the way there.
Did you read the article? If you had you would have known there's no automation at all; you must have been thinking of the TV show a year or two ago that showed a car that was supposed to be as intelligent as the Mars Rovers escape and started doing it's own thing.
After only one meeting with the Rover drivers, I still couldn't help but laugh out loud at what that car could do.
If you live alone you'll probably know where you left the missing remote. If you don't live alone there's always going to be missing remotes. Nice to only have one to look for.
You wrote: Oh and payroll is something you can't get wrong. Quite possibly more so then any other business function has to be right the first time. Fixing mistakes is hard and extreemly costly, and that is before any legal exposure is considered. You will also find your self working with the group of business people who are the least trusting, and first to loose confidence, for very good reasons.
There are already lots of legal ramifications. For example, if I'm a teacher who's been overpaid I'm going to get a W2 with the wrong information on it. Correcting it with the IRS is both expensive and time-consuming, and probably impossible to do if I don't give back any overpayments.. The only easy resolution is to pay the tax on the incorrect amount. After all, my deductions have already been withheld on it.
So what happens when I give the money back? I then have to file a corrected tax return, which if nothing else, is time consuming, expensive, and opens me to audit.
Perhaps I should just refuse to give the money back?
I'll be in court for the rest of my life fighting that one, and will eventually lose.
What happens if I get paid too little?
Since the state owes me the money and hasn't paid it, it's still been earned. I probably have to report it as income and pay taxes on it. If I haven't had enough withheld to cover the taxes I could be liable for fines.
What happens if I get paid much too little? Or nothing?
The school district has already said it's against the law for me to strike even if I haven't been paid, so I can't go there. I suppose I can take a second job so I can afford my living expenses. But that doesn't leave me enough time to spend with my family, so of course I'm going; to sue the district.
Not to mention underpayments to pension funds, vacation funds, etc.
And what happens to the district?
Every day they're breaking both civil and criminal laws requiring that payments be made for wages in a timely manner.
Those laws don't allow for mistakes in programs.
It's a mess. If I ran the teachers' union I'd call a strike. Who cares if it's illegal? Everything else in this mess is, too.
And the disclaimer:
They say it's working but I haven't tried it yet. I've got my own wireless and I've got a Sprint card. And I'm close to the University of California at Riverside, with thousands of students with open connections.
> I don't know how much novell charges for their Linux but
> its got to be less than $650 per seat.
It's us$50/seat/year starting at quantity one. Cheaper as you buy more. I went to a Novell presentation on Thursday at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel. They paid for breakfast and lunch and the $20 parking bill and gave out both SLED (desktop) and SLES (server), both Service Pack1, and both fully working with no expiration (but without updates).
And they showed a lot of neat stuff. They definitely know how to build buzz.
Reminded me of a similar meeting I went to back when Corel introduced their desktop Linux, also at a Los Angeles area hotel.
They showed us some neat stuff, and had a drawing. They gave away two copies of the product, and offered it to the rest of us at a discount.
They had maybe ten buyers, and the product soon failed.
And I can make one with no resistors, no microcontrollers, a core from a roll of toilet paper, some fine wire, a steel razor blade and a piece of the so-called lead (it's really graphite) from a #2 pencil.
I crossed paths with Michael many times, most recently at a resort in Southern California in the early 90s.
Earlier than that when I ran a TRS-80 software project at Programma International and we released a product named Pencil Point which added inline formatting (similar to what later became HTML) based on codes I'd used on earlier Alphatype and CompuGraphic typesetting systems.
Before then, Electric Pencil was strictly wysiwyg. I started development on Pencil Point before merging my Practical Applications company with Programma International, after meeting with Arthur Schawlow (yes, that Arthur Shawlow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schawlow) who was working towards getting Stanford University to switch from expensive Wang word processing systems to using the TRS-80 Model One with a hardware hack to enable lower case.
While that project never caught on (probably because of the required hardware hack), Shawlow was definitely ahead of his day, as was Michael Shrayer.
Michael was a cameraman (I don't remember whether for television or film) when he wrote Electric Pencil. Based on conversations with him, I believe he never really earned that much money from the project. I don't believe he was ever a millionaire.
Slashdot Mirror
People still believe that. Today I hopefully saved a guy $160. His college-age kid was at the register at the local OfficeMax about to by Windows Office Student Edition. The cashier said "$160". The dad said "WHAT?" (Yes, he shouted.)
I explained to both that they should try OpenOffice.org. And why. They were both rather incredulous that free software was office. I brought up the site on my phone to show them. They were still incredulous. The dad even asked me if the site would still be there when they got home. Really.
But when I explained that they could always try it and if it didn't work they could come back to the store later and pay $160, but it was worth trying to save.
They left before I did, without buying it, so I think Open Source may stand a chance in that family.
Allegedly Verizon turned Jobs down without even listening to his pitch, a decision they may well regret now that they are hemorrhaging customers.
Anyone remember when the IBM folk came frst to CP/M developer Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc.? He was out for the day, so they left, and went to visit Bill Gates.
Bill became (for a while) the richest man on earth, and Kildall died after a fight in a Monterey, Calif., restaurant.
The interesting Wikipedia article found here gives a slightly sanitized version of the story; it seems there's nowhere to get attributions of any of the juicy details.
It doesn't cost them anything. It shows up as a one year registration but they have five days to "return" it. And since they don't have to pay until the five days are over it's no money out of pocket at all.
If you're in the webhosting business (I am) you'll pay about the same per month for a RHEL license as you will for a Microsoft Windows Web Server edition 2008.
Of course I had to try it.
...
...
...
...
Here are the results...
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,500,000,000 for Google. (0.02 seconds)
Now that wasn't too bad, was it?
Is this a gutshot reaction or something? Seriously, I don't see what the problem with this is. They're not planning to put up pictures of recently released criminals. They're not planning to put up pictures of sex offenders in your neighborhood. They're not planning to put up pictures telling you to vote Republican. This is to be used same way as America's Most Wanted and backs of milk cartons. At least for now. If that changes, then start complaining.
Give 'em time, they'll do all of those things. They'll take one small step at a time. If you wait for it to happen before you complain it'll be way too late.
Back in the early days of the first TRS-80, my company Practical Applications, now out of business for many many years, issued a music program for the Radio Shack TRS-80. It relied on the non-shielding employed (or should that be the shielding not employed on that early personal computer, and we offered both a musical keyboard and also some available music.
The sound came from the speaker of any nearby AM-band radio.
All the newspapers have to do is give me chance to read them online.
Not the way they (don't) do it now, forcing me to register and then tracking every story I read. In some cases not even publishing online until their print version hits the porches.
They could even charge me for the privilege, but there's no real need for them to do so, the newsprint on which they deliver their print versions, and delivery thereof, costs more than what they charge me, so they can certainly make enough money through advertising to cover the web-distribution model.
As long as they won't give me good timely delivery of news and features without invading my privacy, they can forget about my business.
Thanks for your info. I'm in the U.S. and I can only hope the situation is the same here. I must admit that channels 7.x are working fine today.
The in-attic antenna is UHF-VHF and it works extremely well for both analog transmissions, even though we're in an almost-fringe area. And all three networks (here, channels 2, 4, and 7) are on the same mountain top (it's not that tall a mountain though we call it one) and the antenna points toward that mountain. Other channels seem to work well, though many are in completely different directions. The "talk" in town is that the difference is power. Digital reception without cable was actually a surprise to me, since the salespeople at the "big-box" store where I bought the set tried hard to sell me cable (I cannot get a "dish" for satellite reception in my apartment complex), but it's so good except for channel 7 that I'm loathe to subscribe to cable and lose all the other great digital channels I'm getting.
I'm going to try the more expensive (hopefully better) amplifier from Radio Shack if the channel drops out again; if that doesn't help I'll reserve making a decision until analog completely goes away. At that point I may be so addictive to my range of digital channels over the air that I'll forget about cable.
Again, thanks.
You wrote:
Sort of, but not quite. The government and broadcasters aren't going to pay to upgrade anyone's home antenna but they are going to increase the power of the digital transmissions when the analogue ones have been turned off, so the problem will just go away.The fear was that digital transmitters might have caused interference to the existing analogue service so they were all made low power, but with analogue gone that's no longer an issue.
Can you point to a site to confirm that? I'm currently having problems with only one channel, and I don't want to move to cable.
I'm in Riverside, Calif. I have TV outlets in the living room and every bedroom of my apartment; I can choose cable or attic-antenna, but it's one or the other for the entire apartment.
I get about 50 channels (lots of digital, and all the over-the-air HDTV, stations, except one) but the one I don't get is one I don't want to lose when the US goes all digital. The local ABC affiliate's digital stations are often dark. If I switch to cable I lose most of the PBS digital channels; I only get one from the local PBS station; now I have Los Angeles, Orange County, and Riverside/San Bernardino to choose from, and lots of channels from each.
I've just today tried the cheaper Radio Shack amp; it doesn't help. I'm going back for the expensive one tomorrow.
Jeff
I loved it when Craig Dykstra defends a computer copy of the Dungeons and Dragons board game.
I wonder if the publishers of the board game ever paid TSR, the company losing money when people play the computer version instead of the original?
All of that said, I guess those software protection people are right; there are less and less versions of almost all commercial products. But wait, there are more and more versions of all the free software.
Hmmmmm....
And a few days ago a big box store tried to cell me a cable for my new upconverting DVD player that was more expensive than the player.
These stores always make more on the accessories than they do on loss-leader item.
But what has any of this got to do with the OLPC system?
Did you read the article? If you had you would have known there's no automation at all; you must have been thinking of the TV show a year or two ago that showed a car that was supposed to be as intelligent as the Mars Rovers escape and started doing it's own thing.
After only one meeting with the Rover drivers, I still couldn't help but laugh out loud at what that car could do.
If you live alone you'll probably know where you left the missing remote. If you don't live alone there's always going to be missing remotes. Nice to only have one to look for.
Doing an nslookup on their name gives an IP#. Doing a whois on the IP# shows the IP# is owned by a company in Florida.
So should the studios involved use the DMCA to force the site to be shut down?
You wrote:
Oh and payroll is something you can't get wrong. Quite possibly more so then any other business function has to be right the first time. Fixing mistakes is hard and extreemly costly, and that is before any legal exposure is considered. You will also find your self working with the group of business people who are the least trusting, and first to loose confidence, for very good reasons.
There are already lots of legal ramifications. For example, if I'm a teacher who's been overpaid I'm going to get a W2 with the wrong information on it. Correcting it with the IRS is both expensive and time-consuming, and probably impossible to do if I don't give back any overpayments.. The only easy resolution is to pay the tax on the incorrect amount. After all, my deductions have already been withheld on it.
So what happens when I give the money back? I then have to file a corrected tax return, which if nothing else, is time consuming, expensive, and opens me to audit.
Perhaps I should just refuse to give the money back?
I'll be in court for the rest of my life fighting that one, and will eventually lose.
What happens if I get paid too little?
Since the state owes me the money and hasn't paid it, it's still been earned. I probably have to report it as income and pay taxes on it. If I haven't had enough withheld to cover the taxes I could be liable for fines.
What happens if I get paid much too little? Or nothing?
The school district has already said it's against the law for me to strike even if I haven't been paid, so I can't go there. I suppose I can take a second job so I can afford my living expenses. But that doesn't leave me enough time to spend with my family, so of course I'm going; to sue the district.
Not to mention underpayments to pension funds, vacation funds, etc.
And what happens to the district?
Every day they're breaking both civil and criminal laws requiring that payments be made for wages in a timely manner.
Those laws don't allow for mistakes in programs.
It's a mess. If I ran the teachers' union I'd call a strike. Who cares if it's illegal? Everything else in this mess is, too.
Two words:
Riverside, California.
And the obligatory link:
http://www.intomobile.com/2007/07/08/att-hooks-up-riverside-ca-with-free-municipal-wifi.html
And the disclaimer:
They say it's working but I haven't tried it yet. I've got my own wireless and I've got a Sprint card. And I'm close to the University of California at Riverside, with thousands of students with open connections.
Heck, there are eleven million Canadians in the Southern U.S. every winter.
> I don't know how much novell charges for their Linux but
> its got to be less than $650 per seat.
It's us$50/seat/year starting at quantity one. Cheaper as you buy more. I went to a Novell presentation on Thursday at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel. They paid for breakfast and lunch and the $20 parking bill and gave out both SLED (desktop) and SLES (server), both Service Pack1, and both fully working with no expiration (but without updates).
And they showed a lot of neat stuff. They definitely know how to build buzz.
Reminded me of a similar meeting I went to back when Corel introduced their desktop Linux, also at a Los Angeles area hotel.
They showed us some neat stuff, and had a drawing. They gave away two copies of the product, and offered it to the rest of us at a discount.
They had maybe ten buyers, and the product soon failed.
Lessons to be learned here?
And I can make one with no resistors, no microcontrollers, a core from a roll of toilet paper, some fine wire, a steel razor blade and a piece of the so-called lead (it's really graphite) from a #2 pencil.
;)
I crossed paths with Michael many times, most recently at a resort in Southern California in the early 90s.
Earlier than that when I ran a TRS-80 software project at Programma International and we released a product named Pencil Point which added inline formatting (similar to what later became HTML) based on codes I'd used on earlier Alphatype and CompuGraphic typesetting systems.
Before then, Electric Pencil was strictly wysiwyg. I started development on Pencil Point before merging my Practical Applications company with Programma International, after meeting with Arthur Schawlow (yes, that Arthur Shawlow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schawlow) who was working towards getting Stanford University to switch from expensive Wang word processing systems to using the TRS-80 Model One with a hardware hack to enable lower case.
While that project never caught on (probably because of the required hardware hack), Shawlow was definitely ahead of his day, as was Michael Shrayer.
Michael was a cameraman (I don't remember whether for television or film) when he wrote Electric Pencil. Based on conversations with him, I believe he never really earned that much money from the project. I don't believe he was ever a millionaire.
So after all the shouting is done and over with are you going to buy a fancy new player without any content or any way to make any?
Selling this box in India may be the way to go, but selling it here is going to require agreements with the studios.
I can hardly wait until next month.
Then we'll see if this rumor turns into a selling product I'd buy.
The American Banking System has nothing to do with the PayPal subscription system, which is entirely internal to PayPal.
There are some libertarians who would rather not have anything to do with a bank that is submitting to effective external regulation.